In time for Easter we thought that we should list a few funny and geeky Easter eggs. Easter eggs in software don’t do anything good besides being funny which we of course like. So here we present a few selected ones that we think are funny.

Mac OS X Leopard, Blue Screen of Death

Start by connecting to a networked PC and then open finder. In the sidebar to the left an icon will be shown under Devices. The icon looks like an old CRT monitor with the well known Blue Screen of Death, if you would like a closer look use Cover Flow.

GNOME cow attack

Press Alt+F2 to open the run dialog box and then type “gegls from outer space” without the quotes. You will get a Space Invaders type of game but with cows.

Should work in all GNOME distributions.

GIMP, Pushing your Pixels since 1995

Hold down the Alt-key and the open Help > About to show a alternative about image. In some cases it’s the Ctrl-key instead of Alt.

GNOME fish

Press Alt+F2 to open the run dialog box and then type “free the fish” without the quotes. You’ll get a small fish on your desktop.

Should work in all GNOME distributions.

Package manager cows

Apt-get has some art if you type “apt-get moo” in the terminal. You will get a ASCII cow.

A similar easter egg is available in Gentoo if you type “emerge moo” in the terminal.

And finally in Debian and aptitude where they stretched the joke a bit. Type “aptitude moo” and you will get the text “There are no Easter Eggs in this program”. If you then type “aptitude –v moo” you get the message “There really are no Easter Eggs in this program”. Keep on adding –v’s to get several messages until you get to “aptitude –vvvvv moo” where the text reads “All right, you win” together with a ASCII drawing.

Do you know any good Easter Eggs? Please share them with us in the comments.

In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

Read more

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

Read more

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

Read more

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, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

Read more

Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

Read more