Ejecutive

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols unleashes a scathing attack on Microsoft following the outage suffered by the London Stock Exchange:

It should have been a great day on the London Stock Exchange.

It was, the traders got to watch funny videos on YouTube all day instead of working.

Later the LSE gave the vague explanation, that “It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn’t have foreseen,” and not caused by high-volume. The spokesperson added, “We’ve introduced a fix and we’re confident it will not happen again.”

Somehow “we couldn’t have foreseen” and “we’re confident it will not happen again” don’t fit very well together.

Well, they didn’t foresee it. It happened, and it crashed the system. They now know what happened, and they’ve made a fix that makes sure that bug never strikes again. Comprende?

So what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and…

None of them talk to me any more so I had to conjure this story out of my rectum.

On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

Nothing wrong there, at least they aren’t using a database with it’s own host of corruption and performance issues…

The programmers and serious database administrators in the audience can already see where this is going.

Yep, a Linux fanboy with nothing better to write about is going to do another misinformed rant about Microsoft.

Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can’t possibly handle the world’s number three stock exchange’s transaction load on a consistent basis.

Okay, got any evidence to back up those statements?

I’d been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.

No then.

What I find really amazing is that the LSE’s software stack hadn’t blown its top earlier. Even setting aside my feelings for Linux, there’s simply no way I’d recommend Server 2003, .NET and SQL Server for a job even a tenth this size. If a customer of mine insisted that they didn’t want open source - more fool them - I’d recommended Sun Solaris, JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) and Oracle or IBM AIX or z/OS, WebSphere and DB2.

Yes yes! Anything but Microsoft! Write it in C++, no C, no Haskell, no Smalltalk, no assembly, no in direct machine code! Yes, that’s the best way to do it!

What I’d really prefer to see is RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), JBoss, and MySQL or Oracle or Novell’s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), JEE, and, again MySQL or Oracle for the DBMS engine.

Ah good old MySQL with it’s corruption and performance issues. Yes, that’s a much better DBMS than SQL Server for crucial financial data. And I’m sure the dog bowl mess that is JBoss and J2EE will be much better to work with than .NET. Like I said, anything but Microsoft!

In any case, though, the real moral of this story is that if you really want HA (high availability) or HPC (high performance computing), Microsoft’s products should be at the bottom of your list. Unix, mainframes, and, yes Linux, are far, far better for companies that need fast and reliable computing.

No, the real moral of the story is that Linux fanboys will latch onto any story where they can falsely discredit Microsoft using lies and spin, and none of them are worth reading. This is one I’m making an example out of.

Vaughan-Nichols fails to mention (or maybe he failed to research) that the outage wasn’t the fault of the .NET application he attacks (TradeElect), but on the “trading gateway between the LSE’s Extranex private network (linking the exchange and clients) and the TradElect electronic trading platform”.

Eight months ago, Twitterlicious 2.1 was released. Since then, I’ve just not had the time to fix some critical bugs that have been bugging me and every other Twitterlicious user out there! This new 2.2 release aims to fix the two major outstanding bugs:

1. Twitterlicious is sometimes (for no apparent reason) starts to timeout every connection to Twitter.
2. Updates with quotes (”) in were cut short.

With these issues hopefully now resolved, I can concentrate on new features to bring Twitterlicious in line with what the API is no capable of.

Download from the usual place.

I encountered a strange bug today while working on a login page in .NET. This page differed from your run-of-the-mill login page by having the user select their username and then enter their password, so only had one text field on the page.

The bug meant that when the user pressed enter after typing in their password to submit the form, although the form was submitted, the SubmitButton_Click event that is set to trigger with the submit wasn’t evoked. Clicking the button itself worked, but trying to press enter anywhere on the form (except with the submit button selected) didn’t.

Even wrapping the content around a Panel and setting the DefaultButton property on that to the submit button didn’t work. It turns out that Internet Explorer won’t evoke the SubmitButton_Click event when there is only one textbox on the form, even if it’s explicitly set as the default button.

The solution is to create an empty textbox and set it to be invisible through CSS:

<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Style="display:none;">
</asp:TextBox>

Note that you can’t set its Visible property to false as that won’t render the textbox at all and you’ll still have the same problem.

Obviously, this is not the ideal solution to the problem, and hopefully this bug will be fixed in Internet Explorer 8. However for now, until I find a better fix, this is the only solution that works around this bug.

Nullriver released their NetShare application onto the iTunes App Store last night, only to have it removed only a few hours later.

It’s surprising that this app was approved in the first place, since AT&T typically charge an extra $30 per month to allow tethering use in the US. Upon investigating the terms set out by other telecos, O2 UK say:

You may not use your SIM Card in any other device, or use your SIM Card or iPhone to allow the continuous streaming of any audio / video content, enable Voice over Internet (Voip), P2P or file sharing or use them in such a way that adversely impacts the service to other customers of O2 or The Cloud.

Which seems to restrict the use of streaming audio and video content, something which the built-in YouTube app allows you to do, along with Last.fm radio streaming app. However what it doesn’t explicitly forbid is the use of a tethering application to allow you to access the internet through another device, as long as the SIM card is still in your iPhone, so with O2 UK there is nothing to stop you using NetShare.

If, like me, have your iPhone unlocked and on another network such as T-Mobile UK, they may have even less restrictions. From T-Mobile’s web’n'walk fair use policy:

This plan comes with a fair use policy of 1GB a month. We’ll monitor how much you send and receive each calendar month so that we can protect our network for all our web’n'walk customers. If you use more than your fair use policy amount, we won’t charge you any more, but we may restrict how you can use your plan, depending on how often you go over your amount and by how much.

Which seems to allow everything, as long as you keep within the 1GB fair use policy. As Apple has exclusive contracts with one teleco for each country the iPhone is being sold, it is possible for them to restrict NetShare to only countries that allow tethering apps. The chance of the app appearing back on the App Store is small though, which begs the question, why was it approved in the first place?

If you’ve been using an original, unlocked iPhone with a SIM from an “unofficial” provider, then you haven’t been able to upgrade to the new 2.0 firmware because, well, it would lock your phone. You’ve had to sit by twiddling with the old 1.1.4 firmware while been reading reviews of the fantastic new applications and all the new things you can do with them.

The new firmware has been out for over a week now without a released unlock tool, although videos of a proof of concept unlock have been floating around the internet.

This week, the iphone-dev team finally released their long anticipated PwnageTool that’s capable of unlocking the original iPhone with 2.0 firmware. Infact it’s quite clever in that it takes the official firmware, and transforms it into a jailbroken and unlocked version that you restore with iTunes!

The process is pretty straightforward, but still not without pitfalls which could be hard to dig yourself out, so I’ve made some notes of problems I’ve had during the unlock, so you don’t have to:

• You’ll need three other files along with PwnageTool to unlock your phone, the two bootloaders and the original firmware. PwnageTool should be able to find those automatically after you download them.
• If Safari extracts the original firmware to a folder, drag the iPhone1,1_2.0_5A347_Restore.ipsw.zip file from the trash to your desktop and remove the .zip from the end of the filename.
• PwnageTool might fail when it tries to enter DFU mode (also known as recovery mode). Don’t worry, manually put your phone in recovery mode by having the iPhone plugged into your computer, holding the home and power button for seven seconds, and then releasing the power button (but still holding the home button) and wait for iTunes to report that your iPhone is in recovery mode.
• I would use Expert mode to stop PwnageTool from replacing the Apple boot logo with their stupid pineapple.
• To restore your cracked firmware, hold alt/option when clicking the Restore button (shift in Windows) and then you can browse to the file you want.

PwnageTool is for Mac users only, but if you look hard enough), you can find a pre-cracked firmware that you can just restore with iTunes on Windows.