Hanukkah (חֲנֻכָּה) started at sundown on Tuesday, December 20th, 2011. This year’s data was collected the following morning.

1. Hanukkah: 20,800,000 hits.
2. Chanukah: 6,820,000 hits.
3. Hannukah: 1,860,000 hits.
4. Hanukah: 1,560,000 hits.
5. Chanukkah: 568,000 hits.
6. Chanuka: 388,000 hits.
7. Hanukka: 375,000 hits.
8. Channukah: 306,000 hits.
9. Hanuka: 215,000 hits.
10. Hannuka: 104,000 hits.
11. Hannukkah: 97,400 hits.
12. Chanukka: 72,300 hits.
13. Channuka: 57,200 hits.
14. Hannukka: 38,300 hits.
15. Xanuka: 31,900 hits.
16. Chanuqa: 27,700 hits.
17. Channukka: 19,700 hits.
18. Janukah: 14,200 hits.
19. Janukkah: 12,700 hits.
20. Channukkah: 8,530 hits.

Instead the spaghetti graph from previous years, I’ve switched to a stacked area chart. This shows total hits and gives a quick visual sense of how each spelling is distributed. Prettier AND more meaningful!

Bing was used to generate the numbers this year, collecting the data with the Bing API was fast and easy. Google is a mess, their search result counts are basically arbitrary, change constantly and are difficult to collect.

This year I’ve opened up the spreadsheet data through Google Docs. I’m not a spreadsheet guy or a statistician, if this could be done better let me know. Here’s the link: How to Spell Hanukkah Spreadsheet.

And finally for my mother, who insists on Chanukah, I’ve included a new “gelt” chart which breaks down the spellings by H vs. Ch:

Based on my original Sixteen Ways to Spell Hanukkah post from 2005. Updated in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

A couple weeks ago I temporarily switched our company email over to Google Apps Gmail. The switch only lasted 36 hours because, without explanation or recourse, Google suspended several of our users–including one of the owners. I had no administrative control over our accounts or access to their data on our Google-hosted services (Mail, Docs, Calendar etc.) Based on Google’s Gmail support forums, wrongful account suspensions are common. This effectively ended our experiment with Google Apps, which I can no longer recommend as a realistic solution for small businesses.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Immediately after switching our email, we noticed a significant uptick in spam. Most of it appeared to be coming from our own accounts. I didn’t have time to fully trace these, so I can only speculate that these messages had something to do with Google’s mail systems.

Shortly after that, a friend’s Gmail account was used to spam all her contacts. The sent message didn’t exist in her account. Google’s forums have a lot of reports of this happening.

All this leads up to yesterday, February 27th 2011, when something happened to reset a huge number of Gmail accounts.

Google is handling this horribly. Here’s their statement:

“A very small number users are having difficulty accessing their Gmail accounts […] This is affecting less than .08% of our Gmail user base, and we’ve already fixed the problem for some users. Our engineers are working as quickly as possible and we hope to have everything back to normal as soon as possible. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.”

0.08% is weasel-speak. According to the BBC, there are estimated to be about 150-200 million Gmail accounts. That means around 150,000 accounts were affected. 150,000 people is a small city. Also, based on the volume of comments, Gmail support forum posts and response on Twitter, I’m inclined to believe the number is higher than Google is aware of or willing to divulge.

It’s mostly a hunch, but I’m beginning to fear Gmail itself has been compromised. Google appears to be scurrying and patching, either unaware there’s a bigger problem or, worse, knowing there’s a problem but with no idea where it’s from or how to fix it.

Last night we tried to rent an iTunes movie on our newish Apple TV. Instead of starting right away, the Apple TV said it would be 2+ hours before we could start watching. I’ve got a healthy 15-20Mb/s connection and a clean wire to the Apple TV, so this shouldn’t be happening.

A little bit of research turned up a surprising fix: Don’t use Google DNS.

The iTunes Store has thousands of entrances. Everyone using Google DNS is trying to get in through the same door.

Some anecdotal evidence:

• Apple TV HD Rental Streaming Problem
• Apple TV users report long rental wait times
• Slow iTunes HD download when using Google DNS
• OpenDNS causes slow download for AppleTV
• Slow tv rental download
• Why using Google DNS / OpenDNS is a bad idea

This totally makes sense. iTunes’ video content is delivered by Akamai who has distributed massive datastores around the world so those large files originate from nearby servers and spend less time getting switched around the network. Akamai somehow uses our DNS routing to determine our location. If Google DNS or OpenDNS routes everyone to Akamai the same way, then those Akamai nodes and the pipes leading to them get overwhelmed.

Since most people don’t know what a DNS server is, this problem primarily affects the “tech-vanguard” and those fortunate/unfortunate enough to be inside our circles of helpfulness.

I switched to my ISP’s DNS servers and now HD rentals on Apple TV are ready to watch in 10-20 seconds.

Go figure…

(I’d forgotton, but I wrote about a similar iTunes-DNS problem in March 2009: iTunes Store DNS Connection Problems)

• Hanukkah: 2,590,000 hits.
• Chanukah: 612,000 hits.
• Hannukah: 214,000 hits.
• Hanuka: 68,200 hits.
• Hanukah: 56,000 hits.
• Chanuka: 50,400 hits.
• Chanukkah: 37,800 hits.
• Hanukka: 23,600 hits.
• Chanukka: 20,500 hits.
• Channukah: 15,800 hits.
• Janukah: 10,200 hits.
• Hannukkah: 9,830 hits.
• Hannuka: 6,890 hits.
• Channuka: 2,460 hits.
• Channukkah: 1,090 hits.
• Hannukka: 1,080 hits.
• Xanuka: 503 hits.
• Chanuqa: 448 hits.
• Channukka: 379 hits.
• Janukkah: 59 hits.

While totals are lower due to Hanukkah’s very early start this year (December 1st), Google’s numbers seem especially screwy this year. I just don’t believe that results for Hanukkah fell by 10 million hits year-over-year.

Here’s my original Sixteen Ways to Spell Hanukkah post from 2005.

May 1, 2013 update: I’m no longer providing a download link to the font files. Please use the googlewebfonts repository on GitHub. Just click the Zip button.

Google’s Font Directory and API for web fonts could have a transformative effect on how we read the web. The only problem is, Google has made it very difficult to download all of the actual font files.

Web designers must be free to experiment with fonts, to sketch, comp and get to know the typefaces in browser and non-browser applications. Making the fonts difficult to get or requiring special software isn’t helpful.

So I’ve got a big update ready to go for iTransmogrify!. Except there’s a problem with Google Code.

Google Code doesn’t allow downloads to be renamed or deleted after they’re 2 days old or have 50+ downloads. That nugget of critical information is buried deep in their FAQ.

I posted this in Google Code Support, Rename or replace download and commented on issue 417, Need a stable link to the latest version of a download. A ‘latest version’ link on Google Code would solve this completely, but it’s been almost four months since they tagged the issue, so who knows when or if that feature will ever exist.

I’m not expecting any help from Google, so I’m considering the following two options:

1. Link files directly from svn trunk.
2. Set up externally-hosted http redirect.

Neither is ideal and both would require users to update their bookmarks or miss out on updates. Additionally the main script file would be outside of stats collection, so no one would know how many times iTransmogrify has been used, when I hit publish on this post, that number was just under 279,000 times.

My solution

After a day of thinking about it and discussing things with a few people, I’ve decided to go with a locally-hosted redirect for the main JavaScript file. Going forward I’ll just manually update the redirect to point to the latest version. This is an acceptable outcome for an imperfect situation.

The update will unfortunately require action on the users’ part, something I had intended never to happen: Users will need to update the bookmarklet. From here forward, all updates will just happen, as I’d planned from the beginning.

Once this update is known to be working, I will modify the graphics seen by the old script file to announce the changes. Hopefully that last step will get most everyone moved to the newer bookmarklet.

Last year I posted Sixteen ways to spell Hanukkah, here’s an updated list showing this years counts for the various spellings:

• Hanukkah : 25,400,000 hits.
• Chanukah : 5,090,000 hits.
• Hanukah : 1,120,000 hits.
• Hannukah : 1,390,000 hits.
• Chanuka : 841,000 hits.
• Chanukkah : 439,000 hits.
• Hanuka : 954,000 hits.
• Channukah : 537,000 hits.
• Chanukka : 486,000 hits.
• Hanukka : 185,000 hits.
• Hannuka : 139,000 hits.
• Hannukkah : 82,400 hits.
• Channuka : 34,700 hits.
• Xanuka : 15,300 hits.
• Hannukka : 970 hits.
• Channukkah : 940 hits.
• Channukka : 644 hits.
• Chanuqa : 22 hits.

36,515,976 total hits. Again, Google’s index seems to have grown quite a bit, the total number of hits is more than double the total from 2005. This file contains my Hanukkah spelling counts for the past three years.

Thanks again to Jeremy Blachman for posting the 2004 numbers.

Happy Hanukkah, see you again in 2007.