A Major pre-christmas internet outage seems to be hitting the heavy hitters on the web right now. Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, and Walmart.com are all offline right now, perhaps even more. Interestingly enough sites running on amazon web services (AWS EC2) seem to be running just fine. An outage of these large sites at the same time is likely a result of an attack of massive proportions.

UPDATE: I was right, tonight Google announced Google Groups is now part of Google Apps for Domains!

This morning I noticed a change in the way emails sent to a group (formerly known as list) email address on google apps for domains appear. Below is an example of the bottom of the email headers on an email sent to one of my groups on nick.pro:

On the other hand here is the bottom of the email headers on an email sent to that same group today:

As you can see in these images, a few new list specific header lines have been added that make lists appear more like they were handled by more traditional mailing list software, rather then a simple email forwarder.

I've confirmed this change seems to have happened today as emails to groups as recently as yesterday do not have the additional headers, while emails to the same groups today have the additional headers, hop past the break to see a breakdown of the 4 new headers and what I think this change means:

The Blog Mobile Site creator service Mofuse is down today with a MySQL Error.

I have successfully migrated the nick.pro site from the Wordpress blog that it has been for ages, into Drupal. This is perhaps the most unusual migration of this blog (and I've moved this blog several times now), in that I don't actually consider Drupal to be a better blogging software then Wordpress, in fact, I find Wordpress to be the absolute best blogging software available today. However I've long wanted nick.pro to be something more then just a blog, I've wanted it to be a whole site showcasing what I'm up to online and off, and Drupal is a far better CMS platform for a more robust site then just a blog.

While Drupal works fine as a blog, where it really shines is in it's flexibility. There are Third Party Modules available to do almost anything you can imagine, and for those things you can't imagine, it's a robust php framework for coding my own modules to do even more incredible things.

For the moment, all I've accomplished is migrating my old blog content, making sure all of the URLs redirect correctly, and adding an activity stream to show my recent activity on various online sites (twitter, digg, youtube, and flickr to start, more to come).

This is far from the first time I have migrated my blog. Stay tuned after the break for a brief glimpse of how this site has progressed from "Cap's Log" on Movable Type 2, to Nick.pro running on Drupal today.

Check out my review of the HTC Magic (T-Mobile G2) and the comparisons against the iPhone 3G and 3GS on LLRX. This is my third article published on LLRX. I am writing another article for the site, with my review of Google Wave, which should be out in the next week or two. (By posting this here, I am forcing myself to get it done, hopefully.)

I'm attending the Developing Extensions for Google Chrome session right now, which is hosted by Aaron Boodman who is noted for being the creator of the Greasemonkey Firefox Extension and who now works at Google, and is working on Chrome Extensions.

My wife and are are checked into our hotel in San Francisco. Tomorrow begins Google I/O 2009 at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco. I'm quite looking forward to two days of Google Developer Goodness. I'm hoping that we'll learn about a lot of great new updates to Google APIs and developer tools, and of course, I haven't forgot about my prediction that Google Chrome will get Extensions at Google I/O. I'm a little more cautious about saying that for sure, but I'm still pretty optimistic that it will happen, or at least we'll get some sort of time table as to when we will.

Yesterday I retweeted a post by ReadWriteWeb concerning Yahoo's announcement that they are closing down GeoCities this year.

This was particularly sad news for me because GeoCities was where my first website was hosted.

Earlier this month, I wrote about tracking mentions of yourself on twitter more completly then just checking the @replies tab on twitter (or in tweetdeck).  Keeping tabs on what people say about you in twitter is only one step in effectively tracking references to yourself online.

So here's step 2, if you want to really know what people are saying about you online, take the search a step furthe

For the second year in a row, my wife and I participated in Earth Hour. At 8:30 I hit the main breaker in our apartment shutting everything down for an hour. During that time we read together by candlelight and reflected on just how much energy we use on a day to day basis. It was amazing to us how quiet it was without the ambient hum of electronics running, serving our whims, and it was humbling to think how hard it seemed to read by candlelight and how much we rely on technology for every aspect of our lives.