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You may remember our April Fool’s joke this year: SaveIE6.com. Want to hear something cool? The petition on that website now has more than 1,000 signatures. 
The Conficker virus was supposed to start working its sinister magic on April 1. Were people really worried? Sure looks like it.
Is SaaS (software as a service) a trend that is gaining more and more of a foothold in IT departments, or is it doomed to be the bastard stepchild of traditional software? Jeffrey Kaplan from Computerworld set out to debunk five common myths about the SaaS model. He had several interesting points.
The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).
The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.
People trying to access Apple’s Mobile Me by going directly to the me.com domain yesterday were met by a 404 HTTP error response and a white screen with a single text message on it: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.”
Accessing me.com/mail worked, but anyone typing in www.me.com or me.com got the error page mentioned above and was not redirected to the login page (which is what is supposed to happen).
Jeff Dean from Google recently held a lecture at the University of Washington which is highly interesting to anyone curious about the current and future challenges that face companies that operate computing on such a large scale as Google. And of course, it will give you some nice insights into how Google does things.
Since this is from Google’s perspective there are also several aspects specific to search companies, SaaS and distributed computing. It’s a very interesting lecture, easy to follow and well worth the time (it runs almost exactly an hour). You can download it or stream it from here.
ZDNet has posted a short walkthrough of HP’s portable data center, POD, which we assume is set to compete with other container data centers from for example Sun and Rackable.
Want one? It’ll only cost you just over $1 million. Without servers.
Aptimize has released a product called Runtime Page Optimizer. The software runs on your webserver and applies performance optimizations to pages before they are delivered to the browser.
Aptimize uses many of the optimizations that Steve Souders describes in his book High Performance Web Sites and the best practices from YSlow.
InformationWeek has managed to get an inside look at 1&1’s Lenexa, Kansas data center, built inside a former storage facility. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies in the world (arguably the largest), and this data center certainly isn’t small.
The data center has five server rooms with a total of 860 racks and can handle at least 40,000 servers.
