David Sedaris on the kookaburra : The New Yorker Quote: "One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two." (categories: lifevaluesprioritiesattentionculture )
Chris Hates Writing • Small things add up Quote: " Despite doing our best to keep cookie size down, our use of Google Analytics puts the average user’s cookie size around 1 kilobyte. Because these cookies are sent with every request made to content hosted on 4chan.org, the average user must send 4chan roughly 100 KB of data per page load to receive the response." (categories: performancehttpcookiesweb )
Home – Sigar – Hyperic Support The Sigar API provides a portable interface for gathering system information such as: System memory, swap, cpu, load average, uptime, logins, Per-process memory, cpu, credential info, state, arguments, environment, open files, File system detection and metrics, Network interface detection, configuration info and metrics, TCP and UDP connection tables, Network route table (categories: javasysadminsystemsdevopsmemoryswapping )
Blog | Eric Larsen Explore Quote: "One of my favorite authors, Sigurd Olsen, used the term ‘Lighting Out’ to describe the physical act of leaving the comfort and convenience of modern civilization and heading out into the wilderness. For some, purposefully putting yourself in uncomfortable situations seems ridiculous at best." Have come across the notion of constantly putting yourself in uncomfortable situations as a sure way to keep growing. Like the phrase "lighting out". (categories: lifelifehacksculturemental-hackschange )
A Beginner’s Guide to Perceived Performance: 4 Ways to Make Your Mobile Site Feel Like a Native App | Mobify Quote: "This is a great example of the importance of perceived performance. It doesn’t matter how fast your site is if it doesn’t feel fast. In the case of the spinner, it just drew the user’s attention to the fact that they were waiting instead of distracting them from it." Also some really cool stuff with touch state and momentum scrolling. The "don’t remind users that they’re waiting for something" reminds me of the NY Times story about the airport that just made people walk farther so they wouldn’t have to "wait" at baggage claim. All about perception. (categories: performancemobilespeeddesign )
Why Waiting in Line Is Torture – NYTimes.com Quote: "This story hints at a general principle: the experience of waiting, whether for luggage or groceries, is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait. “Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” notes the M.I.T. operations researcher Richard Larson, widely considered to be the world’s foremost expert on lines. Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel). Research on queuing has shown that, on average, people overestimate how long they’ve waited in a line by about 36 percent." (categories: performancewaitingmental-hacks )
The secrets of the world’s happiest cities | Society | The Guardian Quote: "… sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself." Lovely. (categories: citieshappinessculturelife )
Help! Linux ate my RAM! Helpful little site that I’m going to use with customers who get amped up about "all their memory" being used. (categories: linuxmemorysysadmin )