Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

I just received an interesting email, which “offers” to help me secure my .com domain name in the Chinese varieties .cn and .hk. It’s more of a threatening piece of spam, because it carries the fear that if I do not avail myself of their services, them or another company will steal my brand!

Subject: YOUR DOMAIN NAME (elliottback)’S CURRENT SITUATION

Dear ELLIOTT C.Back

We are the domain name registration organization in Hong Kong, ,which mainly deal with the domain names’ conflicts of the company in China and Asia regions.We have received an formal application online from one company named “TianHaiYuanTong (China) Investment Co.Ltd” who is trying to apply for the domain names(www. elliottback.cn www. elliottback.hk etc.) and the Internet keyword(elliottback) as their domain name and internet brand on Oct 6,2008.After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names being applied are the same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you don’t know this company, we doubt that they buy these domain names with other aims. We have not started the registration for TianHaiYuanTong company until now. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Boyce Meng

Tel: +852-31757931 (ext8048)
Fax: +852- 31757932
Email: boyce.meng@hk-nsc.org.cn

Hong Kong Network Service Company Limited
website: www.hknsc.hk

However, as far as I can tell, there is no such “Tian Hai Yuan Tong” company, and I am not replying. I advise you to do the same, and post any more samples of this spam in the comments!

Gizmodo has a new review of the Western Digital Sharespace 4TB personal NAS product that just came out, and it’s absolutely glowing:

Western Digital’s ShareSpace Storage is a steely, cubular vault of NAS with fast Gigabit ethernet that brings enterprise-level centralized storage down to the small business and deathcore nerd space.

For $999 you get 4TB of storage (2.66TB actually free w/ RAID5), sluggish transfer speeds (10.5MB/s writing and 12MB/s pulling data), three USB ports, and Gigabit ethernet. You could get a faster Drobo for $100 more. And, in my tests, the better looking Drobo gets 16MB/s, and is also hot-swappable. You can buy the enclosure and put in 1.5TB drives to get a 6TB rig if you are so inclined, something that’s less possible with the prepackaged WD NAS solution.

I am extremely impressed with Obama ‘08: The Official iPhone Application. It’s slick, down-to-earth, full-featured, breathtakingly gorgeous, fast, and functional. Its blue theme coherently extends the Obama ‘08 campaign branding to mobile devices. Check out these screens:

It’s interesting that the Obama campaign application shows your friends (classified by zip code) as a checklist to call off and recruit. Will it work to get more people out on voting day? Who can say. It’s certainly aggressive, and the only big turn-off of the application. In a way, it reminds me of the moronic Facebook applications “Vampires and Werewolves” or “Pirates vs Ninjas” which both try to coerce you into harassing your friends.

The local news is what I’m looking for, Obama news and updates for the US and NYC.

The issues pages are also nice; it would be better, perhaps if they included a summary of other candidates views, with rebuttals from the Obama camp, but you can’t wish for everything to be perfectly balanced–this is politics.

Gizmodo rants, “This is something like what politicking at the grassroots level will look like by the next election—local and immediate, but definitely national in scope. It makes you feel like a part of the campaign.” For me, this might be the first opportunity to follow Obama’s announcements without being harassed by email or sms-spammed.

Go download it now in the iTunes store, it’s free!

Although the Dow (according to Google finance) closed at 10,850.66, up $485.21 or (4.68%), Google itself (GOOG) dropped precipitously from $413 to under $200 in the last five minutes of the day:

While some of the commentors at TechCrunc think that there was a finance/Government conspiracy, a regulatory message from Nasdaq indicates that the trades were “clearly erroneous” and will be canceled:

Pursuant to Rule 11890(b) NASDAQ, on its own motion, has determined to cancel all trades in security Google Inc Cl - A “GOOG” at or above $425.29 and at or below $400.52 that were executed in NASDAQ between 15:57:00 and 16:02:00 ET. In addition, NASDAQ will be adjusting the NASDAQ Official Closing Cross (NOCP) and all trades executed in the cross to $400.52. This decision cannot be appealed. MarketWatch has coordinated this decision to break trades with other UTP Exchanges. NASDAQ will be canceling trades on the participant’s behalf.

According to Reuters, “the erroneous orders that caused the abrupt plunge were triggered by orders routed from another exchange.” Or perhaps, the orders were a classic fat-finger mistake! We’ll never know…

If you’ve thought about whether upgrading from WP Cache 2.0 to WP Super Cache is a good idea, hopefully this benchmark will convince you. I followed my instructions on benchmarking Wordpress with Apache Bench on four configurations of this blog’s main page to measure performance:

1. Without any caching plugins
2. With WP Cache 2.0
3. With WP Super Cache (no compression)
4. With WP Super Cache (compression enabled)

The results show that WP Super Cache is a clear winner, performing 225% better than the older WP Cache. Here is the raw data I gathered during the test:

No caching:
Requests per second: 22.81 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 4383.559 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 43.836 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 613.75 [Kbytes/sec] received

WP cache:
Requests per second: 872.30 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 114.640 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.146 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 23549.46 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (no compression):
Requests per second: 1518.90 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 65.837 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.658 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 41150.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

Super cache (compression):
Requests per second: 1960.39 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 51.010 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.510 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 53108.70 [Kbytes/sec] received

For more tips on how to improve your Wordpress performance, check out Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours. Another interesting WP caching plugin is Batcache, which uses the memcached backend to serve requests out of a cluster of machines’ RAM memory.