You all know Mr. Murphy. He’s the man who gave his name to the infamous Murphy’s Law, the one that states that “if anything can go wrong, it will.”

Murphy’s Law is behind 99% of all downtime on the internet.

Why? Because assumptions are made every day that invite disaster. Leave a window of opportunity for Mr. Murphy, and chances are that you will regret it sooner or later.

Famous last words

Do you recognize any of these?

“Restarting the server will only take two minutes.”

“I’m just going to upload a tiny change to the production server.”

“Don’t worry, it’s really easy to configure this firewall.”

“The risk for my servers going down in the middle of the night is minimal. No need to worry.”

And it doesn’t even have to be your fault. Your ISP or hosting provider could have made similar assumptions that end up affecting you.

Another way Murphy’s Law applies to the web, and especially web development, is that users always seem to find ways of using a website that the creators never thought of.

Murphy’s Law can be your friend

Murphy’s Law is your worst enemy. But awareness of Murphy’s Law can be your best friend.

Whenever you are about to do something that could in any way potentially affect your website or your servers, try to think of every possible way it can go wrong. This kind of thinking is invaluable to web (and software) developers and can save you from a long line of head aches.

To find out every little detail about Murphy’s Law and its origin, check out the very detailed entry in Wikipedia.

NOTE: Man in the picture is not Murphy or is not related to uptime in any way. He just looks cool.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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