Wandering Thoughts archives

Link: an engineering management hack

Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique is an amusing story of how a group of engineers got their management to pay attention to Brooks's Law ("Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"). I won't spoil the punchline; read it yourself.

Around here we don't have problems with Brooks's Law, perhaps because we don't have the extra manpower to add to late projects to start with.

(From Daring Fireball.)

Link: an excerpt from On Writing Well

Here are chapters 2 through 4 of William Zinsser's On Writing Well, a classic book on, well, writing well. Just start with the opening of chapter 2 and keep going:

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Remind you of any computer manuals you've read recently? (Hopefully it does not remind you too much of WanderingThoughts. I try, but I know I have a long way to go.)

On Writing Well itself can be gotten from the online bookseller of your choice. (My choices are Canadian.)

(From a comment on a Slashdot article about writing.)

Link: Search engine page size limits for indexing

Search Engine Indexing Limits: Where Do the Bots Stop? takes an experimental approach to seeing how big a page various search engine bots will fetch, and how much of large pages they index. I find this an interesting question because it affects how you organize your content and generate indexes to it, especially for dynamic websites with auto-generated aggregate pages.

One area not investigated in the article is how far down the pages the search engine bots will go looking for links to follow. I smell a followup project for someone.

(From Ned Batchelder, who has interesting information on the size of his own blog pages as a result of this.)

Link: Readable colour text combinations

Color Test Results is a summary of the results of surveying a bunch of Internet users about what colour text on what background they found the easiest to read. The summary quote:

As you can see, the most readable color combination is black text on white background; overall, there is a stronger preference for any combination containing black.

Not coincidentally, most of my text is black on white (or black on slightly off-white). I was interested to see that white on black actually rates fairly highly, because for me bright colours on black (like white, jwz's green, etc) rapidly give me eye-searing, headache inducing afterimages.

(The survey is pretty old, but human perception is unlikely to have changed that much in ten years or so.)

(From Bill de hÓra.)

Link: Scaling Apache at ftp.heanet.ie

ftp.heanet.ie serves a huge volume of mostly static file downloads with Apache on a single machine. This results in interesting Apache tuning issues, among other things.

• Scaling Apache 2.x beyond 20,000 concurrent downloads [PDF]; just the title alone gives you the flavour.
• Niagara vs ftp.heanet.ie Showdown (Niagara is the new Sun server box and chipset.)
• Niagara Benchmarks: Update

If this sort of thing is your cup of tea, much of Colm MacCárthaigh's blog may be interesting.

(From Tim Bray.)