Journalspace.com dies instantly, for lack of a smart CTO

Hearts out to anyone who blogged on Journalspace.com. The service is dead now, in a heartbeat, because they did not back up their data. Ever, apparently.

Hard to believe a website can remain popular for six years, whilst its IT team merrily whistle through their work day without once stopping to think about data backup.

Maybe I'm myopic, but I've seen this happen with companies started by business and marketing people without a technical stakeholder, albeit no implosion has been so instantaneous. Not everyone can be technically minded, but if you aren't, and you are starting a dot com, better hire someone who is, give them a stake in the company, and listen to them about things like contingency planning.

So, what would you do if your data was lost? This question applies to home users and business people alike. As a CTO, this question should keep you up at night, in many different manifestations:

- What if a HD in the database server goes?
- What if the whole database server blows up?
- What if your web server blows up?
- What if your data center goes off line?
- What if the CEO looses his laptop?
- What if someone hacks into the development environment?

There are hundreds of variations on this theme. Good sleep is for the naive, and the retired, and those that have worked very hard for high availability, disaster recovery, and security.

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.

MSNBC.com's double links fatal flaw

For 10 years now cnn.com has been my primary source of news. But they've been dedicating more and more of their homepage to ads that *look* like articles. The banner ads I never mind. I understand they need to make money. But when they had "stories" on their home page that were links to CareerBuilder ever-green content, I got fed up and left (I was competing against CareerBuilder at the time).

I've been using MSNBC.com since then. Their coverage is as good, sometimes notably better. For example, an article can sit on the tecnology section of CNN's homepage all weekend, because they don't have enough content to keep it fresher than that. On MSNBC the churn rate for technology articles is much greater.

But once you dig into an msnbc article, they use those very annoying double underlines links, that if you mouse over an you navigate around the page popup a distracting ad bubble that is completely irrelevant to the story. The double links don't appear on every article. A quick perusal shows them to be on only a minority of articles at the moment. But it's enough of a distraction to be a fatal flaw. When I'm reading, I want to focus on the content, not traversing a minefield of distraction.

Looks like the newest iteration of the cnn redesign doesn't include CareerBuilder fluff, and the ads are clearly marked, so it looks like I'll be switching back for now.