When does 9 mins = 0 mins? When it's Google Apps SLA

TechCrunch covered this. In a worst-case-scenario nutshell, Google Apps can be down 90% of the time and be considered 100% up, if it is "up" for at least one minute (or to be pedantic, instant) for every nine minutes of "down."

Commentors at TechCrunch surmise that is not a real-world scenario where a web site can be up for one minute then down for nine for a persistent amount of time.

I wish that were true. I recalled working for iWon.com during the original dot com bubble. Version 1.0 of that site was written against Vignette CMS. The cost for that was rumored to be around $1M per processor (that was the talk around the office) but we had piles of money to burn (and give away).

The application was so unstable that, by the time I left, we had about 24 web servers in the cluster, and each was rebooted every 7 minutes. The fine folks at Vignette gave us that "work around" with a straight face. My brother was still with iWon and helped them move to open-source Tcl.

Since then, I've made sure I don't even hold any mutual funds that have Vignette stock.

Songbird to relase your music from iTunes

With the release of Songbird 1.0, I get one step closer to moving from Windows to Ubuntu. If Apple won't make a Linux client, then I'd love to drop iTunes. Ars technica does a nice writeup.

Other items anchoring me to Windows, for now:
- Quicken
- PC Games. Steam really needs to make a Linux client. And of course, the games themselves. I'm playing only Enemy Territory: Quake Wars these days, but am close to moving on to something new. Unless WoW or EverQuest drag me back in.

Ask.com Top 10 Search Terms for 2008

Ask.com announced their top 10 search terms for 2008, and Tech crunch covered it succinctly.

Its not surprising to anyone who has examined user behavior that it is common to use search navigationally. That is, they type in Google the search box of Yahoo and,apparently, Ask.com, to get to google. Ask.com top term "dictionary" should be seen as a navigational search; Ask.com owns dictionary.com.

TechCrunch lauds Ask for being more honest than the other search engines who scrub their lists so much the results are meaningless.

In my opinion, Ask.com and others should cite their methodology. Do they remove terms that are navigational to their competitors? Do they remove porn terms? Its fine and expected that they do, but they should say that.

Raw data is one outcome I hope to see in the future, and why I laud projects like solr that help make open search a reality.