The sad passing of Michael Jackson became a breaking news story that sent a shockwave spike through the infrastructure of the internet. Google saw a huge spike in traffic that security threshold detectors interpreted as a hacker attack, resulting in a 25 minute captcha confirmation or service refusal from Google News. Yahoo had the MJ report headlined in their news aggregator, then Google had it further down, and Microsoft's Bing had it way way down. A Bing blog post seemed to imply that it was ranked down because it did not have images with it, which breaking news typically wouldn't.

The website TMZ.com broke the story 20 minutes after his passing, then went down briefly under the load. The LA Times was the first news site, and it fell over soon after. Online news services saw a 20% increase in traffic, but the availability of popular web news sites dropped from 100% to 86% and didn't return for another 4 hours.

So it's time finally to let the cat out of the blog. I'm producing a comedy benefit gig - with just a tiny bit of help from people who actually know what they're doing - to celebrate the astonishing achievements of those jolly clever men and women who worked in tip-top secret at Bletchley Park to crack the fiendishly fiddly codes being used by the Germans in WWII.

I like to explain it this way:

Take two music magazines: Rolling Stone and Guitar Techniques.

One is written by people who probably don't play a musical instrument and is aimed at an audience of people who probably don't play a musical instrument either and is mostly not about the actual music itself. Rolling Stone is a magazine about the music business and the musician's lifestyle.

A few weeks I went down to the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to register Ariel, my daughter, as an American citizen born abroad. (She's a dualie, because she was born in Canada to an American parent: me. I'm a dualie too, born in the U.S. to Canadian parents. Being born a dual citizen is a wonderful example of a best practice. You should follow it. But I digress.)

The application process is, naturally, fraught with complication and bureaucracy. There's also a chilling and intimidating level of security; one isn't allowed to bring anything electronic into the Consulate at all. No cell phones, no PDAs, and certainly no laptop computers. That means no electronic records, and no hope of looking anything up. So one has to prepare.

Thanks to the energetic James Lyndsay, a bunch of us are meeting at the conclusion of his Exploratory Testing class and my Rapid Testing class on Friday, June 3 2009, in London, UK. I expect we'll be there somewhere between 5:30 and 9:00pm. The venue is the Prince Arthur pub, 80-82 Eversholt Street, Euston, London, NW1 1BX, right across the street from Euston Station, north of Euston Road. Three large tables have been reserved. All are welcome; please spread the word!

Part of a series on the seven pillars of a good Agile team In the world of software, there are two competing slogans:“Many heads are better than one.”“A committee is the only form of life with many heads and no brain.”In a skilled Agile team, the first slogan wins. It is routine for two [...]

Earlier this month, I gave a talk at Agile Roots on Artisanal Retro-Futurism crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism. It was well-received. They’ve now released the video. The talk is about 25 minutes long.