July 2004 Archives

A week ago one of our salespeople approached me with a simple question. Some of the people in his client company were unable to browse to our company’s Web site. He was rather embarrassed at the prospect that our company’s Web site (and by extension, our company) could be viewed as shaky and unreliable.

While I am biased, I believe our Web site is highly reliable and it operates as flawlessly as they come. Sure, there are the occasional hiccups, but in most cases reported issues have been at the users’ end and not ours.

So after carefully examining the Web server and running some internal and external tests, I declared our systems healthy and asked the salesperson to relay the findings back to the company. We all agreed that our Web site appeared completely accessible. Even employees from other departments at the same company had no problems reaching our site. The problem was spotty and I speculated that the company’s IT department should be able to resolve it rather quickly.

But a few days later I received an interesting email from their IT manager. They had inspected their systems and had found no issues on their end. They were prepared to dig deeper into the problem, but they made a simple request first. “I would like to ensure that you are not blocking [our IP address] in an ACL list on your ingress router.”, the email requested.

“Impossible”, I thought. But just to humor him I logged on to the firewall and looked up the deny list. And there it was, their IP address almost at the top of the list with my own note from over a year ago declaring it a rogue address due to packet flooding. Turns out that their network had caught a virus at that time and was flooding us causing a denial of service, and that had landed them in our deny list.

This incident is now resolved, but I wonder how many deny lists like ours are there with old, dated, or even wrong information. It's a deliberate type of denial of service or reverse denial of service that can hamper progress on the Internet just as much as the real thing can.

At least it keeps us employed.

One of my chief passions in life is programming, and some of my best times at work is spent working on software projects. Unfortunately a good part of my day is spent managing and trouble-shooting various servers and technologies at work, so it’s difficult to find a sufficient block of time to immerse myself in development work.

So what’s a developer to do? Switch to faster and more productive platforms to get the job done. And so when microsoft released the .NET platform, we became an early adopter. In Web development, ASP.NET offers great improvements over its predecessor, ASP. ASP.NET affords a faster development time than the classic ASP, and additionally it offers a number of useful controls (ready-to-use, pre-packaged software components) to facilitate the task of presenting data to the users.

When a recent project called for a grid layout to be presented to the user, the component to choose was DataGrid. This is a very useful control that can be programmed to display data to the users, and with some additional coding it allows users to page, sort, update, or delete data among other tasks. Providing all this in the classic ASP would have taken considerably more time. So why am I not happy with DataGrid? Because the next version of ASP.NET (version 2) comes with a brand new grid component, called GridView, that makes DataGrid look too archaic and cumbersome. Only problem is that we’re a still a few months away from the release of ASP.NET 2. Knowing that an easier and more powerful component is on the horizon, should I pause and wait for its arrival, or should I plow ahead with the existing component?

This developer’s quandary is certainly not exclusive to Microsoft products nor Web development. Developers everywhere must make choices like this everyday. I suppose it makes life more interesting, but I’d still rather spend my energy developing applications than being stuck at a fork in the road.

Microsoft is a classic example of a company that has gone through the stages of its business life perfectly, and it has done that in a super-accelerated pace.

Think about it. Microsoft started its life as a tiny company, a glimmer in its founders’ eyes. As it gathered momentum, it turned into a speculative public company, then it became an aggressive growth company, followed by a plain growth one. And now it has finally reached maturity.

The announcement of the $75 billion cash reward to the investors is all the reason to believe that Microsoft has transformed itself from growth to an income company. With the stock yield just above 1%, a commanding dominance in the markets it operates, and a clear vision for the future, Microsoft is firmly planted in the list of the elite companies that includes admired institutions like GE and Wal-Mart.

The company may not experience the break-neck growth it has experienced in its short life, but its future looks bright.

I have been an MSN Messenger user since I started using IM (Instant Messaging). Being somewhat of a luddite (I have been accused of that several times), it took me a while to warm up to IM and since I was a Hotmail user, MSN Messenger was a no-brainer path. But in those early days ICQ was all the rage, so there weren’t too many people to IM to with MSN. I installed it on my home pc and coaxed my wife to chat with me at work. She did for a while and then being a devout Yahoo! Mail user, converted to Yahoo Messenger and that was the end of our online chatting.

Fast forward to now and all of the people I IM to are MSN converts. Except for my wife, who is still on Yahoo. So I was elated to read about the new initiative the three IM companies (Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL) are taking to make their IM products compatible with each other. My excitement was short-lived however. For now this integration is only planned for their business users.

When it comes to consumers, these companies are still tight-lipped about integration, only making references to the technical hurdles! Poor babies. Companies that create complex and innovative software products are suddenly faced with an insurmountable software challenge. And it just so happens that only the business portions of their IM products are easy to integrate.

This is, of course, all about money. Somehow they fear the loss of their user bases if they integrated their products and until they get over that hurdle, we’re gonna be stuck with the fragmented consumer IM market.

Sometimes it’s great to see Web sites go out of their way to make themselves appealing with sexy graphics and nifty multi-media. Yes, we are visual creatures and perhaps no sense is as much under assault than our visual sense on a daily basis.

However, as the novelty wears off, it’s refreshing to see that some sites go for simplicity and clarity. Google and Ebay have relatively simple and clean sites and perhaps that has contributed even more to their popularity.

But having a simple and clean site may no longer be just an option, it may very well be a necessity. I’m not talking about improved download speeds, although that’s a good side-benefit. I’m talking about a drastic shift in vendors’ (mainly Microsoft) and users’ stance in defending themselves against the unrelenting viruses and worms. Many of the newer and more nefarious types have been worming their way into our computers through our browsers (mainly Internet Explorer) and users have started to turn off many of their browsers’ options and features in order to save themselves from the onslaught.

Unfortunately the same features and options are what many interactive sites count on to deliver snazzy content to their readers. When users turn off these options, the souped up Web sites will look bland and unrefined at best. At worst, they may appear broken and unavailable. Microsoft’s newest service pack for Windows XP will reportedly disable many of these options by default.

It’s hard to fathom, but the virus and worm writers may unwittingly force Web sites to get less cluttered and deliver their content in a simple and clear format. It’s not what the hackers intended, but it may not be a bad consequence either.