« September 08, 2004 | Main | September 10, 2004 »
September 09, 2004
RSS is Eating Me Alive (Almost)
Robert Scoble talks about bandwidth costs of RSS and cites it as a reason more and more sites are not giving full text RSS feeds. I was wondering what it cost me, so I looked at my server logs for yesterday. I have about 800 unique IP addresses grabbing my RSS feed each day. That amounted to about 6000 GETs of which roughly 4200 returned a 304 (not modified). So, around 2/3rds of the hits to my feed return 0 bytes. I don't return a full text feed, so its only around 25K. That works out to over 1GB per month of data transfer just from my RSS feed. Having a full text RSS feed could increase that by 3 to 3GB per month. That's pretty substantial given that I'm serving one lonely RSS feed for one insignificant blog. Here's Scoble's math. Sam Ruby weighs in on the proper use of HTTP.
04:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The Great IDE Debate
Chad Dickerson's column in InfoWorld is about the great IDE debate got me thinking. I've never seriously used an IDE, unless you count Emacs. I'm generally someone who loves new tools and count myself as an early adopter. Still, I never saw the trade-off as worthwhile. I've often thought of it as a generational thing--younger programmers used IDEs--but I'm not sure that's really true.
Its certainly true, that whether or not you use an IDE depends a great deal on the language you use. I suspect that there are not nearly as many Perl or Python programmers who use an IDE. And I don't think that's just because they're less common. If Perl programmers wanted to use Eclipse, they'd build a plug-in to do it. I suspect it has more to do with the style of programming. Paul Grahams quote about Java being used to accrete large programs as a series of patches is germane here, I think.
01:23 PM | Recommend This | Print This
SMS Appointment Reminders
My dentists sends me reminders of my appointments using SMS. They're generated automatically from his appointments software. Maybe I'm easily impressed, but I thought this was a good example of the right message on the right medium.