#if debug

Today the automatic update kicked in for Java on my notebook, which it does quite regularly. I love the fact that different products implement a relatively unobtrusive upgrade to their software to keep it up to date, I know if they didn’t - all of my non-critical software would quietly go out of date.

During this particular update, I happened to notice (not sure if it was there before) - however Sun are now bundling (optionally of course), Google Toolbar with the Java installer. I’m all for providing the automatic update, however I don’t believe they should be bundling additional software, optional or otherwise with an automatic update.

I have no issue if you just installed Java for the first time and you have chosen to install the additional software, however adding it into an update and having it enabled by default is just a little to slimy for my liking.

I’m an advocate for sensible usability on web sites and fully support the usability guidelines that recommend descriptive link text. There are measurable improvements to a users browsing experience when a webmaster makes a conscious decision to use useful link text, instead of an uninformative ‘click here’.

One particular aspect of useful link text that I try to abide by at all times, is that the link text should be descriptive and should reflect the resource that it is linking to. As an example, if you’re linking to a web page about the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, then a useful link might be Porsche 911 GT3 RS.

A popular technology site, TechCrunch has various web real estates that it promotes at every opportunity - however I think of late they are going a little too far with their frivolous, slap happy linking. Recently, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that California has secured the manufacturing plant from Tesla, bringing it back from New Mexico.

In the article on TechCrunch, they provide a number of links (link text and URI below):

• Tesla Motors, http://www.teslamotors.com/
• the Roadster model, http://www.crunchgear.com/tag/tesla/
• “Come with me if you want to live”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHV6OzHjWV8
• “Do it, do it now”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6ALySsPXt0

and my beef is with the second in the above list. When viewing that article, I expected that link to take me to the Roadster vehicle home page within the Tesla Motors site, instead if took me off to a completely useless page regarding Tesla Motors (the company) within their business information site CrunchGear.

I’m all for TechCrunch promoting their other web assets, however I’m confident that their readers would enjoy their site that much more if they’d find a more appropriate manner in which to promote CrunchGear instead of deceptively linking into that site.

In February, I wrote about receiving comment spam from a guy by the name of Jim Mirkalami. Since that time, there has been a lot of different people writing about the spam that they’ve received from our friend Jim; however it appears that he isn’t liking the new found attention that he is receiving.

This week, I received what would otherwise be considered a cease and desist type of comment. It surprises me that Jim would now be spamming more people telling them to stop writing about him and using his name, when it was clear that was his intention in the first place.

In any case, Jim is just going to have suck it up like everyone else online as it isn’t going to get removed from anyones site in a hurry.

Today I received a curious comment into #if debug:

Other than the fact it is a fairly standard useless comment, it perked my interest immediately when he mentioned that he’d been visiting the site a lot lately. While I’m sure my content has been nothing short of engaging, it’d be surprising given I’m using a standard WordPress template and the domain is only three months old.

For the sake of it, a quick investigation about Jim Mirkalami reveals that he has been using a lot of peoples sites lately. In fact, not only has he been using them - he has been leaving a similar or identical comment on them all.

I suspect that Jim is a clever sort of a bloke, looking for smaller gains than your average spammer. Instead of dropping a comment with a dozen or more links - his comments don’t include any links. The comment uses plain English, so it is less likely to get hit by a bayesian filter and polite enough that some people would let it through their comment moderation. Mr Mirkalami also appears to favour the highly visible domains such as Google and Yahoo!.

At some point down the road, Jim is going to return to the sites that he later found to accept his comment and is hoping to exploit a convenient option that most WordPress users enable. The option is related to comment moderation and allows someone to pass through comment moderation once they have had a comment approved.

If Jim is doing what I suspect he is, you have to give him a little credit for showing a small amount of patience with his spamming. Of course, that credit becomes completely invalid when you remember that he is nothing but a filthy filthy spammer.

Blogging master and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has changed domain.

Matt has been blogging for the last seven years under http://photomatt.net, which was an appropriate domain at the the time. Early on in the piece, Matt would post photos regularly and any photos of him often included his own camera.

Since leaving CNet and founding Automattic, Matt has been fiercely committed to developing the blogging platform WordPress and its associated products Ping-o-matic, Akismet and recently Gravatar.

How times have changed for Matt, after taking the initial gamble of starting Automattic - the company has just closed a USD$29.5 million dollar series B funding. The new round of funding is going to allow the team to not worry about money for salaries for the next few years and really focus on enhancing their current product line and building out new ones.

With the change, the new internet home of Matt Mullenweg is announced http://ma.tt

Rich Skrenta wrote an article recently about ranking web 2.0 sites by server performance, in which he talks about server response time and latency and how it impacts a site.

To see how everything stacked up, Rich decided that he’d profile over 500 of the top web 2.0 sites and throw in a healthy bunch of familiar faces as a yard stick. Some of the more familiar sites which were profiled were:

• Amazon
• Google
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Reddit
• Slide
• Twitter
• Yahoo!
• YouTube

The average response times of the sites profiled varies wildly, ranging from a blazingly fast 6 milliseconds all the way up to a pathetic 15 seconds. It seems that for every 100 web sites you go down the list - it increases the average response time by approximately 75 milliseconds until you get to the outriders which skew the results.

Rich conveniently includes the web server used for the site if it was available, which as you’d expect features Apache and IIS heavily. What I found particularly interesting though, was to see where all of the super cool Ruby On Rails web sites sit within the list. You’ll notice that the programming language or platform isn’t specified within the list, so you’re probably wondering how I joined the dots - well it was the Mongrel web server which many Ruby On Rails web sites use.

Scanning down the list of web 2.0 sites, you might have noticed how many sites are running Mongrel:

• 1 - 100, three sites
• 101 - 200, two sites
• 201 - 300, six sites
• 301 - 400, four sites
• 401 - 500, seven sites
• 500+, two sites

The web 2.0 space has been dominated by people building out the next cool thing using Ruby On Rails, as it was the flavour of the month. Given that there are so few sites running Mongrel as a web site, either Rich happened to pick over 500 sites which generally don’t use Ruby On Rails or combining it with Mongrel isn’t the preferred mechanism anymore.

Everything else aside, the list does point out one really really significant thing; it doesn’t matter what web server or programming language your site or product is built in, poor design and architecture will lead to poor performance in nearly every instance. Apache delivering the fastest and slowest content within the list is evidence of this fact.