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.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 30th, 2009 by Pingdom
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
Posted in
Main on June 26th, 2009 by Pingdom
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
Posted in
Main on June 24th, 2009 by Pingdom
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
Posted in
Main on June 23rd, 2009 by Pingdom
URL shortening services have been around for a long time (TinyURL started back in 2002) but it wasn’t until Twitter started gaining momentum that they became widely popular. Now we have a TON of them, including the original TinyURL, Bit.ly, Is.gd, and many, many more.
We have all placed an enormous amount of trust in these services by using them to such a large extent. They offer a legitimate, highly useful service, but we should at least be aware of the flip side of the coin.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 17th, 2009 by Pingdom
Many of today’s most popular applications and operating systems have been around for a long time. This is a look back at version 1.0 of some of the most popular and widespread applications of today, many of them ranging all the way back to the 1980s.
To keep this article from becoming the size of a novel we were extremely picky with what we included. We only included applications that are in current use and so widespread and popular that they have more or less become iconic. We also decided to focus solely on Windows and Mac OS this time (sorry, Linux people, we’ll make amends in the future).
Let’s start with the first versions of Windows and Mac OS and move on to the applications from there…
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 16th, 2009 by Pingdom
Few people take the plunge and turn that Web startup idea into reality, and making a viable business out of it is even harder.
That’s why we had this idea to sit down with people who have launched Web startups within the last couple of years and pick their brains. We’re hoping these little Web startup Q&A sessions will be both inspirational and interesting, and plan on making them somewhat of a series over the course of 2009.
First off is Allen Stern, who many know from his blog, CenterNetworks. He is the founder of CloudContacts, a Web startup that launched last year. Allen was kind enough to let us pick his brain about his startup and Web startups in general.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 12th, 2009 by Pingdom
The iPhone 3.0 update is almost here now. One of the features that we and many others have been looking forward to the most is the new push notification service from Apple. We are also curious about how reliable push notifications will be.
Why do we wonder about reliability? Because push notifications are sent from third-party servers to Apple’s servers, and then on to your iPhone.
In short: Apple becomes a single point of failure since it acts as a go-between for all push notifications.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 11th, 2009 by Pingdom
For decades, supercomputers have helped scientists perform calculations that would not have been possible on regular computers of that time. Not only has the construction of supercomputers helped push the envolope of what is possible within the computing field, but the calculations supercomputers have performed for us have helped further both science and technology, and ultimately our lives.
This post pays tribute to some of the most powerful supercomputers the world has seen, all the way from the 1970s until today.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 9th, 2009 by Pingdom
The technological world we live in is often more sensitive to disruptions than people care to admit. We have often written about various kinds of incidents and outages on the Internet, as well as the occasional blackout and software bug. After all, via our uptime monitoring service we deal with downtime-related issues every single day, so it’s a fascinating subject to us.
This is a set of articles that all show Murphy’s Law in action. If things can go wrong, they will. Pretty much nothing is safe from Mr. Murphy…
Read more
Mozilla 
This week Google launched a new Web community on 
Microsoft has been drumming up its marketing for Internet Explorer 8 lately, with some interesting results. That marketers can be a bit, shall we say… “creative”… when touting a product is well known, but the question is if Microsoft’s marketing team hasn’t taken it a bit too far with their “Get the Facts” campaign, especially when they start comparing IE8 to other web browsers.
