Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail: "“The Gmail Team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are actively investigating the issue, and we will provide updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”"

About Google Page Creator

About Google Page Creator: "We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and easy as possible, and we will post more details as we get closer to the transition time. You can also manually move your web pages from Page Creator to Google Sites or other service providers at any time."

ENGINEERS' DREAMS

Edge: ENGINEERS' DREAMS By George Dyson: "And why trace the connections in the brain of one individual when you can trace the connections in the mind of the entire species at once? Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?"

Cloud versus cloud

Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-07-21 | By Peter Wayner: "Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print; beneath the heady metaphor lurk familiar pitfalls, complex pricing, and many questions"

Google enrolled for schools email deal

Google enrolled for schools email deal - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world - the NSW Department of Education - away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product."

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies)

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies) | Analytics and Site Intelligence: "When someone visits a website that is properly coded with Google Analytics Tracking Code, that website sets four first-party cookies on the visitor’s computer automatically."

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008
down for about 8 hours

Microsoft Office Live Home

Microsoft Office Live Home: "Quickly build your Web site with ready-to-use templates and simple yet powerful Site Designer"

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog

Adding Content
Content elements, such as videos, pictures, maps, and text are added to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to your webpage. We have a bunch of cool elements and add more all the time. Are we missing an element you'd like? Suggest it, and we'll include it as soon as we can.

Choosing a Design
Deciding on a look for your website couldn't be easier. Click over to the "Design" tab and you'll see thumbnails pictures of available designs. Hover your mouse over a thumbnail to preview the new look instantaneously or click the thumbnail to select it as the design for your website.

Customizing the Content
Once elements have been added to your page, customize everything just by double-clicking. Double-click a picture to upload a new one, double-click text to change it, or double-click a map to set the address. Rearrange the elements by dragging them into an new order.

Managing your Pages
Adding and organizing your website's pages is completed in the "Pages" tab. When you add new page to your website, it's automatically added to the navigation bar. Reordering pages is simple, just drag and drop them into place.

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser: "Photo editing made fun
Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It's fast, easy, and fun."

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "web applications which may rocket to popular success - or sink when the flash crowd that arrives melts the web server. In the web context, utility computing provides a path by which the innovator can, with minimal capital, prepare for overwhelming popularity."

This is an outstanding practical paper on the current options for scaling web services.

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?: "Have a small business in need of a website, but no budget for professional design services? Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all offer free small business site creation tools that can help you develop a professional online presence. Keep reading for an in-depth review of what Office Live Basics, Google Page Creator and Yahoo SiteBuilder include and how they work. Additionally, we'll consider ease of use, positives and negatives, and recommended uses for each tool."

MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme

BBC NEWS | Technology | MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme: "MySpace members will soon be able to use their login details to get access to some other websites."

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML: "In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Yesterday afternoon, Google publicly released documentation for a system it has been using internally, called Protocol Buffers, inviting others to use it as well. And in a surprising blog post, one of its own software engineers argued that its system was preferable to XML because it's less expensive to deploy, and can more easily scale up to very large databases."

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb: "URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers."

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out - the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as Wordpress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.

The End of Theory

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Board opens way for new top-level domains

Board opens way for new top-level domains - Network World: "Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday's vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today -- over 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains -- france.ebay instead of ebay.fr, for instance"

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch

Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Agents, who pay about $650 a month to have realestate.com.au connect them with home buyers, are furious and baffled as to how such a seemingly basic error at a high-tech internet company could go unnoticed for so long.

The delays meant many leads were lost and agents complained of damage to their reputations caused by the significant delays in following up queries."

RAM Footprint

A program's RAM footprint can be critical to its success. A program that uses too much memory can force the operating system to rely on virtual memory. Because virtual memory is many times slower than physical RAM, relying on virtual memory can result in slow performance and a poor user experience. While developing your system, be aware of your target deployment environment and consider how much RAM will be available on machines running your software.

Lazy Bastards: How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

How we read online. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

What Is This Article About?
For the past month, I've been away from the computer screen. Now I'm back reading on it many hours a day. Which got me thinking: How do we read online?

In which we prove that a college education can make some people dumber

Summary of Findings: Global Warming: A Divide on Causes and Solutions:



"There also are striking educational differences in partisans' views of global warming. Among Republicans, higher education is linked to greater skepticism about global warming -- fully 43% of Republicans with a college degree say that there is no evidence of global warming, compared with 24% of Republicans with less education."

Another symptom of the Republican War on Science.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Understanding Amazon Web Services

Bezos goes on to note that Amazon's retailing operation is "a low gross margin business" compared to software and technology businesses, which "tend to have very high margins." The relatively low profitability of the retailing business gave Amazon the incentive to create a highly efficient, highly automated computing system, which in turn could become the foundation for a set of cloud computing services that could be sold at low enough prices to attract a large clientele. It also made a low-margin utility business attractive to the firm in a way that it isn't for a lot of large tech companies who are averse to making big capital investments in new, low-margin businesses.

"On the surface, superficially, [cloud computing] appears to be very different [from our retailing business]," Bezos sums up. "But the fact is we've been running a web-scale application for a long time, and we needed to build this set of infrastructure web services just to be able to manage our own internal house."

This is the great advantage that, at this early stage in the evolution of the utility computing industry, is held by companies like Amazon and Google. Building an efficient cloud-computing infrastructure does not represent an added expense for them; it's a prerequisite to the success of their existing business.

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell

goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.:
This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page."

Google spotlights data center inner workings

Google spotlights data center inner workings | Tech news blog - CNET News.com: "The search colossus has shed only occasional light on its data center operations, but on Wednesday, Google fellow Jeff Dean turned a spotlight on some parts of the operation."

Capacity Planning for Web Operations

Capacity Planning for Web Operations: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 — Co-produced by TechWeb & O'Reilly Conferences, April 22 - 25, 2008, San Francisco, CA: "Capacity planning for growth is not a new concept in web operations, but planning for the explosive and unpredictable types of growth that social applications experience is a whole new ballgame.

This talk will take a look at new and different approaches to capacity planning, and how we do it at Flickr. John Allspaw will cover real-world challenges and lessons learned"

Planning for growth

Planning for growth: "This paper presents a methodology for IT professionals to use to determine whether their Web site can satisfy future demands and to evaluate potential workload and infrastructure changes."

Zipf Distribution

Zipf Distribution of Website Popularity: "Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution." It appears to apply within a site and across sites. It also applies to outgoing page requests from a network and it applies to links.

"Zipf's law, an empirical law formulated using statistics, refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions."