Dogbert: barking up the wrong tree

With all the hoopla about Maps, I couldn’t help tinkering around with them myself.

Over the weekend, I took the Google Maps API out for spin and I was impressed by the ease of use of the javascript API. Checkout my quick hack here:

Google Maps – Kuwait

It’s only a very crude application that allows you to click around on the flags and see the name of the cities. It may take a while to load since it’s mapping about 200 locations.
But these basic tools can be used to conjure up some wicked apps like these:

oodle maps
Bicycle Route (Let’s you map your bicycle tour as an animation on Google Maps. Very innovative hack to animate the route.)

If people can provide me geocodings (latitude/longitude) of popular Kuwait landmarks, I can add them to the map.

I’ll do a small write-up later on if anyone is interested in playing around with the API (You don’t really need to be a programmer to do simple things with it).

I came across this site to “speed up” page downloading in Firefox. I think I do notice an improvement in the speed but it may just be my imagination:

How To Speed Up Firefox

At a technical level, I can see how establishing 30 connections to an HTTP server can speed up download. Without the tweak outlined in the article, all elements on a page are downloaded one after another. So if you have a page with 100 images on it, these images will be downloaded serially. However, with parallelization, it will download 30 images at a time. Of course if you have an all-text page, it wouldn’t affect the download speed at all since the page will only be downloaded serially on one HTTP connection.

That said, I wonder why they don’t use these as the default settings. One reason I can imagine is that they want all users to have equal access to the HTTP server. Since the number of users that can logon to an HTTP server is limited, if I hog up 30 connections, that’s 29 fewer people who can browse that site while I’m on it. That’s not so good from the perspective of commercial websites because more traffic translates to bigger $$$.

Setting the nglayout:initialpaint parameter to 0 milliseconds should have a big impact on pages that have a lot of HTML on them. This is because even though most browsers start rendering the webpage before all the images have been downloaded, they will never render the page without downloading all the HTML. If I understand this correctly, setting this parameter to zero may have undesirable effects on a huge HTML page that uses javascript to modify the page at the end of the HTML contents. (e.g. updating div tags)

Nonetheless, a great speed booster for those willing to risk it all =)