Google is known for hiring geniuses, and this is a brilliant move: they have successfully prevented all the people who both care enough about Google to visit a garage and don’t know how to use search engines, from visiting the house.

Our good buddies at IDG News Service report that the failure of a DNS (domain name system) server at Comcast caused problems for some Web surfers in the northeast section of the U.S. today, making several Web sites, including Google, inaccessible.

The server failure caused connectivity problems for a “few hours,” said Jeanne Russo, a Comcast spokeswoman. By late Tuesday, the broadband provider had rerouted traffic to other servers, she said.

An undetermined number of Google users who subscribe to Comcast’s broadband service “experienced problems accessing Google and other services for a short period of time,” a Google spokesman told IDG News via e-mail.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the spokesman wrote.

The server was knocked offline because of a hardware failure, Russo said. She couldn’t exactly how many Web pages were unavailable to Comcast users. The problems were “very isolated, very random,” she added.

“Google engineers helped troubleshoot the problem and provided diagnostic information to the ISP. We believe the issue has since been resolved by the ISP,” the Google spokesman wrote.

Postings in discussion groups and blogs seems to indicate the problem hit the northeastern part of the U.S. the hardest, specifically Boston.

This wasn’t the case out here in San Francisco, where I Googled all day long without problems.

Could you go a day without Google?

The outage included this blog, and it was strange in that it affected only sites that require cookies. So for example, I could search Google, but I couldn’t check Gmail; I could view my blog but not log in. How could a DNS server failure do that?

Google has published just a handful of some of the most popular search terms of 2005. As you can see in the graph, when Google charts the popularity of the search phrase “the force” and the “dark side” over the year, “the force” wins overall. I suppose we can take that as good news.

By the way, “Yoda origami” has been the second-most popular search phrase of the last two months in bringing people to my blog.

Gmail’s “Accounts” feature lets you send emails from different addresses. I’ve been using it to send emails from my work email address, and emails sent to my work address forward automatically to my Gmail account. That means I can organize, send, and receive all my emails from one central location, without giving away my private email address. Or so I thought.

I just discovered that even when you send email “from” another account, Gmail includes your Gmail account email as the “sender.” The screen-shot of a recent email’s header shows what I mean. Here I sent the email while logged in to my if.website#nosp@m#gmail#h.re#com Gmail account. I sent it as “webmaster#nosp@m#ilfilosofo#h.re#com”, but it says the sender is “if.website#nosp@m#gmail#h.re#com”.

I can’t think of any good reason to make that address public, and worse, nothing in the “Accounts” pages warns you that this will happen.

I view it as a personal failure that Flash collected the bronze medal for annoyance. It’s been three years since I launched a major effort to remedy Flash problems and published the guidelines for using Flash appropriately. When I spoke at the main Flash developer conference, almost everybody agreed that past excesses should be abandoned and that Flash’s future was in providing useful user interfaces.

Despite such good intentions, most of the Flash that Web users encounter each day is bad Flash with no purpose beyond annoying people. The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct. They are so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won’t recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them.

Flash is a programming environment and should be used to offer users additional power and features that are unavailable from a static page. Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don’t make your pages move. It doesn’t increase users’ attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.

Using Flash for navigation is almost as bad. People prefer predictable navigation and static menus.

Nielsen is right that Flash can have useful applications, but as he also points out, most of the time it’s used just for the “wow” effect. And with Google’s creativity showing how far one can go with “Ajax”-based apps, the number of situations in which Flash is necessary is shrinking.

What I dislike about Flash the most and what makes it an anomaly on the Internet is that it’s a proprietary standard. You have to run software made by Macromedia in order to view Flash. Unfortunately, when Macromedia decides it doesn’t want to port Flash to a given operating system (as it has done with mine, Linux 64-bit), then users are out in the cold. The number of those users is bound to increase, as mobile phones with web access become more common. Almost no other significant web technology is proprietary. From serving web pages to browsing them, you can do it all with open-source applications. Why should Flash be the exception?

Howard and Melissa of Boca Raton, Florida found out first hand that the Internet can be a powerful tool for parents. A few weeks after they brought their premature twins, Andrew and Carly, home from the hospital Andrew had to be admitted to the ER. The doctors told them that the baby had a serious problem, that his hemoglobin levels had dropped from 14 (at birth) to 7. The doctors wanted to do an emergency blood transfusion immediately. Using his cell phone, Howard used Google to search for “hemoglobin” and “premature infant.” The results were surprising. He found a medical journal article which said that it’s normal for preemie twins to have a drop in their hemoglobin levels during the first three months.

Howard gave the link to the doctors, and they spent a few hours researching it. When they returned, they “sheepishly admitted that our son was indeed fine – no treatment was necessary…Google literally saved our newborn son from having to endure an extremely dangerous, and totally unnecessary, blood transfusion.”

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.

His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.

HT: digg.com

So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?

Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

As you probably already know, Google’s slogan is “don’t be evil.” But from the context of the interview, Gates actually was referring to Google’s saying that “they are going to organize the world’s information.” Or was it a Freudian slip?

HT: /.