Posted in
Main on July 15th, 2009 by Pingdom
Are you a programmer? Want to do something for the environment and even make the world a better place? Then start optimizing your code!
It seems like today the solution to most software performance issues is to throw more hardware at the problem instead of making the software run faster on existing hardware. Doing more with less is a forgotten mantra, and Wirth’s Law continues to ring true:
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
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Posted in
Main on July 13th, 2009 by Pingdom
When talking about measurements, why be like everyone else and use the standard metric system or American units when you can stand out considerably by making almost no sense at all?
To help you with this, we at Pingdom have gathered up a whole bunch of highly unusual units for measuring distance, time, volume, and even geeky things like coolness, fame and smell.
Off we go…
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Posted in
Main on July 10th, 2009 by Pingdom
Data Center Knowledge has posted an interesting article about customer poaching in the web hosting industry, especially in combination with downtime incidents, sometimes referred to as “rescue marketing”.
What happens is that when a hosting provider suffers from downtime (which will understandably result in lots of frustrated customers), competing companies will swoop in and try to take advantage of this. In the past this was often accomplished with text ads in search engines, but these days Twitter is becoming an increasingly common way to target customers.
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Posted in
Main on July 9th, 2009 by Pingdom
What we search for online reveals our interests and what is going on in our lives at the time. In other words, Google knows what all of us are up to. 
Google has some nice tools that enable you to examine overall search trends. Although we here at Pingdom usually look at trends to see if they are increasing or decreasing over time, many search terms also have recurring patterns that can be quite fun to study, with interest flaring up on a seasonal or otherwise periodic basis.
These patterns are what we’ll be looking at in this article.
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Posted in
Main on July 8th, 2009 by Pingdom
We all know which sites are popular today, but at one point they were new up-and-comers with an uncertain future. What was the buzz around these websites when they were just getting started? What was being said? We’ve done the digging so you can do the reading.
We looked for early mentions of YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Google in the press and blogosphere.
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Posted in
Main on July 6th, 2009 by Pingdom
There are plenty of both formal and informal rules that programmers love to quote, either because they’re fun or quirky, or simply because they are useful and thought-provoking.
We’ve gathered some of the most interesting ones for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!
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Posted in
Pingdom on July 6th, 2009 by Pingdom
For those of you who use our Mr. Uptime Firefox extension, we just wanted to let you know that we have updated it for Firefox 3.5.
The update was submitted to Mozilla last Friday and is pending approval, but you can already download it directly from the Mr. Uptime website. (It’s free, as it always has been.)
For those of you who don’t know what Mr. Uptime is, it’s a Firefox extension from us here at Pingdom that will tell you when a broken website is working again.
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Posted in
Main on July 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Guest posts on July 2nd, 2009 by Pingdom
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 into the wild on June 30, prompting millions of downloads and a ton of mentions in tech press and blogs all over the world.
Considering all this attention, Firefox should have been a pretty hot search topic on Google that day. Right?
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Posted in
Pingdom on July 1st, 2009 by Pingdom
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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