Cox Crow

On the Cusp

TeleGeography has reports that I'd like to read, if I could buy them. (There's a difference between being willing to buy something and being able to buy it.) They include an article from The New York Times in their press mentions: "When the Cellphone is the Home Phone."

In what may be the start of an alarming trend for the nation's largest telephone companies, the total number of business and residential telephone lines declined last year for the first time since the Depression—to 192.3 million at year's end from 192.6 million a year earlier, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

Those lines are going wireless. This is a big problem for an industry that depends on a rise in population to increase the saturation point for a given region. The young ones aren't buying. And so we have saturation. What can we do?

4:07:40 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

The Phantom Menace

Once we [go into Iraq], I think it is clear that we will never again return to the Old Republic. So what do we do after that? What can we keep of the Republic as we make our transition to empire?
— Jerry Pournelle

Good question. civis romanum sum

3:11:37 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics

You're Lost, Little Girl

Cindi Measles, her mother: "But I think lethal injection is too easy."

1:29:10 PM # Google It!
categories: Sadness

Everything Else is Commentary

I've enabling comments here, despite the performance hit that the call to radiocomments.userland.com makes. Apparently I did so a while ago, but neglected to put <%commentLink%> in my #itemTemplate. I didn't notice until the change last night.

10:34:16 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Up to Par

Keynote Systems offers an easy way to understand how the various elements on your page affect your site's performance. The numbers returned are, however, only one point of view in analyzing how things are doing. Gomez Networks can provide another perspective. Both measure from various locations around the Net.

Keynote's results graph breaks down the transaction: DNS lookup, TCP session establishment, and HTTP request. If you look at this sample [legend], you'll see that the time for the first byte download is a significant percentage. This could be any number of things. With HealthScout, it was a NIC set to the wrong speed.

You'll also notice that Userland could improve their performance with some minor optimizations.

While looking at my results from Keynote, I noticed that the Blog HOT or NOT image wasn't loading. It moved. This was fortuitous. I found Matt's Beer Blog while trying to find the new location. I'm unsure which is more important: performance, or beer.

9:59:44 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Fans stood in line for hours...

Kasia, who works for Tickets.com, posted some graphs of latency from the rush to buy World Series tickets.

9:49:22 AM # Google It!
categories: System Administration