Google, why do you hate SEO so much?

See the post on GetClicky blog re:Google's new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking for everyone.

In a nutshell, the referrers you get from Google SERPs may no longer have the keyword phrase on the query string. So good luck trying to figure out how your customers are finding you!

Web Developers: Don't Reinvent the Non-secured Wheel

I'm thinking about beginning another web project. Before one gets coding the fun part of any web application, though, there is tons of core code that needs to we written: login, user management, session management, user registration, logout etc. But writing secure applications can be tricky, and any attempt to roll your own is likely to have security flaws. Open source can solve both of these problems: the code is already written, letting you get onto the fun stuff; and if it's been vetted by a large developer community already you get the security benefit of past mistakes fixed.

One might think that reference implementations would be readily available for these in all web languages, and that we would all be using them by now.

Kudos to OWASP for developing it themselves, in their Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) Project. It details all the functions that a secure application needs. Much more, though, they also offer reference implementations in Java.

I'd love to see the web development community support this project by developing reference implementations in pHp, ColdFusion, and .net. Implementations in each of the popular frameworks would go a long way toward making the web a safer place, and would make the development of every new web application that much easier.

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.