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That dip there in response time is thanks to WP-SuperCache. My average page load time has dropped from 1 second to 0.25 seconds.

I found this piece from “The Happiness Hypothesis” pretty interesting:

In the 1990s, Damasio found that when certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex are damaged, patients lose most of their emotional lives. They report that when they ought to feel emotion, they feel nothing, and studies of their autonomic reactions (such as those used in lie detector tests) confirm that they lack the normal flashes of bodily reaction that the rest of us experience when observing scenes of horror or beauty. Yet their reasoning and logical abilities are intact. They perform normally on tests of intelligence and knowledge of social rules and moral principles.

So what happens when these people go out into the world? Now that they are free of the distractions of emotion, do they become hyperlogical, able to see through the haze of feelings that blinds the rest of us to the path of perfect rationality? Just the opposite. They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other. When the rest of us look out at the world, our emotional brains have instantly and automatically appraised the possibilities. One possibility usually jumps out at us as the obvious best one. We need only use reason to weigh the pros and cons when two or three possibilities seem equally good.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality.

Guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that models based on rationality fail.

PPK’s State of the Browser – IE Edition mentions one reason why IE6 will probably stay on for a while.

Now why do I expect IE6 to stick around while IE7 goes down? The answer is simple: Intranets… many office workers will continue to be condemned to IE6.

At work, that is. It’s quite likely that on their private computer at home they run another browser — IE7 or 8, Firefox, or maybe one of the smaller ones.

… Basically, most of the IE6 market share comes from office-hour surfing, while it drops significantly in the after-hours period.

I checked the numbers on my site. It’s bang on. Last month, the percentage of IE6 users around noon was a little over 40%. At midnight, the percentage was 20%.

Percentage of IE6 users over a 24-hour window

Given that the bulk of my audience is from India, I would assume that these statistics are probably representative of Indian corporates. But I guess it means that there’s a fair bit of music listening happening at work. Probably a good thing.

This graph is the number of referrals Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, sent to my site over the last few days. Looks like the hype is dying out. Though Bing did leapfrog Yahoo briefly, that lasted just one day.

I’m quite busy on a project right now, and don’t get time to write long articles. So for a while, I’m going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff.

1. Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on Why You Should Encourage Weakness. It boils down to a choice: do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses? Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. The weakness isn’t why you hired the person! Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths.
2. Google Analytics has a fairly interesting API that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode()
3. The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a Checkout sandbox, an AJAX API playground, an AdWords sandbox, an AdSense API sandbox, the Mapstraction API sandbox, even an event called Developer Sandbox. (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)

I left my camera near the window of my office at Canary Wharf in time lapse mode on a cloudy day. The video is playing at 60 times normal speed.

Check out the related time lapse videos. They’re stunning. With this one, you can figure out which firms work till late in the night.

I just upgraded from Firefox 3 Beta 4 to Beta 5. It’s amazing how unstable Beta 5 is compared to the earlier version. Gmail crashes. Google maps crashes. Almost every other site I visit crashes. And looks like I’m not alone: doing a Google search for “Firefox 3 beta x crash” shows a consistently increasing number of results.

Update (8/Apr/08): As the comments rightly point out, this could simply be because more people use Beta 5. Here’s the number of Google hits for “Firefox 3 Beta x” — and it shows a clear increasing trend.

So, adjusting for this, here’s the relative crash frequency:

Beta 5 still stands out.

Maybe Google search results are not a good proxy. Maybe the mention of “crash” doesn’t indicate the software itself crashing. But it sure crashes a lot more for me.

The songs were moving enough. The lyrics turn out to be beautiful too. The beauty of the language really comes out with songs like these.

• Taare Zameen Par (lyrics)
• Kholo Kholo (lyrics)
• Bum Bum Bole (lyrics)
• Jame Raho (lyrics)
• Maa (lyrics)
• Bheja Kum (lyrics)
• Mera Jahan (lyrics)

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Ivory sculptures at the Guangzhou Chen Family Temple. The first two, especially, have spheres within spheres within spheres… which looks impossible to carve.

John Resig has written a Sparklines library. Here’s an example. I wrote that HTTP download speeds not linear 182,315,313,319,314,459,441,445,453,525,567,552,577,587,580,581,590,663,639,658,616,705,720,695,739,750,720,741,803,800,800,818,800,856,796,816,866,841,836,828,861,893,859,905,881,885,946,944,943,984,1003,1012,994,979,977,986,1010,1017,1027,1000,1035,986,1006,1006,996,1022,1003,1053,1046,1061,1002,1064,1014,1039,1061,1023,1076,1081,1019,1064,1072,1089,1101,1069,1128,1125,1092,1155,1170,1067,1094,1082,1178,1211,1154,1169,1133,1161,1193,1167 and that they flatten out over time. A linear line would look like this: 180,190,201,211,221,232,242,252,262,273,283,293,304,314,324,335,345,355,365,376,386,396,407,417,427,438,448,458,468,479,489,499,510,520,530,541,551,561,572,582,592,602,613,623,633,644,654,664,675,685,695,705,716,726,736,747,757,767,778,788,798,808,819,829,839,850,860,870,881,891,901,912,922,932,942,953,963,973,984,994,1004,1015,1025,1035,1045,1056,1066,1076,1087,1097,1107,1118,1128,1138,1148,1159,1169,1179,1190,1200 The little red line here is a sparkline that’s based on real data. John’s javascript converts the data into a graph.

Sparklines were introduced by Edward Tufte.