Pagespeed

My job requires analysis of each and every object on a website's page. Analysis down the details of parsing each and every header in HTTP response to figure what happened in the round trip of an object. Lately, i came across a tool, Firebug, that very nicely merges with Firefox. Firebug acts as a platform on top of which a lot of other tools can integrate. Pagespeed [from Google] & Yslow [from Yahoo] are couple of very famous ones which are now widely used by web developers.

These tools provide rules that analyze embedded objects and suggest actions that can make their delivery faster. Read here for more details on rule. Yslow provides almost the same rules. Based on how your page fares on these rules, a score is given to you. These rules contain everything that can make your content deliver faster and make end user experience richer.

With Akamai in picture, biggest problem i was facing was figuring out what object was treated in what way at our edge. We do have plugins like LiveHttpHeader to look at response headers but then with 120 objects on page, things go out of hands. I have modified Pagespeed's code in way that it shows all Akamai relevant information to me in the resource tab of pagespeed. On this page, i get to see what treatment an object got on our Server. Which server the request went to ? And how many tiers did the request involve. Thanks to Pagespeed brilliantly written infrastructure, these changes were not very hard to plan and implement. To know more, contact me :)

die in the rye

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger




I picked up the book to know what was all the fuss about and the question remains unanswered even after finishing it. Holden is the worst character. He is a depressed soul and reading about him turns you into one. Reading his thoughts makes it excruciatingly irritating to the extent that you want to slap him hard. Reading earlier posted reviews, i find some people said they liked it when they read it as a child / adolescent. I cant say it for sure but i don't think i might have liked it even if i had read it back then.
All in all, a book that can stay in shelf & never come out of it.

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Three men in a boat - JkJ

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Right friends make every trip worthwhile :). Author has an interesting humor while narrating past events and in the way he links them to current happenings. For obvious reasons, i couldn't relate much to British history and geography scattered all through the book. His quaint account of their adventures, mishaps, past-tales makes you fall in love with book. The sudden twists and turns spread all across will keep you on your toes. Every nook and corner of the book is artfully written. Ever-so-famous fish story had me in splits.

I wish i could read it in one sitting. A must read if you like humor.

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My First post at PerlMonk

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=848710

VIM trivia

Have been bugged by this in behavior for quite sometime. My work revolves around reading code in vim and reading/writing docs on Ms Word. I, sometimes, involuntarily press ctrl+s when on Vim and damn its dead. I just realized, this is used to freeze the o/p and you can use ctrl+q to restart the o/p.

Phew, a bug mystery solved.

Dont Blink

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Unconscious abilities work in mysterious ways. I get it. Some of the anecdotes made it interesting in bits and pieces. Author's writing frequently looses pace on account of excruciating details that he takes support of in proving a point.

He makes a good point that rapid cognition is a power that can be honed by right practice. Book lacked flow and organization but made an impact.

His description of human behavior in the time of crisis takes the crown. How human abilities shrink under stress. How the amount of data that one can process in the scene of impending peril reduces to some core categories. Cops account of how they clearly have a vision of just their target and rest all fades away. This part of the book was truly riveting.

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Robin 'DUMB' varghese

Dork: The Incredible Adventures Of Robin 'einstein' Varghese by Sidin Vadukut


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A really really boring book where you wish you could slap the protagonist. All attempts to make it interesting fell flat. Einstein sees the world completely oblivious of the way world sees him. I am surprised how someone as insane as him made it to IIM in the first place. If that was not enough, he manages to get a hot chick on his side too.

The stuff he mentions about management consulting firms, is that for real ?

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Johny gone down

Johnny Gone Down by Karan Bajaj


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A true bollywood style story. Book had all masala that one needs to remain glued to it. It fell weak when author tried to give a message out of it. Bolly stories are far from real to draw and any meaning or message out of it.

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