Hasta La Gadget!

Performance artists. What won’t they do for attention? One guy, French artist Abraham Poincheval, is spending 13 days inside a taxidermy bear. That’s right. He is camping out inside of a dead bear.

He is doing this for his performance art piece “Dans La Peau de l’Ours” (“Inside the Skin of the Bear”) at the Hunting and Wildlife Museum in Paris through April 13, 2014. And also for attention. It’s just how artists are. Poincheval will remain enclosed in a cramped compartment inside of the bear. Kind of like a bear baby in the womb.

The “performance” is being streamed live via two cameras if you’re into that kind of thing. Watch man and bear co-exist in a truly weird way.

Whooah, we’re half way there
Livin’ in a bear
Take my hand and we’ll make it – I swear
Livin’ in a bear

[via BBC News via Laughing Squid]

This article was written on February 17, 2011 by CyberNet.

I’ve helped all kinds of people troubleshoot “slow” Internet connections, and more often than not it has something to do with the twenty toolbars they have installed in their browser. Sometimes, however, there has been a legitimate concern with their ISP. You might be able to identify the problem using the traceroute command, but as any experienced geek knows you can’t just rely on a single traceroute to pinpoint the issue. You have to run it several times to make sure the problem consistently appears. Let me introduce you to PingPlotter Freeware.

PingPlotter comes in a variety of flavors, and while the paid versions have some useful features my focus is going to be on the free version. With the free version you can specify the URL you want to trace, the duration between traces, and the number of “samples to include” in a set. The number of samples can be confusing, but it is important because it’s what the PL% and averages are based on (we’ll explain those later). So when you set the sample “samples to include” to “10″ it will include the last 10 traces when calculating those numbers, and you can see in the status bar (like in the screenshot above) how far along in the traces it currently is. Since I have the sample size set to 10 only samples 117 through 126 are actually used in the calculations. If my sample size was 150 it would have been using all of the samples in the calculations and graph.

What does all the different information mean? Here’s a breakdown of the columns and how the graph works:

• Hop – You’ll notice that as you go down the Trace Graph from top to bottom, the Hop number increments. What the Hop number shows you is that, for instance, data from you to the target hits the device at Hop 1 first, and then goes to Hop 2, etc. al. Those hops you see are most likely network routers or servers, but they really could be anything that will forward the ping requests.
• PL% – The percentage number of data packets that have been lost in the current sample set. So if you have your “Samples to Include” set to 10, and five of the last ten traces PingPlotter sent to that hop didn’t even make it back to PingPlotter, your PL% for that hop will be 50. So PL%, or packet loss percent, gives you a number at a glance for that hop of how many packets have made it out and should have made it back. Obviously a high packet loss percentage here isn’t a good thing.
• IP – The IP address for that hop.
• DNSName – The DNS name for that hop. If you’re seeing “————” instead of a name, PingPlotter wasn’t able to get DNS information for that device.
• Avg – The average response time in milliseconds for the number of samples in that sample set.
• Cur – The roundtrip time (the ping time) in milliseconds for data to make it to that hop and back again. Another term for this roundtrip time is latency.
• The Graph
  • Red line – represents the average response time for each host for the currently selected samples.
  • Blue X – represents the response time for the current packet.
  • Black horizontal lines – represent the minimum and maximum response times.
  • Red horizontal bar (not pictured in my screenshot above) – shows the packet loss for that hop (same as the PL% column, but there for readability).

If you’ve ever dealt with traceroutes before you’ll likely already know of some situations where PingPlotter could have been valuable. I’d love for this to be packaged as a portable app, but you’ll unfortunately have to install it.

PingPlotter Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

One of the really nice things that Microsoft added to Vista was three different power plans, and also provided the ability to create your own if you so desire. By default the operating system ships with a power saver, balanced, and high performance plan. I can really attest to the power saver plan squeezing every bit of juice out of your battery, but most people will likely never switch out of the “balanced” plan that Microsoft has set as the default.

Naturally you would expect performance to suffer when using the balanced plan when compared to the high performance plan. After all, the balanced plan is more friendly on your pocketbook and the environment. Interestingly enough that’s not turning out to be the case according to some recent CrystalMark benchmarks by PocketTables (here and here).

What they found was that Vista’s balanced power plan beat out high performance on two different machines that they tested. You would expect it to be pretty darn close since the balanced plan is supposed to kick up performance when it’s needed, but to flat-out beat the high performance plan in nearly every test is just crazy.

If you’ve been using the high performance power plan maybe it’s time you kick it “down” to the balanced option. 😉

[via jkOnTheRun]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We’ve been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.

One thing that you need to remember with these tests is that the results are all relative to each other. Each browser is running on the exact same machine so that the comparisons are accurate. What we heard the last time we did tests like this is “such and such browser performed a lot better/worse for me.” We appreciate hearing what your results are, but for the sake of accuracy they can’t really be compared to what we get.

Notes:

• All of these tests are performed on the same Windows Vista SP1 machine, and is wired into a network to minimize the effects of wireless disturbances.
• To test both IE7 and IE8 Beta I ran all of the tests in IE 7, installed IE 8, and then reran all the tests again.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions installed.
• Caches were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time and no other applications (other than standard Vista services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was always used in the native rendering mode (a.k.a. standards compliant mode).

–JavaScript Tests–

We’ve previously run Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript tests, but there was apparently some controversy of using that because people felt that it could be a little biased. We wanted to pick a test that used tools you’ll find in sites you visit everyday. That’s why we went with the MooTools SlickSpeed test which checks the browser against different JavaScript libraries: Dojo 1.0.2, JQuery 1.2.3, MooTools 1.2B2, and Prototype 1.6.0.2.

Many sites use those libraries, and even we use JQuery for things such as the AJAX commenting. By putting the browsers back-to-back with the SlickSpeed test, we’ll be able to find out exactly which ones will give us the better JavaScript performance (this is what really matters on a day to day basis).

Pretty much none of the browsers were able to complete all of the tests error-free, and so we’re focusing purely on the speed. We ran each test three times, totaled the runtime (measured in milliseconds) for all four libraries, and then averaged the results. In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

1. Safari 3.1: 447.33ms (407,536,399)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 502.00ms (523,456,527)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 909.00ms (921,904,902)
4. Opera 9.26: 1036.33ms (992,1034,1083)
5. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1507.67ms (1523,1472,1528)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 5944.33ms (5965,5998,5870)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 6690ms (6245,7206,6619)

It looks like the new Safari 3.1 takes the crown on this set of tests!

–Page Load Times–

I was trying to figure out what the best method would be to measure page load times in all the browsers. Sure some of the browsers report how long it takes for a site to load, but we wanted a universal way that would work across all of the browsers. We figured sitting here with a stop watch just wouldn’t cut it.

After some searching around I came across the Numion Stopwatch, which is a great tool for measuring how long it takes for a site to load. It’s entirely encased in a website so that there is nothing to install, and it uses JavaScript to notify you exactly how long it takes a page to load. From what I can tell it does a rather superb job!

We ran the page load test three times on two different sites so that we could really see what the results were like. We used the Official Google Blog and the Yahoo Search Blog for our benchmarks, and there are very good reasons that we chose those sites. Both of those serve up nearly the exact same content every time you load the site. If I chose a site such as ours we would run into the issue of different ads being served in the different browsers.

For each test the browser started with a cleared cache, and the three results were averaged together to get a single overall load time (measured in seconds). In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

Note: I literally went and deleted each browser’s cache after each refresh just to remove any concern that a Control/Shift refresh was not deleting the site’s cache correctly.

The Google Blog:

1. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 2.498s (2.129,2.606,2.760)
2. Safari 3.1: 2.798s (2.619,2.963,2.811)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 3.009s (3.167,3.347,2.513)
4. Opera 9.26: 3.360s (3.606,3.215,3.260)
5. Internet Explorer 7: 4.235s (4.402,3.800,4.504)
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 4.485s (4.852,4.258,4.346)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 4.602s (4.409,4.238,5.158)

The Yahoo Search Blog:

1. Safari 3.1: 1.411s (1.547,1.312,1.375)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 1.599s (1.578,1.625,1.593)
3. Opera 9.26: 1.677s (1.547,1.625,1.860)
4. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1.771s (1.797,1.844,1.672)
5. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 2.055s (2.430,2.143,1.591)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 2.594s (2.563,2.219,3.000)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 3.365s (2.875,3.750,3.470)

It looks like Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5 both do really well in these tests, and I would consider it a tie between the two.

–Memory Usage–

This is probably one of the areas that interests most of you. Memory usage has become a big concern these days as we’ve seen some browsers (*cough* Firefox *cough*) use up insane amounts of our computer’s resources. So we took each of the browsers seen in the previous tests, developed a list of sites to open in each, and went at it.

We’re not going to list out all of the sites that we decided to visit, but they are all sites that are extremely popular. Places like MySpace, YouTube, CNN, and others were all included as we chugged through our four different memory usage readings:

1. Started the browser, and took a memory usage reading.
2. Loaded 10 predetermined sites in tabs, and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
3. Loaded 15 more predetermined sites in tabs (totaling 25 sites), and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
4. Let the browser sit for 10 minutes with the 25 tabs open, and then took a memory usage reading.

And now for the results! The table below lists the different browsers and the result from each test mentioned above. The best browser from each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

For this round it’s clear that Firefox 3 Beta 4 walks away as the clear winner. Mozilla has obviously put some work into making Firefox 3 a more memory efficient browser than it previously was, and this is proof of that.

I can’t say that I was surprised that some version of Internet Explorer almost always did the worst, but I was quite taken back that Internet Explorer 8 shows little improvement over version 7. Apparently that is not the focus of Microsoft right now.

–Overview–

It took us about 6 hours to compile all of the results that you see above, and I would say that doing this on your own is not really for the faint of heart. Things like not being able to run IE7 and IE8 side-by-side is really a time killer, but we wanted to be sure to include both versions in our results. And surprisingly the only browser that crashed on us was Internet Explorer 8 Beta when trying to open the 25 tabs.

We’d love to hear any comments you may have regarding our results, but remember that what you’ll see on your computer will likely differ from what we see. The important thing to take out of the stats is how each of them relatively rank up against each other.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on November 23, 2011 by CyberNet.

There are some great tools out there for testing a website’s performance including Web Page Test, Stella, and WatchMouse. Those are the three that I regularly find myself using, but the website monitoring service Pingdom recently updated their Full Page Test tool blowing many others out of the water.

The new interface they have is beautifully designed, which helps in understanding the data they are presenting to you. When you begin navigating through the various sections you’ll find a full waterfall view that lets you know how long each individual request on the site took, and you can even see a page analysis to help serve as an overview of all those requests.

Then you can flip over to the performance grade to get an idea of which areas on your site could use the most improvement. Expanding any of the sections will list out the requests that go against that particular rule, and towards the bottom they provide a link referencing what you can do to resolve the issues.

There are also some settings you can choose from before you initiate a test. One setting lets you decide whether the results of the test should be saved and made public, and the other is the location of the server running the test (Netherlands, New York, or Texas).

Pingdom Full Page Test Homepage

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com