Archive for November, 2009

In September, we began asking users on 8.1 clients to upgrade to the latest version of messenger to ensure that they had the most up to-date and secure release.  (see post)

Starting today, users on version 8.5 will also be required to upgrade before they can sign-in to the service.  Starting on the November 9th, users on Messenger 2009 (version 14) will need to upgrade their clients too.  Users who have already installed the latest version, which was released Aug 18th 2009 (Build: 14.0.8089.726),  will not be required to upgrade.

If you are using Messenger 2009 and are curious what version you have, you can go to the Help –> About Menu.

If you have any issues or questions during the upgrade process, here are the places you can go to get some answers.

Troubleshooting Login Issues	This post from the support team provides some guidance into how to determine what error you are getting and steps to resolve many of these.
Online Help	You can also try the online help pages.  On the left hand side, you can select ‘Table of Contents’ (near the bottom) and get information on troubleshooting and error codes.
Contact the Support Team	If you have already tried the going through the online help suggestions and still having difficulties then you should consider contacting the Messenger support team and providing them with more information about the problems that you are encountering.

 

Note: Users on Windows XP will need to ensure that they have installed Service Pack 2 (SP2) or higher, otherwise the upgrade will not work.  Instructions to install the latest Service Pack (SP3) can be found here.  Additionally, here is more information about the system requirements.

Thanks for everyone’s continued support.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Messenger Team

Ever wanted to have Google quality search and ultra fast speed for your online store? Now you can. Today we are launching Google Commerce Search to provide the search on your retail website. Google Commerce Search also leverages the data feed that you submit through Google Merchant Center so you don't need to submit your data again to use Google Commerce Search for your online store.

Google Commerce Search (GCS) is a hosted, cloud-based offering that brings the relevancy, speed, and Google ease-of-use to e-commerce sites.



GCS also has a bunch of user-friendly features that make shopping on online stores easier, and search results more refined and accurate. Some of those features are:

• speed – GCS leverages Google's ultra fast platform, because it's hosted, providing sub-second response times to users.

• Google quality and ranking – GCS analyzes every item in our index using proprietary signals to determine its optimal placement in the result set, for more accurate query results for shoppers.

• parametric search and sorting – GCS allows users to refine or sort results by category, price, brand, or other attribute; this is fully-functional parametric search for e-stores.

• product boost and promotions – Retailers can boost the relevance of certain items, or highlight specific products during a sale, and cross-sell related products.

• spell check, stemming and synonyms – By leveraging the larger Google engine, GCS can include these advanced search and synonym options, so the shopping experience is smoother for customers – even customers who mistype.

• fast deployment and scale – Since this is a cloud-based offering, GCS can be deployed in days and, because it's hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods like the holidays without worrying about slowdowns or spikes.

Birkenstock USA has implemented Google Commerce Search on one of their online properties and found it has already made an impact on their business. "Google Commerce Search is improving user satisfaction -- bounce rates have decreased and we're seeing more return customers,' said Jeff Kilmer, COO, Birkenstock USA. 'The search results are ultra-fast, so customers more easily find the specific products they're looking for. We deployed Google Commerce Search quickly and easily, and we've seen dramatic conversion improvement since implementation. It has also meant a better shopping experience for our customers, which is critical given the holiday season rush."

For more information check out google.com/commercesearch.

Posted by Matthias Zenger, Max Loubser Google Commerce Search Team

Posted by Jeffrey Peng, Software Engineer, Google Books

I'm a software engineer on Google Books. One of my main projects is adding magazine content and features to the site. In September we were excited to announce the availability of over 1,860 issues of the iconic LIFE magazine on Google Books. One of the feature requests that I got from friends and family was to add a way to browse all the magazines available. Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles. The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast. I'm happy to announce that last week I coded up a page on Google Books that lets you browse the available magazine titles. You can view the page here.



I can't promise that I can respond to every Internet protest with a feature addition, but you're always invited to send us feedback here. Rest assured that we're working hard to make the magazine browse, search, and reading experience better each month. Happy reading!

By Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager

After a recent service interruption, we started talking about how we could improve our communications about these (hopefully infrequent) issues. Going forward, in the case of significant service interruptions, we plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger Status blog within 3 business days to provide details about what went wrong and what we're doing to help prevent similar problems in the future.

During any outage, we try to keep the Blogger Status blog updated once we know about an issue. Of course sometimes — as was the case on Saturday — affected users who cannot reach Blogger cannot reach the Status blog either. In such cases, we will try to post updates on the Blogger account on Twitter to keep users apprised of what we know and when we expect a resolution.

We don't like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we're doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you. As always, thank you for using Blogger.

Postmortem on recent issues affecting users in Europe

What happened
Beginning at approximately 2:30am (PDT) Saturday, October 31, a DNS configuration issue in a new datacenter in Europe caused requests to blogger.com and *.blogspot.com to be sent to an invalid IP address. Affected users throughout Europe were unable to connect to either Blogger or to blogs hosted by Blogger at blogspot.com for approximately 10 hours.

What we're doing about it
1. Blogger's systems engineers will proactively monitor and verify DNS settings during major system changes.
2. We have improved our automated monitoring so that on-call engineers will be paged earlier for DNS-related failures.
3. Checks in our DNS management system have been made to prevent the change that caused this to occur.

Eddie Kessler, Blogger Engineering Manager

I've sometimes thought that optimizing web applications is as much a science as dowsing. (No offense intended, dowsers of the world — but you have to admit it's a hard thing to explain even when it does work out.) Even when you are completely willing to invest time and energy into optimizing an application, how do you actually go about it?

Our team, along with everyone else in the world who cares about web application performance, has had to essentially guess at where time goes inside the browser. We've spent countless hours debating each others' wild-eyed speculations as to the true sources of latency afflicting a wide variety of applications. Indeed, web apps can be slow for all sorts of opaque and unintuitive reasons. Don't be fooled into thinking that bloated, slow JavaScript is the only culprit. We've seen pathological situations in which a few seemingly insignificant CSS tweaks can improve performance by a factor of 5 or more. Another dark gem: rearranging a mere few lines of JavaScript that were inadvertently calling DOM-related methods in an unfortunate sequence (which caused multiple redundant layouts) turned a life-negating 5 second operation into a sprightly 50 millisecond blink of an eye. That one took 5 days to find the offending 4 lines of JavaScript and then about 3 seconds to actually make the code change. #nowiamwaybehindingooglereader

We couldn't take it anymore. We decided we had to find a way to transform the witchcraft of optimizing web apps into a legitimate engineering task, once and for all.

My team began working on a series of changes to WebKit and Chrome to collect precise metrics on where time is, in fact, going within the browser. When, exactly, does layout occur? How long does each layout take? Can layout happen synchronously while my JavaScript is executing, or is it deferred? How much time is spent on CSS selector matching? How long does parsing (versus executing) JavaScript take? Does the process of actually painting pixels on the screen take much time? We instrumented the browser way deep down inside to produce a stream of such metrics, being very careful to keep observer effects to a minimum.

Happily, we've managed to land these changes into both WebKit and Chrome over the last several weeks. Soon you'll see the first examples of tools that make these metrics available to web developers using WebKit-based browsers. Of course, we have a lot more instrumentation planned, but the ball is really rolling now thanks to lots of help from the friendly folks on the WebKit and Chrome teams (especially Pavel Feldman and Timothy Hatcher). We've gained many new insights, some of which I mentioned in my Measure in Milliseconds talk at Google I/O earlier this year. When you see these metrics yourself for your own web apps, you'll likely be surprised — and you'll almost certainly wonder how anyone tried to write high-performance code without this sort of insight. Be sure to keep an eye on the Chrome Dev Channel and the WebKit nightly builds for new Inspector features based on our work.

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