Moonwatcher

Google to Build System Status Dashboard for Apps

Other bloggers will cover it in more depth, but I just got an email from Google with the following good news (among lots of other things):

We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:

1. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.

2. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.

This will be a very welcome addition, not only for those of us who use Google Apps to our businesses, but also for those of us who service tens of thousands of other people who do too.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

An instant classic.

Bob Hope is Dead

Earlier today I wrote a post about MobileMe's security problems, but soon discovered that much of my thinking was based on old information. I deleted the post from my blog, but several services had already picked it up from my RSS feed. Unfortunately, RSS provides no good way to indicate that a post has been deleted. (In the earliest days of Internet content syndication, we called this the "Bob Hope is Dead" problem. In 1998 Bob Hope was still alive but some news outlets reported that he had died. Online publishers wanted a way to retract stories once they had been syndicated.)

So, even though Bob Hope is no longer with us, my earlier post is. If you see it, please ignore it. As the man says, "Move along. Move along."

Hear, hear!

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company.

Maturity: don't let it happen to you

This morning my Unix fortune made me smile. It said, "You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely."

SCOCA pwns noncompete clauses

From State Supreme Court rejects noncompete clauses on SFGate:

Californians have the right to move from one company to another or start their own business and can't be prohibited by their employer from working for a competitor in their next job, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

Nicely done.

Eddy Cue gets my dream job

In his letter to Apple employees yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that iTunes VP Eddy Cue is taking on some additional responsibilities in a newly-created role at Apple: VP of Internet Services, which is functionally equivalent to being appointed God Emperor of Awesome.

Many people, including some inside Apple, don't think Apple has what it takes to get the whole "cloud computing" thing right. But, recent problems with MobileMe notwithstanding, Apple is doing a pretty amazing job with the iTunes Store, no mean feat of cloud computing itself. And they don't just do the cloud—they do the clients too: Macs, iPods, iPhones, AppleTV's, even Windows PC's. They even do some of the networking stuff that puts it all together. And they do it all very well.

This whole cloud computing thing is hard. Even Google doesn't get it right all the time, even though they have effectively infinite resources and that's pretty much all they do. But I have great confidence that Apple will get it right. If there's to be an Apple in 20 years, they'll have to.

So Eddy, if you need someone who has some experience running Mac services in the cloud to get your coffee, pick up your dry cleaning, or get your car washed, just let me know. Technical Assistant to the God Emperor of Awesome. That has a nice ring to it.

Update: Misspelling Eddy's name probably wasn't the best way to land the TA job, but I blame Engadget. Then again, maybe it's for the best.

Lower Margins, Product Transitions, and Speculation

Let me go on record as saying that I believe the upcoming "product transition" Apple's CFO mentioned on their earnings call last month will turn out to be a dramatically lower-priced iPod touch.

But like everyone else, I'm guessing.

It would be great if Cringely's H.264 prediction were to come true, but I'm not holding my breath.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Why is it that these days comics are the only ones who seem to have a grasp of the truth? Fortune's Stanley Big gets it right in Worry less! Spend more! :

Gas costs too much. So drive less. Stop driving cars that cost more than $64.50 to fill up. Take a bus. Relax.

House prices down? Keep your home until it regains its value. Where do you think you're going, anyhow?

Unemployment up? Stay in your job and try to be as happy as possible.

Stock market stinks? Don't buy stocks.

Get out there every goddamn weekend and pump as much money as you can back into the economy.

Limit the viewing of financial news outlets to 45 minutes a day, and get off the blogs. The Internet is supposed to be fun, dammit. Have you seen how cheap area rugs are on eBay?

Three-quarters of our economy is built upon our willingness to part with our money in exchange for goods and services. We can affect that metric. But only if we have the confidence to do so.

So get some. Now, I think, would be a good time to start.

I say instead of complaining about record profits by ExxonMobil, buy some XOM. Etc.

ebayahooglezon: The Infrastructure of the Modern Web

The other day I sat down to document exactly how Spanning Sync works—not just the client and server code, but the whole business. Actually I didn't sit down, I went for a run. And I didn't so much "document" it all as take a mental inventory.

Anyway, during my inventory I realized that we use various bits from infrastructure from each of the four companies that comprise ebayahooglezon: eBay (PayPal for payments), Yahoo (del.icio.us for tracking reviews), Google (GData API's, Groups, FeedBurner, Analytics, YouTube, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Docs) and Amazon (S3 for downloads). Whew.

There are a few services that we use that notably don't belong to ebayahooglezon, including TypePad, Digg, and old-school hosting from ServerBeach. But it's remarkable how much infrastructure, all of it either free or very inexpensive, comes from these four providers. It's even more remarkable how much of it comes from just one of them: Google.

If we used Google Checkout instead of PayPal, Blogger instead of TypePad, Google Reader clippings instead of deli.cio.us, and AppEngine instead of ServerBeach, and if Google were to go ahead, pull the trigger, and buy Digg, Google would be operating essentially 100% of our infrastructure.

We're not going to do that. But the fact that we could gives me the Microsoftie heebie jeebies.