I cannot resist pointing to Jakob Nielsen's latest column, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes .If you're interested in usability issues, and anyone interested inmaking effective web sites had better be, his columns are usuallyworthwhile. (One of my embarrassments is that I haven't been readinghim much lately; I used to care about this quite a lot.)

I think that Nielsen's weblog usability issues, like a fair amount ofhis writing, are aimed at what I would

If you haven't tested it, it doesn't work.

I got this from the Extreme Programming movement, but it's just asapplicable to systems and procedures as it is to developing software.(Remember verifying backups ? That's an instanceof this aphorism.)

This has an important corollary:

If you aren't checking it, it's broken.

For example, when you have a spiffy hardware RAID system you shouldmake very sure that you do indeed get notified when a disk

The big myth of support is that you can get it. Usually you can't.

Oh, there's no shortage of vendors who will take your money in orderto tell you how to fix known problems. And why not? It's pretty easy money. (The only tricky bit is figuring out which known problemyou're having.)

But this is the easy bit, so easy that we should call it by adifferent name like 'troubleshooting' .Real support is (also)

This week we received 12,137 email messages from 240 different IPaddresses. Our SMTP server handled 51,672 sessions from 4,977different IP addresses. Session volume is down from last week , but not by what I'd consider alot.

Overall connections are down to roughly the numbers we last saw four weeks ago :222,800 connections from at least 38,400 different IPaddresses. We did hit a

So, how is Hotmail doing with its spam problems ? This very issue has come up innews.admin.net-abuse.email recently, so let's take a look and see.

This week we accepted exactly one email from Hotmail, which may or maynot have been spam.

Also this week, we refused 84 messages from Hotmail that came fromnon-Hotmail email addresses, mostly msn.com but including domains like'ukwiningnotice.com', 'usm2005lot.

First question: why bother, apart from idle curiosity? For a start,I'm interested in knowing how worthwhile it is to do things that helpa specific search engine.

Search engines care a lot about their popularity, with the result thatyou can't really trust anything they say about it. I'm not sure youcan trust any other source of information, and to get solid data youprobably have to pay money for it.

Besides, I don't care about global search engine popularity