I’ve spent a little time around boats. You eventually discover that the entire maritime industry is superstitious. Big, burley men get very serious when you inadvertently violate one of these invisible taboos. One of the bigger superstitions that I ran into was basically the idea that doing anything significant on a Friday was fraught with peril. The boat yard that I spent time at refused to launch any of their boats on a Friday. Many of the boaters that I ran into would always work their cruising schedules so that they didn’t leave port on Friday, especially for a long voyage.

Being a sailor at heart, it seemed prudent to push the release back until Monday. It’ll be worth the short wait. Among other things, the new release will have even more creative tools and much better support for lower resolution screens.

In other news, you may have noticed that Adobe announced their plans to move Flex into open source. Many of you have (correctly) surmised that we’re built on Flex. We are huge fans of the Flash platform we were impressed to see Adobe open source Flex. Atta boy, Adobe!

This morning, I migrated Picnik over to using a DNS service provided by DNSMadeEasy. So far, I’d recommend them for small companies looking for solid DNS at a reasonable price.

Any change carries some risk, and DNS is no exception. Over the past few days I’ve tested several transition plans on some unused domains (they’re useful for something!) and came up with what I thought was the best. With that said, some users might experience some problems, so I’ll apologize up front: I’m sorry!

If you do run into problems, you can try clearing your DNS cache.

After a week and a half of jury duty (not guilty!) and a super busy week in the office last week (writing code, testing code, shopping for PR agency) things are getting back on track. We have a big release this week. In this post I’m going to talk about the big change that I hope you don’t notice. We’ll be rolling out our high availability/scalability solution over the next two weeks. (CDN sales guys: this is not an implied request to have you call me and try to sell me your solution. Again.) Call us optimists, but we think that in the next couple of months you’ll be hearing about some major partnership deals that will dramatically increase our traffic and it would be nice if we were ready for the traffic.

I’d like to thank Brad Fitzpatrick at Danga/Live Journal for sharing the tools and architecture that they use at Live Journal. It’s great to be able to take advantage of the expertise of others. We hope that we can contribute some software back to the cause with our Python MogileFS wrapper and some PerlBal plug-ins. Stay tuned, we will have a labs page up soon. We’re also big fans of Cal Henderson’s conference sessions and his book–go check it out.

Currently, Picnik is running on a single web server and two DB servers. Starting this week, we (primarily Justin and I) will be rolling out our solution that allows us to scale horizontally and take advantage of all of those other servers in our rack. The first piece of the puzzle is the PicnikFS wrapper that encapsulates MogileFS and is a first step to taking advantage of off-site storage like Amazon’s S3. Once we’re happy with the stability of PicnikFS we’ll turn on PerlBal and start load balancing across several Web servers. The last piece of the software puzzle falls into place when we separate our rendering code from the web server and get it running on our 4/8 core boxen.

For what it’s worth, our existing box has done a great job. No major hiccups even when we got crunch’d and photojojo‘d.

We’re also tweaking our upload code to elimiate some of the errors that a small percentage of you have been seeing. Please send email to feedback if you see any errors uploading your pictures.

Darrin, Peter and Brian also have lots of goodies ready for the next release, more on that in my next post.

Enjoy!

We just discovered that some of our performance problems with Picasa Web were due to (gasp) our own internal issue. Go figure. We had a mis-configured DNS server that was causing some of our name resolution requests to run slowly. This has been fixed and Picasa Web Album performance has been greatly improved.