Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Today at the Macworld 2008 Expo, Steve Jobs released a new version of the Macbook called the Macbook Air. Unlike last year’s iPhone announcement, the response to the Air was negative. The price of Apple’s stock today dropped 9.02% to close at $169.04 and $163.01 in after-hours trading:

If you’re interested in the Macbook Air, check out these specifications from the Apple Store. For $1799, you get a 0.76 inch thick, 3.0 pound notebook with a 13.3 inch backlit widescreen display, 1.6 GHz Core2 Duo processor, iSight camera, backlit keyboard, and multi-touch trackpad. It has a single USB 2 slot and a single micro-DVI slot and headphone jack via a door on the side. Wirelessly, it supports 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.1/EDR. It has no optical drive natively, and comes with a wimpy 80GB 4200 RPM hard disk. A 1.8 GHz processor and a 64GB solid-state drive (SSD) will cost $3,098.

I have to agree with Michael Arrington of Techcrunch that the laptop, even as a premium option, is grossly overpriced and underpowered. A slightly heavier, but significantly more powerful Sony Vaio (40% faster CPU, 30% faster hard disk, more ports, fingerprint sensor, nvidia graphics, twice as much hard disk space, slightly thicker, slightly heavier, same height and width) can be bought for $1800. If you go to Dell, you can configure their 13.3-inch widescreen XPS M1330 with an SSD drive and a few upgrades for just $2,404, a significant savings over Apple’s price.

It’s interesting that Kineda and Paul both point out seriously problems with the new Macbook (it’s wimpy, overpriced, and full of proprietary non-replaceable, non-upgradable parts) but still cheer it on. Paul says,

News flash to Devin people don’t buy ultraportable notebooks for their workstation-like performance. Enough said. Do I want one? Hell yes.

But, it’s Daring Fireball who finally gets to the bottom of the Macbook Air, and why it sucks. It just doesn’t make the right design choice! Thinner is not the same as smaller; we want a 12″ or 11″ or 10″ model, both smaller in form factor and thinner and lighter to boot:

I’d have rather seen a smaller footprint, a la the old 12-inch PowerBook G4 — something just exactly as wide as a full keyboard. I’d prefer to sacrifice screen size on the notebook in exchange for an even smaller machine.

Update: Did you know that five years ago, Sony made the Vaio X505, a laptop .8″ thick? Pwnt, Apple. That’s all I can say!

A lot of people talk about Wordpress performance, and how to get a webserver to perform as efficiently as possible. However, without a quantifiable methodology to testing website performance, you can’t actually talk about it. ApacheBench (ab) is the solution to the problem of measuring website performance. What is ApacheBench? The man page provides a suitable answer:

ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool

ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.

If you have installed apache or apache-devel, you should be to simple invoke ab by typing it on the command line. For example, to benchmark my own site here, I would write:

[root ~]# ab -n 10000 -c 100 http://elliottback.com/wp/

This says “make 10,000 concurrent requests to host elliottback.com via http and request /wp/ on 100 threads.” The result of this is the following report:

This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.40-dev < $Revision: 1.146 $> apache-2.0
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright 2006 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking elliottback.com (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Finished 10000 requests

Server Software: Apache/2.2.6
Server Hostname: elliottback.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /wp/
Document Length: 34331 bytes

Concurrency Level: 100
Time taken for tests: 13.596345 seconds
Complete requests: 10000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 346230000 bytes
HTML transferred: 343310000 bytes
Requests per second: 735.49 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 135.963 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 1.360 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 24868.08 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 1.6 0 20
Processing: 8 134 12.7 132 190
Waiting: 4 134 12.7 132 190
Total: 16 134 12.1 132 190

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 132
66% 134
75% 136
80% 137
90% 145
95% 160
98% 175
99% 179
100% 190 (longest request)

According to these numbers, my dual core server can do 750 requests per second, fulfilling each within about 150ms each. That’s pretty fast, probably because I know the secrets of Wordpress Optimization. If you make every layer as fast as it can be, and cache heavily, you too can see lightening fast Wordpress installations!

I’ve just added two little cute features to the main page of my website. They don’t do much more than improve the usability and aesthetic of the front page by a tiny margin. The first is quite practical–it alerts you and sets the 404 status code if you loaded my site through a domain or subdomain:

The second is a Flickr badge across the top of my page, with a custom-made Flickr logo to take you to my Flick page:

But this is Web 2.0, and I use the Thickbox script in other places on my site, so why not here too?

It’s fun tinkering around with your main page. I need to add a cookie-rotator to the image on the front page, rather than make it time based. Then people can see different versions of me everytime they come back, rather than the current “new elliott at 1 AM” business.

I’m feeling like gadget blog Gizmodo (nofollow) has lost all its credibility in the blogging world. I am sure you’ve all hear about their scandal at CES 2008, which has hurt all bloggers’ credibility and left at least one of their staff banned from CES for life. Ironically, Gizmodo even had the stones to blog about it, calling their childish prank “the meanest thing Gizmodo did at CES (nofollow):”

CES has no shortage of displays. And when MAKE offered us some TV-B-Gone clickers to bring to the show, we pretty much couldn’t help ourselves. We shut off a TV. And then another. And then a wall of TVs. And we just couldn’t stop.

Their title implies Gizmodo did other, but less mean, things at CES. I don’t get why they decided to sabotage a trade show? Their actions show they were there as irresponsible bloggers, and not the members of the press their badges said they were. This isn’t the only thing that’s made me give up on them, though. Here’s a running list:

1) Posting porn to Kotaku

If you check out this apology note from Kotaku, a well respected gaming blog, you’ll find that a Gizmodo editor decided “to post a very inappropriate photo on the top of Kotaku using someone else’s name.” The photo, an obscene shock / porn image known as “Tubgirl” was visible on the site for at least 20 minutes before a Kotaku editor noticed and removed it.

2) Immature staff

I can’t help but reproduce this photo from a pit stop competition (nofollow) Gizmodo did where they thought it would make a cool and professional photo of them all giving the finger. Such displays have their place, but stick them in your Facebook photos where your other drunk exploits go, please?

3) Misleading stories, headlines

When there isn’t news, according to Apple Gazette, Brian Lam–editor of Gizmodo–will just make some up, dropping a delicious teaser story a year ago about the iPhone. Unfortunately, he wasn’t writing about the Apple iPhone, he was writing about the Cisco one. Nevertheless, making it seem like it was about Apple got Gizmodo lots of hits.

4) Gizmodo’s foray into porn

We’ve heard that the “internet is for porn,” but Gizmodo keeps posting inappropriate gadget-unrelated material to their homepage, the latest of which is a tour of the AVN expo (nofollow) also occurring near CES. Sexuality and technology is an interesting topic–one that magazines like Wired cover better and more professionally–but Gizmodo is incapable of handling adult matters with delicacy, and just ruts around with them in the mud.

If you use wordpress and would like to boycott Gizmodo, you can run a simple database query to add nofollow to all of their links:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, '<a href="http://gizmodo', '<a rel="nofollow" href="http://gizmodo') WHERE post_content LIKE '%gizmodo%' AND post_content NOT LIKE '%nofollow%'
;
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, '<a href="http://www.gizmodo', '<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.gizmodo') WHERE post_content LIKE '%gizmodo%' AND post_content NOT LIKE '%nofollow%'
;

This checks to see if any of the old links have a rel attribute in them. This SQL will only touch posts with Gizmodo in them, so rest safe, but at the same time don’t trust me either!

Update: Somehow Gizmodo now thinks that their childish prank is hard hitting journalism (nofollow). How is turning off TVs at a conference about TVs journalism? Would it be excellent journalism if you also firebombed the place?

According to an article in Network World magazine, young IT workers aged 18-31, the so-called Millennials, are difficult to manage and retain. Essentially, Young IT workers disillusioned, hard to hold, survey says makes the claim that Millennials want more than they’re entitled to as entry level employees:

“The issue managers are facing is with retention, not hiring. That means the work environment is not living up to the employee’s expectation,” he says. For instance, many younger workers expect to get an office immediately or be paid at a rate higher than entry level.

“Millennials are coming in with high expectations and are disillusioned about the reality of a work place. They feel they should be rewarded and start at the top, when we all know you have to work your way up. They have been raised to be rewarded often and when you get into the workforce those rules change a bit,” Harrington says

The article strikes a chord with me, as I left my job at a Fortune 25 in the financial services industry on Friday to work for a competitor. My reasons for moving were significantly different than the ones this survey hints at. Where Millennials seem to be expecting perks, promotions, and compensation, I’m more interested in learning something new, challenging myself, and developing my skill set.