Christmas is upon us, and like the geeks we are here at Pingdom, we couldn’t help but check out how our fellow geeks worldwide are handling their Christmas decorations. We found some very cool examples where people have put together über-geeky Christmas trees, wreaths and other decorations. And then of course there’s that Christmas tree network monitoring system…

Now embrace both your inner geek and your Christmas spirit, and keep scrolling down.

Christmas tree made entirely from old computer parts

Photo by Sunny Brook.

Got RAM?

Found at Mediatinker.

Best. Tree. Ever.

Photo by dragon caiman (Carlos).

The iTree

Photo by Metromorphosis.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and other things for your Xmas tree

Photo by Lei Shi.

Proof that Tux IS a star

Photo by Maya.

These lights are connected to a network monitoring system.

White lights = all ok. Red lights = network trouble.

Photo by Jonathan Gaynor.

Computer geek Xmas wreath

Photo by Yoshi.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 2

Photo by mcr25823 (Michael).

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 3

Photo by Bruce Hartman.

Computer geek Xmas wreath no 4

From TeamDroid.

Going old-school: Punch-card wreath

Photo by Jerry Gilbert.

And let’s not forget DESSERT!

Gingerbread laptop

Found at Mediatinker.

Gingerbread motherboard

Found at Mediatinker.

What are you waiting for? There’s still time to add some computer hardware to your Christmas tree!

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

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!

Read more

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.

Read more