Gmail Fails, Google Apologises

Reference: Techdare.com

Google's Electronic Mail service GMail recently crashed on Wednesday, the 2nd of September for an astonishing 100 minutes! The outage nearly killed the Tweety Twitter again!
But isn't just Google a vast spread network of its never-out-of-run servers. As everyone kept wondering whatever happened with Google and GMail, the service kept responding to the Sign-In requests with the erroneous (but quite friendly!) message:

[Credit: GearDiary.com]

Of course, why do we have to worry????

Better still, 'twas good seeing Google publicly apologizing for the unhappy incident.
Looks like they've got everything tangled, and this one was big!!! Real big!
Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

That was a big Oops! Better still, GMail is online again.

Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.

Let's hope Google sticks to its commitment

Apple rolls out Snow Leopard; Win 7 still waiting!

Reference: CNET News

Seems Apple is in real hurry!

While Microsoft has released plans for its Windows 7 this week, Apple has rolled out its Mac OS X Snow Leopard, a little earlier than expected.

According to CNET, the new OS doesn't sport many new features, rather Apple is deep into refining the exisiting code of the Operating System. Apple reports to have worked on 90 percent of the Mac OS X code for the Snow Leopord release. It does have a good box cover too! [image:Left (Credit:Apple)]

Here's the CNET Teams review for the Snow Leaopard. The team gave it a review of Excellent in its Test:

"Interface enhancements like Expose in the Dock and better file and folde viewing in Stacks make finding apps and files much easier. A completely overhauled QuickTime X now sports a cleaner interface and recording tools. The much-anticipated Exchange support across Mail, the Address Book, and iCal is huge for thise who take their Macs to work.

CNET Reviews Team however notes that Snow Leopard will work only in Intel-powered Macs; PowerPC users are out of Luck!

Experts note that Snow Leopard could have more features on the Security side, which the OS is said to be lacking. About the Popular belief that people have more Mac, that it is much safer than the Windows counterpart, experts deny. The Mac is merely safer as malware writers do not prefer to target the Apple Platform than the Windows one, according to Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, co-authors of The Mac Hacker's Handbook, which came out this spring.

"Apple hasn't implemented all the security features that Vista has," Miller said. "They made some improvements in Leopard, but they are still behind."

Better gear up!

Salman Khan cancels US trip after SRK episode

Source: Rediff Movies

Learning lessons from Shah Rukh Khan [ Images ] episode, Bollywood star Salman Khan [ Images ] has cancelled his upcoming trip to New York to promote his latest movie Wanted, besides participating in the auction of his personal paintings to raise funds for his charity.

Organisers and promoters associated with the event cited Shah Rukh Khan's episode at Newark Airport early this month, where he was questioned by immigration officials and taken for a second screening, as a major reason for Salman to cancel his New York trip scheduled in early September.

The event was scheduled for September 3 in New York. The promoters were also in talks with local organisers in cities like Chicago, Houston and Dallas for his other events.

"However, after the Shah Rukh Khan event, Salman informed us that he would not like to take the risk of coming to the US at this point," an informed source involved with the planning and organising the September 3 event told PTI.

It is understood that Salman's decision was also propelled by what his aid alleged "the hard time" being given by the US Consulate in Mumbai [ Images ] in approving the visa of his close associates, including one of his family members, whom Salman wanted to bring along with on this promotional trip.