YouTube goes down last night, leaving users with the extremely helpful message of
http/1.1 service unavailable
So what do people do? They paste that into Google of course, which means that for 2 hours last night http/1.1 service unavailable was the number one search on Google.
So I’ve downloaded & installed Visual Studio 2008. First impressions: nice. It seems faster than 2005, but that may just because I haven’t installed ReSharper yet 
. The multi-targeting feature that allows you to specify which version of the .NET framework to compile the project as is awesome. It makes migration so much easier. I’ve now been able to migrate our whole web solution to Visual Studio 2008 but keep the framework version at 2.0. We’ll upgrade to 3.5 later.
Very glad Microsoft decided to keep Web Application Projects built in to 2008, makes it all really simple. Everything ran fine except for one little gotcha with the web project itself. It’s not a big deal, but it was really annoying and the error messages were not overly helpful. It’s basically around Visual Studio trying to create the required virtual directory for the website in IIS. The error I was getting was:
Creation of the virtual directory http://dev.drive.com.au failed with the error: Could not find the server ‘http://dev.drive.com.au’ on the local machine. Creating a virtual directory is only supported on the local IIS server
See below for steps to reproduce & how to resolve this:
Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 with .NET 3.5. The full version is up on MSDN now, and the express edition can be downloaded here. I’ve been really looking forward to this, LINQ, Lambda expressions and extension methods, plus built in JavaScript debugging & intellisense. But one of the best features IMHO is that we’ll be able to step into the .NET framework code while debugging. That’s going to be awesome.
To download the Visual Studio releases, you need to do it from the ‘Top Subscriber Downloads’ section, it’s not actually available in the normal subscriber downloads section. Probably to reduce server load. VS2008 Professional is a 3.81GB download, so make some room.
Microsoft released the 1.0 version of Windows Live writer this week, which wasn’t much of a change on the last beta, just a couple of new features, including spellchecking for English (US, UK, Canadian), French, German & Spanish and support for AtomPub. Good though, I’m glad they’re supporting it & not left it in perpetual beta. Especially since WordPress updated to allow tag creation based on WLW keywords, WLW has become hugely useful for me.
I’m still not a huge fan of the whole Live.com web interface, it just looks a bit weird to me. Oh well, I can’t really talk about quality design skills anyway.
Also released was the ability to sign up for a live.com (.au/.uk/.etc..) email address. When I first went to the signup page it set me up as a .co.uk user, I guess because I’ve got my language set as British English somewhere. Easy to fix though, just change the mkt=en-uk to mkt=en-au. Not really a user-friendly option though, but I couldn’t find any other way to change it from that page.
Following from the ICANN meeting today in which they took up the issue of the whois privacy debate. The outcome is, unsurprisingly, motion 2. Motion 2 is basically the do-nothing option. It says that there is no consensus and more study is needed. This after years of study by the ICANN commissioned whois Task force. I really don’t know what else the expect to find out, this really is just a ‘we don’t want to decide, so lets put it off‘ option.
Comments on the decision:
In practical terms, this means that the ICANN community’s attempt to come to consensus about WHOIS is over for now. It is pretty clear that there is indeed no WHOIS policy that that community can agree on without a change to the political environment that it is operating in; it is also clear that this is not due to a lack of factual knowledge or background research, but because of deeply divergent views on the issues. Maybe taking time out would help. Nevertheless, the GNSO (and ICANN as a whole) also suffers horror vacui: ICANN is, after all, the organization tasked with coming to consensus about these kinds of issues, and ICANN giving up means a big opening for others to step in.
Now, it’s time for the Council to vote. Council’s draft motions.
Motion 1: Approve OPOC as modified, 7 yes, 17 no. fails. The PDP is over. Long live the privacy-sapping WHOIS stalemate. Ross Rader, Registrar rep from Tucows, puts it best: “I do not think we have done the community any favors as a result of this discussion.”
The negotiation-forcing sunset proposal failed on a close vote: 10 yes, 13 no. It would have called for the elimination of WHOIS requirements from contracts in a year if consensus were not reached in the interim.
Instead, the Council called for — wait for it — more study. Don’t hold your breath.
It’s clearly time to go outside ICANN for help on the privacy front. I would like to see someone offer a _true_ privacy-preserving registration service — one that does not merely offer up the domain registrant’s personal information upon request. Any takers?
The SMH tech section has picked up on an ongoing debate about the whois service & what it should contain. ICANN was accepting submissions on a new set of proposals on how the whois database should work up until 00:00 UTC 30th Oct 2007 (that was 10:30am AEDST yesterday).
So what’s the actual issue? Wendy Seltzer has a good run-down on her site:
The specifics of the current debate, apart from the substanceless comments filling the forums, is a proposal to allow domain registrants to substitute an “Operational Point of Contact,” or OPOC, in the public listing. While all their private information would still be collected, it need not be published. Instead, the OPOC would route messages to the right recipient, for operational, technical, or legal inquiries. Thus OPOC would simultaneously make WHOIS a better technical contact resource and improve domain registrants’ privacy options. Even OPOC doesn’t go so far as I would like — I’d allow anonymous registrations, rather than insisting that data be collected if not displayed — but it’s better than the status quo.
New SubSonic Provider: LOLCode.NET
Just finished putting the wraps on a new provider for SubSonic using the new LOLCat.NET coding engine. If you haven’t seen it, it’s “teh suk”
…
HAI!
IM IN YR Northwind
HOW DUZ I ListProducts YR id
PRODUCTS = GETPRODUCTS id
OMFG FOUND YR PRODUCTS
IF U SEZ
IM OUTTA YR Northwind
Read the rest, he goes on to show how to work with strings, try/catch, switching & loops. This is available right now in the latest checkin.
Also, congrats to Rob for his new job at Microsoft!
New WordPress release, minor revision number update. There’s a bunch of bug fixes, security patches and speed improvements, but the best new bit is that now your blog will turn Windows Live Writer keywords into tags for the post. Once again showing why I love using WordPress, the developers aren’t just inward looking. They’re seeing what’s else is out there that people use, and adding features to work with them too. None of this "not invented here" complex.
Note: This is not the ‘Insert Tags…’ link on the WLW sidebar, that will still insert the Technorati (or whatever) links inside the div with the GUID id attribute (why does it do that?).
To get the WordPress tags working, view the properties bar (hit F2 inside WLW or click the little up arrows next to the ‘set publish date’ box. Then put the tags you want into the keywords field, comma separated. When you publish the post, the keywords will be turned into tags on post.
Great simple new feature that makes it just that little bit easier to post. I no longer have to go into the WP post edit page to update the tags for a new post, in fact, I rarely go to the edit page at all now.
As an aside, does anyone know how to change WLW so that it’s the keywords field that shows up by default at the bottom of the new post window instead of the set categories drop-down?
So most people know LOLCats now right? If not, drop over to ICanHasCheezburger.com for a minute & check it out. Leave your brain at the door.
So then some genius came along and designed a LOLCode specification, that is, a programming language that uses LOLCats language as its syntax. That specification is now in its 4th revision (yes, you read that right, people have that much free time on their hands).
But wait, there’s more. The specification has now been implemented in a number of languages & platforms including .NET.
So you can now write your next ground-breaking social networking startup site in LOLCode.NET. Yes, you can write software in LOLCode & debug it using Visual Studio. The compiler was written by Arachnid, very smart guy by the way. I highly recommend reading his series on Damn Cool Algorithms if you’re interested in such things. The compiler has been rather well received by the .NET community, so much so that Nick Hodge featured it in a presentation he gave at TechEd07. Nice.
Still, I’m almost certain that this is one of the signs of the apocalypse.
New software releases in the last week or so:
and last but not least
It always seems like these things come in batches.