5tags

Here are two photos of just prior to the hanging of Saddam Husein.

On a recent Diggnation episode, Kevin Rose setup Alex Albrecht to say something very funny. You’ll just have to check it out. You can download this funny thing in several formats:

Video:

You Tube

Longer:

MP3
WAV

Shorter:

MP3
WAV

More formats including video soon!

Startup Sound (Mac Style):

MP3
WAV

More formats including video soon!

Ever wonder how digg.com began. This photo should answer that.

It’s unclear when the photo was taken but it was made public by David Prager. It’s somewhat funny.

[source: flickr]

After Thursday’s upgrade to the grid server, Media Temple promised better service. Just as I thought I was getting great service again, I go to check my website and guess what I see? A DATABASE ERROR! When will this ever end? I really hope that Media Temple gives some sort of compensation for this.

Actually I got an email from another disappointed Media Temple customer. He told me that Media Temple have him 3 months free as compensation. I’m not about to email them to receive compensation, (mt) should be big boys and either fix their service and/or compensate on their own.

In other grid server news it seems Digg co-founder Kevin Rose is on the grid. Prior to using Media Temple Kevin had a Typepad blog. After checking his kevinrose.com website it seems that he will have something special to come. Hopefully his site will actually be up when it debuts!

Prior to this week I have received about 15 spam messages in my You Tube message inbox. These messages are being sent out by a bot. Currently there is no way to defend against spam although you can block senders. Over the past few days I have received over 100 of the same messages but from several different You Tube user accounts. According to You Tube they are trying to fix this situation and they are saying they their own employees are targets of these messages as well. I would post the message but I don’t really want to do advertising for these losers.

I just received an email from Media Temple outlining their new improvements. These improvements will be launched on Thursday. I really hope that (gs) works now. Here are the details.
(mt) Media Temple is proud to announce its latest version (GMR v.1.1) of the new (gs) Grid-Server hosting system. Combining several months of beta test usage along with the feedback and experiences of thousands of production users, our new release includes numerous user-requested features, fixes to over one hundred bug reports, and the inclusion of newly added levels of redundancy and stability. (GMR v.1.1) will begin being released on production Clusters inside the GRID Thursday 12/7/2006. A scheduled maintenance notice will follow including the details and time of the version release.

Highlights of (GMR v.1.1)
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• Sever count (400+). After the release of (GMR v.1.1), the most active cluster (Cluster1) will have a server count of over 400. This includes physical OS nodes and container OS nodes which increases thin-provisioning safety ratios and performance capacity.
• MySQL improvements. Includes new balancing technology (Tahiti v.0.5) developed by (mt) Media Temple which improves MySQL performance and stability. New auto-relocation features distribute MySQL performance into a newly developed MySQL farm-model inside the Grid. Ongoing development of the Tahiti framework will permit systems engineers to continue improving MySQL in-between GMR releases.
• Storage improvements. Includes a new storage architecture which provides more redundancy options in the event of hardware related issues occurring within a segment. Will include a new firmware release into current storage segment hardware which alleviates downtime causing memory leaks.
• Urchin improvements. Overhaul of the Urchin log processing system. Results in the correction of missing information in Urchin reports and significantly improves log crunching times. Provides future possibility of increasing frequency of report generation.
• Email improvements. Optimized email sub-systems improve overall mail experience by decreasing mail delivery time. Also corrects several bug reports; including SMTP related issues.
• Faster WebControl panel. Optimizations made to AC result in a 40% speed improvement in WebControl panel load times.
• SSL improvements. Faster SSL connection setup, and resolves the periodic ‘503 error’.
• Improved web segment load times. Numerous tuning and configuration changes enhance the speed in which web requests are processed and delivered.
• RoR Container improvements. Better support of Rmagick, new binary gems in response to customer requests, and several bug fixes.
• GPU report control page. New report within the WebControl panel will include details on current and historical GPU usage.
• Improved one-click install features.
• Migration Manager improvements. More edge cases detected, customer experience more consistent, monitoring and stability increased. Results in dramatically less migration related issues.
• New health and wellness monitors. In (GMR v.1.1) administration staff have several new Grid health checks and monitoring sub-systems which increase overall visibility into the system.

Items to look for in for future releases
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• Tahiti (v.0.6). Next version of MySQL system which includes even more reliability features and the option for MySQL containers.
• New Containers. Python containers with support for DJango and Trac. FlashMedia Server, ColdFusion, MySQL containers all in development.
• Enhanced sub-user control. Increases the granularity of permissions relating to sub-users. Will provide server administrator greater visibility into files and directory structures.
• MailProtect improvements. New anti-spam algorithms and techniques will improve the functionality and spam stopping capabilities of MailProtect.

We hope you that enjoy the improvements of (GMR v.1.1). (mt) Media Temple is excited now more than ever to continue delivering you new technologies like the (gs) Grid-Server. As with any new system we’ve released, real-world usage and customer feedback prove to be the most important and useful aspects of making our hosting systems as reliable as possible.

Also, we would like to especially thank our early adopters and first users of the (gs) Grid-Server. Your direct feedback and experiences have been incredibly helpful and our systems are now more powerful and running better with your help. Thank you again.