Down Time: Register.com Down?

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As many of our readers may have noticed we went down for over an hour on Saturday, but in all my years of hosting this is the first time I’ve seen such a large outage caused by the domain registrar failing. Apparently, a number of Register.com’s partner name servers went down (although Register.com itself stayed up). This affected not only my accounts and web servers, but the partner’s main websites themselves. In other words, I couldn’t even visit the affected registrar’s website for support information or to open a ticket. Luckily, I found the company’s phone number buried in Google’s cache. Upon waiting 25 minutes on the phone, I finally spoke to an operator who informed me they were ‘aware of the problem’ and gave me to a few alternative links to use to access my account information, none of which worked.

I’m not sure what happened today but I can only imagine the number of websites that must have been affected if an entire group of registrar’s were offline.

how to view source code generated by dojo

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Dojo abstracts alot from you when creating widgets.  So how do you see the real source?  The source is important when testing certain types of requirements.  Accessibility is one of those requirements.

Normal code

As an example, I wrote a simple line of code to display a Dojo widget for currency.

<input type="text" id="amount" name="amt" dojoType="dijit.form.CurrencyTextBox" constraints="{fractional:true}" currency="USD" invalidMessage="Invalid amount format." />

When I do a simple “view source”, I see exactly what I have here.  However, I’m interested in the source code the browser is rendering.  I installed the Firefox Web Developer extension to find out.  It was a simple as going to my web page and clicking view source –> view generated source.  The result is at the bottom of this post as it’s a bit long.  [I’m curious what other/better ways there are of seeing the source.  Feel free to add a comment if you have one.]

This is really interesting.  A few things jump out at me:

  1. Dojo takes care of quite a bit a code for us!
  2. Dojo creates a Dojo input element that does all the work and wraps a hidden input element representing what I actually wrote.  This lets me use the name I specified in my own code while letting Dojo add everything it needs.
  3. IBM did a good job adding accessibility support to Dojo.

Error messages

I was also interested in what was generated when validation pops up that you did something wrong.  I was able to use the same steps – enter an invalid amount, tab out and then view source –> view generated source.  Dojo generated a single exra div for that.  It also generated the ARIA/WAI alert roles so a screenreader knows the validation has popped up.

<div role="alert" class="dijitTooltipContainer dijitTooltipContents"
dojoattachpoint="containerNode" wairole="alert">Invalid amount format.</div>

The following is what gets generated for the one line input tag:

<div widgetid="amount" value="NaN" role="presentation" class="dijit dijitReset dijitInlineTable dijitLeft dijitTextBox" id="widget_amount" dojoattachevent="onmouseenter:_onMouse,onmouseleave:_onMouse,onmousedown:_onMouse" wairole="presentation">
<div style="overflow: hidden;">
<div class="dijitReset dijitValidationIcon"><br></div>
<div class="dijitReset dijitValidationIconText">?</div>
<div class="dijitReset dijitInputField">
<input aria-invalid="false" aria-valuenow="NaN" value="" tabindex="0" id="amount" class="dijitReset"       dojoattachpoint="textbox,focusNode"
dojoattachevent="onfocus:_update,onkeyup:_onkeyup,onblur:_onMouse,onkeypress:_onKeyPress"
autocomplete="off" type="text">
<input name="amt" style="display: none;" value="" type="text">
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

Cablevision Hijacks DNS Error Pages

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I just noticed Cablevision’s Optimum Online service has begun hijacking DNS Error pages with, you guessed it, ad-sponsored results:

And apparently I’m not the only one that noticed: Justin Flood and Dan. As Justin Flood reported Cablevision has secretly adjusted their TOS to reflect this morally questionable service:

The preceding search results page is displayed to you as a result of the specific Domain Name Service (DNS) servers used by Optimum Online to look up domain names. If you misspell or mistype a web address, dead-end “no such name” errors can occur. However, the DNS servers used by Optimum Online are designed to eliminate dead-end “no such name” error pages you can encounter as you surf the web. By displaying the preceding search results page, users know that the web site they’ve attempted to navigate to does not exist, and are presented with suggested sites they may have been seeking. No software is installed on your computer for this search service to work.

Don’t they realize the dangers of replacing DNS errors with content pages? Aside from hurting the underlying stability of the Internet, there have been instances where hackers have used such tools against customers. I know Road Runner customers have had to deal with this for a couple months now, although at least they have an outlet to turn it off. I did find this broken disable button on the “About This Page” link:

Upon clicking it, you see a message “You have successfully opted out of the DNS Assistance service” although it appears to be broken as the service is still in effect. Defective by design perhaps? Rolling out morally ambiguous feature with a broken disable link? Sounds like the same people that send spam messages to me.

Update: From user comments it seems clear most (soon to be all?) ISPs are doing the same. I’m just surprised after the fiasco with VeriSign, this issue has been ignored so often in the IT community. I guess better to better to have a choice which ISP hijacks your URLs?

Another Update: Maybe I’m the only one who’s having trouble opting out. Or perhaps I need to restart my router. Either way its definitely not working on multiple browsers and computers.