With the official launch of Windows 7 just a few weeks away, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at some overlooked and improved features that were first introduced in Windows Vista. Far and away the least mentioned and most effective carryover for many may very well be ReadyBoost , particularly in the case of enterprise deployment .. and a few ‘older’ PCs. One of the boxes I tested Windows 7 on would be considered ‘legacy’ at this stage. A single core processor, 1 GB of RAM onboard and shared graphics memory. Honestly, while I expected a little ’search’ for some drivers, I wasn’t sure if any of the versions would work at all. The ‘Beta’, RC, and Enterprise version all ran fine and at about the same speed as XP. Memory intensive graphics and video were a challenge but still an improvement over XP using the latest Windows 7 drivers. Then came the magic. ReadyBoost. I plugged in an 8 GB flash drive (ReadyBoost certified … IE: 1 ms or less access time) and dedicated the drive to ReadyBoost via the pop-up dialog. Microsoft should be talking more about this. Not only did ReadyBoost under Windows 7 improve overall system performance and speed, but it literally felt like I had changed the CPU or added more memory. On the same computer, XP was now a very slow ‘turtle’. There was absolutely no comparison in access times, video or graphics. I’m not encouraging installation of the operating system on computers with less than the recommended system resources but if you ‘need’ to push one or two boxes on your network to ‘the next level’, ReadyBoost might be the answer. (In the chance that it isn’t, obviously back everything up first?!). On to other stuff … Vista also introduced the ‘Snipping Tool’. After a little networking last night, apparently I’m not the only one that missed it entirely. Bottom line …. Screen capture (with annotation) is build into the operating system. Couple that with a significantly upgraded version of yes, Microsoft Paint, and you can actually do some pretty neat stuff without launching another ‘big’ program. (Left – ‘Snipped’ on the fly while writing this piece) Like any other operating system, Windows 7 is going to behave differently with different hardware configurations. It’s a pretty safe bet that if your box ran well (or great) with Vista, it should not only ‘like’ Windows 7, but from everything I’ve experienced to date, it should find all the drivers you need automatically. Finally a suggestion. After visiting your PC manufacturer’s website, take an inventory of your computer’s components and head over to the component manufacturer’s website(s) to see if any newer Windows 7 specific drivers have been released for your chipset(s), wireless adapter, audio, etc. As has been the case for me since the initial release of the Windows 7 Beta …. you may get a very pleasant surprise.
Archive for category deployment
A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. This article shows a method to improve the providing of static content for a web platform. Further, it will show you a way to automate the deployment of these files, so you can deliver them with least effort but with maximum performance. This tutorial will take some time to set it up, but it’s going to save you hours of work in the future and will improve your page speed significantly. 1. Why do I need this? There are several approaches to optimize the delivery of contents. Some use on-the-fly compression via the server itself or a scripting language, which costs performance and does not optimize the structure and content of the files. The method shown here prepares the files once and also merges and optimizes the code of CSS and Javascript files before the files are compressed, which makes the delivery of them even faster. Most browsers download only two files from a source at once . If a page needs to load more files from one domain, they get queued. More files to transfer mean more requests to the server, more traffic and more usage of the server’s performance. For the users of the platform, this means longer loading times. The more steps you need to deploy these files, the more space for mistakes is given. Deployment is boring. It’s far more exciting to invest some time once, to set up a reusable automation, than wasting time doing the same copy/paste/upload actions over and over again. Compare this two screenshots that show the same content before and after the optimization. The apricot colored parts of the bars stand for the status “in queue” while loading the page. The “in queue” status means nothing less than: Wasted time of the user. In this example, the loading time was reduced by 33% , the transferred data size was reduced by 65% and the number of requests to the server even by 80% . By using CSS sprites and merged CSS and Javascript files, there is no queue for the loading of the basic static content. 2. How to improve your static content Besides caching, there are some principles to make the whole setup of static content more efficient right from the start of development. Use CSS sprites for your layout graphics. It not only saves you a lot of traffic and loading time. If you got used to maintain your graphics like this, you’ll notice that it can be much more comfortable to have your layout elements e.g. in a single Photoshop file. Don’t blow up the loading time with your CSS and Javascript files. Combine the files of each kind into one single file , minimize them (e.g. by removing line breaks and other unnecessary characters) and compress them using GZip to get the load even smaller. This is covered in this tutorial. 3. Automating the deployment using Ruby This automation is written in the Ruby language . So you need to have Ruby installed on your development computer. The installation is pretty simple on Windows and Mac OS X even ships with Ruby. Please keep in mind: The scripts are completely independent from the language you’re using to run your site! You can also use them to deploy content e.g. for a PHP project. If you’re not used to work on the command line, the next steps might look cryptic to you. Don’t hesitate, clench your teeth and take care that you always pass the correct path of the files to deal with. You only have to go through this once. When you’re finished, all you need to do is to type one single command to start the whole process. To make it easier for you, this is the folder structure used for this tutorial: + css/ – fonts.css – grids.css – layout.css – reset.css – static.min.css (generated) – static.min.css.gz (generated) + js/ – framework.js – gallery.js – plugin1.js – plugin2.js – start.js – static.min.js (generated) – static.min.js.gz (generated) + deploy/ – batch – ftp.rb – gzip.rb index.php (or something similar) Requirements for this tutorial Don’t worry, besides Ruby you won’t need anything, that you don’t probably already have: A simple text editor to save the source code. A command line tool, like Windows cmd.exe or Mac OS X Terminal to call the scripts. A FTP account to try out the upload script. A project to enhance. Optional: The Firefox add-on Firebug (or something similar for other browsers), to see the enhancements afterwards.
A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. This article shows a method to improve the providing of static content for a web platform. Further, it will show you a way to automate the deployment of these files, so you can deliver them with least effort but with maximum performance. This tutorial will take some time to set it up, but it’s going to save you hours of work in the future and will improve your page speed significantly. 1. Why do I need this? There are several approaches to optimize the delivery of contents. Some use on-the-fly compression via the server itself or a scripting language, which costs performance and does not optimize the structure and content of the files. The method shown here prepares the files once and also merges and optimizes the code of CSS and Javascript files before the files are compressed, which makes the delivery of them even faster. Most browsers download only two files from a source at once . If a page needs to load more files from one domain, they get queued. More files to transfer mean more requests to the server, more traffic and more usage of the server’s performance. For the users of the platform, this means longer loading times. The more steps you need to deploy these files, the more space for mistakes is given. Deployment is boring. It’s far more exciting to invest some time once, to set up a reusable automation, than wasting time doing the same copy/paste/upload actions over and over again. Compare this two screenshots that show the same content before and after the optimization. The apricot colored parts of the bars stand for the status “in queue” while loading the page. The “in queue” status means nothing less than: Wasted time of the user. In this example, the loading time was reduced by 33% , the transferred data size was reduced by 65% and the number of requests to the server even by 80% . By using CSS sprites and merged CSS and Javascript files, there is no queue for the loading of the basic static content. 2. How to improve your static content Besides caching, there are some principles to make the whole setup of static content more efficient right from the start of development. Use CSS sprites for your layout graphics. It not only saves you a lot of traffic and loading time. If you got used to maintain your graphics like this, you’ll notice that it can be much more comfortable to have your layout elements e.g. in a single Photoshop file. Don’t blow up the loading time with your CSS and Javascript files. Combine the files of each kind into one single file , minimize them (e.g. by removing line breaks and other unnecessary characters) and compress them using GZip to get the load even smaller. This is covered in this tutorial. 3. Automating the deployment using Ruby This automation is written in the Ruby language . So you need to have Ruby installed on your development computer. The installation is pretty simple on Windows and Mac OS X even ships with Ruby. Please keep in mind: The scripts are completely independent from the language you’re using to run your site! You can also use them to deploy content e.g. for a PHP project. If you’re not used to work on the command line, the next steps might look cryptic to you. Don’t hesitate, clench your teeth and take care that you always pass the correct path of the files to deal with. You only have to go through this once. When you’re finished, all you need to do is to type one single command to start the whole process. To make it easier for you, this is the folder structure used for this tutorial: + css/ – fonts.css – grids.css – layout.css – reset.css – static.min.css (generated) – static.min.css.gz (generated) + js/ – framework.js – gallery.js – plugin1.js – plugin2.js – start.js – static.min.js (generated) – static.min.js.gz (generated) + deploy/ – batch – ftp.rb – gzip.rb index.php (or something similar) Requirements for this tutorial Don’t worry, besides Ruby you won’t need anything, that you don’t probably already have: A simple text editor to save the source code. A command line tool, like Windows cmd.exe or Mac OS X Terminal to call the scripts. A FTP account to try out the upload script. A project to enhance.
A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. This article shows a method to improve the providing of static content for a web platform. Further, it will show you a way to automate the deployment of these files, so you can deliver them with least effort but with maximum performance. This tutorial will take some time to set it up, but it’s going to save you hours of work in the future and will improve your page speed significantly. 1. Why do I need this? There are several approaches to optimize the delivery of contents. Some use on-the-fly compression via the server itself or a scripting language, which costs performance and does not optimize the structure and content of the files. The method shown here prepares the files once and also merges and optimizes the code of CSS and Javascript files before the files are compressed, which makes the delivery of them even faster. Most browsers download only two files from a source at once . If a page needs to load more files from one domain, they get queued. More files to transfer mean more requests to the server, more traffic and more usage of the server’s performance. For the users of the platform, this means longer loading times. The more steps you need to deploy these files, the more space for mistakes is given. Deployment is boring. It’s far more exciting to invest some time once, to set up a reusable automation, than wasting time doing the same copy/paste/upload actions over and over again. Compare this two screenshots that show the same content before and after the optimization. The apricot colored parts of the bars stand for the status “in queue” while loading the page. The “in queue” status means nothing less than: Wasted time of the user. In this example, the loading time was reduced by 33% , the transferred data size was reduced by 65% and the number of requests to the server even by 80% . By using CSS sprites and merged CSS and Javascript files, there is no queue for the loading of the basic static content. 2. How to improve your static content Besides caching, there are some principles to make the whole setup of static content more efficient right from the start of development. Use CSS sprites for your layout graphics. It not only saves you a lot of traffic and loading time. If you got used to maintain your graphics like this, you’ll notice that it can be much more comfortable to have your layout elements e.g
A lot of traffic between users and your site comes from the static content you’re using to set up the user interface, namely layout graphics, Stylesheets and Javascript files. This article shows a method to improve the providing of static content for a web platform. Further, it will show you a way to automate the deployment of these files, so you can deliver them with least effort but with maximum performance. This tutorial will take some time to set it up, but it’s going to save you hours of work in the future and will improve your page speed significantly. 1. Why do I need this? There are several approaches to optimize the delivery of contents. Some use on-the-fly compression via the server itself or a scripting language, which costs performance and does not optimize the structure and content of the files. The method shown here prepares the files once and also merges and optimizes the code of CSS and Javascript files before the files are compressed, which makes the delivery of them even faster. Most browsers download only two files from a source at once . If a page needs to load more files from one domain, they get queued. More files to transfer mean more requests to the server, more traffic and more usage of the server’s performance. For the users of the platform, this means longer loading times. The more steps you need to deploy these files, the more space for mistakes is given. Deployment is boring. It’s far more exciting to invest some time once, to set up a reusable automation, than wasting time doing the same copy/paste/upload actions over and over again. Compare this two screenshots that show the same content before and after the optimization. The apricot colored parts of the bars stand for the status “in queue” while loading the page. The “in queue” status means nothing less than: Wasted time of the user. In this example, the loading time was reduced by 33% , the transferred data size was reduced by 65% and the number of requests to the server even by 80% . By using CSS sprites and merged CSS and Javascript files, there is no queue for the loading of the basic static content. 2. How to improve your static content Besides caching, there are some principles to make the whole setup of static content more efficient right from the start of development. Use CSS sprites for your layout graphics. It not only saves you a lot of traffic and loading time. If you got used to maintain your graphics like this, you’ll notice that it can be much more comfortable to have your layout elements e.g. in a single Photoshop file. Don’t blow up the loading time with your CSS and Javascript files. Combine the files of each kind into one single file , minimize them (e.g. by removing line breaks and other unnecessary characters) and compress them using GZip to get the load even smaller. This is covered in this tutorial. 3. Automating the deployment using Ruby This automation is written in the Ruby language . So you need to have Ruby installed on your development computer. The installation is pretty simple on Windows and Mac OS X even ships with Ruby. Please keep in mind: The scripts are completely independent from the language you’re using to run your site! You can also use them to deploy content e.g. for a PHP project. If you’re not used to work on the command line, the next steps might look cryptic to you. Don’t hesitate, clench your teeth and take care that you always pass the correct path of the files to deal with