Bangkok Floating Market

This most interesting excursion brings you to the rural floating market of Damnoen Saduak, situated 110 kilometers west of Bangkok. Continue to Kanchanaburi and take a scenic boat trip on Maeklong River towards the famous bridge over the River Kwai. After lunch, visit the Thailand-Burma Railway Center, an interactive museum, information and research facility dedicated to presenting the history of the Thailand-Burma Railway.

The fully air-conditioned center offers the visitor an educational and moving experience. Then visit the two well-kept war cemeteries, which contain the graves of an estimated 9,000 allied soldiers who lost their lives while building the bridge and constructing the notorious "Death Railway" which the Japanese had hoped to stretch all the way to the Burmese (Myanmar) border. On your return journey to Bangkok, stop at Phra Pathom Chedi, considered to be the highest pagoda in the world.

Mourinho the master will bring magic to Madrid

A tactical master class in Madrid saw Jose Mourinho give Internazionale their first European Cup since 1965. In two years at the San Siro, the charismatic and controversial Portuguese coach built a team that relied on hard work, discipline and resilience to become kings of the continent once more.

I saw it coming. Leading up to the semifinal tie against Barcelona, I wrote that Inter would eliminate the defending champions and go on to win the title. My opinion was formed after watching the Italian giants teach Chelsea a footballing lesson that Carlo Ancelotti will not forget anytime soon. So, indeed, they went on to contain the almighty Barca and then prevailed against Bayern.

Why website crashes are unavoidable -- at least for now

This has been a week of crashing websites.

First it was Twitter, which had "site availability issues" on and off this week. Then, on Thursday night, it was WordPress, the popular blogging platform that supports more than 10 million blogs, all of which went down for several hours because of a coding problem.

Big-name tech blogs such as TechCrunch and GigaOm were yanked offline because of the WordPress glitch. And, for purposes of disclosure, CNN's blogs also were among those that were unavailable for a matter of hours.

Jason Kincaid, a writer at TechCrunch, wrote that he was far from pleased about the service outage. "If you tried to access TechCrunch any time in the last hour or so, you probably noticed that it wasn't working at all," he wrote Thursday. "Instead, you were greeted by the overly cheery notice 'WordPress.com will be back in a minute!' Had we written that message ourselves, there would have been significantly more profanity."

Obviously, no one likes it when websites go down. And, for website owners, even a few hours offline can mean a big hit to revenue from ads. But if you understand how the Internet works, there's one thing you realize quickly: Websites will continue to crash from time to time, and, without a big rethink of the system, there's no way to prevent that completely.
"I think that all services will have downtime," WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg wrote in an e-mail to CNN on Friday. "No matter how much you prepare, have redundant systems, or audit, there will periodically be a black swan event that is completely unlike whatever you've experienced before. It even happens to Google! In these moments of crisis, the key is how the service and the people behind it respond."

Over the past five years, WordPress has been up -- meaning the whole site is functioning normally -- 99.9 percent of the time, Mullenweg said. That translates to about nine hours of downtime per year.

The site does not make guarantees that its service will always work. Instead, "our guarantee to our users is that we'll do our very best to have their blog be completely reliable so they don't have to worry about it," he said.

Rich Miller, editor of the blog Data Center Knowledge, said websites will continue to crash because they are run by mechanical computers, which always fail eventually.

"This is an industry that is built around trying to take every measure possible to ensure websites don't go down and data centers don't lose power," he said. "But there's always Murphy's Law, which is anything that can go wrong will -- and sometimes will in multiple places at once."

The main way websites are trying prevent downtime is by building more data centers, Miller said. Data centers are essentially the brains of the Web -- they're huge warehouses full of computer servers that store information.

Companies tend to store information at multiple sites, so that if a computer server crashes, or if a certain town loses power because of a natural disaster, then the website doesn't go down and information isn't lost.

"At the end of the day you're still dealing with mechanical, electronic systems," Miller said. "These things break and get old and die. And so what you do is you design and build these facilities to try to account for every possible scenario. The math gets challenging when you try to imagine every possible scenario."

He said Twitter and WordPress generally do a good job at preventing crashes.

Christofer Hoff, director of cloud and virtualization solutions at Cisco, said there needs to be a "reasonable resetting of expectations" among consumers about how often websites should go down. Hoff said he has been personally irritated by Twitter's frequent crashes, but he understands that things such as increased traffic because of the World Cup or a tech event such as Monday's iPhone 4 unveiling can cause unforeseen problems that lead to service issues.

"It seems like a really simple set of problems, but the scalability of website operations is a very, very tricky business," he said, "especially when you look at all of the moving parts."
Mullenweg, of WordPress, said Thursday's crash resulted from "a highly unfortunate code error which had some cascading effects." Twitter posted on its Status Blog that "networking problems" caused its trouble, and that the site issues continued on Friday.

Just because websites will continue to crash from time to time doesn't mean that these shortcomings aren't significant. People increasingly rely on Internet services such as WordPress and Gmail to host their work communications and contacts lists. Websites such as TechCrunch lose money and possibly readers if their product isn't available online. And Twitter has become an increasingly vital means for people to communicate in the age of real-time information access.

"We live in a 24-by-7-by-365 world now," Miller said. "That's the expectation folks have now" -- that information will always be available.

Some websites are better than others at meeting these expectations.

A report from the company Pingdom (PDF) segmented out downtime for social networks in 2008. Twitter was at the bottom of the list, meaning it was down that year more often than most. Facebook and others fared better in that report.

Without any solution that's 100 percent effective, Miller said the data-center industry measures website uptime by "how many nines" a website has. Three "9s" -- or 99.9 percent uptime -- is good. The best in the industry manage to create services with five "9s," he said, meaning they're up 99.999 percent of the time.

Usually, these uptimes aren't guaranteed to website users unless they pay to access the site's services. Some paid services operate under signed agreements that guarantee a certain amount of uptime or a penalty will be paid to the consumer.

Perhaps just as important as uptime, Miller said, is the way companies respond to these website crashes when they do occur.

The old model was to ignore them publicly, he said. But with today's real-time Web, he said, that's not an option anymore.

Gaga causes a stir at yesterday's Mets game

Lady Gaga didn't make it down to the field during the New York Mets vs. San Diego Padres baseball game yesterday afternoon, but she certainly caused a foul play.

The international superstar didn't take kindly to the prime seats she was given at Citi Field right behind home plate, and was caught on camera flipping off any onlookers.

While it's unclear what caused her to making the obscene gesture, FoxSports reports that Mets fans were booing the singer, while others have speculated she was angered because she was right behind a slew of photographers who were snapping photos of her hanging out with friends and enjoying a beer.

Gaga and her group relocated to Jerry Seinfeld's luxury box later in the game, where she continued to give any onlookers two middle-finger salutes. The pop star later shed her jacket to reveal that she was clad in nothing but a bra and underwear set that looks just like the one she wore in her "Telephone" video.

If you witnessed this craziness with your own eyes, tell us the story in the comments below.

Filed under: Lady Gaga • celebrities • music

Afghan schoolgirls hospitalized for possible poisoning

Kabul, Afghanistan -- About 60 schoolgirls in Afghanistan's Balkh province appear to have been poisoned and required hospitalization, the Ministry of Health said Sunday.

The victims ranged in age from 9 to 14. Most suffered minor reactions, ministry spokesman Sakhi Kargan told CNN.

It's at least the third suspected poisoning of girls attending schools in Afghanistan this week.

Nearly 90 people were poisoned in attacks on three schools in April. There have been no known deaths to date in any of the attacks.

The Taliban banned girls from going to school when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Since girls' schools began reopening after the Taliban were overthrown, facilities, female students and teachers have been the victims of attacks.