I do most of my work on a 1.33 gig PowerBook G4, but I'm not going to say no to a company-issued computer with decent specs. Hence the other computer on my desk, a 3.0 gig P4 IBM ThinkCentre with half a gig of RAM, one of the standard issue machines here at Tucows. I use it mostly as a machine for testing sites and web applications in Windows, and occasionally, I'll do a tiny bit of Windows development on it. There aren't any important files on the machine, which made it a suitable subject for today's scary Hallowe'en experiment: installing Windows Vista RC1 (that's Release Candidate 1).

I got a copy of Windows Vista RC1 last night at a gathering held by Microsoft here in Toronto, where they invited a number of Toronto tech bloggers to see Vista in action and hear presentations on deployment and security. I took notes and will post them here later.

Earlier today, I attempted to install Windows Vista on my work machine and my notes from that experience appear in Global Nerdy, a tech blog I write with my friend George Scriban. The experience wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped.

Link

A sizable contingent from Tucows will be making an appearance at ISPCON Fall 2006, the premier conference for internet service providers, wireless providers, VOIP providers and internet businesses. It'll take place from Tuesday, November 7th through Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. If you're in the neighbourhood, we'd like to see you, which is why we're handing out these free guest passes!

These guest passes get you free admittance to:

• The exhibit hall, where among other things, you'll find our booth. We'll have a number of product managers 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, In the Hotseat with Doc: A Fireside Chat
• Networking events
• Vendor-sponsored education sessions

The guest passes also entitle you to register for the conference at a great discount.

There's no limit to the number of guest passes we can hand out. If you'd like one (or several) -- simply click here or the image below to download a PDF of the pass [816K PDF file], print it out and bring it to ISPCON. See you there!

Bruce Schneier has an essay in Forbes titled Casual Conversation, R.I.P., in which he talks about how ephemeral conversation is disappearing:

Fewer conversations are ephemeral, and we’re losing control over the data. We trust our ISPs, employers and cellphone companies with our privacy, but again and again they’ve proven they can’t be trusted. Identity thieves routinely gain access to these repositories of our information. Paris Hilton and other celebrities have been the victims of hackers breaking into their cellphone providers’ networks. Google reads our Gmail and inserts context-dependent ads.

I also throw in my own two cents on the issue on a blog that my pal George and I write, Global Nerdy.

If you're feeling particularly bold, you can venture over to the Internet Explorer page and download the final release version of Internet Explorer 7, which became available to the general public yesterday afternoon.

Although the Windows machine I have at work is a pretty nice one (developers are assigned machines with the same specs), it's largely relegated to Windows compatibility testing and a teensy bit of .NET development. Since I don't store any crucial files on that machine, I thought it would be the perfect guinea pig on which to test IE7. Over the next few days, I'll report my experiences, complete with screenshots.

Here's a screenshot of IE7 showing the Tucows Blog main page:

Google Blogoscoped presents these ten rules of Good Blog Writing Style:

1. Use descriptive headlines.
2. Write in "inverted-pyramid" style (get to the point at the beginning, elaborate in later paragraphs)
4. The first link is the one people click on, so make it the main link of your article.
5. Reintroduce core ideas in longer posts.
6. Use lists, images, tables and anything else that will make your artiles easier to scan.
7. Use simple language if you're writing for a global audience.
8. Credit your sources.
9. Mark updates and changes.
10. Spellcheck your posts and re-read them for clarity.
11. Note that all these rules have exceptions; know when they apply!

The next month is going to be a busy one for many of us here at Tucows. In additional to the usual work stuff, some of us will be making appearances at the following conferences:

CASCON 2006 (Toronto)

I got a last-minute invitation to IBM's CASCON 2006 conference, which runs from October 16th through 19th, where I'll participate in the Social Computing: Best Practices panel. I'm thinking of catching the "Introduction to AJAX Technologies" workshop on Monday and the "Rails/DB2" workshop on Tuesday afternoon. Note that admission to this conference is free, including the food!

The Ajax Experience (Boston)

Here's a good one -- Brent Ashley, who will lead the Ajax Transport Layer Alternatives session, gave me a complimentary pass to The Ajax Experience, which runs from October 23rd through 25th. This looks to be a very meaty conference for techies and I plan to take copious notes and share them with the developers here at Tucows as well as you, the readers.

ISPCON Fall 2006 (Santa Clara)

ISPCON Fall 2006 is the premier conference for internet service providers, wireless providers, VOIP providers and internet businesses. Tucows people will be all over this one -- on the exhibit floor, doing the opening keynote and leading a couple of sessions! For the full details, check out this entry; to get a free pass to the exhibit floor and the keynote, see this entry.

We've had last week's podcast of the Bill Ford/Platypus 6 podcast transcribed and I've included the transcript with the original article. Check it out!

We're in the last hours of the "landrush period" for .mobi domain names, a period when .mobi domains are available to the general public for a higher-than-normal price; in exchange for paying mor eper domain, you get a better chance of getting the domains you want. Starting tomorrow, October 11th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern (7:00 a.m. Pacific / 1400 hours UTC), the .mobi Registry will drop the price of .mobi names to their standard price.

For more on /mobi, see MidwestBusiness.com's article, Thursday Begins General Ongoing Registration For .mobi Domains and ComputerWorld's article, Why you need to buy a .mobi domain name soon.

This should come handy for those of you hoping to make it big in the mobile applications department: FierceDeveloper have put together their list of the five most-anticipated smartphones (pictured to the right). They are:

• Nokia E62
• BlackBerry 8800
• T-Mobile Dash
• Samsung i607
• HTC TyTN

They've thrown in a bonus list of the 5 silliest phones. My favourites are the Motorola Feng Shui phone (which uses sensors to calculate the amount of Qi -- "energy flow" -- in the current location) and the LG "Sobriety Phone", which has a built-in breathalyzer to stop you from "drunk dialing" certain numbers.

Platypus is Tucows' billing system for web hosting and internet access providers, offering invoicing and billing, customer management and service provisioning. Version 6 is coming out soon, and on this Tucows Blog podcast, I chat about it with Bill Ford, Tucows' Director of Billing Services, who came from the Starkville office last week to visit us up here in Toronto.

The podcast is an MP3 file 10.7 MB in size and is 17 minutes, 16 seconds in length. Click here to play it (or right-click and choose "Save as") to save it to your hard drive.

Update: We've had the interview transcibed; you can find the transcript here.

There are more details about Platypus and how to download a free 30-day evaluation copy after the jump.

The .mobi Registry reports in a press release that people from more than 100 countries have registered over 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain's general availability. They state that this demonstrates the great demand for these domains and offered this comparison:

In contrast, it took ten years for the general public to register 100,000 PC-based domain names in the early days of the Internet.

I think that's an apples-and-oranges comparison, but it's an interesting one nonetheless.