Hasta La Gadget!

So, why did Skype experience a giant outage during its most heavily utilized time of year? Server clusters, Windows bugs, and supernodes. The VoIP provider’s CIO Lars Rabbe explained why the network went down for roughly 24 hour on December 22 and 23 on the company’s blog today.

According to Rabbe, several servers became overloaded on the 22nd, setting into motion a series of unfortunate events culminating in the big crash. “As a result of this overload, some Skype clients received delayed responses from the overloaded servers,” said Rabbe. “In a version of the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152), the delayed responses from the overloaded servers were not properly processed, causing Windows clients running the affected version to crash.”

Due to that crash, 25 to 30 percent of the system’s supernodes failed. Is a supernode important? I’m glad you asked. Rabbe again,

A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients, helping to establish connections between them and creating local clusters typically of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode.

Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the P2P network again. As a result, the P2P network was left with 25-30% fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes.

Rabbe promised that the company is doing its best to avoid such issues in the future, through bug fixes, problem detection, and infrastructure reviews. “Lessons will be learned and we will use this as an opportunity to identify and introduce areas of improvement to our software, further assess and invest in capacity and stability, and develop better processes for outage recovery and communications to our user base.”

If everyone were like Cory Booker, maybe I wouldn’t still be trapped in this hotel room during an extended layover to New York. Okay, maybe that’s not true, but the Newark, NJ is getting all manner of accolade for his use of Twitter during the recent snow storm that buried the East Coast under feet of snow.

After the storm, @CoryBooker’s followers looked toward the mayor’s account (the real kind, not the Four Square kind) for advice. Booker responded, taking to the streets, shovel in hand, Tweeting like a madman about the storm.

Booker tweeted advice like, “If you don’t have to go out of the house, the best strategy for today is to stay in and off the roads.” And when people came to him looking for advice and guidance, he answered.

“I need street names and patience,” Booker responded when a user asked, “I have about 4 employees in Nwk stating their blocks still have not been cleaned. Resolution?”

“I’m stuck on bergen & grumman ave,” another told the mayor. “Please DM me your phone number,” he answered. There are several examples of responses like that over the last couple of days.

“This is one of those times you’re just pushing,” Booker told Time in an interview, while riding around the streets. “It’s an endurance test.”

Making New Year’s resolutions is simple enough (hey, we make all kinds of promises when we’re drunk, right?). Keeping them past, say, March, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Thanks to modern technology, however, 2011 will almost certainly be the year you get serious about self-improvement.

After the jump, we’ve got a few technology tools to help you quit smoking, loose weight, pay attention to those finances, and generally make yourself a better person.

The best news about this Oklahoma story making national headlines is that we all know what to do now when our respective calves get trapped on an icy lake (if I had a nickel…). Simple. Call a helicopter pilot.

After spotting the calf on the ice, an Oklahoma City rancher called the local news, having already seen the station’s helicopter pilot rescue a stranded animal. News 9‘s Mason Dunn came to the calf’s rescue, using wind generated by the blades to push the small cow in the right direction.

The rescue came not a moment too soon–the ice cracked as the calf came close t shore, dumping it in the icy water. Thankfully, it was only a few feet away, so it managed to make it back to dry land safely.