It seems that the notoriously tightwad ICANN is now relaxing domain naming conventions. Now any combination of letters, numbers and non-Latin text will be able to resolve to a Web site. Personally, I think this is a serious mistake.

There already are plenty of domain name suffixes to select from but time and time again .COM is the most selected suffix. It’s what people know and they are used to. I remember a few years ago there was a huge stink over whitehouse.com going to a porn site rather then to a government site. Those who understood domain names would have gone to .GOV. At the time there were only a handful of suffixes to choose from, this new direction by ICANN will change all that.

Personally, I think this adds more confusion to domain names. I already see plenty of challenges, even with technical folks understanding the differences in subdomains such as blog.imulus.com vs imulus.com vs www.imulus.com. Usually there is a 50 / 50 chance that if I give someone a domain name containing a subdomain they will usually add www to the URL; for instance bet.rmi.org then becomes www.bet.rmi.org.

This will surely benefit search engines more then the average user. I guess the lawyers benefit also because it sure will be interesting to watch the copyright and trademark lawsuits for all the domain name variations which will be gobbled up by the name registers.

Nice move ICANN!

Netflix recently announced that they are eliminating the Profiles feature from their online movie rental service. For a company that built it’s business on customer service, this is a seriously bonehead move. For families or small businesses this was the feature that made the service work for them. Without it, it isn’t a very good solution at all. I can only assume that some bean counters at Netflix think that all those profile users are now going to have to signup for a full account and they will increase their profits. On the contrary, this is going to make the service unusable for a lot of people and they will try something else. If Blockbuster can add profiles they will destroy Netflix. If you want to voice your opinion, I suggest you email Netflix and sign the petition here: http://www.savenetflixprofiles.com/

Update: Netflix has reversed their policy on this topic and will be keeping profiles for single accounts. This is wonderful, and a great example of users making their voice heard. Way to support and respect your users Netflix!

As many of you have probably noticed, a huge design trend these days is the infamous reflection. I am not ashamed to say that I am probably one of the biggest fans of this style. However, I am not a huge fan of throwing perspective out the window. What I mean by this is if you are going to use reflections, you should understand how something would reflect if it was a physical 3d object.

Too often do I see images that are robotically flipped, rotated and opacity-ed but the designer doesn’t take perspective into consideration. If the object is 3d, this tactic doesn’t work mainly because the surface should reflect the planes of the object.

Being a massive nerd I have a tendency to do a lot of things while at my computer.

This includes: eating, brushing my teeth, lifting weights, sleeping, wine tasting, texting, changing, and crying about my pathetic state of nerdery.

Hence, it was no surprise last week when I dumped an entire bowl of Rice Krispies onto my brand new Apple bluetooth keyboard. And let me clarify, we aren’t talking some minor spill. I literally dumped the entire bowl onto my keyboard. In fact, I mind as well have used the keyboard as a bowl in the first place. However, before losing all hope I quickly removed the keyboard’s batteries, dashed it to the sink, and washed the whole thing with water. After a good shake I set it down on a towel at a 45 degree angle and let it dry for the next six days.

To my surprise when I plugged the batteries back in last night the keyboard came back to life as if nothing had gone wrong. Now… I’ve heard rumors about being able to place keyboards in the dishwasher, but I myself have never successfully had this work. And therefore I have to admit that I was not only extremely happy (not to mention $80 richer), but also somewhat amazed that my keyboard was still functioning.

Either way, I hope this tale helps fellow geeks resurrect what would otherwise be a dead keyboard or laptop. Or better yet, helps them realize that food and drink directly over the keyboard might be a questionable idea in the first place.

A few months ago we moved our website from Alentus to Sungard (formly Inflow), with what we thought was great success. The latency between our office and our dedicated server was cut in half. When we accessed the server from various connections such as Qwest and Comcast our download rates were far improved. Then one day we received a call from a client saying that since we moved them into our new facility, they’ve received increased complaints of download failures.

Our initial response was one of skepticism because we were seeing improved performance, not a decrease. Using terminal services to connect to our other dedicated servers around the country I was able to reproduce the client’s experience. Apparently, about 70% of traffic around the country was having difficulty or decreased performance while accessing our servers. I then stumbled on a tool called Website Pulse.

Website Pulse monitors your website for performance and related issues from various locations internationally. In the chart below you can see the results of downloading a 22 MB file from our servers. The numbers on the left are seconds needed to download a file from Chicago over a backbone provided by nLayer, Level3, UUNET. The drop in seconds occurred when we moved our servers out of Sungard and into ViaWest in Denver, CO. The sudden increase on the 5th of October was an issue with the switch used in our rack.

Unknown to us, when Sungard acquired Inflow they also changed their policy in regards to capping bandwidth. Rather then allowing for bandwidth overages, and then surcharging the customer; Sungard’s policy was to cap bandwidth and not tell the customer of the performance hit.

Prior to this issue we didn’t realize various locations around the country experienced our websites in such a wide variety of speeds. With Website Pulse we receive alerts when any of our sites a falling below our acceptable load times.

It’s a great tool and I highly recommend using it for website monitoring.