SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

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.

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.

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?

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.

This has to be one of the more bizarre gadgets we’ve seen lately. It’s a Japanese device called the Akiduki Pulse box that automatically posts your heart rate to Twitter.

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!

This week Google launched a new Web community on code.google.com/speed. The goal is to help Web developers speed up their Web applications, but the long-term goal is even more ambitious; to work together to make the Web as a whole a lot faster.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

Financial Times just published an article about the “secret war on web crooks.” The article contains several interesting tidbits of information about spam and the challenges of trying to prevent it.

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.

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…

Most reasonably technical Internet users have a pretty good idea what DNS is, but what actually happens when you look up a domain name is not always so clear. For those of you who are a bit uncertain of how it works (or just like geeky server charts), we found an excellent picture describing the chain of events of a DNS lookup.

Here’s some interesting news for all you webmasters and web developers out there. Google has just introduced a tool they call Page Speed that tests a web page based on a set of rules and best practices for fast-loading websites. It then gives you advice on what you can improve to make your website faster. It works as an add-on to Firefox and needs the Firebug extension to work.

Verisign publishes a quarterly report about the domain name industry called The Domain Name Industry Brief. The latest report, summing up Q1 2009, was just released.
Since there is always a lot of data in these reports to mull through, we decided to pick out what we think are some of the more interesting facts and figures and sum them up in this article.

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been getting some serious buzz lately. We thought it would be interesting to see where in the world it’s been the most popular so far.
To get an idea of this, we used Google stats (oh, the irony) to see the popularity of the search term “Bing” in the last 30 days. Since it’s a pretty common word, we restricted our lookup to include only the “computers & electronics” category to get around this (in Google Insights for Search). No Sopranos references should have snuck in…
What we found was, at least to us here at the Pingdom office, a wee bit surprising.

What is now the fastest supercomputer in Europe was recently unveiled at a research institute in Jülich, Germany. The computer, named Jugene, is capable of a massive one trillion computing operations per second.
Here is a look at what makes Jugene tick, including pictures of its installation.