Monday, October 30, 2006

Bloglines, OPML, Blogger and Flock

I aggregate 50 or so blog feeds using Bloglines, its a very useful way to keep track of infrequent blogs in particular, and it strips off the adverts and other decoration from the power bloggers.

I just did some tidying up of my blog list, exported it in OPML format and uploaded it to http://share.opml.org/

This is an interesting way to contribute to the "Top 100" blogs list on that site, and it also has some useful features like seeing who else reads the same blogs, and who has the most similar list of blogs.

I seem to have added to the "long tail" since many of the blogs I read were new to the site, so I'm the only reader. My blog had one other reader "Ian" (hello!) who has a very long list of blogs, that I may poke around in if I get some free time...

Meanwhile, Flock is working well as my cross-platform browser. I'm writing blog entries with it, although I did lose an entry I was writing a week or so ago, when I upgraded Flock and didn't save an almost complete entry first. The new version of Flock appears to automatically save entries every few minutes, but I hate re-writing things, so that entry may not be re-created for a while.

Flock seems to have some issues writing entries to blogger.com at the moment. I'm not using the updated blogger.com, but Flock fails to write the blog entry most of the time, then randomly works. I gave up and used cut and paste to post this entry directly....

Pandora Prog Channel

I've been trying Pandora on and off for Internet music for a while, and attended a talk by CEO Tim Westergren last week, which got me to try it again. They are continuously improving their algorithms for choosing music, and I was trying to make a channel that would serve me interesting new music alongside some of my favourite experimental "Prog Rock" bands. It seems to be working much better, and I keep tuning the channel by skipping tracks that I don't like and giving thumbs up to the ones I do. The nice thing is you can listen to my channel, even though you don't get exactly the same songs as I do, there should be an interesting mix of King Crimson, Zappa, Estradasphere, and many other bands playing music you won't hear often. Its easy to make your own channel (it takes less training to make a more mainstream channel) and its the best way I've found to discover completely new music.

http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh59488715848528731

Enjoy...

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Sunday, October 08, 2006

CMG06 Conference - Reno December 3-8

As usual I'll be attending the Computer Measurement Group conference in Reno Nevada this December. I've attended every year since 1994, and its the place where I get an update on the state of the art in Performance Management, and get to mingle with my friends and peers who work on Capacity Planning.

This year I'm presenting three times:

  1. Sunday morning 3 hour seminar on Capacity Planning with Free and Bundled Tools. This is a repeat of last years talk, presented jointly with Mario Jauvin, who covers the Windows OS and Networking related areas. I cover Solaris, Linux and the system oriented tools.
  2. Wednesday morning conference paper titled "Utlization is Virtually useless as a Metric!". Regular readers of this blog will recognize much of the content of this paper, which gathers together all the ways in which your measurements can be corrupted by virtualization.
  3. Thursday morning I'm giving a 3 hour training course called the Unix/Linux CMG Quick Start Course, which is part of a new feature for CMG and is based on the training classes in performance tuning that I have given for many years.
Early bird discounted registration is open until October 13th. The sunday seminars are an extra cost item, but the Thursday morning training classes are included in the regular conference fee. This is the only place I'm planning to give public training classes, and since I'm at the conference all week its a great opportunity to discuss performance and capacity issues in person. I hope to see you there...

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