Category: Internet
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Volunia: Back From The Dead?
What. The. Hell. Remember the Volunia Launch? Everyone and their cat pointed out that the launch was a disaster from a communication/marketing perspective, and that the site looked like something from the nineties. Since then, the graphic appearance of the social search engine has changed slightly – not enough in my opinion, but at least…
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We Still Haven’t Figured JavaScript Out
That fact that manipulating the DOM via JavaScript has become very easy, thanks to libraries like jQuery, doesn’t mean we should feel authorized to write crappy unmaintainable JavaScript code. The problem is, I can’t seem to avoid writing piles of bad JavaScript. It’s just too hard. Or, rather, it’s too easy to write bad code.…
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Misbehaving DNS
Large cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Windows Azure share, at least for certain features, a common trait: DNS is used aggressively to quickly provision and deprovision instances/services/load balancers/endpoints. The trick is to keep DNS records’ TTL values very low. Azure, for instance, keeps TTL at 10 seconds, meaning that the client connecting to…
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Will Large Cloud Providers Kill Smaller Ones?
Now that Microsoft has launched additional services for Windows Azure, providing a generic, scalable service for hosting websites, and has improved support for running generic virtual machines, things are bound to change for the entire hosting market. The point is, Amazon has offered virtual machines for ages with EC2, and we all know how successful…
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Internet Gold Rush: Generic Top-level Domain Names
Do we need generic TLDs? In a word, no. Let’s start from the basics though. What is a TLD? It’s a top-level domain, that is .com, .net, .org, .it, .fr and so on (.it, .fr, etc. are ccTLDs – country-code TLDs). What is a generic TLD, or gTLD? It’s a custom top-level domain, for example…