Xaprb

I don’t get why companies talk about how many pageviews they get per month. Maybe it is a handy metric when thinking about revenue, but when thinking about performance, it’s not a convenient way to measure.

For example, “we get 50M page views per month.” Let’s translate that into something useful for an engineer: 20 page views per second. How about 2.5B pageviews per month? Roughly 1000 per second.

Much easier to think about what this means. And not so impressive.

Gotta love those three-dimensional charts. They sure are shiny! Look at this:

FusionCharts graphs

This is a screenshot of FusionCharts graphs. But wait, on closer inspection: 5 and 7 are the same height? 6 is exactly twice as tall as 2?

Pseudo-three-dimensional charts are the bane of my existence. Tufte would definitely not approve. (If you don’t have The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, you should really get it and give it a read.)

Spammers seem to have gotten smarter recently, and able to post garbage to Google Groups. There was some spam on a couple of the groups I’ve created, and members helped me find a way to stop it. I’m glad they did, because since then it’s stopped an increasing flow of spam. I just deleted and banned a whole bunch of emails titled “answer group” across different groups, and I see the same crud got through to a group I’m on but don’t own.

Here’s the recipe:

• Moderate messages from new members.

That’s all. Then you can log in and delete emails from spammers, and ban them, so that at least only you, and not the whole group, gets spammed.