Entries in Life

I stayed at the Capacity offices as long as I could.  I could feel the fatigue hitting me pretty hard, but after lunch (including some kind of purplish yam and a good dose of caffeine) I managed to get the System 76 Laptop in some kind of working order.

I should give props here to dcm who suggested that I “download the internet” and take it with me to Rwanda.  I managed to get around 175GB of the Ubuntu repository mirrored onto a disk.  This proved invaluable when I was installing the system and applying updates.  For a little while I switched to the usual web-based mirror and was told it would take a couple of hours to download everything I needed (for perspective, at home, the download times take no more than five or ten minutes).  Having the disk handy meant I could install packages directly.  The mirror isn't complete, so some things did have to be downloaded, but the majority of stuff was right there.

One bug I ran into showed up after I did an “aptitude dist-upgrade” after doing a clean install.  All of the sudden I couldn't log in via GDM.  (The last time I had problems with a gutsy upgrade, it was using XFS so probably not something that was a core concern.) Weary from lack of sleep and not really in the mood for too much trouble-shooting, I ended up purging “ubuntu-desktop” (and its dependent packages) and then reinstalling it.  Strangely enough, that did the trick (for the most part).

After that, I told Vanessa I was ready to give in to sleep.  We walked back to the hotel with me snapping pictures like a madman on the way back.  I saw some armed police standing outside and asked if I could photograph them.  “It is not allowed.”  Fine, no close ups for you!

Once back I crashed in the hotel.  The turndown service woke me up twice.  First when they came in un-announced — or maybe I didn't hear them knock and only woke up when they opened the door — and the second time when they called me (two times in a row).  I was so confused I thought they were asking for someone named “Tom”.  I was pretty annoyed, but it didn't keep me from falling back to sleep quickly.

Finally dcm woke me up so we could go have dinner at the Mille Colline.  Curried Veg, yum!

(Oops! I slept in! Curse these blackout curtains!)

I have Zimbra installed on my mail server.  I liked its web interface well enough... until I got to Rwanda!

Now, part of the problem is that this is my own server.  I don't own several different globally dispersed operations facilities like Google does.  So I have a lot of latency between Rwanda and California, where the server is.

But over these connections, Zimbra seems to take forever to load up.  Since I'm used to using OfflineIMAP and Gnus normally this isn't too big a problem.

Still, it makes me that much more aware of how much each  HTTP request costs.

In response to my complaint about Zimbra's slow web interface, Nathan said I should use Amazon's EC2.  The problem is that even if I use EC2, the server is in a single place ... and I can't choose that place.  And Zimbra is still a very heavy web application.

And, worse, Amazon (unlike Google and Yahoo!) is not obsessed with page-load times.  When I cleared my cache and pointed YSlow at Amazon's front page, it took over 40 seconds to load!  And a good 10 of those seconds showed nothing but an empty page.  Twitter (front page load time, 15+ seconds) uses Amazon's S3 for image hosting and if you go to someone's page on Twitter (say, USofA, 75+ seconds!), you can watch each of the images for the people he is following load slowly, one after another, as they fill in on the page.  People are using S3 for a content distribution network, but that isn't what S3 is.  I expect EC2 to fair worse than S3.

By contrast Google took under 5 seconds and Yahoo! (a lot more images) took  about 10 seconds.  (Nathan's page to just over 12 seconds.  My own page took over 20 seconds and didn't display anything for a while, something I need to work on.)

This is where I'd like Zimbra to focus.  So that even those of us who only have one server hosted in California (or on EC2 somewhere) can get to our email quickly.

But I can't just sit on my butt about speed.  Actually coming to Rwanda helps me understand that page load times matter -- a lot.  We don't know what sort of connection people will have to any applications we build.  For Ajax apps, Google Reader gives a good idea of how to build a useful, responsive application even when you don't have a 1MBit connection.