Blog archives for October, 2006
Implementing Scrum
Software development methodology can be tough and/or tedious, and therefore is there a better way to gain understanding of a process than by having a chicken and a pig tell you about it. Implementing Scrum is a cartoon strip involving a chicken, a pig, and Scrum guru discussing various issues related to the methodology. I must admit, though, that the cartoons can be tought to get occasionally. For a starter, here’s an explanation of what is scrum. Luckily, each cartoon is followed with an explanation of what it means.
Finished reading Data Structures an Algorithms
I started taking a bus to work, and one immediate advantage of doing that is ability to read books. In 6 days I finished Data Structures and Algorithms by Alfred V. Aho, Jeffrey D. Ullman, John E. Hopcroft. It’s a pretty good overview of data structures and algorithms in Computer Science, although it’s a bit light on the examples. The chapter-by-chapter overview of data structures and algorithms is pretty straightforward, and it offers good tips on algorithm design and analysis. None of this stuff would be new to anyone who’s been through a data structures class, but if you’re out of college for a while now, refreshing helps, and next time someone brings up a balanced DSW tree or analyzing recursive algorithms as far as their O(n) performance in a casual conversation, you can quickly chime in. The authors stick to pseudo-code throughout the book, so mentally transforming the examples into your favorite programming language is not too hard. Overall, a pretty good refresher, not as comprehensive as this list of data structures from NIST, but easy to read and coherent.
Cities with most unsold homes
Business Week does a slideshow of cities with the most unsold home inventories. Phoenix, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Baltimore, San Francisco, Sacramento and Washington DC make the list.
Of course Google Checkout is growing
Google tells MarketWatch the Checkout service is experiencing strong growth. Well, duh. Google Checkout has been subsidizing purchases of over $30 with $10 immediate discount with selected merchants that happen to include Buy.com, eCost.com, eBags and Starbucks store online. With $10 off $30 you’d be crazy not to use Google Checkout option to get some stuff that’s already on sale (like this Linksys Wi-Fi camera) at additional discount and people have been fully taking advantage of this discount.
Brian Griffin’s book is out
Brian Griffin of Family Guy now has the book published. Alright, it’s not really the highly educated martini-sipping dog that wrote the book, but Family Guy: Brian Griffin’s Guide: to Booze, Broads, and the Lost Art of Being a Man is written by Andfrew Goldberg, who works for the show. To promote the book, Brian Griffin is guest-blogging on Olive Reader.
CNET reviews Vizio GV46L
There’s a review of Vizio GV46L LCD HDTV on CNET. The TV is a 46″ model of the Vizio GV42L that generally was received pretty well. However, this time CNET is not as impressed with the newcomer:
Inaccurate color temperature; reproduces relatively light color of black; no color-temperature presets; subpar off-angle viewing performance.
Is cheap gas at Costco a loss leader?
If you ever stopped by Costco on the weekend or on the way from work later in the afternoon, you probably noticed the lines at Costco gas stations. Costco tends to have cheaper gas than anybody else, and quite often shows up as the top place to get gas on price comparison sites. So how can it afford to sell the gas cheaper? The buy in bulk argument doesn’t quite fly here, since gas stations, whose primary business is buying and selling gas, buy in much greater volumes, and yet are rarely able to compete on price.
Fool.com’s discussion of the Costco investor relations call sheds some light on the situation: Costco indeed is making more money when the gas prices are high, Costco’s are comparatively low, so the car drivers make a special trip to get to Costco when that yellow light is blinking. Once you made an effort to get into Costco parking lot, it’s usually not a big deal to drop by the store and get some stuff, since you rarely make it to Costco anyway, and two special trips this week would be too much. Therefore gas prices go up - Costco’s profits go up, even if gas is sold at cost.
Availability of cheap gas is apprently driving another revenue stream for Costco - membership sign-ups:
Galanti added that the warehouses not only see greater customer frequency during times of peak gas prices, but the company also sees an increase in membership sign-ups.
Benchmarking page load times in Firefox
Google’s Load Time Analyzer was released to the world yeterday. It’s a Firefox extension that tracks how long it took to download, parse and execute (in case of JavaScript) every single component of the page. It builds a nice graph showing which parts of your page take longer to download/execute, so you can concentrate on bottlenecks.
The extension is also prone to slowing down your Firefox (by blindly keeping time on every single browser action), so yesterday Martin pointed me towards Tamper Data, an extension that also tracks how much time it took the browser to download and execute components of the page. Tamper Data also allows tampering HTTP requests, replaying POST requests, and somehow doesn’t slow down the browsing experience.
How scaling (or lack of it) kills
New York Times‘ story on Friendster and its decline (except for Southern Pacific countries, I guess) and point out to surprisingly technical issue behind Friendster’s dropping star:
As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site.
For Web applications, disregard to the application scaling and caching architecture will result in decreased load times, and disregard to user experience in the future. Another potential culprit that might show its ugly face in the future is non-optimized data model, which leads to less-than-optimal database schemas. Nitin Borwankar’s TagSchema blog is a good source of reading for that. If you have time just for one post this year, read Fundamental Scalability Problem of Data 2.0.