At the new registrar, I entered the domain name of interest and found that it was no longer available.  According to the Whois results for it, it was registered on 01-12-2008 (the same day I was looking) by Network Solutions and if I wanted to buy it, I HAD to buy it from Network Solutions for $34.99 for 1 year.  It looks like they swooped in after I had been looking and bought it before I could.  So, if I want it, I HAVE to buy it from them.

Now, they may release it back after a 5 day grace period known as “Domain Tasting” and then I could try to register it myself at the other registrar, but I don’t know for certain if they’ll do this — I’ll follow-up once I find out.

I wanted to do some research to find out if others have experienced this same issue.  My Google search for “network solutions registering” returned several articles of others experiencing this exact situation, including an article from Computerworld indicating that they may end the practice (Network Solutions calls this a “service”).  

We’ll see what happens moving forward.  But I’ll avoid Network Solutions (as much as I can) and will advise my customers that have domain names with Network Solutions to move to other registrars — ones that are cheaper and that don’t “steal” from their customers.

Related Articles

• Network Solutions Steals Domain Ideas; Confirmed
• Network Solutions Scandal: Hijacking User Domain Searches
• Network Solutions Registering Domains After Availability Lookup

Tickets went on sale at 10:00A on October 22, 2007.  A group of us banded together to try and get tickets and many of us were using multiple browsers to try and get in.  Unfortunately, nobody was getting in.  The company that sells tickets for MLB online experienced huge demand and their systems seemed unable to keep up with it — shortly after tickets first went on sale, the Rockies suspended sales.  After several delays, the Rockies held a press conference to indicate that “malicious activity” brought the servers down — it seemed possible, but unlikely in my mind.  My feeling is that they just didn’t prepare for the demand.  Anyway, they announced that ticket sales would resume on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at noon.

We restarted our ticket operation on Tuesday.  As things got underway, it appeared to many that it was just a repeat of Monday’s system issues.  We plugged along slowly, then all of the sudden my connection to the site seemed to be blocked.  Several other people in our group also reported, what appeared to be, blocked connections.  I tried connecting in through a different provider and was able to get in without a problem — it looks like we were indeed being blocked.  Rockies were back on announcing tickets were selling at the rate of 1,500 per minute (which means they should have sold out within 34 minutes, but it was 2:15P when they made the announcement).  In the end, when the tickets did sell out (at 2:45P), we ended up with nothing — if we were going to go to the game, it would take jumping on StubHub to pay 3 - 5 times face value for tickets. 

So what happened?  Well, in my opinion, the ticket vendor failed to anticipate the load and their systems didn’t seem to do a good job throttling visitors into the checkout process.  The same servers that seemed to act as “bouncers” were also handling tickets sales.  The “bouncers” were essentially pages that refreshed every 120 seconds (it was 60 seconds on Monday, but they changed it to 120 seconds on Tuesday) and tried to connect in.  It wasn’t immediately clear if there was a queue, or if it just happened to be when you hit the server and if there was room.  However, later it appears there was no queue, it was randomly letting visitors into the ticket process without regard for how long you were waiting.  The “malicious activity” was apparently just automated processes used by ticket brokers to grab up tickets.  I’m not sure why that wasn’t anticipated, but it should have been easy enough to block at the firewall.  On Tuesday, they resorted to blocking anything that looked remotely suspicious, which is why we were blocked and several companies I know of where they share a single Internet connection.  My feeling is that they saw a repeat of Monday’s events and wanted to prevent that from happening, so they overreacted with their IP blocking to keep things manageable.

The ticket vendor has some work to do.  This process should be much smoother and for a company the deals with ticket sales all the time, there is not excuse as to why they didn’t anticipate this demand.  They need to re-think their system architecture and flow and be better prepared for next time — including understanding how to respond appropriately to automated processes or genuine “malicious activity”.

The idea is that it functions like those vacuum tubes at the bank that zip your checks and money back and forth with the teller — you drop files into your Tube and the contents are synchronized and shared with other people that you’ve invited to your Tube.  Other people in your network can also share items in your Tube, if you’ve given them such access.  Of course, any Tubes user can create their own Tubes and invite other people to join at their discretion. 

Tubes makes it easy to share files without having to send them via email and clog up email boxes.  It’s secure, so your contents are protected and they give you up to 2GB of space in your Tube.  The “Beta” version is available for free from http://www.tubesnow.com.

At this point, I would advise *NOT* installing Windows Vista on any business computer. After a new operating system (OS) is released, there is a period of time where we generally like to let the “bugs” settle out before deploying the environment (for example: Windows XP really started to shine after service pack 2) in a production scenario. This period of time is approximately 12 months.

In addition, there are no tremendous advantages to deploying Windows Vista, if you’re already running Windows XP Professional. We feel that the changes and enhancements are generally not significant enough to justify the cost of the upgrade (product and service time) and with the software in the early general availability stage, you may encounter business-impacting system glitches.

Further, there are known driver and software compatibility issues with Vista and some older equipment and certain software may not work with Vista at all at this point. Over time, companies may deploy Vista compatible drivers and software — but upgrading an existing platform may pose some problems. If you are looking to order a new machine for business use, then I would recommend a “Vista Ready” system with “Windows XP Professional”. If you are looking to order a new machine for personal use, then certainly Windows Vista is an option, but I personally would order Windows XP Professional (the choice, of course, is yours).

Apple’s industrial designers have completely revamped the “traditional” phone interface and developed a unique touch-screen that appears to be quite intuitive and user-friendly.  There are no buttons on the front, as everything is controlled by context sensitive menus and actions on the 3.5″ screen. 

The iPhone will be available in June for $499 for the 4GB model and $599 for the 8GB model, both which will likely require a 2 year contract from Cingular Wireless, the exclusive wireless carrier for iPhone in the U.S.

You can get more information and see usage examples at Apple’s iPhone website.

Phishing is the criminal activity of tricking users into providing personal, private, or privileged information to a third-party via electronic communication (email, website, etc) that masquerades as a legitimate business entity. 

Check out this article from MSNBC and be on the lookout — especially this Holiday season — for fraudulent online order confirmations and charity scams that are phishing for your personal information.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16212289/from/RS.3/

At the very basic level, there are the devices that connect to your system and “sync” with your messaging and contact platform (Outlook, Palm Desktop, etc).  With these devices, it’s usually just a matter of connecting your phone to the computer with a USB cable, and pressing a button within the software or on the phone itself to synchronize your data.  Often times this means bringing your calendars and contact information up-to-date.  For businesses that aren’t generally mobile, but like to have this information available when they are, this is the best solution.  The price point is very low and it doesn’t require any additional functionality from your service provider.

Next is designed for the small office that has a highly mobile users and requires sychronization with email, as well as other contact and calendar information.  This can be accomplished by installing software on your local PC and having redirect your message, contact, and calendar information back-and-forth between your desktop and your phone.  This solution requires that you leave your local PC on and often requires additional functionality from your service provider.

Finally, you have the fully-integrated system.  The fully-integrated systems communicate with your email server and can share email, contacts, calendar, and tasks between the mobile device and your email server.  This configuration creates a seemless integration of your desktop and mobile environments.  Of course, there are additional costs for this type of integration, but in most cases it’s affordable, even for small businesses.