A few months ago we moved our website from Alentus to Sungard (formly Inflow), with what we thought was great success. The latency between our office and our dedicated server was cut in half. When we accessed the server from various connections such as Qwest and Comcast our download rates were far improved. Then one day we received a call from a client saying that since we moved them into our new facility, they’ve received increased complaints of download failures.

Our initial response was one of skepticism because we were seeing improved performance, not a decrease. Using terminal services to connect to our other dedicated servers around the country I was able to reproduce the client’s experience. Apparently, about 70% of traffic around the country was having difficulty or decreased performance while accessing our servers. I then stumbled on a tool called Website Pulse.

Website Pulse monitors your website for performance and related issues from various locations internationally. In the chart below you can see the results of downloading a 22 MB file from our servers. The numbers on the left are seconds needed to download a file from Chicago over a backbone provided by nLayer, Level3, UUNET. The drop in seconds occurred when we moved our servers out of Sungard and into ViaWest in Denver, CO. The sudden increase on the 5th of October was an issue with the switch used in our rack.

Unknown to us, when Sungard acquired Inflow they also changed their policy in regards to capping bandwidth. Rather then allowing for bandwidth overages, and then surcharging the customer; Sungard’s policy was to cap bandwidth and not tell the customer of the performance hit.

Prior to this issue we didn’t realize various locations around the country experienced our websites in such a wide variety of speeds. With Website Pulse we receive alerts when any of our sites a falling below our acceptable load times.

It’s a great tool and I highly recommend using it for website monitoring.

A while ago I posted a blog about image retargeting, a new form of image resizing that uses algorithms to determine what part of the image is most important and what can be stripped away during resizing.

And while the video helped illustrate the concept of image retargeting, it didn’t allow for first hand usage of the technique. Therefore I would like to direct your attention to riszr.com. An online flash application that allows you to upload images and resize them using retargeting (along with the normal methods). Then you can save your retargeted image out.

Rsizr.com is really well done, and greatly helps to demonstrate just how beneficial and powerful image retargeting is. It even offers advanced features such as area selection for retargeting protection. A technique that allows you to select parts of the image and protect them from being retargeted. Head on over to www.rsizr.com and give it a whirl.

This past Friday I took a few minutes and jumped over to layertennis.com to watch Shuan Inman and Kevin Cornell compete in the first ever layer tennis live match. It was an exhilarating competition, and got me thinking about how many people may not know exactly what layer tennis is and how it works.

So, for those of you that are new to layer tennis, let me give some background on exactly what it is and how it’s played.

To start, there are two designers per match, each one with their own refined battle skills and tactics. For example, one designer may be a photo manipulation wizard, while another might excel at typography and text. However, once the match starts each side will be struggling to meet time limits and come up with new and creative responses to the previous designer’s volley.

Generally a match goes for ten rounds, each round (volley) taking anywhere from fifteen minutes to 24 hours. The goal is that each designer will create an addition to the image that is unique and new but which plays off of their opponents previous concept. For instance, below we can see a set of volleys which are both creative and unique but maintain a constant theme between them.

Shaun Inman - Step 8 - Layer Tennis Match 9/28/2007

Kevin Cornell - Step 9 - Layer Tennis Match 9/28/2007

The server, who is randomly selected, creates the first image (serve) with whatever theme they see fit. From there each consecutive volley must maintain a visual or conceptual connection with the previous work. As the match progresses the theme often twists or takes new direction.

Upon completion of the match there is a vote by the viewers. Generally this takes place on a web forum or poll. In some cases the winner might get a prize but most of the time it’s simply for pride.