Tucows will be at HostingCon 2007, which takes place next week in Chicago from Monday, July 23rd to Wednesday, July 25th at Navy Pier. HostingCon bills itself as “the largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world” and for more details about the conference, check our their conference program.
We’ll be making our presence known there — I won’t be there, but my coworkers Kim, Leona, Adam and Hasdeep will. Be sure to keep an eye out for squishy cows and…
Our Booth
We’ll have a booth in the exhibitors’ hall — booth 817, which is right beside the networking lounge. Feel free to come chat with us about our new Email Service, Premium Domains and other upcoming things from Tucows.
You can look for booth 817 on the official HostingCon map or use our slightly customized one below to find us:
Our Session: Rethinking Domain Name Search
On Wednesday, July 25th, from 3:30 - 4:15 p.m. in room 109, Product Manager for Domains Adam Eisner will be making his presentation, Rethinking Domain Name Search.
Here’s the description of his presentation:
With the rise of the domain name aftermarket, many expired names never return to the public for repurchase. This, combined with the fact most web hosting companies don’t provide an effective domain name search feature on their website, results in many lost sales opportunities for domain names, web hosting, email and more.
This session will show web hosts how to “re-think” their website’s domain name search strategy in response to market developments like better name suggestion technology, fewer available names, and the rise of the domain name aftermarket. The strategies outlined and demonstrated will help web hosts obtain tangible improvements in their domain name and web hosting sales.
Topics covered will include:
How to improve sales by improving your existing domain name search process (using tangible examples)
Maximizing the number of relevant results provided using name suggestion technology
Using domain name aftermarket to ensure customers receive the most relevant domain name availability results possible
Here’s something I found amusing and entertaining: an explanation of the ins, outs and benefits of old-school letterpress typography, done in a 1950’s black-and-white newsreel/documentary style: Typography School. The video features David Dabner, who teaches letterpress typography at the London College of Printing and thinks that computer-based typography has made students lazy and sloppy.
My co-worker at OpenCola, Helen Waters, told me this story.
Helen was our tech person was OpenCola (this was back in the late ’90’s), making sure that people got the machines they needed, that their software got installed and so on. One day, she had presented a woman at the office with her new company-assigned ThinkPad whose pointing device, naturally enough, was a TrackPoint.
The woman, who’d used only mice and touchpads before, had no idea how to mouse around with the TrackPoint and began tapping on it as if it were a button — first a couple of tentative taps, and then taps in rapid succession — with predictable results.
Helen stepped in and quickly demonstrated the TrackPoint principle. She reached in and with her finger, pointed the TrackPad the way it was meant to be used — like a tiny joystick.
“It figures,” said the woman, “It was obviously designed by a man.”
First, I was reminded that you never know what’s going to connect with people. I wasn’t expecting this article to gain any more attention than the usual number of pageviews and maybe a comment or two. After all, most of the laws, rules and axioms in the list have been around for a while and chances are (especially if your line of work is programming, engineering or tech) that you’ve seen at least a few of them on a web page, poster, t-shirt or mug.
Second: Sometimes all you need is a single link from a site with high readership. This is hardly a revelation; if you’ve read The Tipping Point or books of that ilk or heard the saying that goes “It isn’t what you know, it’s whom you know,” you’ve already internalized this fact. But it’s always good to have an example that you can point to. My thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for linking to the article and saying such nice things about this site on BoingBoing.
The Not-As-Small Insight
Years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s book BAD or, The Dumbing of America, a critique of that the American tendency to glorify the cheap, schlocky and superficially good and ignore genuinely good things.
One passage that stands out for me is in the chapter about the outright BADness of modern American poetry. At the end, he encouraged people that rather than writing more bad poetry, they should compile tables of easily-observable data, such as the weather every day over several years; that information would certainly be of more use to more people than painful poesy.
I’m going to ignore the cultural snobbery in Fussell’s statement and focus on the idea of compiling easily-observable data into tables because I think there’s a gem in that thought: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
As with the second insight, as a reader of this blog (I’m assuming most readers either work in tech or follow tech news) chances are that you already knew this, deep down. But it’s such a simple and basic idea that sometimes, like the air we breathe or the high-speed connections that we didn’t have even a mere 10 years ago, we forget about it.
Displaying the laws in tabular format rather than like an article
Adding a few laws by Googling for the ones that weren’t in Phil’s list that I remembered
Arranging the laws by name in alphabetical order
Linking the name of each law to a page containing its description (or failing that, the most relevant page I could find)
Naming the person who gave us the law or the person after whom the law was named and linking to the most relevant page for the person
The article merely had readily-available information, compiled into an easy-to-read format, with convenient links to additional information. And despite not being rocket science, it got a lot of eyeballs and the most comments of any article ever posted here on Global Nerdy.
Allow me to repeat the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
I’m repeating it at least partially for myself, because it’s a lesson I keep forgetting, even though I keep seeing examples all the frickin’ time:
The more successful social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook give people their social contacts and ways to interact with them in a single, convenient place
If you’re trying to come up with a useful and possibly profitable application — hey, I am — and you’re banging your head screaming: “I can’t come up with a new technology!”, remember the insight: Take stuff people want and put it a single place that’s easy to understand and navigate.
If you know of a law of computers, programming or technology that didn’t make it into yesterday’s table of laws, please let me know in the comments. I’m going to take those laws, add them to the table and post it on a permanent page in this blog.
If you’ve read any of the novels in William Gibson’s “Sprawl Series” or anything that borrowed heavily from that body of work, you’re familiar with the concept of 3D objects being used as metaphors for data or programs. Over the years a number of developers have tried to turn this idea into reality, the latest being the folks behind 3D Mailbox, which blends videogame worlds with an email client.
Level 1 of 3D Mailbox is Miami Beach, in which email is represented by a scantily-clad beachgoer. You’ll see your incoming mail tan, swim, and use the shower, complete with suggestive self-scrubbing. Marking and deleting spam is represented by feeding that mail to the sharks in the ocean. Level 2 is Los Angeles Airport, and in that level, your email is represented by planes coming and going.
The concept of 3D Mailbox, coupled with that very cheesy YouTube trailer, is so silly that I’m having trouble thinking that it’s not a joke. I guess I should download the client, install it on my “nothing terribly important goes on this box” Windows desktop at work and take it for a spin.
Inspired by Phil Haack’s article 19 Eponymous Laws of Software Development, I decided to collect laws, axioms and rules pertaining to mainstream software development and put them in a nice, easy-to-read table.
This is by no means a complete list of laws; I’ve purposely stuck to the ones that apply to everyday software development and steered clear of the more theoretical ones. Maybe I’ll compile a more complete list someday.
You’ll notice that some of the laws come from the world of biology — they also appear in some lists of software laws, and I think they still apply.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information — the key — is public knowledge.
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
For just about any technology, be it an operating system, application or network, when a sufficient level of adoption is reached, that technology then becomes a threat vector.
After a little over two weeks with my fancy new iPhone (yes, I was one of those nerds who braved the opening day hordes to have one on June 29 — it took me all of an hour to get my Jesus phone), I’ve started to compile a list of the things I think the iPhone is missing.
Let me start off by saying that I’m a fan of this thing in just about every regard. I find the virtual keyboard to be more functional than any BlackBerry I’ve used, the battery life to be more than acceptable for a smart phone, and despite being tossed in my pocket every day, neither the screen nor the back of the case has a scratch on it.
Basically, what’s included with the iPhone ranges from good (the YouTube or Notes apps, for example) to un-freaking-believable (Mail, Safari, and the overall user experience). Well, with one minor exception; this is the first phone I’ve had with a camera, and I have to say that I’m totally underwhelmed. Then again, my regular camera is a Nikon D40.
No, my quibbles with the iPhone aren’t about how Apple implemented what’s there as much as they are about what Apple left out.
First on my list: lists. Specifically to-do lists. While the iPhone is a double-plus good media device, it’ll only be so-so at helping you get things done without real to-do list functionality. To be sure, Apple’s default to-do solution in Mac OS X Tiger, iCal, is a less-than-stellar product itself. Be that as it may, Apple’s iPhone calendar doesn’t support iCal’s to-do list feature, so iPhone users are pretty much out of luck if they wish to rely on their shiny new devices to help them to remember to do stuff that might not be strictly calendar event driven.
Any to-do list feature worth the name would also be tightly integrated with the user’s desktop; not much value in a get-things-done tool that only addresses your life on-the-go, is there? You should be able to take action on your to-dos whether you’re at your desk or not, and the action you take in one situation should be automatically reflected in the other.
One possible way of addressing this would be an online application like 37signals’ Ta-da List. I certainly intend to give it a try as a way to keep universal to-do lists across mobile and desktop situations.
Next on my wish list: blogging/tagging/sharing tools.
Back when I first started at Tucows — four years ago last Saturday — they asked me to start a developer blog that featured a mix of articles about programming in general and articles about developing using Tucows’ services. This blog became The Farm, and it received a fair bit of acclaim and a decent-size readership (typically about 1,500 pageviews on any given business day).
When we introduced the Tucows Blog in the fall of 2006, we thought that we’d roll the programming content in The Farm into it. Over time, we learned that it it’s better to have articles on programming in their own blog, so we’ve decided to bring back the developer blog and make it a little more “official” by making it part of the services.tucows.com site.
It’s aimed primarily at developers who use Tucows’ services or are likely to do so, which means that it’s got articles about developing using Tucows services and articles for developers in general, especially those doing web application development. Like The Farm, I plan to update it every business day and write it using my “voice”, which is generally casual and sometimes irreverent.
If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
