Over the course of my involvement [1] in my Indonesian company's website, the question of how to design a website to deal with slow and bad network links presented itself over several occasions as most of our users surf either over a mobile connection or a similarly dimensioned fixed line. While optimizing design and resources … Continue reading The impact of network packet loss on HTTP latency
Author: George Georgovassilis
Installing Lightning for Thunderbird in Ubuntu 11.04 64bit
For a new setup, I tried today to install Lightning for Thunderbird under an Ubuntu 11.04 64bit over the addon mechanism which failed with an ominous message about my build platform not being supported. This is due to an over-precautions setting in the plugin's installation manifest which can be changed easily similar to changing version … Continue reading Installing Lightning for Thunderbird in Ubuntu 11.04 64bit
CSS for frontend engineers
If you are working on a webapp, it is likely that sooner or later you will find yourself tasked with generating some web UI. While the esteemed colleague from the web design department excels at that (disclosure: I'm not a web designer), when asked for advice on how to get something "simple" done you'll find … Continue reading CSS for frontend engineers
HTTP pipelining, Tomcat 7 and Firefox 4
During an optimisation cycle for Bazarooma aimed at further reducing latencies I started experimenting with Firefox' HTTP pipelining [1] feature, which is disabled by default. This can be enabled by typing about:config in the URL bar, locating the network.http.pipelining entry and setting it to true. While Firebug did not report any measurable improvement, it turned … Continue reading HTTP pipelining, Tomcat 7 and Firefox 4
Speeding up Ubuntu 11.04 boot time
Just because I have nothing else to do on a lazy, rainy Sunday morning I thought it would be fun to see how much I can slash off the startup time for Ubuntu 11.04 64Bit on my HP Probook 4720s. The OS boots from a class 6 SD card (16 Mbyte/sec read) and 6 GB … Continue reading Speeding up Ubuntu 11.04 boot time

