It’s not exactly a big secret that we here at Pingdom are complete and utter geeks (which we freely admit). That’s why we love what we’ve seen in the way of pumpkin designs now that Halloween is around the corner. There are pumpkins designed as robots, computers, nice IT logos, gaming icons and more.

We have collected some of them in this post. Let your inner geek loose and keep reading.

Computer pumpkins

Photo by Chris Meller.

Photo by Christopher Marney.

Photo by Isaac Lee.

Computer logo pumpkins

Photo by Eugene (Katz Family).

Photo by Matt Dunlop.

Photo by Sleigh Boy.

Photo by Mark Eagleton.

Gaming pumpkins

Photo by Michael Cramer.

Photo by Rakka.

Photo by Mdholtdesign.

Photo by Daisy Morrison.

Robot pumpkins

Photo by Windell H. Oskay at www.evilmadscientist.com.

Photo by Christy Gray.

Found at Hot Costume Ideas.

Photo by Anetron.

Flirty pumpkin, geek style

Photo by Nick Smith.

There are a huge amount of pumpkin designs proudly displayed around the Web, and we are sure to have missed some really cool ones, so please feel free to add links in the comments.

And though it’s a wee bit early: Happy Halloween everyone!

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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