We recently received the following email regarding our corporate domain name:

From: leo.guo 
Date: 2008/3/23
Subject: (omitted) domain name
To: info 


Dear (omitted domain name)
 We are Beijing Inveis Network Information Technology Co.,Ltd , which is the domain name
register center in China. We received a formal application from a company who is called
Yunfeitongda International Trade Company  are applying to register "  (omitted)  " as their domain
name and Internet keyword on Mar 23th 2008. Because this involved your company name or
trade marks so we inform you in no time. If you considered these domain names and
internet keywords are important to you and there was necessary to protect them by
registering them first, contact us soon.
Kind Regards,
Leo Guo
Tel:     +86-10-82476192-605
Fax:     +86-10-62477798
Email:   leo.guo@inveis.com
Beijing Inveis Network Information Technology Co.,Ltd
www.inveis.com

Aside from the poor grammar, this would seem somewhat legitimate. There is an actual website that gives the appearance of being a respectable overseas registrar. It also seems that it would be fairly harmless to respond to the email stating the domain is taken and there is no interest in selling it.

A quick who-is search on inveis.com shows a creation date of 3/20/2008. The email just got a little more than fishy. Googling the company name came up with nothing. Hmm, what are they trying to pull?

A search on their phone number is the only thing that provided any results. http://louminatti.blogspot.com/2008/01/china-scam.html. Hah, same email, only the names have been changed.

Apparantly, they will register your domain under .cn and try to sell it back to you if you respond with any concerns over your domain name. I guess this is what happens when you get tired of writing bots that farm WoW gold for you to sell on eBay.

This is the screen I was presented with when trying to install software and drivers for my HP Photosmart C5280 all-in-on printer/scanner. Granted, I am trying to install this on Windows Server 2003 and the documentation does not specifically say that is supported. But you'd think that if they detected a non-supported o/s and removed the 'Install' button, they would prompt you in some way.

Several years ago, well, maybe over a decade ago I was working at my first "real" job after college. It was at a remote sales office for a VAR named Andataco based out of San Diego, CA. Our office was in Irvine, CA and just happened to be right across the hall from a Sun Microsystems branch office. They had just released the new and exciting Ultra 1 and 2 using UltraSPARC processors as a replacement for the SPARCstation 20. So sometime around late '95 and early '96.

I remember walking across the hall and seeing a demo unit powered on and thinking to myself "what could anyone possibly do with that?" I believe it was running the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and it looked cool, but I couldn't figure out specifically why it was any better.

Mostly, this was because I really didn't have that much experience with computers. Sure, we had a Commodore VIC-20 and eventually a PC clone running DOS/Windows when I was growing up, but I only used those for games. If you remember the VIC-20, then you remember buying the books with pages and pages of basic code that you had to type in just to play a game. And if you had a typo, you spent hours trying to figure out where you went wrong.

That trend didn't change at all in college. I had a computer, but it was only as good as the games I could play on it were. I didn't take any computer science courses, programming classes, or anything to trigger a further interest in technology. Computers were for playing games when you should be studying.

So I really had no idea why UltraSPARC was cool or what advantages Solaris had to offer. I just knew that people wanted them and were spending a lot of money.

I had an old AMD 3200+ machine laying around with Fedora running that I experimented with Mono on. MonoDevelop is actually much better than I had ever thought, but that is a different story altogether. The machine has a decent hard drive, memory, and graphics. Remembering that Solaris is freely available for x86 machines, I figured I'd give it a try even though finding drivers for my system most likely would be a deal killer.

I went and fetched the ISO's for Solaris here, burned them to DVD, and installed. Goodbye Fedora. To my surprise, the install went on without a hitch. Upon login, you are given a choice between CDE and the Java Desktop. I chose CDE but quickly switched to the Java Desktop because CDE looked terrible out of the box.

The Java Desktop looks really nice and it is very friendly as far as providing GUI configuration. It comes pre-packaged with productivity tools, internet, and collaboration applications.

For the most part, all of my hardware seems to work in the Java Desktop. Everything but the on-board network adapter, which is ok for now. In looking at the hardware compatability list, it looks like I can pick up a cheap 10/100 PCI NIC from Belkin and fetch the Solaris drivers from RealTek. Their site seems very slow, but you can find them here.

After playing around with it for a couple hours, I find myself in the same place I was all those years ago. "What could I possibly do with this?"

To be continued...

When you use .NET Remoting to communicate using custom objects between processes, you can suffer a performance penalty if you do not perform custom serialization on those objects.

Why? The default serialization is a generic implementation that includes all of the CLR type information for each object. This is needed to reconstruct the object on the receiving end of the remoting call.

This isn't a really big deal if you are only communicating single objects at a time and infrequently. This does become noticeable if you are returning custom collections that contain many objects or your application is really chatty.

Ok, so how do you improve the performance? Implement ISerializable on your objects and collections. It's a little tedious, but easy to do. Someday I may write an addin to do this work for me, but currently I use a code generator for my objects that includes this.

There are 3 things you need to do. In the example below, we are going to serialize the object as a byte[]. This serialization will be automatically called by the Remoting formatter when sending the object over the wire.

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Several years ago there was a big WTF moment for me when I read Frans Bouma's post refuting all of the claims people made for using stored procedures.

Jeff Atwood summarizes Fran's post here.

Every reason I had ever heard for using them over inline SQL was addressed. Ad-hoc (inline) SQL is brittle, it's easier to secure access to data in the database, and performance. The latter being the primary reason why I chose stored procedures.

I don't really have any arguments against their enlightening views. I'll even add to that the idea that if your database logic is in your database, you are tied to that database. It seems the general consensus is that a mixture of stored procedures (for specialized situations) and inline sql (for crud) is the way to go.

So why on earth do I still use stored procedures?

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