Special Editorial Comment
By Brian Boyko, Editor, Network Performance Daily.
Editor, Network Performance Daily
Since we started this blog in October of 2006, I’ve been consumed with three questions: 1) “How can I help inform my readers?” 2) “What would my readers like to read about?” and 3) “Can’t anybody find me… somebody to love?”
I still can’t find the answer to #3, but I think we’ve done a very good job with the first two. And this is the 300th post on Network Performance Daily.
Yay us!
In all seriousness, we’ve covered some amazing stories over the past 300 posts. And just like the “Golden Girls” got suddenly nostalgic whenever there was a writer’s strike, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the events of the past year.
Let’s start with one of our earliest posts, Manish Chacko’s “God Help The Help Desk”
Imagine a man walking into a hospital, saying that he doesn’t feel good, and doctors around the country are immediately called in, starting with the cardiologist, who rules out heart trouble. The man is next wheeled to a podiatrist, who rules out any problems with his feet.He’s then wheeled to a gynecologist (But I’m a man… Ma’am, I’m a doctor. I think I should make that determination – and only after the tests come back.) If your diagnostic process is trial by error, you’re not, technically, diagnosing.
Remember this post from Carol Shiraldi, on “Why enterprise developers (generally) use Java and game programmers (generally) use C++“?
Gaming programmers are performance-oriented to the extreme, because if you release a game and it’s slow, no one is going to use it no matter how cool it is or how many features it has. Other programmers often code first for functionality, and at the end of the cycle, start to worry about performance issues. Game programmers need optimized performance from the get-go. This means game programmers are willing to forgo certain things. For example, the enterprise side of the software world was very quick to move to Java when it first came out, but the game programmers didn’t.
The first time I knew this blog would be big was when we got on Slashdot for our series on Windows Vista TCP/IP stack, including Ted Romer’s “Vista’s ‘Next Generation’ TCP/IP Stack and the Enterprise,” and again for Steven Maercklein and Zack Belcher’s “Vista TCP/IP Promises and Perils“.
There was also the day that Lowell Heddings, of Dzone, asked us “Aren’t routers boring?” and we responded.
Routers are designed to be boring. You don’t want any one router to get “interesting” because it’s probably having a host of issues – buffer overrun, CPU pegged at 100%, memory, etc. Like a war zone, it’s a good day when nothing happens. In the networking world, it’s a good day when no alerts are sent concerning any one router.
Probably I’m most proud of our coverage of the Julie Amero case, including this interview with Herb Horner. Without overstating our role in her eventual exoneration, I’m glad that we were able to help get her side of the story out in the blogosphere.
Our most controversial post has to be Jim Sampson’s “Ten years of pushing for Linux adoption in the workplace (and why I gave up.)” With over 100 comments, it certainly was an eventful day.
We’ve been on BoingBoing, Slashdot, Digg, but sometimes, there’s just something about when your story gets on Fark… as it did when we first announced Netcosm.
Another story that got on Fark was when Wafaa Bilal gave an interview regarding his art project in which he was confined to a room with a paintball gun controlled by people on the Internet.
We’ve had our share of experts and celebrities chiming in, from Linden Labs’ Joe Miller talking about VoIP in Second Life, to the day we were “schooled by Vint Cerf,” the day we interviewed the man who invented the flying car, and when I got to speak to a teenage-geek-hero of mine, Rob Malda, a.k.a. CmdrTaco, editor of Slashdot.
Of course, to top it all off, ComputerWorld decided to interview us for a story they were doing on corporate blogging.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
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