The Blogware Mechanic is a series of articles that covers how to get the most out of your Blogware blog through customization. In this series, we'll look at all sorts of ways to take advantage of the flexibility of the Blogware blogging platform and make your blog better-looking, easier to use, funkier, more highly-ranked by search engines and even help make you a little money! If you have a Blogware blog and want to soup it up like those fancy "A-lister" blogs, then this series is for you.

Every series has to start at the beginning, and that's what I'll do here. I'll begin with a couple of articles on basic customization. If you've been using Blogware for a while, there's a good chance that none of this will be new to you; in fact, you'll find the same information in the Blogware Publisher Guide. However, in the interest of being thorough and for the benefit of new Blogware users, I'm going to go over the basics before diving into the fancy stuff.

This article is the first of two that cover the basics of changing your blog's appearance. I'll cover two things:

• Changing Your Blog's Color Scheme
• Changing Your Blog's Column Layout

The rest of the article is after the jump.

Actually, I know a number of developers who have some sense of what a user interface should be like. But I also know some other developers, who when charged with creating a UI create monstrosities like the one below:

What's wrong with this dialog box? Click to see it at full size.

For more on this dialog box, see this entry in the blog Coding Horror.

If you're short on user interface designers, you might do well to follow the advice in this blog entry: Never design what you can steal.

This morning, I attended a Technology Innovators Breakfast session at the Toronto Board of Trade as a guest of Alicia Bulwyk, Project Manager of ICT Toronto. It's a suit-y affair, held at the Toronto Board of Trade's dining room, deep in the heart of suitland: First Canadian Place at the corner of Bay and King Streets, the centre of the Canadian financial universe.

This breakfast gathering is one of a new series in which interested parties can "hear Toronto's industry leaders expound on their own personal success stories - why Toronto is their company's chosen location to expand their business, and what their forecast is for the next wave of technology." Today's speakers were:

• Alizabeth Calder, Executive Vice President, National Accounts for Brainhunter, doing a short preliminary presentation
• Dan Fortin, President and CEO of IBM Canada doing the main presentation.

By my count, the event was attended by about 100 people, with a good number of IBMers in attendance, and the major banks well-represented. I sat at the ICT Toronto table, joined by a number of the ICT Toronto regulars, including my TorCamp brain trust compatriot Jay Goldman.

I found the event useful -- it's good to break out of the nerd world every now and again and see what the suits -- particularly the big players like IBM, Accenture and the major financial institutions -- are up to. After all, tech centres thrive when nerds meet rich people. I'd be more than happy to attend another one of these breakfast sessions and learn more.

I took notes of the presentations; they appear after the jump.

 In the age of MoveOn.org and Michelle Malkin, getting good domain name for your political campaign is more important than ever. The Indianapolis Star covers this in an article that looks at how domain name speculators are jumping on campaign-related domain names like "hillary2008.com" (bought back in 1999, when she was only starting her bid to become a senator for the state of New York) and "obama2008.com".

"Nearly every conceivable presidential ticket has been registered," says the article, "including mccaingiuliani2008.com and clintongore2008.com. Even the name hillandbill2008.com is taken."

The article reports that the intentions of the domain buyers vary; some want to make sure that their favorite candidate gets the appropriate domain names, while others are hoping to sell them to candidates for as much as "$30,000-plus".

In case you want to get in on the action, you might want to try out our Duke of URL app to come up with variations on candidates' names...

iMedia Connection gives us brief looks at how General Motors, Sun Microsystems and Wells Fargo are reaching out to their customers using blogs in the article titled 3 Big Brands Reinvent Themselves with Blogs. In addition to showing how these companies are making use of their blogs, the article also provides some useful advice for companies who are thinking of starting their own customer-facing blogs.

We've just activated the latest addition to the OpenSRS API (the API that out partners can use to provision and manage domain names), the Name Suggest API call. Given a word or phrase, the Name Suggest API call will generate up to 100 available .com/.net/.org/.info/.biz domain names that are variations on that word or phrase. It's a useful tool if you're brainstorming domain names or if the domain name you want is already taken.

In order to demonstrate the Name Suggest API call in action, we've created an example application called...

Duke of URL takes a word or phrase that you enter, lets you choose a domain name type (.com, .net, .org, .info or .biz) and provides you with a list of 100 available domain names based on the word or phrase that you provided. The Duke of URL lives at:

http://dukeofurl.biz

Remember that the Duke of URL is demonstrates just one possible app that you can build using the Name Suggest API call and the OpenSRS API. As such, the Good Duke gives his results in one particular way. Next week, we'll show what else is possible.

We'll also reveal the code behind the Duke of URL and explain how it works next week.

In the meantime, go give the Good Duke a visit!

We at Tucows would like to wish our American friends a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

(I'm in Boston myself, helping my mother-in-law with the Turkey. See you folks on Monday!)

Everything I hate about SOAP -- the so-called "Simple Object Access Protocol" -- has been summarized quite nicely in the dialogue The S Stands for Simple in Pete Lacey's Weblog.

As web applications evolve to provide the rich user experience that was once the sole domain of desktop applications, their CSS and JavaScript files have grown in size and number. Since a web page won't even render under its CSS and JavaScript files have been loaded, each one of these files slows down the application a little.

The solution put forth by Wormly's site is simple: consolidate and cache. In other words, gather all your CSS into a single .css file and gather all your JavaScript into a single .js file. That way, only two resources are required before page rendering starts, and two simultaneous downloads is well within the limits of most browsers. Serving the necessary HTTP headers alongside these files encourages the browser and the proxy server to cache them aggressively, meaning more perfomance gains.

Kevin Barnes has posted a FAQ for programmers about living in India on his blog, Code Craft. The questions covered in his FAQ are:

• How did you end up going to India?
• How much do jobs pay in India?
• How can you live with yourself for helping to move American jobs to India?
• What’s the cost of living? / How can people there live on so little?
• Can someone from the US get a job working in India at US wages?
• What’s the visa/tax situation like?
• What’s it like raising your kids in India?
• Aren’t Indian programmers better/worse than US ones?
• Don’t you hate ... in India/Bangalore?
• How long will you stay in India?

"If you want a more artistic sense for my feelings about India," writes Kevin, "read this or this."

If you're look for a job in a place with a long history and a good work environment, may I suggest Tucows? We've got some openings right now, including:

Web Developer

Here's the job description:

Build and maintain company websites and online web applications focusing primarily on the presentation layer using current Internet and scripting languages and Web authoring tools. Develops code using industry best practices for structure, usability and design. Responsible for ensuring code is compatible across current popular browsers. Keeps informed of the latest browser and plug-in technologies. Operates under minimal supervision.

For details, see the page for the web developer position.

Customer Service Manager

Here's the job description:

Manage a team of 9-10 Customer Service personnel responsible for dealing with a variety of Internet related end-customer issues. Support staff work 8am – 8pm seven days a week. The Customer Service Manager develops standards for Tucows technical and customer support; provides technical guidance to the staff; liaises with internal technical and business management personnel to resolve customer issues and escalates to Senior Management accordingly. Able to act as an escalation point for support staff when appropriate. This includes not only resolving issues, but also acting as the end-customer’s advocate, ensuring that the customer has the right product / service to meet their needs and requirements. Accountable for providing leadership and direction in the planning, implementation and administration of quality measurement and evaluation of vendor performance for contracted services to ensure the optimization of resource use and the continual improvement of services from a client perspective. Responsible for alerting appropriate personnel of recurring problems and / or quality deficiencies.

For details, see the page for the customer service manager position.

It's always good to see Doc Searls, and I'm glad I had the chance to hang out with him at the recent ISPCON Fall 2006 conference. He's been a friend of Tucows since he first met us as ISPCON years ago, and he's been up to Toronto for a number of visits since then, the most recent one being last year's Christmas holiday party. In fact, it was a blogger get-together that he had during his visit in early 2003 that led to my getting a job here.

Doc's long time friendship with Tucows and Elliot is probably why their ISPCON opening keynote, Internet Service: The Fifth Utility? was more like a listening in on a casual conversation than attending a panel discussion. In their hour-long chat, Doc and Elliot talked about the internet not as a bonus service offered by telcos, but as a utility on par with things like roads, water, waste treatment and electricity. I attended this keynote and made a recording of their chat, which you can hear by downloading the podcast below.

We'd like to express our thanks to Jon Price, Denise Miller and the rest of the people behind ISPCON Fall 2006 for putting on a great conference, and to Doc for driving up to San Jose to take part in the keynote.

Podcast: The Internet: The Fifth Utility
File	Tucows Podcasts - Internet Service -- The Fifth Utility.mp3
Format	MP3 file
Length	57 minutes, 54 seconds
File size	28.9 MB

Did you hear? We’re bringing sexy back. We launched Platypus v6.0 yesterday, on time (it was November 15th somewhere), with great fanfare.

Sayeth Marketing:

The Platypus Billing System is Tucow’s class-leading billing solution for providers of internet related services. Platypus 6.0 is the most hosting-friendly release to date, making it even easier to manage a hosting business than ever before.

That’s nice stuff. Platypus v6.0 is definitely the biggest release we’ve ever done in terms of new features and improvements. In case you haven’t read your solicited commercial email describing the key features of v6, here are a few, from http://resellers.tucows.com/backoffice/plat6:

• Integration with leading web hosting control panels: Integration with cPanel, Plesk, H-Sphere and Ensim let Platypus communicate with these control panels seamlessly. Platypus 6.0’s domain-centric service structure allows hosting companies to tie multiple services to one domain name.
• Nested services: Platypus 6.0 lets companies tie multiple services to one product out of the box, with no custom configuration required.
• Service contracts: Enforce contract terms with early cancellation penalties. Contract penalties can be fixed or scaled.
• Logic-driven provisioning: Platypus' provisioning integration system now supports VB scripting, giving you the ability to develop logic-driven provisioning rules without complicated external coding.
• Server pooling: Use Platypus 6.0 to perform load balanced provisioning of end user control panels on web hosting servers.

Technically, I suppose the integrations with the control panels are a huge benefit to hosting companies. But to me, the nested services are the sharpest improvement of v6. In the old days, services provided by a rate group were just a loose collection of unstructured step-kids that belonged to a rate. Now with nested services, you have a sensible representation of the services you are providing. A domain service could own email services, and an email service could own an anti-spam service. Or a dialup service could own an accelerator service.

Apart from just looking neat, that lets you provision much more intelligently and simply.

I actually made one guy cry at ISPCon, when I told him about two features that would reduce the number (thousands) of rate groups he had defined. The first: the ability to handle multiple billing frequencies with a single rate group definition. Ja, gut. And the second: the ability to completely override and customize any rate group after it’s assigned to a customer. Hosting companies never do the same deal twice, so this feature is huge.

There are other pretty cool additions, such as a screen that shows you a live view of our integrations vault. A single service can now bill for more than one type of billing; in the past you’d need multiple overlapping services. We added the ability to move rates and services, even between customers. VZ redid most of the wizards to make them easier to use without losing any of their power. Oh, and we added VB scripting support to our provisioning wizard, which means you can basically make it do anything now.

A big THANKS to the dev team who did a great job on Platypus v6. I hope you like it as much as we do.

Those of you trying to determine whether to write your next web application using the Django framework or Ruby on Rails might find this article interesting: it's a comparative case study of the development of a web application using Django and Rails.

In the case study, two developers work from the same specification to implement the same application, with one using Django and the other using Rails. The application, Habitual Readers is a book club's public website. It lets viewers see the books that each book club member has read, as well as their comments for each book. Books are categorized using tags, and additional book information is retrieved from Amazon.

The conclusion that the authors of the article reached was that while each framework has its strengths, there is no clear technical benefit for an experienced Rails development team to switch to Django or vice versa and that Ruby developers should use Rails while people more comfortable with Python should use Django. Here's a table that summarizes the aspects of both frameworks that were investigated:

Factor	Rails	Django
Support for model and schema evolution	Integrated framework for schema evolution.	Minimal.
Internationalization	No support.	Some support.
Designer Friendly Templates?	Possible, with disciplined practices or use of third-party library.	Yes.
Third Party Plugin Support	Mature plugin architecture, well used by the community.	Some support via the applications mechanism.
Javascript Support	Prototype and Scriptaculous bundled with Rails. RJS framework simplifies their use.	Possible, but no direct support for any particular library.
Flavour	Concise.	Explicit.

I found this interesting: rather than post it as a web page or a blog entry, the authors of the article are sharing a Google Docs and Spreadsheets document. We'll have to see if more people start sharing documents on the Web this way.

I've finally returned to the office, so expect the return of all sorts of blog posts, including ones from ISPCON as well as my usual postings for web developers.

The trip and conference were pretty good, and I have to say that it's pretty good having the gentlemen pictured below as travelling companions:

That's VP Marketing Ken Schafer on the left and
Iron Chef Product Marketing Adam Eisner on the right.

The good folks from the CBC dropped by Tucows World HQ this morning to chat about spam, botnets, DDOS attacks etc. The story will air this evening, so if you are within arms reach of an internet connection or TV set that can tune into "The National" tonight, yours truly and a few of our intrepid weekend staffers will be featured for a few seconds at some point during the national newscast.

In doing background for this story, I learned quite a few new things about the subject. I was amazed at how quickly the sophistication of botnets is ramping up. The internet community really needs to come to grips with the scope of this problem and start getting creative with the problem solving. I keep hearing that laws and governments don't really figure into the solutions for a whole bunch of really smart reasons (privacy, costs, etc.) but I'm wondering how governments can apply some focused pressure in specific areas so that the economic equation changes slightly so that is a higher level of profit to be found on the white hat side of the fence. If spam fighters could make a real buck fighting spam and other network abuse, smarter people could be deployed to look at the problems, smarter technology would emerge, and we might not end up in the situation that's being predicted now where close to 100% of all mail is spam (estimates indicate that 87-95% of all email traffic is spam right now...). If the white hats could make as much money doing this as the black hats, don't we put ourselves in a position where we might be able to have a fair fight?

Anyways, CBC Newsworld @ 9pm EST, CBC National @ 10pm. I'll post a link to an online version for those of you that don't have access to Canadian television if I can dig one up (the CBC does a ton of mediacasting over the internet, so I should be able to find *something*.

It was standing room only for this session. In what has become an ISPCON tradition, Mike Cassidy (site) (blog) a marketing consultant for service providers, presented the hottest products and services for 2007.

On the second day of ISPCON I managed to stop event organizer Jon Price for a few moments and asked him about why he's been blogging up a storm at the ISPCON Blog.

(If you're reading this in your feedreader you won't see the video, but you can catch it by clicking here.)

I've long been impressed by the success of Dreamhost's affiliate marketing program, so when I had a chance at ISPCON to talk to Josh and Dallas - co-founders of Dreamhost - I had to ask about the program. They gave some really candid insights. Enjoy!

(If you are reading the feed you won't see the embedded video, so click here to see it.)

I really enjoyed this panel discussion with four service providers who shared their insights. These guys are progressive examples of the evolution of the Internet service provider:

Dane Jasper, CEO, Sonic.net
Jonathan Snyder, president, CEO and director, KeyOn Communications
Dan Hoffman, president and CEO, M5 Networks
Rich Bader, president and CEO, EasyStreet Online Services

Moderator: Paul Stapleton, managing director, DH Capital LLC.

Call me a keener. I had two cups of coffee at breakfast and did this session at 8:45 a.m. Wednesday morning with David Snead and Isabel Wang.

The session focused on legal risks of the emerging opportunities for web hosts. While, I appreciate pragmatic legal counsel, the discussion of risk at this session far outweighed the discussion of opportunity. It was a bit of a buzz kill. The information and advice wasn't bad however, especially if you're a web host considering new opportunities.

Here's the recap.
The shift in web hosting services means:
- New contract issues
- Data retention is high risk
- Conduit status may be affected
- Pay attention to intellectual property

There's more detail after the jump.

As a Tucows newbie, I'm at ISPCON to soak up insights about the industry, meet our partners and pick up on trends.

The Hotshows in Hosting session was an interactive round-table featuring perspective from:
- Christian Dawson, director, corporate development, ServInt Internet Services
- Will Charnock, vice president, technology, EV1 Servers/The Planet
- Christopher Faulkner, founder, president & CEO, C I Host
- Ted Smith, vice president, dedicated hosting, Peer 1 Networks

Moderated the by Candice Rodriguez from Web Host Industry Review, the panel focused largely on how these companies became leaders in web hosting. Lots of inside scoop on how to build a leading hosting business after the jump.

A few weeks ago, over at One Degree I had the good fortunate to interview co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto David Weinberger about misperceptions people have of the message Cluetrain was meant to deliver. ISPCON gave me a chance to ask another cluetrain author, Doc Searls the same question...

(Apologies to Doc for cutting his reply short. The memory card in my camera seems to have given up the ghost. Sad yes, but this gives Joey and me a chance to check out the local Frys).

At ISPCON earlier today I talked to HostMySite.com CEO Lou Honick about how you use great customer service to attract new business.

Tucows as a large contingent at ISPCON in Santa Clara this week. Along with taking in the sessions, doing presentations, hanging out at our booth and generally connecting with customers and community, we're also looking forward to sharing much of the conference experience with you oh humble Tucows Blog reader. Watch for videos, podcasts and blog posts from and about the conference.

This afternoon at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (2:00 p.m. Pacific / 2200 hours UTC), Tucows will be holding its quarterly investment community conference call Q3 2006, in which management will discuss the third-quarter financial results after market close.

If you'd like to listen to this conference call, click here to access the webcast site. You'll need Windows Media Player to listen in.

We'll also record the conference call and post it here later as a podacast.

For most of this week, we'll be in Santa Clara, California, where we'll be making our presence known at ISPCON, the premier conference for internet service providers, hosting companies and VOIP providers. We'll be milling about the conferences, manning our booth on the exhibit floor and presenting at three different sessions, one on each day of the conference (which runs from Tuesday, November 7th through Thursday, November 9th).

We'll be blogging from the conference floor, so watch this space for updates!

Where the Conference Is, and How to Get In for Free

The conference takes place at the Santa Clara Convention Center (5001 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara).

As a sponsor of the conference, we've got an unlimited number of free passes to ISPCON for you to download. These passes will admit you to:

• The exhibit hall, where among other things, you'll find our booth. We'll have a number of product managers and our sales team here, who'll be more than happy to demonstrate our internet services.
• Keynotes, including the opening one featuring our very own CEO Elliot Noss and Doc Searls, Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?
• Networking events
• Vendor-sponsored education sessions

If you want a guest pass, click here for the PDF file [816K PDF file]. Print it out and bring it to the conference, where you'll be admitted for free.

In the Exhibit Hall - The Tucows Booth

We've got a booth on the exhibit hall (booth 501), where you can see demonstrations of Tucows' services, talk with us in person, and if you're very lucky, perhaps get your paws on some valuable Tucows swag. Come on down and say hi!

Here's a map of the exhibit hall, showing the location of the Tucows booth:

Tuesday, November 7th, 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. - Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?

Tucows CEO Elliot Noss will be one of the speakers at ISPCON's opening keynote, titled Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?. He'll be presenting with Cluetrain Manifesto co-author, Linux Journal editor and popular blogger Doc Searls. Here's the description of the keynote from the conference schedule:

The telco/cableco duopoly continues to see the Net as gravy on their basic services (and are more motivated to get into each other's business than do anything new with the Internet). Meanwhile, communities, competitors and customers are creating their own bypass while treating the Net as a "fifth utility" alongside water, waste treatment, roads and electric services. To make matters even more interesting, giants like Google and Microsoft are building massive computing clouds to support a shift toward on-demand services.

How is this all going to play out? Will the incumbents succeed in efforts to thwart muni networks? Does access even make sense as a utility? Are there benefits to incumbency other than creating scarcities everywhere they have a choke-hold? Who has the advantage or stands to thrive and survive in a this new utility-based infrastructure model? Where will ISPs, Hosts and WISPs fit in all this? Can you line up behind, alongside or in front of the citizens and elected officials or are you on a collision course? Once the service is deployed, what will it be like, who will use it and how?

Doc and Elliot will discuss the range of issues surrounding how this kind of accessibility to the net changes everything and why it matters to you. From changing patterns of use, new applications, shifting adoption and behavioral habits to altering the landscape of competition while favoring different services, unique models for varied applications and insight on how one should build a business around this redefined service relationship.

Wednesday, November 8th, 4:15 - 5:15 p.m. - What the Web 2.0?

Here's my session: I'll be moderating a panel What the Web 2.0? discussion about Web 2.0 from an ISP and hosting service point of view. Although it's at the end of the day, I think the audience will be awake for this one, as we've got a group of interesting panelists in addition to a scintillating moderator. Here's the description of the event:

You can talk all day long about blogs, tags, MySpace and YouTube without putting a single dollar in your pocket. We're going to spend this hour together doing the exact opposite. First we'll cover the "what and why" of the subject through an overview of the direct and indirect value these big trends represent for ISPs, Hosts and customers. Then, we'll address the "how" of providers and customers alike who are leveraging these technologies out in the wild with some best practices. Finally, the "wow" being the business impact it is having, it's potential, overall customer behavior/usage habits, effects on bandwidth, churn, ARPU, adoption and of course how this all translates into real dollars in your pocket, better customer relationships and unique value in the marketplace.

Here's the roster of people on the panel:

• Javier Hall, CCO, Userplane
• Kevin Henrikson, Director of Engineering, Zimbra
• Josh Jones, CJO and Co-Founder, DreamHost
• Ivaylo Lenkov, CTO and Founder, SiteKreator
• Dallas Bethune, Co-Founder / CTO, DreamHost

Thursday, November 9th, 12:45 - 1:45 p.m. - 30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed

On Thursday, Ken will make his presentation, 30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed, where he'll show you how to make the most of your website. Here's the official conference description:

Many ISPs and Hosts fail to realize the full potential of their own websites and spend little time updating, let alone optimizing them to achieve key business objectives. What's the desired outcome for your site? Serve as a local community portal, a customer extranet for support or webmail, a place to showcase solutions, convert new leads to customers or just tired brochureware for that snazzy $19.95 dial-up? During this fast-paced "no holds barred" session, Internet best practice expert Ken Schafer will guide you through 30 ways to make your site dramatically better and meet key business objectives. Using dozens of examples, we'll provide eye-opening insights into how these Quick Wins and Big Ideas can shape your site and provide an unfair advantage over your competitors. GUARANTEE: If at the end of the session you don't feel you have at least five techniques that will improve YOUR site, Ken will personally assess your site and give you five ways to improve it!

In addition to the job openings for Sales Engineer and Integration Engineer, we've got a job opening for the position of Business Development Manager - Americas. I've included the copy from our HR department below. If you're interested, email your resume in Word .doc format to hrdept@tucows.com with the subject line BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - AMERICAS.

---

Tucows currently has a challenging opportunity available in our Sales Department. As a Business Development Manager – Americas, you will identify, prospect and close new business opportunities within assigned territory or industry vertical(s). You will create action plans and drive solutions forward to implementation. The successful incumbent will identify and prospect new sales opportunities; sell Tucows services and solutions to new prospects and existing customers; manage and maintain existing account base; as well as manage the administration, including the maintenance, of effective, accurate and complete CRM records.

We’re looking for a self-motivated, driven professional, with a minimum of 5 years proven experience, preferably in a channel or B2B services environment; this includes experience selling to broad audiences, from technical staff to C level executives. You have knowledge of IT-related business operations and solutions sales processes, including experience selling software solutions in an ASP environment; along with the ability to effectively prospect new sales and close new sales opportunities through. Your skills are well rounded by strong analytical, technical and organizational abilities and superior communications including excellent presentation and business writing; as well as the ability to work in a collaborative team environment. An undergraduate degree is desirable, along with previous sales training; in addition. Travel as required (approx 30%). Experience using Salesforce.com or similar CRM applications.

If you're interested in this position, please send a resume in Microsoft Word .doc format to hrdept@tucows.com with BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER - AMERICAS as the subject line.

Here's another job opening -- this one's for the position of Sales Engineer. I've included the copy from our HR department below. If you're interested, email your resume in Word .doc format to hrdept@tucows.com with the subject line SALES ENGINEER.

---

We are currently seeking a Sales Engineer to function as our technical lead in developing new accounts and maintaining existing customers of Tucows services; including web hosting companies, internet service providers, web design firms, domain name resellers, telecommunications service providers and large enterprise customers.

As our Sales Engineer you will work directly with the Sales Team providing technical credibility and support for implementation initiatives including training and consultation; as well as participate in the implementation and support of new products and services.

In addition, you will resolve technical pre-sales issues; communicate technical capabilities, features and benefits of Tucows e-commerce solution; provide consultation and product expertise, resolve technical issues and support resellers through major design initiatives; assist the Training Department in the development, coordination, and delivery of technical training; maintain a high level of technical competency and knowledge across the entire range of our products and services; all while working with our Sales, Product Management, Project Management, Professional Services, Operations and Customer Support business units.

To be considered for this exciting opportunity, applicants must possess:

• A minimum of five years pre-sales, technical support and related e-business experience
• Bachelor's Degree in computer science or related discipline, or equivalent experience
• Fluency in one or more languages in addition to English is preferred
• Demonstrated ability to articulate technical information to both technical and non-technical customer audiences
• Proven experience and capability in the technical sale of complex high technology products and services, including email services
• A sound understanding of operational metrics pertaining to performance, reliability, availability, scalability, and manageability of key business systems from the reseller and end-user perspectives
• Knowledge of Perl scripting and Unix system administration
• Experience creating technical and functional documentation
• The ability to quickly understand, learn and work with new technologies
• Strong self-motivation
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Excellent project management and personal time management skills
• Strong teamwork and interpersonal skills

If you're interested in this Sales Engineer, please send a resume in Microsoft Word .doc format to hrdept@tucows.com with SALES ENGINEER as the subject line.

We've got a job opening for an Integration Engineer here at Tucows. Here's a quick summary of the job position:

The successful candidate will have the challenging opportunity to work on Tucows’ vast and complex high availability system spread across multiple data centers, servers and operating systems. You’ll work with a dynamic team of Integration Engineers to develop, deploy and maintain components of a large scale hosted messaging platform. In addition, you will develop software components for our hosted messaging platform; liaise with third party suppliers in customizing applications for deployment on our high availability production environment; as well as contribute to ongoing process improvement of the SDLC.

If this sounds like the kind of work you can do, there are more details after the jump.

If you've been checking out Global Nerdy, a tech blog I share with my buddy George, I've gotten my hands on a copy of Release Candidate 1 of Microsoft's next version of Windows, Windows Vista. So far, I've made two attempts to install it, both without success.

Here's the short version: yes, I finally got it installed. As with software from Microsoft, the third time's the charm. My trick was the tried-and-true fix that all IT workers know: turn the damned machine off and on again. This trick is so useful that it's been immortalized on t-shirts and in at least one television show, The IT Crowd:

For more, go check out the full story.

This CNN report says that according to Netcraft, there are now 100 million web sites:

There were just 18,000 Web sites when Netcraft, based in Bath, England, began keeping track in August of 1995. It took until May of 2004 to reach the 50 million milestone; then only 30 more months to hit 100 million, late in the month of October 2006.

This calls for a graph! Here's one from Netcraft, which shows both hostnames and "active" sites, from August 1995 to the present day:

That's a lot of pictures of kittens and porn.

Netcraft lists these previous milestones:

• April 1997: 1 million sites
• February 2000: 10 million sites
• September 2000: 20 million sites
• July 2001: 30 million sites
• April 2003: 40 million sites
• May 2004: 50 million sites
• March 2005: 60 million sites
• August 2005: 70 million sites
• April 2006: 80 million sites
  
• August 2006: 90 million sites
  

Greg Sterling offers his thoughts on this latest milestone:

This all means that there’s more and more noise online and it’s only getting “worse.” I’ve been talking about that in the limited context of local. But the general cacophony of new and me-too sites and services only means that brands and habitual behavior become more powerful; people will fall back on what they like, know and trust rather than try new things.

The idea that “our competition is only a click away” only really means something if you’re a no-name site. It’s very different if you’re Google or Yahoo (or even MySpace now).

People talk about “the Internet” in the same way they discuss “the small business market.” There is no “small business market,” there are only 10 or 14 or 17 or 20 million small businesses, with some shared characteristics. Similarly, “the Internet” is not a monolith, but 100 million websites.

Thus those would would “aggregate the tail” (whether eyeballs, publishers/site or marketers) are thus increasingly important to the online ecosystem.

Link

"Island hopping" is the name of the current trend in spamming. Now that anti-spam filters and blacklists are wise to the spam domains in the typical .com, .biz and .info namespaces, they're switching to domains of small island nations such as Sao Tome and Principe (.st) and Tokelau (.tk) to bypass them.

The malware reasearches at McAfee first caught onto this trick after noticing an unusual number of .st domain name registrations. This raised a red flag for them, and further research showed a migration of spammers to domains for small island nations, particularly:

Domain	Island	Area (sq. km)	Population
.tk	Tokelau	10	1,392
.cc	Cocos (Keeling) Islands	14	628
.tv	Tuvalu	26	11,810
.as	American Samoa	199	57,794
.im	Isle of Man	572	75,550
.to	Tonga	748	114,689
.st	Sao Tome and Principe	1,001	193,413

Spam from these domains has been increasing -- here's what an article in EFYTimes has to say:

"This new trend is another example of spammers' relentless quest to spread their abuse of Internet domains far and wide," said Guy Roberts, senior development manager, McAfee anti-spam R&D team. "Some of these islands have dozens of spammed domains per square mile."

Link

CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, reports that the 750,000th registration of a .ca domain name was recorded this week, marking a 50% rise in the number of such registrations in under two years. A snippet from their news release:

"The phenomenal growth of dot-ca registrations is the result of increased awareness of the value of dot-ca and the trust Canadians place in it," says Bernard Turcotte, President and CEO of the Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Registration Authority. "Dot-ca still offers the best opportunity to get the domain name you want when compared with the larger dot-com registry."

"Dot-ca is reserved for Canadians and defines an organization or individual who meets Canadian presence requirements," explains Mr. Turcotte.

According to the press release, when CIRA took over the .ca registry, there were 60,000 names registered there. By 2003, there were 250,000 .ca names registered and in March 2005, that number had doubled to 500,000.

Over at Global Nerdy, I've posted my second attempt at installing Windows Vista onto my Wintel desktop machine at work.

The short version: still no luck.