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 attack from a new ICANN employee - On the inside, looking out at a tornado.

On the day that the ASP.NET team announce their new WYSIWYG IDE for Visual Studio Orcas (start downloading that base VPC now), it seems appropriate to have a quick muse about when to talk about new releases of software and their contents. Jeremy Miller started a post series about ‘ilities’ today so I’d put a vote in for a fuller discussion than this on Visibility. Microsoft’s monthly(-ish) CTP releases may be a burden to our phone bills but they also make transparent the direction that the product will go which promotes discussion and sometimes even a change in tack of development. Which is good. Compare and contract Fog Creek software’s reluctance to release details of Fogbugz v6.0 despite some debate on its support forums. Joel Spolsky, the owner of Fog Creek, explains neatly why he prefers less frequent releases and not releasing information about what’s in a new release here, but is a black box approach wise? Ship dates aside, when do you think initial information about a new project or version of a new product should be released?

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 try to do as much as possible online. There are some great internet start-ups out there to help the moving process such as helpiammoving.com, iammoving.com and helpineedboxes.co.uk to make the build up to that day somewhat easier, but the general ring around still can’t be avoided and it remains a great frustration when my bank will only change the address on my account if I walk into a branch and fill out a form. More so when the branch then won’t talk to the credit card and pension departments and get them to change my address on their books as well. No, I’ve got to send them each a handwritten letter in the post (not v. secure) to make that change. Considering they were one of the first to allow online banking, it would appear that little has progressed since that launch. The assistant in the branch says everything will be updated for me with one form. Experience says otherwise.

My wife in comparison, who banks elsewhere did all of this in about five minutes online. Sigh. And she’s the luddite.

Despite phoning up well in advance of moving, I still won’t have a phone \ net connection for three weeks either. The previous owners let me know that BT were having to send an engineer out to disconnect them. It looks the same guy will appear again to reconnect me again. Which makes me wonder about broadband sans landline. But I’m in the countryside which nixes that particular idea for wireless broadband (although mynow.co.uk look very good for those who can get it btw), satellite broadband would never cover the cost of installing it and the idea of using NT Hell is quickly dismissed. A 3G card though is an interesting idea provided I’m in a 3G reception area and I can stop myself aimlessly browsing researching stuff online for hours. Nope - guess BT can do what they want. Except send me bills online.

I work in very close proximity to three separate company helpdesks and it strikes me as ironic that while all three can answer near as damn it 100% of our customer queries either on the phone or within an hour of hanging up, our parent company’s IT helpdesk is much more comfortable hiring people who only know how to refer calls to other teams who can actually answer the calls while they remain blissful in their seeming ignorance. I challenged the helpdesk manager about this while querying why one of his team members had never heard of spyware before and got the ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ reply. ‘How many cooks are too many’, I wondered before fixing the problem myself.

Who else out there is more than a little concerned when it appears that the technical customer service helpdesk knows less about basic technology than you?

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 use of it for the next five years before Microsoft bring out the first post-Gates\Allchin version of their OS. And I’m going to go whole hog here and start straight out with the x64 version of Vista.
The latest issue of PC Pro already went through the advantages of this decision. Two of them - signed drivers being required and the windows kernel being protected by the PatchGuard system - are also regarded as problems. Application compatibility with Vista’s Glass\Aero scheme is also a sticking issue. Just ask those of us unfortunate to run early builds of Vista in a VPC and then open an app which didn’t support Aero.
But I think this is exactly the reason why x64 should the way to go. I mean I didn’t hear many Mac users cry out because most of their apps didn’t play well with Mac OS X when it was first released. They just had Mac OS 9 somewhere at hand and waited for the apps to make the way across. Even Quark made it into OS X land eventually. So will apps into Vista x64.
And while we’re waiting, what’s to stop us from actually getting to grips with exactly what Vista comes with out of the box? I know that I don’t know how half of XP works and I want to redress that. The ‘Introducing Vista’ I reviewed in my last post confirms there’s a lot to try out and see if it can make my life easier. And that’s more straightforward to do without me installing all the other bits and bobs that will eventually stake their claim on a piece of my hard drive.
As a developer, I’m waiting for SQL 2005 Service Pack 2 and VS2005 SP1 anyway before they get officially supported on Vista so what’s the rush? As a home user, Office 2007 is already OK on Vista but I wonder if I’ll actually need to install it this time as all I ever actually used was Word, Outlook and OneNote. Potentially redundant anyway as I only ever used about 10% of their functionality anyway?
64 bit virii - also far and few between - which is kinda handy when you realise how much trouble some antivirus firms are in following the realisation that MS really meant it this time when x64 switched PatchGuard on with no exceptions. They’re crying foul play to the moon when an MS clampdown on kernel patching should have happened years ago and in fact did happen 18 months ago when Microsoft finally had the opportunity with Windows x64. (Incidentally, while we can’t have failed to notice how happy Sophos are that their AV software does in fact work fine on x64, surely they aren’t the only ones who haven’t been caught out like Symantec and McAfee?) You can’t see Microsoft ever going back to a non-Patchguard world so now’s the time to make the bold step and see what it’s like. To be honest, if I have to buy Sophos products I will but I full expect the others to catch up.
Games - OK I’m not a gamer, but let’s look at the facts. Vista Aero likes DirectX 10. NVidia\ATI have just started releasing the first DX10 boards. MS is hedging its bets and releasing some games as exclusive to Vista (Halo 3 anyone?) before release to other platforms later on. If the games of today don’t work on x64 it’s not because of the hardware - it’s because they aren’t signed - but the games of 2007 will be signed and will be better anyway with their geometry shading and their even newer bells and whistles.
Oh yes, adopting Vista x64 early is the way to go. A tiny bit of pain up front, six years of pleasure to follow.

Vista is imminent. We know this. It does not include some of the features initially promised. We know this too. It looks prettier thanks to the new graphics subsystem. Yup. It has a new IP stack rewritten from scratch, new key additions to its default group policy objects, and revamped system backups and restores to name but a few others. Maybe some of this is news?
There’s a lot of brouhaha in the general press about what there is and isn’t in Vista any more. With the release of RC2 though, people’s attentions are being brought back to actually what it does contain and whether it’s worth the upgrade. Enter “Introducing Vista” which, while it was written against a previous version of the O\S, gives you a pretty good and thorough overview of all the features within and where to find them too. Exactly what’s required at this point with volume licensed copies due out before the end of the year.
This guide is well written and pretty clinical with its coverage - there’s not really much discussion of the applications for the new features for example - but it’s pretty typical of it’s author, William Stanek (more known for his SysAdmin guides than intro books). Still, that’s not a bad thing; the book reads like a manual and not a piece of propaganda as it might have done otherwise. And it’s a good book too, covering many features you might not have found otherwise. Given the target audience for this book is early adopters and system admins trying to get a jump start on business managers with the green flag for actually upgrading operating systems in a business, you could argue that the chapter order of the book should be different, but the book does exactly what it says on the tin. And, because it’s Vista, you know that there’ll be a second edition (or equivalent) put out for the release version of Vista too. A good investment if you actually want to know what’s in this new O\S from Microsoft.

Microsoft has just saved thousands of development companies lots of money. For the wrong reason. In his latest post, MS Corporate VP S. Somasegar announces the first beta release of service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 - which is nice - and the extent of MS support for Visual Studio in Vista. And here’s the kicker.
MS will support Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Visual Basic 6.0 ONLY on Vista. So then, unless you’re already developing .NET 3.0 apps for Vista, what the hell is the point of switching to Vista? Aside from it looks nicer than XP. I need to run VS2003 to support already written apps regardless of the fact I have VS2005. And even if I did have the time to upgrade them all to VS2005 projects, Somasegar also points out that there will be compatibility issues with VS2005 SP1 anyway. So why release it now? We’re developers - we know how to patch our own machines. Can’t SP1 wait until it will cure compatibility too? Grrr.

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 on course to make the Vista package deadline as Microsoft said it would with its first release candidate being made available to download over the weekend. Just to remind you, .NET 3.0 is actually a collection of add-on libraries for .NET 2.0 dealign with UI, comms, business workflow and a few other things beside. The .NET 3.0 home page hasn’t been updated yet but the site does give a good overview of what there is to play with if you do choose to download it. Enjoy.

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. Initial attempts to phone the makers of said spam filter were met by staff on their not-so-helpful-desk who confirmed that said rule was correct. Being the technical manager for the .coop TLD registry, that was a tad irksome, and the next update for that filter removed the rule with apologies from the vendor.
The thing is though, why did this happen at all? Surely internet application developers pay attention to this kind of thing? It’s not like there are so many new TLDs released that they can’t keep up or at the very least train their helpdesk staff appropriately so mistakes like this aren’t made to begin with?
Is it a case of fear, uncertainty or doubt for anything newer than .com or.co.uk? Or just ill education? Take another example: the Co-operative bank in the UK still uses www.co-operativebank.co.uk as their main web address, which is fine. They also own www.co-operativebank.coop as well, but it’s a dead end; it doesn’t even redirect to the .co.uk site. Why? FUD? Judging by the fact it tells you that a .coop email address is invalid while you try and create an online account with them, maybe its doubt.
I’m ranting too much here, but my point remains. If you are writing applications that might be affected by the creation of new TLDs, try and add some flexibility into them. To take a case mentioned earlier, owners of .info, .aero, .name, .coop, .jobs, .museum, and .travel domains for instance would be greatly obliged if your email filter didn’t dismiss those email addresses ending in a sequence of more than three letters by default. Likewise, all web administrators should know how to add a header for an alternate domain name to a site that already exists.
It seems ironic that in an environment that publicly continues to evolve, some are unwilling, uncertain or simply don’t know what to do when one of the foundations of that environment offers new opportunities. Too busy looking forward to see behind? I sense a job switch to 3+ letter TLD publicity guru ahead.

[Update] For those interested, it’s worth noting that while ICANN said it was not their problem to begin with, they moved last year to address the problem.  There is a particular area (http://www.icann.org/topics/TLD-acceptance/) linked off their home page that addresses this issue and provides technical references as well as a list of all accepted TLDs for programmers to use in email verification.