For those of you who wonder how Google manages to be so fast when they get so much traffic, you need to head over to Internetnews and read an explanation from one of Google’s engineers. Apparently the secret is to break big tasks into little tasks and spread them over multiple servers while making sure you have multiple backups of everything.

When is a monopoly not a monopoly? Why when you’re Microsoft and your desktop monopoly can’t help make inroads in Web server sales. While Windows accounts for the vast majority of the desktop world, that trend has not been of much use in making Microsoft’s Web server software (IIS or Internet Information Services) the dominant server software hosting Web sites . According to Netcraft Apache has taken another 2 percent of Microsoft’s web server market share this year so far, which gives the Open Source Apache a tiny bit under 70 percent (69.86%) of the whole shebang. Microsoft were found guilty of monopoly practices for among other things using their Windows monopoly to win the browser war against Netscape by giving Internet Explorer away for free as the default browser in Windows. They are now in trouble in the EU for doing the same thing with Media Player, and at some stage in the future may be in trouble for embedding MSN and related services into Windows as well. None of that helps sell Web servers though, which is why every month seems to see a little more of Microsoft’s web server market share go to the Open Source Apache, which is usually running on some form of Unix/Linux/BSD.

Last night while looking at msfn.org to put in my vote for Firefox on their poll, I noticed that the site was based on PHP, an Open Source language. Microsoft usually puts down anything with a GPL license at what seems to be every opportunity, so it seemed odd that a site for Microsoft developers runs on PHP, even if it isn’t’ an official Microsoft site. Then today Cnet put out an article speculating that MSN might be running on PHP and MySQL as well. The screenshot they show as possible evidence, shows the Brazil MSN with a PHP/MySQL error message displayed. I don’t actually think the image is anything but a fraud, because Netcraft shows that server as running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 IIS/6.0 and yet the file paths in the error messages seem to be Unix paths not Windows. Still, there has been long speculation that for a long time some Microsoft servers (like Hotmail) were running BSD and not Windows on the back end, so who really knows?

Yahoo have put up what they call a “Netrospective” site detailing the important things that happened on the Internet while they’ve been around as part of their tenth birthday. There are some interesting items in the list even if it is somewhat time consuming to navigate.

For one thing, look at the bottom row third from the right icon, it’s a pic of the Firefox logo and it talks about the past and current browser wars. (Yahoo recently released their search tool bar for Firefox) Other interesting aspects relate to Ebay, Amazon, Napster and other such companies that revolutionised the way people used the Internet. If you can put up with the DHTML or Flash presentation, it makes for an interesting look at the Internet from Yahoo’s perspective.

Within a few days after the super bowl, a site called missgodaddy.com sprang up. It purportedly featured pin-up style pictures of the actress who portrayed the godaddy girl in the Godaddy.com Super Bowl Advertisement in various stages of undress. That site is now gone! (see adult rated google cache from 3/1/05 – so it disappeared overnight apparently as on 3/2/05 it is no more)

The site had this disclaimer:

Disclaimer This site is not affiliated with GoDaddy.com or any of its subsidiaries, It is also not affiliated with Candice Michelle, This site is intended as a parody to godaddy and its SuperBowl Commercial 2005. The owners of this site cannot be held responsible for any information contained herein. All Information gathered and placed on this site is available at various other resources on the internet. All photos contained are copyright protected by their respective owners. Contact us at msgodaddy[ at ]gmail[ dot ]com

In addition to the pictures, it featured several sponsor links and google ad bot ads. The site has disappeared. If you click on that domain name now, you get … that’s right … godaddy itself.

How did the name get transferred? According to the cached site, Godaddy purchased it.

More importantly, why isn’t the name registered with Godaddy, the proud new owner of the domain name?

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Two flaws have been discovered in Real Media’s Realplayer, they can be used to compromise the machine on which Realplayer is running. You can read more about it here and you can get updates for your Realplayer here.

On the Virus front, the new Bagle variant is running amok, it isn’t technically a Virus, but rather a Trojan horse (a progam that opens a back door on your PC that allows a remote party to take control) and as such has no self propagation method itself relying instead on an apparent spam out, read more here. The danger is not just the Trojan itself, but also that it can in some cases turn off your anti-virus protection making you susceptible to other infection. Here you can find the top ten Viruses from Sophos for February which makes for interesting reading. For anyone not sure they are protected we suggest you head over here, and pick up one of the free anti-virus programs listed there.

Today I happened onto Stu Nicholls’ CSS Playground. I found the site interesting in design, for example the hover over links on the main page shows a flashing brown bar. Is it over the top or interesting? I found some of his general menu structure hard to understand at first without playing, for example his speech bubble that is his comment link.

I like the negative image of the lady that appears … but where are the positives? Not sure what the relevance of the picture is other than it is interesting. I like the color blocks that come on for hovers as well.

I also like some of his menu examples.