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September 22, 2004
Speaking at IT Seminar
I'll be speaking at the weekly IT seminar tomorrow in the Crabtree building (BYU) at 11am. I'll be speaking on the topic of "connected computing." I'll post slides here later for anyone who's interested.
03:19 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Presidential Candidate Website Smackdown
Brian Sweeting has a smackdown comparing the Bush and Kerry Web sites. If the technical merits of a Web site are any indication, Kerry sweeps it according to Brian.
01:34 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Data Center Consolidation
California is pushing data center consolidation among other things. Meanwhile Utah has its own data center consolidation issues. People continue to talk about it but until the legislature decides its time to stop allocating money for new data centers, they'll keep getting built. The Dept. of Corrections is building one in Gunnison, just up the road from the State's back-up data center in Richfield. Dave Fletcher, who runs the Richfield data center, is working hard to make it an attractive alternative for State agencies so that they won't build their own, but apparently that's somewhat threatenting to some Dept. of Corrections employees. At least Devin has the guts to say what he thinks in public---that shows more courage than most.
10:35 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Manipulating Feeds
Have you ever interrupted an HTTP download and then restarted it later and had it pick up where it left off? That little bit of magic is the result of RFC3229: Delta encoding in HTTP. This is useful for more than just resuming downloads. Jon Udell, for example, uses this trick to access a small part of an MP3 file and its also the secret sauce in mod_speedyfeed that I mentioned yesterday.
This article by Bob Wyman that outlines the particulars. In an interesting adaptation, while RFC3229 has always been about byte ranges, but the mod_speedyfeed module uses RFC3229 with item ranges. The bottom line: is there really isn't anything about this that would keep it from working with RSS 2.0 as well as Atom.
10:18 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Authorize.net Getting Hammered
Authorize.net's recent woes have made Wired News. Authorize.net is a local outfit. In fact, iMall and Authorize.net had discussions about merging at one point. We had just bought PurePayment.net and had some great credit card gateway technology that eventually became the SurePay gateway. Authorize.net had lots of customers. We thought it was a match made in heaven, but it was not to be. At any rate, Authorize.net has been suffering from a DDoS attack lately and their 90,000 customers are starting to get antsy:
"I'm losing four grand a day in revenue," said David Hoekje, president of PartsGuy.com, an online heating and air conditioning parts dealer. "My year is a bell curve, and we're on the upwards slope now. This is 5 percent of my year, gone."
"We know how hard it is," said Michael Adberg, co-founder of WeaKnees.com. The site, which sells TiVo upgrades and DirecTV installations, was itself the target of a DDoS attack last October. "But we're surprised that such a large company wasn't better prepared than we were." He added, "They have really let us down.From Wired News: Hack Attack Gums Up Authorize.Net
Referenced Wed Sep 22 2004 07:44:25 GMT-0600
Authorize.net used to be owned by InfoSpace. They were recently bought by LightBridge. LightBridge recently laid off 12% of their workforce and then these mysterious DDoS attacks started. Hmm...If I were looking, I know where I'd start. (see Stealing the Network)
Not surprisingly, the LightBridge Web site doesn't make mention of these problems and the Authorize.net page handles them with a small link that leads to a not very helpful statements. Maybe Authorize.net is connecting with their customers some other way to give them reassurance that they're handling the problem, but somehow I suspect that they're not. Like almost all company Web sites, the Authorize.net Web page continues to scream happy thoughts that in some marketer's imagination are supposed to make us want to use their service. My advice: start a blog and let a human write it. It won't solve the DDoS attacks, but it will connect to customers better.