Ronald's ScribblingsPosts
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Cleaning State
I first got my Mac in 2006 when the first Intel-based Macbook came onto the market, running Mac OS X 10.4.4, and have upgraded to every new OS X release ever since. The seamless OS upgrades have really spoilt me and made me put off doing a clean install for the past 5 years.
Now that Lion has finally reached Gold Master (GM) status, I shall now take this opportunity in the summer holidays to do a clean install of Lion, blasting ageing and possibly incompatible software and configuration files into the trash. Of course, the toughest part to any reinstallation is backups and now is the best time to test how well my backup regime and redundancy holds.
Wish me luck.
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Site Performance Enhancement
If you’re a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that my blog now loads much faster than before. Inspired by a post on Coding Horror that Performance is a Feature, I happened to come across Google’s Page Speed Online while reading up about site optimisation techniques.
I loaded my blog address onto Page Speed and was hopeful that the scores that were to come are much improved, considering that I had enabled CloudFlare CDN for my blog. To much of my surprise, the speed check tool detected a few areas where further performance enhancements can be made to my site. Upon reading the suggestions in greater detail, I’ve picked up a few easily implementable techniques that anyone can use for their sites.
There are a few key focus areas, namely optimising caching, minimising round trip times, minimising requests, and minimising payload size.
While digging deeper into the documentation, I found out that Google has released an Apache 2.2 module, mod_pagespeed, to specifically automate some of these techniques. With this module, one can expect speed increases out-of-the-box, with minimal configuration.
After getting the module installed and running, I’m extremely surprised! My blog used to take approximately more than 6 seconds to load completely and it now takes only 3 seconds. A 50% speed increase!
Looking through the documentation further, there’s another technique to speed up site loading called domain sharding. Enabled it by adding a few CNAME records and tweaking a configuration setting, my site loaded even faster.
Now, on average in most locations, my site loads just under 3 seconds.
So, if you’re an Apache administrator, why not check mod_pagespeed out?
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WWDC 2011 (Part 3)
This post took me a long time as I was thinking about the right perspective to approach this new service—iCloud. I consider it one of they most mysterious of the three products announced at the keynote.
All the time was spent demonstrating and explaining what iCloud is and what it can do for end-users from Apple’s perspective, not much was mentioned about developers and the potential applications of the technology available to 3rd party developers.
However, in recent days, some functionality of the APIs offered to developers under the Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) has been leaked. According to an article from This is My Next, 3 key APIs are offered for 3rd party developers for integration into their applications. The article further postulates that one of them offers the ability for applications to save and restore preference “key-pairs”, and this offers a potential for applications to save state across different devices.
An article on Engadget further elaborates on the concept of the “continuous client”. Imagine a time where you can be messaging, surfing the web and listening to music on your desktop machine, and then decide to continue doing exactly that somewhere else on a laptop. The “continuous client” allows you to do exactly that by saving and synchronising application state across devices. You could just turn on your laptop and continue exactly where you’d left off on the desktop.
This is actually inline with the vision that Steve Jobs articulated in the closing WWDC keynote of 1997. Looking at the advances of Lion (with autosave and resume), iOS 5 with very tight coupling with iCloud (already with autosave and resume), and finally iCloud being offered for free to all users, it looks like the situation that I’ve mentioned above might be a reality really soon.
Just recently, ChromeBooks, powered by Chrome OS, were released to the public. Google has a slightly different view from Apple regarding the concept of cloud. Google wants applications to be powered from the cloud through the context of the browser, anywhere. Apple wants the cloud to be the enabler of various applications through the context of their hardware. The difference is in the viewport. Native OS chrome versus browser-based chrome.
I believe that native chrome UI will prevail in the long run as the browser rendering engine is still limited. Only a subset of applications can be used with a browser chrome UI without difficulty. Just recall when Apple first launched the original iPhone for sale, users were all up in arms when Steve Jobs mentioned that there will be no 3rd-party native applications available and encouraged developers to write web-applications. Hatred towards browser-based web-applications were very visible. JailBreakers raced to crack the iPhone wide-open, bringing in plenty of unauthorised, but very useful, 3rd party applications.
Given that short history, why would users change their mind and embrace the ChromeOS philosophy? Users want “continuous client” across devices, but not a consistent yet unoptimised viewport of their applications.
To conclude my post, here’s an article by kicking bear on how an innocent Push Notifications Service launched by Apple in 2008 has slowly but surely, morphed silently to what iCloud is when launched.
With the release of iCloud, Apple is declaring war against Google, proper.
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CDN for the Rest of Us
Recently, I’ve been introduced to CloudFlare in an article on The Next Web, and another article which I lost the link to that is along the lines of Coding Horror’s Performance is a Feature article.
If you haven’t heard about Cloud Flare, it is a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with security features built-in. Available for free and affordably (with the Pro plan), for those who need greater security and site-protection features, and it can be used by anyone who owns a domain and has control over its nameservers, not just by the rich, large, and the powerful.
Just 9 days ago, they colocated in Singapore, bringing CDN and speed benefits to us living in the South East Asia. With 11 other operational facilities around the world, with 2 more up-and-coming, Cloud Flare seems serious in the business of CDN.
Having enabled Cloud Flare for my site last night, the time taken to load my site has been greatly reduced, especially for visitors outside Singapore. I also used loads.in to test my page load speeds and have found the results rather positive.
Although they claim that adopting the Cloud Flare service is easy and takes no longer than 5 minutes, it is only true for sites with a simple DNS zone file. Cloud Flare requires sites to adopt their nameservers in order to enable their services as it will allow them to seamlessly handle IP transitions without user intervention, putting their service between the web-visitors and your web-servers. As older sites are more complicated, additional time may be required during set-up as you will need to verify your zone files to ensure consistency when you switch DNS nameservers. The good thing is that it’s an one-off exercise that yields positive results, well worth the effort.
So, if you own a domain and would like to get some performance improvements to your site, why not give it a try?
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