I am working on a some new projects that will be media related. If you want to keep up with what I am working on, please follow me on Twitter.

For all of you that have been active in the show, thank you very much! Trust me when I say that you have not seen the last of me! 8-)

As some of you know now, yes Robert Basil has left the show. He will be missed and was great co-host. He is going on to bigger and better things at www.MySocialMediaGuy.com. We are greatful that he helped co-host the show for as long as be did.

Brandon Staggs will be helping with the show even more and even co-host from time to time. My wife is even getting involved and will be helping out in chat, and some of the background work.
So make sure you mark your calendars for Saturdays at 3p for CornDog Computers LIVE!

Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

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.

What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.

via Official Gmail Blog: More on today’s Gmail issue.

Slower Internet?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The biggest U.S. Internet service providers urged regulators to adopt a conservative definition of “broadband,” arguing for minimum speeds that were substantially below many other nations.

The submissions were filed with the Federal Communications Commission which had sought comments by August 31 on how the agency should define broadband for a report to be submitted to Congress early next year.

The Obama administration is seeking ways to extend broadband services to both unserved Americans living in rural areas and to make broadband affordable for those living in urban areas.

Some of the submissions from service providers argued for a definition that even undercut an international ranking of U.S. Internet speed.

A 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that the United States ranked 19th with an advertised rate of 9.6 megabytes per second (mbps). The top three countries were Japan with 92.8 mbps, Korea with 80.8 mbps and France with 51 mbps.

“The definition must include those services that Americans actually need and want — and can afford — to participate in the Internet-driven economy,” AT&T Inc said in its comment letter to the FCC.

AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds, are necessarily needed by unserved Americans.

Verizon Communications Inc and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon and Vodafone Group Plc, urged the FCC to maintain speeds of at least 0.768 mbps downstream and 0.200 mbps upstream.

Those speeds are being used by the U.S. government in administering $7.2 billion in loans and grants for broadband projects as part of the U.S. economic stimulus package.

“It would be disruptive and introduce confusion if the commission were to now create a new and different definition,” Verizon said in its letter.

Comcast Corp, the biggest cable provider, said that “simpler is better” and that the actual online experience of any particular consumer at any particular moment in time involves a wide range of factors.

“Many of which are outside the control of the Internet service provider,” Comcast said in its letter, which argued for defining “basic” broadband as having a downstream and upstream speed of 0.256 mbps.

However, Free Press, a public interest group, urged Congress and the FCC to set the bar high and to consider broadband as a critical infrastructure.

In its submission, Free Press urged the FCC to craft a definition with a minimum upstream and downstream speed of at least 5 mbps for each end user.

“We fully recognize that incumbents for the most part will scoff at a symmetrical definition,” wrote Derek Turner, research director at Free Press. “The commission must ignore any such self-serving pleas for watered-down standards.”

via Reuters .

We will be combing the web for the weird and bizarre tech related media in honor of special guest Martin Sargent!
If you find a story on the web that you want to share, that is a bit out of the ordinary, send a link to the story to Rob or Robert.

Don’t forget to come for the laughs Aug 28th @ 11:00 am GMT -07:00 Arizona time! Quit your job, and drop the kids off at your Moms house… unless you still live with your Mom.

corndogcomputers.com/live

Click here to watch the video

Kyle Gray

This post has absolutely nothing to do with computers or technology. This is a personal entry about my friend… Kyle

I have known Kyle for many years now. We met at Denny’s in Casa Grande many years ago. I was waiting tables, and Kyle would hang out at night and sip coffee with the regulars. He had a long, bushy, curly “fro” at the time, so he stood out from the usual crowd. He was quiet and didn’t say much then, but that was before we got to know each other.

Without going into a million details about the trouble that Kyle and I have got into over the years, like any one else, Kyle has a past. He was on a destructive path until about 4 years ago. Something happened in his life to cause him to change his ways, and make a complete change.

Kyle has since become a very spiritual and kind person. To know him from the day I met him until now, he has become a completely different person. He is the kind of friend you can always count on. Even if it’s the nasty chore of helping your buddy move. He’s very thoughtful and still funny.

Kyle has since become a Christian rapper too. In his spare time, he writes music and records some of it on his Mac. Sometimes he’ll come over to my house and we’ll spend the whole day working on some of his music. I have added two versions of a song that Kyle and I worked on together to the bottom of this post. I encourage you to check em’ out! You may see kyle from time to time on our weekly AZ TechGuys video chat. (He’s the one laying down)

The point of this post is to share my thoughts with all of you about my friend Kyle. I’m very thankful to have known him, and to be his friend. He’s been through a lot in his life. He’s challenged the negativity that surrounds us all, and come out on top! I’m very proud of him!

Thanks for being my friend Kyle.

My Colors by GK (Music sampled from “This Joint” by Slightly Stoopid)

My Colors by GK (Music by me)

This week we tried TokBox with much better success for user interaction. All though TokBox held up well without too many refreshes from the audio drops, it was not without it’s problems. We had no ability to record the show as well as no ability to moderate. I had a call from 2 people yesterday that said they wanted to watch, but every time they went to the chat, TokBox asked them for permission to use their camera, so they quickly got scared and left the page.

Next Friday we will be attempting to use TinyChat. Robert has signed up for a pro account which allows us moderation. We already anticipating some issues with this too. It meets all of our needs except the recording has yet to work for us in our tests. Another problem we are facing, is a way to pull caller audio into the chat as well. We hope to have a solid platform to host our weekly video tech chat soon, but you will have to be our guinea pigs. :)

In the mean time you can keep up with our progress and submit your tech/computer questions to questions@aztechguys.com which we will be trying to answer on the show every week. We really appreciate all of you that have helped so far to get this project started.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @aztechguys to keep up with our progress and announcements.!

Hey, at least you get the news again if you missed it the first time! :)

Anyway. Fastforward 2 years a d here I find myself loving WordPress as default choice to build my company website on. I have been using Rapiweaver. I am still a big fan of Rapidweaver and will continue to use it, but the big problem has been the option to update my website from my iPhone.

So after a LONG weekend of moving all of my content to my new wordpress driven site, I have removed Rapidweaver from the dock, and installed the WP iPhone app. I am ready to start adding content to my newly improved 1.2 version of the site!

I have a n iPhone version of the site too, but it’s just a basic WPTouch plugin. I will be modding it soon to bring back that CornDog style to my site on your pocket computer.

I encourage you to signup for an account on my site so you can post comments, and ask questions. I will try to keep the information comming at a rapid pace!

What a CornDog!

Last Friday was our first live broadcast where we answered tech questions and talked about new technologies. We started at about 9am, but didn’t really get into it until 10am. Unfortunately I didn’t start recording right away so we missed some of the good stuff. We had a live chat room where we reached 95 visitors. This was a trial run of a future project that we are working on and hope to make it a weekly thing. If you missed it you can see the recorded version here.

There were 4 of us live talking about subjects ranging from Twitter to what the most likely scenario of robots taking over the world. :) Co-hosts for the day were Robert Basil, Kyle Gray, and Travis Eichelberger.

Robert and I will be taking the show to TalkShoe next Friday @10am to give a second go around. Come hang out if you have the time and feel free to call in with any questions related to technology. I’ll post more details this week regarding next weeks show.

Thanks for watching.

I’ll post from my iPhone a lot more often now with all of the mispellings and typos you can handle.
What I really need is a way to post with an iPhone app that does rich text formating or HTML.

If you don’t remember the older site, here’s a link to refresh your memory:

http://www.corndogcomputers.com/backup/

Let me know which version you like better.

Click to download

Unless you absolutely have to have the new industrial design on your laptop and you’re willing to pay an extra $300 for the privilege, it does seem that the new white model is the better buy… for now. A performance gap like this is a strong hint that the unibody models are due for a processor bump sometime soon, if only to restore the proper order of things: faster should equal more expensive. Right?

Well after spending most of the day on the phone with Qwest DSL tech support, and buying a new modem. I managed to squeeze in some time at the end of the day and whip up an iPhone version of the site. It’s definitely a work in progress, but the Tips, Screencasts, Reviews, and Blog pages are pretty sharp. I think I may even like them better than the full version.

I am taking a break on it for a bit, but will add more later. In the mean time, get out your trusty iPhone and have a peak. If you find ANY iPhone formated webites in ALL of Casa Grande, AZ…

Let me know.