Update: We're back up and running, everyone. Google responded within five minutes to my email. The quotas were reset and they're going to look into why it happened later today.

That's pretty awesome support! Thanks, guys!

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Paul McDonald, who has been wonderful in working closely with me to make sure that the Singularity web site got up and running on Google App Engine last week, announced on the Google App Engine Blog on Thursday that they had released a new version of the Google App Engine SDK. Version 1.1.1 includes several small updates and I just upgraded to it without issues.

That said, Issue 401 is still unpatched, so if you're running Python 2.5 (not 2.5.1+), you will need to apply the patch.

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I always get ideas for geeky t-shirts and never do anything about it. So today, while taking a break from working on the Singularity web site, I set up a store on Spreadshirt under the naklab brand that I'm thinking of using for quite a few things. And I actually made a shirt for the idea I had today.

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Amazon S3 has been down for several hours now and as Jonathan Boutelle (who, by the way is speaking at the Singularity Web Conference) writes, when S3 goes down, the Internet goes down. Along with images on Twitter, SlideShare, SmugMug, and a host of other sites, images on Pistach.io ads are also down. We've also had intermittent issues with Amazon's SimpleDB. I feel that these issues only serve to highlight the age-old danger of having all your eggs in one basket. Especially a proprietary basket. This is why I applaud Google in releasing the Google App Engine SDK as open source.

The launch of services like Amazon's EC2, S3, SimpleDB and Google's Google App Engine herald the birth of the Commodity Web, wherein web infrastructure is infinitely available and metered just like electricity, water, and gas. For the most part, we don't think about the limits or availability of commodities (as the impending ecological nightmare we've woven for ourselves would attest to, if nothing else.) But when we do try those limits, or when the systems of delivery break down (as in blackouts, for example), the extent of our reliance on these utilities becomes painfully clear.

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I have to confess, I love naked domains. You might say, I have somewhat of a fetish.

Naked domains, of course, are domain names without the www prefix. So, instead of www.singularity08.com, for example, having singularity08.com.

One of my pet peeves are sites that don't display correctly without the www prefix. I've found that it's usually a good sign that the site is going to be pretty crap. In fact, I was hoping that some day we would have www disappear from use altogether and that we'd all be swimming in a sea of naked domains. Well, I almost got my wish -- we've at least got heaps of domains with nudity.

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