SKFox.com performance on Web Faction versus Media Temple. Click for full size.

I think the graph above pretty well sums it up. Using my Wordpress Latency Tracker, you  can see that all things being equal (identical Wordpress installs, the only difference is the server), Web Faction is the clear performance winner. Note that the seconds scale on the left tops out at 0.7 seconds on Web Faction, while the Media Temple scale tops out at 50 seconds. I got the idea for, and created, the WP Latency Tracker plugin for the sole purpose of being able to give (mt) support something more tangible than just “it feels slower today”, and instead provide them with hard numbers. To be fair to (mt), those slow response times were during an system incident that lasted several days. However, slow downs like this were common on the Grid Server.

It wasn’t all bad. On the upside, they kept their promises of 1TB of bandwidth, which I used all of to act as a mirror for CDBurnerXP. Their user forums have a nice community feel to them, and their custom control panel is easy to use. I’ll miss those.

A co-worker mentioned Web Faction to me. I’ve been keeping an ear to the ground for a replacement of Media Temple, but really wanted some far out features  like support for Pylons, Django (Media Temple support this too, but only with a container which adds another $20/month to your bill), and custom compiled software. I signed up for an account and have been amazed at the ease of the transition and the performance.

Web Faction costs me $9.50/month. I was paying, at times, up to $37/month at (mt) for their (gs) and mySQL container. I never saw numbers like this, ever. On top of that, I don’t have to pay $20/month for Django, and can install/compile custom apps to my hearts content on Web Faction. They are a developers dream as far as the feature set they bring to their hosting products.

One of these days, maybe Media Temple can live up to their own hype.

“It’s unfortunate people make that jump. People can disagree — and appropriately disagree — on issues of substance, but when they make the jump to race it’s absolutely ludicrous. My brothers and I were raised by our parents to respect everyone regardless of background or race.”

Emphasis mine. Submitted without further comment.

Turning on a cell’s borders on mouseover should be easy, right? You should be able to give the cell a class, like “selected” and in your CSS specify that td.selected has borders. Then on mouseover, you can add the selected class to the cell.

Except that everything jiggles around. No one wants that – but wait, just give all the other cells a 1px border of “none”, right? Or “transparent” color? Sorry, no luck. IE won’t let it work (to be fair, I’m not sure if FF will either). So you’re resigned to setting the other cells borders to the background-color. It feels dirty, but at least it works.

Actually, it doesn’t. You see, the browser can’t read your mind, it doesn’t know which borders take priority. Enter the border conflict resolution spec, a beautiful piece by the W3C. Just give the background-colored borders a lower-priority style (dashed or dotted) and the solid borders will override them!

Except in IE. Because IE hasn’t bothered to finish implementing the border conflict resolution spec. No, I’m not talking about IE6 – this is broken in IE7. And it appears to still be broken in IE8. So I had to resort to a browser-specific javascript hack that adds a new “prevSelected” class to the cell before the selected cell – just to make IE happy.

And no, “border-collapse: separate” didn’t work as a work-around because the corner pixels showed through.

</rant>

Well said Anonymous, +5 insightful.

Other coverage:

• When Gmail fails, users adapt
• Google Mail Outage
• A hole in the cloud
• Google users hit by mail blackout
• Gmail experiences worldwide crash
• Google Groups page shows adult material during outage
• Trouble in the clouds: Gmail turns into Gfail
• Oops: Gmail outage lasts two and a half hours
• Official Gmail blog
• Google blames Gmail outage on maintenance goof

Update: Check out the new Google Apps dashboard for the latest from several of the gApps.

Google don’t let me down!

I finally came across these steps. After a quick registry edit and reboot, I was back in action. I recently installed Vista SP1, perhaps it had something to do with it.

1) Close all open programs

2) Click on Start, Run, and type REGEDIT and press Enter

3) Click on the plus signs (+) next to the following folders

* HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
* SYSTEM
* CurrentControlSet
* Control
* Class
* {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

4) This folder is the DVD/CD-ROM Drive Class Description in the registry. Look for any of the following names in the right hand column.

* UpperFilters
* LowerFilters
* UpperFilters.bak
* LowerFilters.bak

5) If any of the above keys shown in step 4 are listed, right-click on them and choose Delete

6) After deleting the keys, close the Registry Editor

7) Reboot your computer and confirm that the drive is listed

When a request comes into my web app, I check the CONTENT_TYPE header. Most browsers send this…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

Firefox 3.0.1 is sending…

application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8

…which completely threw my program off when using FF3, while IE6/7, Opera, and Safari were working just fine. The program is using jQuery, the form plugin, etc so the problem could have been anywhere.

I finally broke down and asked for help. Rick was nice enough to point out the flaws in my logic and get me back on track.

2.5 hours of pulling my hair out. Grrr!

Speedtest.net results

I know that speedboost is supposed to speed up small files, but this much? It absolutely sucks when I’m trying to move a few hundred megs up/down from my servers, but regardless this was pretty damn fast.

What drives me nuts is that they will boost my speed up to 20Mb/second for some small files when I would just settle for 1Mb/second consistantly. If I try to FTP/SFTP a few hundred files to my server, my speeds will drop to dial-up or worse.

Trying to compete on theoretical limits is like trying to compete with free. Don’t do it. Sell me a consistent, reliable, unthrottled connection and I may go with you because I want to instead of the lack of options. Do that, and I’ll be impressed.