This is a post by guest blogger Wesley David. You can find more information about Wesley at the end of the article.

Glance down at your keyboard. Look to the top right, somewhere above or around the “Page Up” and “Home” keys. If you’ve got a keyboard that follows long standing convention (at least if you’re using a PC), you’ll see a key that has the cryptic word “SysRq” on it somewhere, possibly as an alternate function. It likely shares a key with the words “Print Screen.” If you have a modern Lenovo laptop, you can stop searching for that key, however. In a bold departure from tradition, Thinkpads have recently been bereft of that oft neglected key.

What is this strange key and what does it mean anyway? “SysRQ” is short for the general term “system request”, however that doesn’t shed much light on its purpose. For that kind of information, we’ll need to step into our wayback machine and take a gander at computing history.

Do you use Lynx? If so, you’re one of a rather small minority that use the text-only web browser, which predates even the world wide web. Although it is still perfectly usable for most websites, the lack of graphics makes Lynx less than desirable for most users today.

But our curiosity got the better of us, and we wanted to find out how useful Lynx would be to browse some of today’s top websites. This is the sort of exercise that gives you a warm geeky feeling inside.

The cloud storage war is heating up. Dropbox is getting more and more competition, and now Google has joined the fray with Google Drive. We’re not going to compare features in this article, but rather test something we can actually measure. And since we here at Pingdom do site monitoring we have focused on how these services compare in terms of performance and reliability.

To make this survey even more interesting, we also added two other file hosting services: Microsoft’s SkyDrive and Box.com. They should give us some additional perspective.

To monitor reliability and performance, in this specific case we thought their homepages were less important than the actual file hosting they offer, so that is what we focused on. We uploaded the same identical file to the four services, a small PNG image, and made it publicly available so we could monitor it.

Today we’re announcing that another great developer has joined the Pingdom team. Jakob Eriksson can juggle code with the best of them, and he’ll put his skills to use on backend development. Now, let’s get to know Jakob a bit better.

We’re big fans of the JavaScript library jQuery, and it appears we are far from alone. As of June this year it’s used by 54.7% of the top 10,000 websites in the world. That’s a massive endorsement by the world’s web developers. It’s also a significant step forward from two years ago, when 28% of the sites used jQuery.

Sequoia is the name of the the fastest supercomputer in the world, as ranked by Top500. IBM built the BlueGene system and it’s  installed at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Sequoia is capable of over 16 PFLOPS (quadrillion operations per second) compared to the 10.5 PFLOPS of the previous number one, which was the K Computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan.

With a new number one, we wanted to see how things have developed over the last couple of decades. We grabbed the specifications for the number one supercomputer from the Top500 website, going back to June 1993, and here’s what we found.

Can you imagine, that among the top 100 ecommerce websites in the world, there’s one site that is over 2.5 MB in total size, and another that takes almost 7 seconds to load?

It’s not all bad news though in our brand new study of the performance of the leading ecommerce sites. We ran the top 100 sites through a set of grueling tests to find out which sites are really fast, which are really big, which ones load a lot of files, and much more.

Some sites are slim and trim, others are slow and bloated. Read on to found out which is which.

Facebook has become a huge presence on the Web. A full 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world have some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage. And if you include regular links to Facebook, the number soars up to a highly impressive 49.3%.

Now after Facebook has had its much talked-about IPO, it’s worth noting how close the social network is to becoming part of the Web’s DNA. When so many websites have some form of Facebook integration, maybe we’re already there.

It’s now just about a week since the 2012 edition of 24-Hour Business Camp, or 24HBC for short, took place in Stockholm. Some 40 teams wrestled with concepts, hacked code, cajoled database queries, optimized interfaces, and much, much more.

Now it’s time to cast your vote for which team you think did the best job.

Even today, in 2012, some people don’t have broadband Internet connections, relying instead on phone lines and those good old dial-up modems. By today’s standards, those connections are extremely slow. Not only is the transfer speed slow, the latency is worse too.

On top of that, today’s websites are generally not designed for such slow connections. Surfing the web on a dial-up modem today is character building. That’s what you say about excruciating, painful experiences, right?

We wanted to see just how bad the situation is today. How long do regular web pages take to load over dial-up?

Now that Apple has introduced the Retina display to the MacBook Pro line, it’s only a matter of time before it starts appearing on other Macs as well. What kind of screen resolutions can we expect once that happens?

We honestly never thought this day would come, when we would put a photo of Justin Bieber on our Royal Pingdom blog.

But it happened just now that we discovered, how should we put this, a bit of a conundrum, when doing a search with Google.

We discovered that Bieber gets right in between Twitter and Wikipedia, but not between Wikipedia and Twitter.

Confused? Let us explain.

Today, we’ll spend just a few minutes introducing you to Yosh Marklund, who just joined the Pingdom team as Systems Engineer. He’ll be a part of the team that makes sure that Pingdom’s infrastructure is always up and running, including maintenance of computers and networking equipment, upgrades, and much more.

Wikipedia is a treasure trove of information and we at Pingdom use it extensively on a daily basis.

The English Wikipedia is the one we most commonly use, as may be the case with you as well.

But are you aware of all the Wikipedias in different languages that are available? And which which language has the most articles?

Let’s dig into the numbers.

When Apple kicked off its annual WWDC show yesterday, portable Macs were front and center. The MacBook Air received a small bump in specifications and Apple introduced an all new MacBook Pro.

The new MacBook Pro sports a 15.4-inch display with an incredible 2880 x 1880 pixel resolution. That’s a pixel density of 220 ppi compared to the 326 ppi of iPhone 4 and 4S.

That means the Retina display has arrived on portable Macs, and it’s time to forget about pixels on computers. In effect, Apple just killed the pixel.

We’re proud to say that when we migrated our entire user base of more than a quarter of a million users over to a brand new platform this week, things went extremely well. And it wasn’t just about the users, but all their monitoring data ranging all the way back to 2007. Quite a lot, in other words.

We did it in just a few hours, but we planned this migration for months to make sure we would get it right.

Success! Our brand new control panel is now live for all Pingdom users. We hope you will enjoy this new experience.

We initially thought the migration away from the old control panel would take a full day, but someone had a light bulb moment and cut it down to a couple of hours. So, out with the old, in with the new. All done.

We have this tradition in Sweden where graduating high school students are driven around on the backs of large trucks together with their classmates. One last celebration before they move on with their lives. That’s today. It’s loud. It’s fun. There’s a long procession of trucks, driving all over town, and you can hear them pretty much a mile away. They’re usually equipped with some serious sound systems, pumping out party music. A calm, quiet celebration it most definitely is not.

This year, we worked with some of the local students, helping them get a really kick-ass graduation. Being geeks ourselves, naturally we went for the computer science graduates, the future IT gurus of their generation. Being the best and brightest, they should be able to graduate with style, right?

Next week we’ll be switching over to a brand new control panel for the Pingdom site monitoring service. We’re calling it My Pingdom. It has a shiny new look, even easier setup, and even better troubleshooting when your site goes down.

You can learn more about it at future.pingdom.com, and a limited preview version is available at my.pingdom.com (it’s been there for a while now). That will also be the address once it’s fully live.

Today, we want to highlight that it was 10 years ago, on June 5 in 2002, that version 1.0 of the open source Mozilla web browser suite was released, blazing a path to the most recent Firefox.

The simple significance of this is that without Mozilla 1.0, Firefox may never have existed.

That makes today an important day in the history of the Internet in general, and the web in particular. In what seems like a lucky coincidence, Firefox 13 is officially released today, something that is no doubt welcome news for scores of users.