E-Commerce and LAN Solutions

Expertise & specialization make their home in a niche

One of my favorite things about the Internet is the phenomenon of the long tail. Basically, the barriers are down and it’s led to an incredible explosion of content & commerce. Shelf space is no longer a consideration, so retailers can afford to either carry millions of SKUs (a la Amazon.com), able to stock nearly every book released or, like youtube.com, provide an endless expanse of content – something to satisfy every interest.

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Troubleshooting: in computers, no one can go very long without being forced to do at least rudimentary attempts, but I’ve found few books or other resources that help teach the mental process. After almost two decades of working with computers, since my first IBM XT at the ripe age of 15, I’ve been dealing with problems of every type. Most of the computer jobs had a large helping of troubleshooting, which was great for me. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed. I thought I would take the opportunity of my girlfriend’s hard drive crashing to walk through one real-world example, and hopefully provide some insight into this sometimes archaic process.

The Symptoms

So the other day my girlfriend tells me her pc has been locking up at odd times. It’s one she built herself a couple years ago, and has been running well for that time. I asked her what kind of lock-ups they were; typically hardware failures cause things like an instant reboot or power off, or the entire screen locking up and being completely unresponsive. That’s a ‘hard lock’. (more…)

Kinesis saves your wrists single-handedly with a goofy looking keyboard

Call it what you like – RSI (repetitive strain injury), carpal tunnel syndrome, or good ol’ “keyboarder’s bane”. Everyone who types much for very long should at least be thinking about it. While I’m sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of crippling pain or numbness, surgery or lots of time off to recover, an amazingly small number of people do anything to prevent it. (Note: this, like all reviews I post, follow my review policy).

Prevention isn’t the best thing, it’s the only thing

Many people don’t know that the original QWERTY layout for keyboards was set up to slow down typists so keys wouldn’t stick together in the old standard typewriters. It’s a good example of a defacto standard that has long outlived its usefulness. Regardless, standard keyboards have no ergonomic thought put into them at all, and the deluge of RSI cases as numbers keyboard workers increase is an obvious proof.

I’ve never heard a good story of someone who let their wrist pain get so bad that they had to see a doctor. Basically, my advice is to never let it get to that stage, no matter what. When I started typing regularly, it was about 6 years ago. I, like everyone, used the standard crap-keyboard that’s flat and designed to be easy to build. After a couple years, my wrists would start to get a little numb in the afternoons (especially after I learned to touch-type). Even then people were talking about carpal tunnel, and I decided to do something about it. I did some research and paid what I thought was an ungodly sum for a keyboard, $300 for a

Kinesis Essiential. Not only did it teach me to type better and much faster, but within a month or so my wrist pain was totally gone. What’s even more amazing to me, is that after using it for 90% of my typing over the last 6 years, my wrists are still in awesome shape, and I type a ton. Hours per day. at 80+ wpm. Very impressive.

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Ways to ferret out the root cause

As with any web hosted environment, response time and performance are a major issue. I would say the entire SAAS industry (software as a service) will have to deal with this problem for the forseeable future. Only Google seems to have figured out how to provide consistently speedy web hosted applications, and they couldn’t do it without their hundreds of thousands of servers. For those mortal companies who have somewhat less than that, performance will always be a major issue.

1. Tip one: Troubleshooting NetSuite back-end performance
   
   When logged in to the NetSuite ‘back end’, where all the actual work is done, sometimes things are slow. To find out some more information, simply double-click the NetSuite logo in the top left corner. You will get a pop-up like this:
   
   
   This breaks down the time it took to load the page. The total is shown first, then the time spent generating the page on the server, next the time it took to transfer the page to the browser, and lastly how long the client’s browser took to render the page. If the server time is a big percentage of the total, you can be sure the problem is on NetSuite’s side, and has nothing to do with your Internet connection or local computer.
   


2. Tip two: Diagnosing web site slowness
   
   To a lesser extent, the e-commerce web sites that are public facing and powered by the NetSuite application do sometimes have speed issues as well. To peek behind the curtain for a given page, simply load it in your browser and view the source code. The last few lines will look something like this:
   
   <!-- 41 39% #12-->
<!-- [ shop-java002.svale.netledger.com ] [ 11.0.4.84 ]-->
<!-- [ 411534 ] [ shopper@411534.com ] [ /s.nl ] [ Wed Dec 20 10:14:01 PST 2006 ] -->
<!-- Not logging slowest SQL -->

   The first number on the first line is how many milliseconds it took to build the page on the server side (I’m not sure what the other numbers on the first line are). The second line starts with the name of the specific server you are connected to in the cluster. This can be useful to watch if some people are seeing a specific problem on your web site but not others. Often it will be only those connected to one or a few of the servers running your site.

   A note on clusters: NetSuite, Google and others employ a technology called clustering to provide enough computing power to run their applications. It’s basically a way to make an arbitrary number of servers appear to work like one server to the outside world. Typically a load-balancing server will direct traffic for a web site to one of a number of servers that can handle the request, and uses a cookie to direct the user back to the original one the next time.
   

Quite a few people have complained about NetSuite’s continuing performance issues since their last major release, 11.0. Hopefully armed with some of these tools, NetSuite users will be able to see a more dedicated response to this critical issue.

Now i’m not the first to predict that soon we’ll be seeing pcs with an operating system made by Google, and there’s still quite a bit of debate on the topic. Officially Google denied it, but in such a vague way that it’s not even an answer. For those of us who don’t balk at speculation, let’s see what we can come up with:

1. First and foremost, Google’s profit comes from pay per click ads on their search pages & adsense content sites. Google has offered lots of free tools & applications, all with the only real benefit for them being market share/mind share/branding/popularity. It all serves to drive up their main revenue source. Imagine a Google-infused PC that takes advantage of all their services & offerings. You’d have a Googler for life.
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