Here is a mesmerizing video that I picked up at Pestaola.gr – 24 hours of worldwide air traffic compressed into a minute or so video. Look at the density of that! Consider the complexity of the underlying technology. Consider how many people are affected but all of that. And that’s not even all worldwide traffic, since some of it escapes the technology used for this research.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gkJTJIPWqo]
I’ve heard a few mentions of CloudFlare before, but I never gave it much attention. Today, after reading this blog post, I decided to give it a try.
What’s more, that 30-40% increase that people used to see is now in the range of at least 50-60% as the team continues to find ways to make CloudFlare faster, while still offering security at the forefront.
What is CloudFlare, you ask? As per their own website:
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
In simple terms: CloudFlare is very cheap (even free) content delivery network (CDN). It provides speed and security improvements, and it is extremely easy to configure. I know so, because I’ve already registered for the free account and configured this site to benefit from the service. Whether it actually lives up to all the hype – I don’t know yet, but I’ll see in the next few days. I suspect it does, since there are numerous positive reviews around the web. I will of course let you know. Especially if you remind me.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaMWqyg_xMo]
Here is a quote from the Google Chrome 12 stable release blog post:
We’d also like to call particular attention to Sergey Glazunov’s $3133.7 reward. Although the linked bug is not of critical severity, it was accompanied by a beautiful chain of lesser severity bugs which demonstrated critical impact.
My focus here is not on the money that Sergey earned with his bug report, even though that is definitely an important and motivating factor. My focus is on the chain of the events. While this chain of events happens pretty much every time a bug is fixed, few people know about it. Maybe nobody, in fact, except for developers themselves.
The thing is that when a bug is discovered and fixed, pretty much every developer searches the code for problems similar to those brought up by the bug report. Be those issues typing mistakes, documentation inconsistencies, memory leaks, security issues, performance bottlenecks, or anything else – the code will be checked to make sure that the same problem doesn’t come up twice. From this perspective, I think that bug reports are so important not because of the specific bugs that they report, but because of those other bugs which aren’t yet fixed and probably aren’t yet reported.
Conclusion: every time you come across a bug in the application, don’t just work around it – take a few minutes of your time to report the problem properly to the developers. Chances are, they will fix some problems that you haven’t yet come across, but have pretty good chances to otherwise.
I used to have polls on this site a very long time ago. Those vanished between the numerous software upgrades and changes. Today, I’m bringing back the functionality with an excellent WP-Polls plugin for WordPress. All polls are grouped into a new Polls category. The latest poll is available in the front page sidebar. Feel free to post comments as well.
