Robert Hashemian

Just logged in to my Hotmail account and noticed the storage meter reads 250 MB. It's good to see them keeping the promise they made a few months ago after Google introduced their 1 gigger email service and Yahoo! followed suit with their 200 meg upgrade.

I was beginning to think that Hotmail might renege on their promise. Glad my suspicion was disproved. Bring on the spam.

Just logged in to my Hotmail account and noticed the storage meter reads 250 MB. It's good to see them keeping the promise they made a few months ago after Google introduced their 1 gigger email service and Yahoo! followed suit with their 200 meg upgrade.

I was beginning to think that Hotmail might renege on their promise. Glad my suspicion was disproved. Bring on the spam.

In the beginning there was Internic, the quasi-government outfit tasked with assigning domain names, numbers, etc. Anyone who wanted a domain name could get one for free just by applying.

Soon the Web turned popular and Internic began charging annual fees for the domain names. It eventually morphed into Network Solutions Inc. or NSI (a for-profit registrar later purchased by Verisign). The other parts became a non-profit known as ICANN tasked with over-seeing the IP addresses and the domain name registrars. Soon there were other registrars competing with NSI and competition moderated prices.

So far so good, except that NSI's prices never quite became competitive and people started to move their domain names to other registrars. Operating out of paranoia and panic NSI has employed some desperate acts to retain its customer base and boost its revenues. First came their deliberately convoluted way to transfer domain names; obviously designed to discourage migration. Then came the unregistered domain redirect fiasco, in an effort to capture that segment of the typo-prone Web browsers. Instead of allowing accesses to non-existent domains fail naturally, NSI decided to redirect them to their own site where they would be greeted by advertising and who knows what else.

The Domain Protect program is their latest gimmick in an effort to throw roadblocks in the way of customers migrating their domains. Don't get me wrong, Domain Protect is a useful feature designed to thwart would be slammers from switching domain names to other registrars. But in their latest email to customers (in an ostensible response to ICANN's latest domain transfer policy changes) NSI states:
"To further enhance the security of the domain names you have registered with NSI and to protect you against unauthorized or fraudulent transfers, we will activate our free Domain Protect service for all of your domain names beginning October 18, 2004."
In other words, we don't care if you had decided not to use this service in the past. We will force it back on you to make your domain transfers as difficult as possible. NSI may be desperate but its trickery machine never seems to cease.

Becoming the largest WiFi hotspot in the world is no small task but that is exactly what Philadelphia is aiming for.

The plan currently under development by the city of Philadelphia would uniformly cover the entire city (135 square miles), and best of all would be available to the residents for free or a small fee. The projected budget for this ambitious project is a mere $10 million, and it would involve installing a large number of WiFi transmitters in and around the city.

It remains to be seen whether this project comes to a successful conclusion, and how it is received by the residents. It also introduces a number of challenges such as maintenance, management, and security.

I, for one, applaud Philadelphia for undertaking this feat. There is no doubt that the DSL and Cable outfits are watching nervously and praying for this project to collapse. I can only hope that other cities and municipalities follow suit and free us from our $600/year Cable and DSL contracts. Or in my case, from my slow dial-up torture.

Imagine my surprise when I went surfing on msnbc.com today at lunch time and I saw this banner:



I have seen political banners before but this was probably the most blunt one I have seen to date. The banner itself was enticing enough to persuade me to click. And I was immediately ushered to the Democratic party's donation page. No preambles and no information, just a simple donation form waiting for me to enter my credit card information.

I guess some people don't mind cutting to the chase and skipping the formalities, but I doubt companies would get far if their banners just funnel the masses to their payment pages asking for money. Usually such banners lead to a page describing the product or service with some information about how the user can be benefited and what the main advantages of such product or service are. If you are asking for money, you need to be a little more subtle and discreet about it.

In this case, it might make sense to highlight Democrats' advantages over Republicans, and once the reader is sold on the concept, then ask for a donation. It’s not about political affiliation, it's about e-commerce etiquette.

To all those frequent flyers out there, you have my sympathy. These days traveling by air is nothing short of a nightmare. This is specially true if your trip calls for a connecting flight. About the only thing these flights don't do is connecting.

On a recent short trip I took by airplane, I found out just how stressful connecting flights could get. Obviously the crux of the problem is the incessant delays that just seem to get worse all the time. Don't you feel stupid rushing to an airport just to find out that your flight has been delayed? And don't you promise yourself to be late the next time, only to find yourself arrive at the airport on time and go through the frustration yet again?

Delays on direct flights are one thing, but they are downright exasperating on indirect flights. In my case the first legs of my trip (both to and from) were delayed, triggering a run-like-hell action to catch the second flights and subjecting myself to the passengers' angry stares who thought my tardiness had held up the flights. What's worse is that on both occasions my luggage never arrived with me. It was delivered to me two days after I had reached my destination, and on my return flight, I am still awaiting my suitcase's arrival.

One wonders if the airline industry is a perfect not-to-do model to gain customer satisfaction. I won't mention the airline here, but what difference does that make? I'm sure my experience would have been just the same on most of them. If you know of a good one, don't be shy and leave a note.

One could call it a historic moment. Hewlett-Packard today announced the shipment of one of their notebook lines with a Linux variant known as SuSE. SuSE was acquired by Novell about a year ago. After watching its fortunes disappear into thin air, mainly due to competition from microsoft on the server side, Novell is now trying to muscle in its way into the desktop market but I wonder if laptops are ideal vehicles to go about this.

Don't get me wrong. I adore Linux. But where Linux truly shines is in a server role. Be it a Web server, mail server, print server, file server, or a firewall, it can outperform Windows any day. Sure, setting up a Linux server is an arcane task, but once up and running, it's stable, graceful, and frugal with the resources.

On the desktop, Linux is a different story. It’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Suddenly this splendid product turns into an unreliable and ugly beast with little to offer. Not to detract from the devoted developers, but the desktop still has far to go to catch up to Windows.

Now let's go back to this notebook offering from HP. With only a meager 5% cost savings over an equivalent Windows notebook, only the absolute Linux fanatics would possibly opt for it. Even I wouldn't order a Linux'ed laptop. A laptop is a mobile device designed to be taken on business trips, remote offices, and vacations. Most laptop users are busy executives and salespeople, and many don’t care to get technical with it. The next time they are in their hotel rooms and have a problem establishing a network connection, I wonder how many people in the hotel's IT staff will be familiar enough with Linux to offer a helping hand.

Linux on notebook is a valiant effort, but while Windows soars like an eagle, it does appear that this penguin just wasn't meant to fly.

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.

It’s hard to imagine a company, much less a large and reputable one, breaking any obvious SEC laws these days. After witnessing so many companies and executives disgraced in public, you’d reckon that companies would go above and beyond their means to keep integrity at the top of their priority list.

But oh no, in the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and corporate memories seem to always have acute Alzheimer's. Such is the recent case of Siebel Systems who has gotten itself in a bit of hot water by allegedly breaking the SEC’s RegFD.

RegFD (Regulation Fair Disclosure) forbids companies from disclosing non-public and material financial information to select groups. It appears that last year Siebel was telling rosy tales of company’s performance to a select number of investors, while publicly painting a slow-quarter picture for the public. The result: those select investors bought in the stock cheap and locked in profits when the rumors began to hit the street.

The stunning part of the story is that Siebel was fined for the same misconduct in 2001, so they should have known better to repeat the same mistake. This time it appears that the SEC is ready to handle the matter in court and it could cost Siebel millions.

Please guys, add a little Ginko Biloba to your daily nosh.

It was bound to happen. Not long after Google started its one-Gigger Gmail service, other free email providers followed suit and raised their storage quotas by some unimaginable multiples. Just take a look at these three popular providers:
Yahoo – from 6 MB to 100 MB
iWon – from 6 MB to 125 MB
Hotmail – from 2 MB to 250 MB

I’m sure most users don’t even care how or why this has happened. They’re just happy to be given the extra storage. And it’s a good move for the providers to keep their user bases loyal. I was itching to migrate from Hotmail to Gmail. Now I am reconsidering the move. As one of the Hotmail guys pointed out, they have taken the storage issue off the table.

Of course I am not the one that would just take the good news and rejoice. My cynical personality is always in search of some sinister motive.
How could the stingy Hotmail that was offering a measly 2 free MB for years suddenly offer 125 times that amount? Did the storage gods suddenly blessed them with a hard disk monsoon? And how all these providers could offer such colossal capacities simultaneously?

So where did all this excess storage come from? I suspect some of it was there to begin with, but in an effort to convert freeloaders to paying customers, these companies were just holding back on us. Until Google figured out a better way to monetize the service while giving the users the freedom to breathe.

And the rest is just a statistical game. Odds are Hotmail and other providers do not have enough storage to accommodate all their users at maximum capacity. What they probably count on is that most users will not utilize all of their allotted capacity and trim their message folders often. Even a messy person like me wouldn’t want to have an entire Gigabyte worth of emails strewn about his email folders.

Back in the old days in Engineering school, I remember setting my digital multi-meter (a souped-up voltage meter), to the most sensitive voltage level, press the leads against my skin and marvel at my body producing tiny and erratic amounts of voltage.

Today Microsoft took that concept one step further by patenting a technology to use skin to transmit power to devices attached to the human body. If you think about, it makes perfect sense. Like it or not, we are becoming more Cyborg-like. People now have devices hanging from every belt-loop and each device requires power and a way to communicate with other devices. As we move into the wearable device age, the skin is a perfect conduit to power these devices and move data between them.

It remains to be seen how useful and reliable a conductor the skin is. For example, would ultra-dry skins or overly oily skins cause grid disruptions? Will microsoft introduce a new body soap to enhance skin’s data transfer rates? Will natural body voltage and brain waves ever be harnessed to power Personal Area Networks?