It’s been an interesting few days thanks to the rather large denial of service attack on the internet’s root servers. Although all thirteen servers were nominally hit, the attack had less effect on the net than the 9/11 attacks when anyone online simply swamped the net looking for a news feed. Which is encouraging.
What interested me more was the amount of information provided by the maintainers of those servers who fared better than others on how their root server works and how it coped. For those interested, have a look at http://www.isc.org/ops/f-root/ for details of just one and this presentation here for how it coped and what the attack looked like from its perspective. What encourages me is that only 3 of the 13 root servers are built like this, so attacks to bring down all the roots at the same time will need either a lot more brute force or several different styles to their attack depending on the structure of each root.
And if you’re still reading, share a smile on this rather more personal perspective on the

On the day that the ASP.NET team announce their new WYSIWYG IDE for Visual Studio Orcas

As a newly paid-up member of the mortgage owner club, my thoughts turn to packing my life up in boxes and making sure everyone knows my new address. Naturally,

I work in very close proximity to three separate company helpdesks and it strikes me as ironic that while

Vista will be with us in January. Hurrah. Regardless of what’s in it and what’s been left out, the sooner you get used to working with it, the sooner you can make effective

Vista is imminent. We know this. It does not include some

Microsoft has just saved

I note with some lust \ annoyance the new lab tests for Business Ultraportable laptops elsewhere on ITPro. It seems to be common knowledge that there are laptops for home users, office users, business users, silver surfers, the weak, the gamer and the third world. So why does the developer never get a laptop or indeed a desktop machine aimed specifically at them? We’re the people that write the software all these other users use. So play fair. Here are my specs. Where’s my cake to eat?

• 2GB+ for running multiple virtual PCs
• gigabit LAN \ 802.11n wireless for connectivity
• Quiet
• As much screenspace as possible for code : That means dual if not triple screen (with DVI) ability off the bat.
• Excluding games programmers, a good enough graphics card to not slow down running a couple of dozen 2D windows running under Aero \ Glass. For games programming, slots for the latest NVidia \ ATI cards and the ability to switch between them in hardware profiles without WIndows choking on the idea + the latest graphics cards.
• I have a stereo, I don’t need a soundcard. Unless I’m a games programmer.
• A CPU that’s future proof enough for at least a couple of years. Perhaps a couple to run VPCs on individual cores.
• A Hard Drive setup that’s fast and reliable enough to survive the many installs, builds, deployments, repartionings, defraggings, virus checks etc that it will be subjected to. Significantly more perhaps than any other user will give it.
• Cheap enough for a company to buy several of if they like what they see.

I built my last machine to get the specs that seemed right to me three years ago. Now there aren’t even the drivers to run Vista on it. Custom PC? PC Pro? Computer Shopper? Your suggestions please?

Well it’s taken a while but it looks like WinFX \ .NET 3.0 is

ICANN has been releasing new top level domain names for the last five years. So why are they treated with such distrust from web and mail apps alike?
Case in point, last summer, several registrants of .coop domains got in touch saying that all of a sudden their emails were being rejected as spam. It turns out that the latest update for their spam filter included a rule stating that all email addresses ending in .coop were invalid and should therefore be classed as spam and not released to the net.