If you were around during the early days of the World Wide Web, you remember webcams. People would point a camera at something like the sky or a coffee pot and others would use their browser to check it out.
You might be thinking no one does that any more, but if you did, you’d be wrong!
To see what I mean, go here. That is specifically for the Northern Lights, but if you scroll down you can see many others as well.
Still a nice way to see the world without leaving your room.
Comments Off on Webcams! Still going! Still a great idea!
Posted in cool
Tagged cool, northernlights, web, webcam
I found this piece on Microsoft FrontPage fascinating. I remember when it first came out: it was a great tool if you wanted to develop for the web. While serious people went with Adobe products, FrontPage made developing web page easier for the rest of us. If you want to learn about the early days of the Web, or if you want to see what well designed software looks like (even if it seems very clunky with that Windows XP interfact), I recommend you read it.
You can actually still download it, here. Now should you? No. Read the sections of the article subtitled “Bad” and “Ugly” to see why.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62237929/9519425490_696632b05d_o.0.1541703823.0.jpg)
I have long ranted against people who confuse the Internet with the (World Wide) Web or social media or basically the part of the Internet they are familiar with.
Well now I no longer have to rant. I can just point people to this: The internet, explained – Vox.
The writers are Vox have done a fine job of explaining what the Internet is. Take a few minutes and read it. I’ve been on the Internet since the late 80s (email was the main use back then). While it is constantly evolving, the fundamental aspects of the Internet don’t change much. Read that piece and you will be good for a few decades.
Comments Off on What is the Internet?
December 4, 2019 in IT, new!
For testing purposes, I occasionally need to generate a simple page to test. This “quick custom boilerplate HTML5 markup generator” does the job for me. Recommended.
There are many tools to use for web performance testing, but if you want a good tool that does the job, I recommend Jmeter. The good and bad thing about JMeter is that there are alot of different options and features. To make it simpler for you, the good folks at Digital Ocean have a good tutorial on getting it set up, here: How To Use Apache JMeter To Perform Load Testing on a Web Server | DigitalOcean. While this is fine for testing one page, there are test scenarios where you want to have the user perform multiple steps (e.g. go to the home page, login to their account, check their account balance, then logout). If that is the case for you, too, then you want to read this next: How To Use JMeter To Record Test Scenarios | DigitalOcean (I used Firefox for this: if you are going to use JMeter to develop your performance test cases, then download Firefox too.) For any performance testing that follows a sequence, you really want to use the recording feature of JMeter.
Some other thoughts….
On my thread group, I added the following listeners:
I also login to the web server and tail -f the access log (and sometimes the error log).
I do all this because it is easy to run have a lot of errors when you first (and even later) run your test. For example, if you are testing a sequence, you might see good performance, but you might also see 404s in the access log, or you might see other anomalies in the aggregate report (e.g. good response 90% of the time, but bad response on average). Having more data is better and it insures you don’t have false positives (e.g., you think performance is good, but it really isn’t because the application is failing).
As soon as your developers have some code in place, have someone run Jmeter against it. Don’t wait until towards the end of the project. Jmeter is free and anyone can use it.
Back up your test plans often. It is easy to change your test plan, have it go from a successful one to an unsuccessful one because of the change, and then find it hard to go back because you changed a number of variables.
For your test plan, have multiple thread groups. This will allow you to test different test scenarios for different test groups. You can have different test plans too: it’s up to you how you manage it. For example, I recorded a long sequence for one test group, then I copied it and made a simple test group with less steps by removing them.
I used to be a big fan of about.me: they enabled me to create a personal home page far better than what I could do. Unfortunately they stripped out some of the things that made the page look great, and when they did that, I decided to make my own about.me page, using free hosting on Github.
First off, here is what my page looks like: http://blm849.github.io
Here’s the steps I took to make it.
Before you start, here’s what you will need if you want to follow my steps. You’ll need:
Here are the steps:
That’s it!
One final note: I recommended using my repository and not the original one I worked on. I did that because I had some problems with displaying my page on my iPhone 6s plus. I added some files and tweaked the index.html file to get it to work. By using my package and my index.html file, there are less changes for you to make, I believe. That said, I am grateful for the code from the original repository and I am making sure I credit the owner of that repository (as should you).
If you are going to talk about the Web or the Internet, it pays to know the history of it. The people at Pew put together the key dates and events of the World Wide Web here: Web History Timeline | Pew Research Center. Of course the history of the Internet is even older.
A very useful thing to consult whenever you read some think piece on “The Internet used to be X or Y”.
I remember all this, but for those of you who feel like the Web has always been with us, it’s worthwhile reading his piece, The Java Theory in The Atlantic.
He didn’t know it at the time, but everything was about to change. I enjoyed reading it, first with hindsight, and then reading it while imagining/remembering what it was like then.
Worthwhile.
If you think this is alarming: Facebook also collects what you decide not to post, tech consultant warns – Technology & Science – CBC News, then I have more news for you.
Not only can Facebook do this, but they can do other things. For example, if they wanted to, they could track where you move your mouse, even if you don’t click on something, using technology like the kind mentioned here: web page mouse tracking – Google Search.
In fact, you don’t even have to go to Facebook to have them track you: Facebook Is Tracking Your Every Move on the Web; Here’s How to Stop It.
And if you use Facebook on your mobile phone, there’s potentially even more information they can track about you.
So, lots of reasons to be concerned. I all but avoid Facebook, but it is not an easy thing to do. In addition, I don’t think Facebook is the only one that does this. They seem to be just the most notorious.
The web is 25 years old, and I have been using it since the very beginning. For those of you that haven’t — and those feeling nostalgic — here are some fun facts about the early days of the World Wide Web:
Happy birthday, World Wide Web, you great information superhighway! May you be around for 25 more!
 | smartpeopleiknow on Trips to Uranus! Roundworms wi… |
 | Carl Setzer on Trips to Uranus! Roundworms wi… |
 | Richard Reeve on A reminder of how great WiReD… |
| smartpeopleiknow on On Cup of Jo, Paul Simon, the… |
| smartpeopleiknow on A reminder of how great WiReD… |
| Carl Setzer on A reminder of how great WiReD… |
| smartpeopleiknow on On Cup of Jo, Paul Simon, the… |
Smart People I Know 