Peter Zaitsev wrote an interesting item on front-end performance of a website.

I’ve always tried to look at the front-end from the user perspective, rather than purely technical. Once you weed out what’s not really necessary for the user, and also deal with issues like “how important is it that this number is live”, you generally look at a fairly different site already ;-)

Before my time at MySQL, I wrote a little gizmo called Measly Mouse which leads a modest but still active life. When reading on from here, please remember it was designed in 2001 and hasn’t really been changed since.

Measly Mouse retrieves a page and deals with redirects, CSS and other includes like images, and tries to apply some basic metric to see how sensible the page is. Basic usability testing shows that people cannot choose between more than about 7 or so items. So you can imagine how the brain desperately fails to deal with most websites (website creators often feel everything is so important it must be on the front page), or through training filters out most things than don’t relate directly to what the person is looking for. The other key factor is size. The bigger the page, and the more includes, the longer it takes. That’s annoying. So the Measly scoring formula is as follows: BYTES + ((REQUESTS + LINKS) * 1024) where:

• BYTES – is the total page content including stylesheets, images, etc;
• REQUESTS – is the total number of requests required (including redirects) to get all page content;
• LINKS – is the total number of clickable items on the page, including forms fields.

Naturally all pages have some includes and some links, it’s just a matter of finding balance to keep the site usable. Some sites use so many redirects…. nutty.

At the time there was quite a lot of debate on the simple methodology and the owners of some sites got pretty upset when someone ran their front page through Measly and it ended up in the top 10 ;-)
I still reckon the concept has merit though… please do make your own judgement and feel free to comment.
You may find some aggregating (like mailing list archive) sites in the top 10… I personally take those entries less serious, because they’re generally focused on a niche (geek) group which does not conform to a general user profile. Still, it’s quite possible their user interface could be improved!

As to how the tool works… it actually parses the pages in PHP using regexes (again remember the time it was built). Although it still works reasonably well, could be vastly improved now and catch more of a modern page.
But what would be really great, is if someone would care turn Measly Mouse into a Firefox plugin. Inside Firefox you have clean access to a page, so the analysis becomes extremely easy. For any page, the plugin could calculate the Measly Mouse (MM?) score, and perhaps optionally submit it to a central location. Who would like to pick this up?

This fellow is pretty amazing: http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades. To the already tiny Eee PC, he added (internally!):

1. USB hub
2. GPS with antenna
3. Bluetooth
4. Card reader w/ additioal SSD
5. Power switch (10 dip) for switching all extra foo on/off
6. Wifi upgrade 802.11n
7. FM transmitter
8. Modem (admittedly there’s design space for that)
9. Touch screen
10. Temperature sensor
11. Heatsink

That’s pretty cool…

Since a few months, sellers can no longer provide neutral or negative feedback to buyers. Not sure if I completely agree with this as I reckon buyers can be quite dodgy and how else to capture that. But the objective was to weed out retaliatory feedback. I.e. buyer has a bad experience, provides neutral or negative feedback, and in return for his honesty gets back similar feedback. So that’s no longer possible. I suppose that’s good.

I actually had such an experience at the beginning of the year, before the new policy. That one (in this case neutral) retaliatory feedback seriously impacts my rating to just over 90%. Not much of an issue as a buyer, but if I want to sell something, potential buyers might regard me as dodgy just on the basis of that number. Of course they could delve into the exact feedback comment and figure out what’s been going on to some degree, but who bothers with such detail while browsing eBay for goodies?

The formula for the rating is positive / (positive+neutral+negative), and all that limited to the last 12 months. Let’s take my simple case where I get one neutral. For 11 transactions over the last year, you get 10/(10+1) = 90%. Ok so I don’t buy stuff on eBay all the time. Most people don’t. But let’s double the number of transactions and see how the formula works out: 20/(20+1) = 95%. Still not good for seller karma. Anyway, you get the picture; this kind of thing is damaging, and you’d really have to go on a buying spree to make up for it. With different buyers or on different weeks, otherwise it’s counted as a duplicate and disregarded. And heaven beware if any of the many different sellers also decides to give you a neutral rating!

Ok ok, so the new eBay policy prevents this exact scenario from occurring again. But consider the mechanism if you’re a seller. Buyers *will* provide you with feedback, and using the same formula a single malicious buyer can destroy your reputation. You suddenly have to sell a lot more to make up for it, except you may not be able to, because of your rating! In a nutshell, unless you’re a powerseller moving dozens of items a month, you’re pretty much an open target. If you, like I, sell the odd item once in a while, you don’t have a chance.

But hang on, isn’t there a policy that allows you to get feedback removed? Yes, but only in very specific cases. For this, the comment would have to be defamatory, referencing an unrelated item/transaction, a policy file number, a URL or other contact details, stuff like that. Also, a clearly negative comment on a positive rating qualifies. But not the other way round.
So, the loophole is a gaping one, and that is: you just scribble something nonsensical or at least meaningless; that way it won’t qualify for removal. So you can just give a seller a neutral (just as damaging as negative, as far as the formula is concerned!) with a comment of “blah de blah” and that does the trick.

Someone please tell me that I went wrong with my logic – and where!

I spent some time today on that, it had gone increasingly gaga after some software and POI updates, then lost the plot completely, and then didn’t want to boot anymore. The usual reset/restore procedures didn’t improve things, so I invented my own which did not involve a restore procedure. I basically formatted the flash and reset the NVRAM and then added the basic stuff until it did stuff again ;-) So now my GO works once more. Horay… just need to figure out where the favourites were stored so I can restore them, setting that up from scratch is a pest.

Along the way, while searching for info online, I actually found out that the TomTom GO series actually runs a Linux 2.6 kernel. There’s a few custom modules for the specific hardware, but basically it’s just an ARM processor.
So there ya go. Good stuff!

Is your child not quite ready for proper typing, but does she love “typing stories” on the keyboard The trick is finding a program that allows them to muck around without the possibility of triggering special functions through some keypress or mouse movement. With the help from Greg Black & James McPherson on the #humbug channel, this is what I have devised for Phoebe’s Eee PC:

Using emEditor, create a menu item “KeyBashing” somewhere and give it a keyboard as icon. Commandline /usr/bin/uxterm -fn 10×20 -geometry 79×21+0+0 -title ‘Keyboard Bashing!’ /home/user/typer.sh

typer.sh contains the following:

stty -isig
echo Welcome! Start typing – exit by closing window
echo
cat >/dev/null

Make typer.sh executable with chmod +x typer.sh
The stty -isig command disables keycombos like Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-C.

After editing menus, you can use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X.