Archive for December, 2009

Rackspace experienced an outage yesterday–a recurring issue this year for the hosted data center provider–which took down a number of high profile sites including the popular blog site TechCrunch. No network is impervious to outages, but a company like Rackspace needs to provide consistent and reliable service.

The Official Rackspace Blog explains “On December 18, 2009 between 3:37 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. CST, Rackspace experienced network connectivity problems.” The timeline doesn’t jive with the fact that the timestamp on the TechCrunch report on the Washington Post site says 12:17pm. Assuming the TechCrunch timestamp is Pacific time, it would mean that the outage began more like 2pm Central time, or possibly even earlier.

It would be nice if we could get insurance quotes for site outages, you know to help compensate those sites that go down for extended periods. Everyone things about the money they lose during downtime, don’t they?

It’s one thing to criticize someone because of their choice of discount rugs in their home, but to criticize someone in the loss of their child is stupid. Everyone has their own way of expressing themselves and since Shellie knew a lot of people online it made sense to ask those people to pray for her son. I did.

A Florida mother is being criticized by bloggers and Twitter users for posting a tweet less than an hour after her 2-year-old son drowned in a swimming pool at her home.

Shellie Ross, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mother who lives outside Patrick Air Force Base, posted a message asking that people pray for her son after he had fallen into the family’s swimming pool on Monday.

If people spent half the energy they put into criticizing other people on being compassionate, they themselves would be much happier.

It’s time to find some cheap health insurance for Windows Mobile.

The iPhone has leapfrogged Windows Mobile to jump into the number two position for smartphone platforms in the United States. That news could be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back for the floundering Windows Mobile operating system.

The latest ComScore report shows that Windows Mobile market share is stagnant for the year. After climbing to 7 million users in May, Windows Mobile market share dropped precipitously to 6.6 million in July, then scratched its way back to 7.1 million in October–most likely due to the release of Windows Mobile 6.5.

At this rate, within a year or so Windows Mobile won’t be around to bring the blue screen of death to the device in your pocket.

While we all sit here following developments in Iran from the safety of our 22 inch monitors, some people in Iran search for whole life insurance just so they can walk down the street. Now this.

A computer hacker briefly hijacked Twitter.com on Thursday, redirecting users to a website and claiming to represent a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army.

Twitter, which in June became a key communication channel for Iranian protesters disputing the country’s election results, said it was disrupted for a little more than an hour.

Twitter’s home page was replaced with one whose headline read “This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army” and an anti-American message.

Isn’t it funny, Iran tries to block access to the internet as a whole, but they can’t stop a stupid attack on Twitter. Nice. Not.