system.reflecti0n.net

Dotster Inc reports that over 70 million domain names have already been registered and most likely all the single-word domain names are used up. The issue raised is that with all the good domain names owned but not in use, options are diminishing for businesses to select a domain name that is memorable or describes their business well.

To me, what makes matters worse is that so many of the recognizable names are just being held by cyber-squatters hoping to cash in. Maybe we set the bar too low for purchasing domain names. ...Somewhere out there is the Imelda Marcos of domain-name ownership. Maybe domains should be a little more difficult to acquire, like drivers-license hard, but not replacement-birth-certificate-hard.

On the other hand, the damage is done. There's no taking them back, the only hope is the cost to renew will turn prohibitive in the near future... Nothing severe, one arm OR one leg perhaps.

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Tags: digg, internet, tlds, criticism

While the demo is a clear failure, what's more stunning is the glee the talking heads display at yet another Microsoft failure. Pretty lame. I really hate it when civillians think they've got one up on programmers, when they've never even tried to program themselves. Stones and glass houses. They've got no basis to criticize a feature that they never wanted and never asked for, either. Idiots.

That aside, more than anything I have to question: THIS is what's holding up Vista?

I wonder how many cement-headed presidents at Microsoft wouldn't relent on this or other features that are seriously not critical to using Windows. Is Vista late because it is bloated with "features"? Is Microsoft holding back Vista until they're sure they've included at least one killer app?

After Vista, if Microsoft ever releases an OS on time, it will be from cutting out the bonus features and moving to simply providing users with a suitable host for running the other software and hardware we buy. Seriously, they fail to impress with their add-ins like Movie Maker, WordPad, Windows Messenger, etc. etc. They should just move that stuff into the Plus! packages and let the users decide how many ornaments they want to hang on their operating system... and with the time and manpower savings they could drop the price of Windows back below $99 and make upgrading an easy choice.

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Tags: windows, microsoft, vista, digg, errors

It is so easy to get .Net 2.0 web service deployment all screwed up if you're not careful.

For instance, I first tried deploying my new web service as a subfolder of another website. To keep things running smoothly I put the new web service under its own application isolation. However the parent folder ran a website that was referencing some Atlas assemblies in the httpModules section of the root folder's web.config. Although ASP.Net was more than happy to apply all the web.configs up the folder tree to the root of the website, the application isolation prevented the webservice from accessing those assemblies (not that they were required for the new web service).

So, I turn off application isolation since IIS 6.0 and ASP.Net can't agree on what the actual boundary of my web service really is and the second problem appears:

It would seen that web services in subfolders of a website can't "inherit" the ASP.Net version selection. For a web service written with ASP.Net 2.0, this causes the web service to deploy using the wrong version of .Net. No matter how many times you check the settings on the root folder or how many time you see for yourself that the subfolder containing the web service says it's inherited .Net verion is 2.0.x.x, you will get the typical "Parser error" message when trying to browse to the .asmx page (assuming you haven't already turned off WSDL for the web service).

The good news is, all you have to do is return to using application isolation and confirm that you've selected .Net 2.0 for the version number in the ASP.Net tab in the IIS properties dialog for your web service's folder.

As always, these are the dumb obvious things that I will forget the moment I turn my back to developing web services for another six months. Hence the need to catalog them in this blog!

Note to future self: Hope This Helps.

Tags: asp.net, iis, webservices, application isolation, errors, installation

I got a call this afternoon saying that email delivery for an Exchange mailbox had dried up, not even 24 hours after I had changed the POP3 connector to download email from our new email domain.

The Message Tracking Center had the verdict: dozens of emails were getting moved to Exchange's Cateogrizer and going no further.

Long story short, the problem began when I set the primary email (and therefore the reply-from email) to one of the addresses from the new email domain. As long as the primary email adress for the user's mailbox was set to this new domain, emails sent to the external domain and picked up by the POP3 Connector would get stuck in the Categorizer. Changing the primary email to an internal email address prevented this from happening. I could have stopped there, but then every reply to external email would have had the internal email tatooed in the reply-from address, making replies to the reply impossible.

Having done a set-it-and-forget-it with Exchange about 10 months ago, I had forgotten to add the new email domain to our Default Recipient Policy. As long as it wasn't there, using the new domain as part of a user's primary email account would effectively stop Exchange from routing any email to it, or at least the email that was addressed to it, even if the primary email and the send-to on the email were an exact match. Using the new email domain in a primary email address just wrecked everything.

So to come around to the point, be sure to add your new email domain name to the Default Recipient Policy before configuring user accounts with their new email addresses.

Of course, if we were keeping the old email domain (which was already in the Recipient Policy from 10 months ago) I might never had changed the primary email address and would never have realized that there was a policy problem because email routing will work if an invalid email domain name is NOT the primary email address.

Phew, glad I got that off my chest. This is probably total spaghetti to anyone desperate enough to find my blog. Be sure to search Google for "exchange add recipient policy pop3 connector" and you'll get all the worthwhile steps that I'm not going to bother to repeat here.

Tags: exchange, pop3, windows, small business server 2003

For those of us who see those recent Mac commercials and remember those noxious Pepsi ads of the 70s and 80s, these parody Mac ads might actually make you laugh.

The ads I remember usually ran on the Buffalo stations and usually directed scorn at the Coke users who weren't "with it" like the cool Pepsi drinkers. By the end of the commercial, the Pepsi drinkers would magnanimously share their Pepsi with the dorky Coke drinker.

Twenty years later, Coke's still here, Pepsi's still here, neither one better off than the other. Makes you question why you'd bother caring if Mac makes another commercial or not.

Unfortunately, the market the Mac ads are pointed at aren't old enough to remember how useless the Pepsi version of this type of advertisement was. Let's face it, just like Coke or Pepsi, you're a Mac user or a PC user and snide little commercial putting you down for your first choice probably isn't going to sway you-- unless you were that insecure about what strangers think of you!

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Tags: apple, fanboys, bad press, television, microsoft