-
The new Santa Rosas have a 1.3Mpixel iSight inside, though the SequenceGrabber software can't run the camera at that resolution, yet.
-
Hopefully this will sort out the problems I've been having with my new MBP, I've had more panics and freezes with this machine in 3 weeks, than I've had in years with my PowerBooks
-
This is a super addition to omnigraffle, much better than the one I'd cobbled together
June 2007 Archives
-
Posh branding of big type books for older people, smart.
-
Making grids work when the content is interacted with, great tips on gently nudging them.
-
Short essay on the changing nature of privacy
-
nice straightforward instructions, including migrating raw data folders from machine to machine.
-
Short video from Tim Berners-Lee talking standards, semantics and openness
After seeing Gavin Starks speak about AMEE at Xtech I've been thinking more seriously about the amount of energy that everything I do uses. I'm reminded of James Duncan Davidson and Chris Messina, both of whom have written about green issues.
I think that as web developers we should think carefully about the amount of cpu cycles and bandwidth we use in our applications. We should be optimising both our usage of energy and the performance of our applications. I'm not advocating a hairshirt attitude, we still need to serve up pages to our users, but we can be a bit more thoughtful in how we do this. Yahoo take this seriously, too.
At the @media2007conference I asked the panel at the end about the environmental impact of what we do and got somewhat blank looks from most of the panel. So I think we need to do a bit more discssion about this amongst tech circles. Look at what you send to and from the client, AJAX can help a lot in terms of avoiding full page refreshes, but watch out for accessibility issues. Use mod_gzip on your web servers, ensure that you support the not modified 304 http status on your feeds. Look at asynchronous means of responding to queries, Jabber will have an interesting role to play in this. Many bits of information do not need to be processed live and immediately returned to the client, some do I'll admit.
A lot of the tips for improving performance will help save the planet too, so at least there is a primary driver for companies to implement this. Something I'd be really interested in would be the trade off between cpu cycles and bandwidth in terms of energy usage. Is it better to gzip and then decompress to avoid sending excess data through many routers, or does the gzip and decompress use more energy? It seems to make sense that sending less data is more efficient.
Textdrive have been exploring this area, as part of their move to Solaris and Sparc machines is to lower their electricity bill. So, I'm pleased that I'll be moving to one of their new solaris machines soon. Amazon EC2 can also be seen as a good initiative in this area. Why have your own capacity sitting idle just in case. Much better to have your code swapped in and out on another machine which is being otherwise kept busy.
I know that this may seem a tiny issue, compared to leaving power adaptors plugged in and electronics in standby, but every little counts. If you have a site then every excess cpu cycle or byte you send uses power every time you serve up a page. Whilst each page downloaded is a tiny contribution, there are many of them. So keep this in mind as you make new websites and applications.
Tags:
enviroment, web development , climate change, performance, bandwidth
-
Kevin Marks' review of Andrew Keen's talk at Google, a good read.
