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“San Francisco (InfoWorld) – Netli on Monday rolled out a new service designed to speed the delivery of Web-services traffic over the Internet.
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NetLightning for Web Services is an application-specific optimization service that uses specialized protocols to avoid network latency and stop performance degradation of machine-to-machine communications. The Netli protocols include techniques for bandwidth management and loss and congestion control.”

>> We anticipate a lot of products in the Web Services space in the next few years. This space has been a confusing buzzword area, but it is maturing and impacting people’s day to day desktop lives …even though they often don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes.

- Michael

John Littler discusses the relationship between art and computer programming. At Pelago, we stress and cross train in both disciplines, hence the tagline “creative engineering, logical design.”

Functional specifications (functional specs), in the end, are the blueprint for how you want a particular web project or application to look and work. It details what the finished product will do, how a user will interact with it, and what it will look like. By creating a blueprint of the product first, time and productivity are saved during the development stage because the programmers can program instead of also working out the logic of the user-experience. It will also enable you to manage the expectations of your clients or management, as they will know exactly what to expect.

Consider the humble URL. In a few short years it’s become so ubiquitous as to be rendered invisible. It’s hard to imagine a world without it, and it’s hard to remember that there was once a time when not having a uniform means of locating resources was considered a fundamental stumbling block to the deployment of any large-scale hypertext system never mind a world-wide one.

Accurate performance analysis depends upon your ability to view the internals of your configuration. No item in your Web infrastructure should be a black box. You can always measure the time it takes for one component to receive, process, and return an event; however, you severely limit your ability to make changes if you don’t have a view into what that component is actually doing.

An information architect is a vital member of a Web development team, playing a critical role in how content is organized on a Web site. This article seeks to clear up some of the misconceptions about information architecture and help define the role an information architect plays in Web site development.

“In this article, I’ll explain the different types of DNS records, what they contain, and then go over the basics of running a name server on a Unix network.”

>> A funny cartoon for a fiesta friday.

- John

In general, the goals of usability engineering seem to be at cross-purposes with those of the business world. Usability engineering focuses on human behavior. Human-computer interaction research and theory are the raisons d’etre of the approach, whose goals are to improve the experience of the user with the technology. Contrast this with the “bottom line,” ROI-driven goals of the business world. The primary emphasis is not on the customer experience per se, but rather, on profit. One would hope that a superior user experience would correlate with profit.

Usability testing is an invaluable technique, and it’s worth spending a significant amount of money on. But there is little point in spending even a little money on a test that will not yield valid results. Development organizations shopping for usability testing vendors should look for evidence that a vendor has the required skills and experience to plan and run a valid usability test, and effectively interpret and utilize the results.