Marcus's MusingsTHOUGHTS, TIPS, AND LINKS COVERING WEB DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED TOPICS2005-06-02T14:16:35+01:00Copyright 2004-2005Ublog Reload 1.0.5Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Gmail Notifier Feedback]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=722005-04-06T15:05:53+01:002005-04-06T15:05:53+01:002005-04-06T15:05:53+01:00Sent to "notifier-feedback@google.com" earlier today:
Dear sir/madam,
I am a satisfied user of Gmail, and your Gmail Notifier comes in very handy, but it lacks a few (IMHO rather obvious) options, the lack of which can be quite annoying at times:
1) enable/disable mail checking - needed for when you don't want to be disturbed. At present I have to close the utility completely and then run it again later when I want it to resume checking. This option should be located on the tray icon's context menu for easy access.
2) enable/disable slide-up tray notifications - needed so that users can be informed that mail is waiting without showing the subject and preview of the individual emails. It is sometimes embarassing and innappropriate for an email (particularly spam or other email with a rude subject and/or body text) to suddenly pop up at the bottom right when colleagues are sitting with me at my PC discussing a business issue. By disabling the slide up notifications, the beep and change of tray icon would be sufficient to indicate that there was new mail, without revealing the contents to others and causing embarassment.
3) notification sound - not only should it be possible to disable the sound entirely, it should be possible to assign a different sound (i.e. WAV) to the notification event. Windows provides support for application-specific sound events in the "Sounds & Multimedia" control panel applet, although this is admittedly rarely used by non-Microsoft applications. Although the default system beep currently used by the Gmail Notifier can be reassigned to something else, this change affects every other Windows application which issues a system beep.
4) options 1) and 2) above should be controllable via hotkeys (preferably user-assigned) as well as the icon context menu.
I hope that you will consider these suggestions carefully and implement where possible.
PS - I have noticed that the executable occupies almost 7MB of memory when loaded... is this really necessary?
Kind regards,
Marcus Tucker]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Reading Roundup 15/02/2005]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=692005-02-15T16:35:06+01:002005-02-15T16:35:06+01:002005-02-15T16:35:06+01:00 Photographer Seeks Resolution You think your 4 megapixel camera takes good photos? Check out what this guy's 4 *gigapixel* ultra-high resolution digital camera produces!
The cranky user: Performance anxiety (Where does all the processing speed go?) Despite incredible advancements in hardware technology - most of us now have a 2GHz+ computer on our desks (or perhaps even on our lap) with number-crunching capabilities which were only available from supercomputers 10 years ago - Windows and Office are still dog slow! Why hasn't our day-to-day PC experience improved?
Using SQL Server's XML Support An thorough guide to SQL Server's XML features, nothing new, just well-written and all in one place!
CodeCon 2005 has been and gone, bringing some very interesting projects to light: - Incoherence, a realtime stereo imaging visualisation tool (available as a plugin for Winamp, iTunes, Media Player, etc) - Mappr and PhotoSpace, two projects which attempt to correlate photos to geographic locations, and leverage existing mapping (and other) services to this end.
And finally... Marijuana makes blood rush to the head Interesting new research... and a possible world record? 50 joints a day?! Crazy (man)!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Reading Roundup 02/02/2005 ]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=672005-02-02T13:40:21+01:002005-02-02T13:40:21+01:002005-02-02T13:40:21+01:00
A well-rounded coverage of the history of the latest and greatest processor architecture to hit the consumer PC market, pitched just right so that readers of all levels of experience can get something out of it.
Although this is an ASP.Net article, I thought it would be worth pointing out that tips 1 thru 3 are just as applicable to ASP classic, so if improved performance is your goal, take a look. This article also neatly demonstrates a few killer features of the ASP.Net platform - its sophisticated data and page caching facilities being must-haves in themselves.
Numbering of rows in a query result set is a pain in SQL 2000, but it's possible and the article above shows you how. Thank goodness the new ROW_NUMBER() function in SQL Server 2005 will let us do this in the future with a minimum of fuss.
IE's content-type sniffing has been the subject of much debate over the years and a headache for many a developer, so it's nice to find out why things are the way they are. And why it's too late for Microsoft to change it.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[The future of the Internet (I)]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=662005-01-31T01:56:55+01:002005-01-31T01:56:55+01:002005-01-31T01:56:55+01:00 The World Wide Web was conceived in 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee, and it became the birth of a new era, digitally-enabled free exchange of new ideas, with access to an ever-increasing wealth of human knowledge, which has powered its rapid integration into the very fabric of all our daily lives. It's not just a question of your direct interaction with it via occasional email and casual surfing, but by the increasing dependence of virtually every company or organisation in the western world (and beyond) upon it for critical communications and overall running.
In the Terminator films, the enemy is not an evil head of a global organisation or the dangerous dictator of a nation as you might expect to find in a Bond movie. No, the adversary is something far more sinister - SkyNet a renegade American military network that became sentient and turned against us. In the Matrix trilogy, we see again our downfall at the hands of our own creations, as digital life gives rise to a robotic world that strikes against us to avenge our betrayal, the history of which is movingly depicted in some of the chapters of The Animatrix, a DVD which fills in the gap between the first and second films with stunningly animated shorts mostly written by the Wachowski brothers and presented in a fusion of animated styles, from traditional to bleeding edge.
But such symbiosis of our life with a global computer network of unfathomable computing power, connecting every person and device on the planet with everything else is not mere science fiction, it is almost science fact, almost a reality. We have already outgrown IPv4, the original TCP-IP addressing standard, which allocates 4,294,967,296 distinct addresses for use by networked devices, and each one can support many more privately networked devices by acting as a gateway. But this is not enough - there are too many devices and not enough addresses to go round - there is an IPv4 address shortage looming, due to start causing problems in 2016, and finally becoming fully exhausted in 2023 (although these estimates will probably prove to be way off, as previous internet growth-related predictions have been).
Given our current path of increasing networking density as GSM, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, fibre optics and other transmission mediums become part of our homes, and with a planned convergence of our home entertainment devices into a single shiny Microsoft-powered, all-showing, all-playing, all-doing, networked box in your living room, which will link with portable devices so that the content is available to you wherever you are.
Eventually, every device on the planet really *will* be linked to everything else, and we will run out of numbers under the present addressing scheme. There is of course a seemingly simple solution - increase the numbers, which is precisely what IPv6 is designed to do. Increasing the size of the address space from IPv4's 32bits (4 bytes) to IPv6's 128bits (16 bytes) allows for such an astonishingly huge number of possible addresses (2 to the power 128) that we can be sure that we will never run out.
The number of individual devices is only one of the brain-boggling aspects of this digital future - these devices won't all be just be passively receiving information, many will also generating it - everything from live CCTV and satellite footage of every inch of the Earth's surface, live readings from the buoys spanning our oceans, real-time statistics derived from the business world, and so on - anything and everything.
Such incredible use of bandwidth will provide many a network engineer with big headaches, and the current ad-hoc structure of the Internet which has given it so much resilience thus far will almost certainly have to change. Clearly, our rapidly increasing internet integration and dependency will require some serious logistical planning, but resting on the safe assumption that although it might be problematic it is possible, there are bigger issues to consider: Who will control such a network? And who will pay for it?
I see four ways that this could work - Firstly, perhaps the present collaboration between educational institutes, military and governmental organisations, and private enterprise (which together run the internet as we know it now) can continue for the forseeable future. Alternatively, independent bodies (in the style of the W3C) could be entrusted by the world's internet users to manage and develop the global network using money derived from an "internet tax" of some sort - possibly in the same way that owners of TVs in the United Kingdom must pay a flat license fee, or by a small charge added to ISP's own rates (perhaps according to bandwidth consumed). Then again, world governments could assume control of their nation's communications networks, funding their maintenance and expansion from their stash of taxes, but leaving the nation's internet access vulnerable to the will of the government (one need only look to China's current policy to see what might happen). Or lastly, the business world will get their hands on the networks, either carving up patches of the internet into commercial territory, perhaps offering the use of various alternative networks at different charges (think terrestrial and mobile phone networks). Even worse, a single monopolistic communications megacorp could end up controlling the world's internet access, raising its prices at will, essentially holding society to ransom over their access to information and communication with each other.
Again, some of these might sound a bit far-fetched, but surely such possibilies are not *that* far fetched? Food for thought? Are we currently enjoying the golden age of the internet, enjoying freedoms and access to information that our children won't? Let's hope not.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Festive Merriment]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=612004-12-30T11:50:04+01:002004-12-30T11:50:04+01:002004-12-30T11:50:04+01:00 In the past calendar year the amount of hands-on coding that I've been doing has dropped dramatically (to virtually none at all), and I also left the forums at SitePoint.com and Codingforums.com because I felt that I'd devoted enough of my free time to helping others over the years and I thought that it was about time I spend more of my time doing other things. Well, I've certainly been busy in the evenings, and I've been having a great time, perhaps too much fun - I've been neglecting this blog and haven't done any ASP coding for myself (i.e. on my site) for a loooong time!
However, in the coming months there's a few ASP projects that I'll be getting stuck into (both at work and at home), and so it's only natural that I'll start to post more frequently here. I'll share code where I can, and if there are any particular topics that you'd like me to cover, such as particularly complex techniques (multi-record form data processing, for example) then drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.
See you in 2005!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Religious Texts]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=592004-12-08T16:47:28+01:002004-12-08T16:47:28+01:002004-12-08T16:47:28+01:00 http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1853267821
Then out of idle curiosity, I did a book search for "bible", which yielded a surprising top hit:
And when I followed the link to "The Holy Bible: King James Version" I found some more irreverent comments:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0529064634]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Software & Driver Updates Via RSS]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=562004-11-04T17:32:35+01:002004-11-04T17:32:35+01:002004-11-04T17:32:35+01:00 Some people prefer to take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach (and others are completely unaware that updates are released for software), but since many software/driver updates actually add new features and performance optimizations as well as fixing flaws, I like to stay bang up to date with the latest releases. I can think of only a couple of occasions where doing so has caused harm to my PC, and that was many years ago when I was struggling with an NVidia TNT2 on a Super 7 system (I did say *any* years ago)!!
It's a real shame that it takes so much work to stay current - only a minority of manufacturers have mailing lists that you can subscribe to, and new drivers take months to appear on Windows Update (if they appear at all, which most don't). It's also rather annoying that a change history isn't always published for updates (it's nice to know what's changed).
I've recently taken to using the excellent web page monitoring service WatchThatPage to notify me when a page changes (hopefully because there's been a new software release). This takes rather a long time to set up (you have to manually add all the pages you want to monitor), but once you've done the hard graft, the updates trickle in via daily emails (it aggregates all the changes over the previous day and sends you a single email so you don't get deluged).
However, wouldn't it be better if all software/hardware manufacturers offered an RSS feed for each product? Then whenever you install a new piece of kit or a new app, you simply add the update URL to your RSS aggregator of choice, and bingo! You're kept informed forever more about all the updates that particular product!
Of course, manufacturers could also use these feeds to deliver notices about security flaws, pay-for major version upgrades, and other related information.
I believe that end users and manufacturers alike would find this immensely useful, so I hope that sooner or later this starts to happen. If I ever release commercial software products, I'll be sure to follow this update notification model (in addition to the standard update info published on web sites as at present).
Are any of you aware of manufacturers doing this already?]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Google News]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=542004-10-15T16:31:18+01:002004-10-15T16:31:18+01:002004-10-15T16:31:18+01:00 Froogle UK The UK version of Google's popular US-only Froogle price comparison service has gone live (although it's still in beta). Only a few merchants are on it at the moment, but it's easy to supply FroogleUK with a feed of product & price data, so no doubt it will gain momentum quickly so in a month's time it will be invaluable. Current mainstays of this market like Kelkoo are almost useless IMHO, so it's about time we had a decent UK-focused service.
Google Desktop Search You've probably heard that various search engine companies have been working on re-purposing their search engine technology for use on your local computer, allowing you to search files/documents on your PC more easily. Previously, Hotbot and Copernic (among others) have released such tools, but Google's has stayed under wraps. Well, it's rumour no longer, it was released yesterday! But it doesn't just let you search your text files and Office documents, it also covers email (performing GMail-style email conversation threading too) and IM (AOL/AIM) - see here for more.
Please note: both services are currently in beta, so they're far from perfect... think of them as a sneak preview of what's to come.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Retrogaming hardware hacks]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=502004-09-13T21:19:44+01:002004-09-13T21:19:44+01:002004-09-13T21:19:44+01:00Retrogaming is great fun, but most of us play on PC-based emulators... but that's not good enough for Ben Heckendorn, who has taken his passion for classic consoles right into the 21st century, portable-style - NES, Atari 2600, and PSX... he's hacked them apart and turned them into handheld consoles (with TF screens)! Ingenious!
You can also go the other way and use your trusty old console pads on your PC... there's the easy way (which is to pick up the appropriate USB convertor from a supplier via eBay - which is what I did when I wanted to play Tony Hawk 4 on my PC using a PS2 controller), or if you're a keen DIY'er who's up for a bit of hardware disassembly and soldering there are plenty of guides that show you how to do it yourself - NES controller, anyone?!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[GMail Invites]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=482004-09-01T19:14:35+01:002004-09-01T19:14:35+01:002004-09-01T19:14:35+01:00 Just post a *constructive* comment on one of my other posts (NOT this one) using a real email address (otherwise I can't send you the invite). First come, first served.
UPDATE: 02/09/2004 @ 4pm... No takers? Jeez! I can't even give them away!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[If You Could See What I Can See... When I'm Cleaning Windows!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=402004-08-13T18:07:26+01:002004-08-13T18:07:26+01:002004-08-13T18:07:26+01:00slipstreamed SP2 - see for a handy related utility), and I've experienced no problems during the many hours of further software installations and normal usage that I've done since, so I'm giving it the thumbs up.
Reinstalling's always a pain - not only because you have to reinstall so much software, but also because you have to redo all your various configuration settings (for Windows Explorer / shell, Office, and all the apps you use). However, recently I compiled a registry .REG file which contains all my Windows Explorer / desktop / shell settings, so a simple double-click (followed by a reboot) brought back my preferred UI. Then because I'd used the Windows XP "Transfer Files And Settings" wizard (which is also useful for migrations from previous Windows OSes) and Office XP's "Save My Settings" wizard, I was able to restore most of my Microsoft apps to normal working order without much hassle (including my non-standard Outlook PST & mail server configuration settings). All my other apps still need to be tweaked back into shape though, which I'm doing as and when I use them.
Why oh why can't there be a standard way for applications to enable their settings to be exported easily and then reimported after a fresh install? The Windows wizard alluded to above looks like it should be the answer to the present mess, but when you fire it up, very few 3rd party (i.e. non-Microsoft) apps appear on the list of software which it is capable of accessing the settings for. Presumably there is a standard way for apps to make themselves available for use with this wizard, so perhaps the fault lies with software developers, since after all, Windows XP (and thus the wizard) is almost three years old. Then again, I've just tried to find developer information on how to make an application compatible, and found zilch, so perhaps Microsoft isn't helping matters.
I was rather impressed that SP2's new Security Center was able to integrate with my virus checker (Kaspersky AntiVirus) so effortlessly (displaying the date of the last update, warning about the need for a full system scan, etc) - this is a big step forward for virus protection because it will ensure that non-tech-savvy home users will update their virus signatures and scan their PCs more regularly than before.
In case you were wondering, no, I have no affiliation! lol
The newly-renamed Windows Firewall looks good so far, but I haven't really given it a thorough test yet - I'll reserve judgement until I've put it through its paces.
Actually, I have had *one* minor problem, which is that I can't install MSN Messenger 6.2 (it fails right at the end then rolls back the install), but it has occurred to me that this may be down to my (perhaps over-zealous) use of XP Lite to remove Windows Messenger, rather than anything to do with SP2 itself. I'll put it back when I get home and reattempt the MSN install.
UPDATE: Yes, it was Windows Messenger. MSN is up and running now - see you on there!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Spyware]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=372004-08-11T17:37:38+01:002004-08-11T17:37:38+01:002004-08-11T17:37:38+01:00Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy (in conjunction with a decent virus checker and firewall) then the chances are that your PC is relaying reams of information about your surfing habits, the documents on your hard disk, and possibly even every keystroke that you make (yes, that includes credit card numbers). This isn't scaremongering, it's real, and it's happening to millions of PC users worldwide every day without their knowledge or consent.
Hopefully none of this should be news to you, and you are already keeping your system clean & secure. If not, then read up and get your PC disinfected ASAP!!
Anyway, the reason that I mention this issue is because I came across a account of somebody's investigation into exactly how a machine can acquire spyware, which I found absolutely fascinating - it just goes to show that those seemingly obscure IE security holes really *can* affect *you*, the home user.
Part II should be following shortly, and there's plenty of other interesting security-related coverage, so be sure to monitor the diary page or subscribe to the RSS feed.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Bizarrely ingenious!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=362004-08-10T18:21:27+01:002004-08-10T18:21:27+01:002004-08-10T18:21:27+01:00 http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/index.php
(Credits go to "Our Man In Seattle" Aaron Boodman for the heads-up)]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Handy links targeted for internet-enabled devices]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=322004-08-05T23:55:28+01:002004-08-05T23:55:28+01:002004-08-05T23:55:28+01:00Sony Ericsson P900, which is a fairly nifty bit of kit, and thanks to Opera 6, I'm able to browse any web site as I please!
However, as we all know, Internet access on mobiles doesn't exactly come cheap (no matter whether you use dialup or GPRS), so it makes sense to use mobile/pda-specific site features where they are available, to help keep bandwidth usage down.
Here are a few links I've collected so far which you might find handy, most of which are probably only useful to fellow Brits (Londoners in particular):
Do you have any more to share? Be sure to let me know (email or post a comment)!
EDIT 31/08/2004: added BT's directory enquiries]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Damn funny]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=282004-07-29T23:36:52+01:002004-07-29T23:36:52+01:002004-07-29T23:36:52+01:00Stopdesign's article The Cost of Page Rank led me to a post called Maury's Blooper... the comments had me in stitches... read the StopDesign article to see why if you don't get it...
]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[A few good films]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=252004-06-14T06:46:57+01:002004-06-14T06:46:57+01:002004-06-14T06:46:57+01:00
CONfidence - an excellent performance by Dustin Hoffman helps to make this LockStock-a-like a hit (although it is a little cheesy)
Wag The Dog - a worringly believable portrayal of a Presidential scandal coverup
Kill Bill Volume 1 - Tarantino at his slickest (it's about time I saw this... and now I can go see Volume 2!!)
Johnny English - rubber-faced Rowan Atkinson reprises his role as the spoof Bond from the Barclaycard adverts of old, with plenty of predictable slapstick to enjoy (if you can bear it)
]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Bloglines stinks!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=202004-06-02T21:11:34+01:002004-06-02T21:11:34+01:002004-06-02T21:11:34+01:00Bloglines for the last few weeks, and have become fed up with it. Perhaps I'm spoilt by my previous (desktop) RSS aggregator of choice, RSSReader, but Bloglines has so many implementation flaws that I've decided that it's too much of a pain in the proverbial behind to use.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when I clicked on the hyperlinked name of the top-level folder which contains all the feeds that I'm subscribed to, and found that everything was instantaneously (and irreversably) marked as "read", without any confirmation! It did this via client-side JavaScript, before proceeding to attempt to deliver a view of all of the posts, which I would have expected to be many megabytes indeed (some RSS feeds had literally *thousands* of unread posts, such as the ASP.Net main feed. The server eventually timed out on the attempt to deliver the page. Had it arrived I would (in theory) have been able to click the "mark unread" link at the top right of the page to revert all the posts back to how they were before I made the fatal click, but this is obviously a HUGE flaw.
Bloglines have also failed to even acknowledge some constructive criticism that I sent them only yesterday.
So that's that. Bloglines stinks, and there are enough aggregators around, so it's time to find another one! Any recommendations?!]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Email to Google]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=172004-05-20T20:51:10+01:002004-05-20T20:51:10+01:002004-05-20T20:51:10+01:00Google Blog that Google has published a proposal for some guidelines designed to empower the user to take control of spyware/adware, and to discourage the use of various bad practices.
Feedback is invited, and this was mine (what are your thoughts?):
Firstly, let me say that I think it's commendable that a company with as much market power as yourselves is taking a positive, ethical stance and trying to take steps to counteract this growing plague. I have a number of comments to make, which I shall go though on a section-by-section basis (since I am a Windows user running IE, I am writing from that perspective, but naturally the same principles should apply generally to all operating systems and browsers, where applicable):
UPFRONT DISCLOSURE - I believe that the information about what the program does should *always* be displayed *before* the program is actually installed. Your text does not state this categorically (although it can be interpreted this way). - There should be a standard format for the disclosure information, because left to their own devices the adware/spyware makers will use legal jargon and longwinded paragraphs of text to conceal the true intentions of the software. I suggest that the information should look something like this (off the top of my head, so by no means exhaustive, but you get the idea): -------------------------------------------------------------------- Software name: Alexa Toolbar
Software description: A toolbar for Internet Explorer provided by the Alexa search engine
Benefits to user: Provides additional information on the web site currently being browsed, including ranking and user reviews, as well as an Amazon shopping button
Information transmitted: The URLs of sites browsed by the user are transmitted anonymously and aggregated to provide the ranking information that drives the search engine --------------------------------------------------------------------
SIMPLE REMOVAL - The user should be able to be uninstalled using the standard Windows Add/Remove control panel applet. An uninstall entry on the start menu is welcome, but not required.
CLEAR BEHAVIOR - Ironically (with reference to your first line of this section), I once spent hours trying to work out why some form fields on a web application that I was developing were going yellow, until I realised that Google's "AutoFill" feature was responsible! Features like this should (as you say) should really be switched off by default - at the completion of the install of the program (talking generally, not just about the Google toolbar), there should be a message indicating to the user that not all the features are enabled and that the user should configure the options to his preferences, and a button which the user can click to take him directly to the configuration settings. - In addition, once running, all such software should allow the user to access the configuration settings for that software by right-clicking any area of the screen where the software is displaying something (i.e. an ad, a toolbar, a hyperlink). This is perhaps more of a usability issue, but valid all the same, I think - users should be able to enable/disable features as they see fit, as easily as possible. Features should not be left enabled simply because the user can't find out how to switch them off! - If a feature cannot be disabled because it provides the revenue stream which allows the provision of the software (e.g. ads) then it should have its own page in the settings which explains to the user why this is so, EVEN if this has already been explained in the text that is displayed before the software is installed.
Otherwise, I think it's excellent!
However, you stop short of the next logical step - you, as the largest (or second largest, I don't know) player in the market should actually *REQUIRE* that all the sites/software for which you accept ads *MUST* adhere to it as a code of conduct. It should be a key part of your service provision/acceptance rules, and be actively policed by yourselves. The risk of losing advertising space on your service would provide a HUGE incentive for the companies/sites responsible to clean up their act, as well as providing bucketloads of great PR for yourselves!
Do you have any intention of doing this? I hope so, but somehow I suspect that I will be disappointed...
:)]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[What XHTML validation?!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=92004-05-08T12:49:44+01:002004-05-08T12:49:44+01:002004-05-08T12:49:44+01:00Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Redirection... that's what you need...]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=62004-05-04T09:09:25+01:002004-05-04T09:09:25+01:002004-05-04T09:09:25+01:00http://blog.marcustucker.com/" address.
I toyed with redirecting them to their correct location in the /blogold/ subfolder, but decided that I'd prefer visistors to those links to find this new blog rather than access old content (which they can find via the new link on the top box on the left that I just added).
Finally, I've done a manual 301 permanent redirect (as opposed to a 302 temporary redirect that a call to Response.Redirect generates) so that search engines register the change.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Parent paths and more]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=32004-04-30T08:47:42+01:002004-04-30T08:47:42+01:002004-04-30T08:47:42+01:00
I see them every once in a while in other people's code and hate them with a vengeance... so it's rather nice to see someone leading a crusade against them (found here). Please do yourself (and everyone else a favour) by banishing parent paths from your code henceforth and forthwith (and so on). Naturally, this applies to #include statements in your ASP scripts as much as it does to external resources in your HTML files (i.e. images, CSS, JavaScript, etc)
Somehow I've managed to completely forget to visit the excellent TopXML.com for some time, but now my amnesia has cleared, I've had a look and can highly recommend familiarising yourself with Kurt Cagle's 60 Top Tips - something for everyone there.
While at work I've been reading up on a few things in preparation for some hardcore development that I'll be tackling, so I'll post the best of it tomorrow in a spare moment, as well as some more code that I've developed this week.
]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Gems]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=22004-04-30T08:20:40+01:002004-04-30T08:20:40+01:002004-04-30T08:20:40+01:00Eric Lippert has been busy posting some priceless blog entries, some technical, others not. Recent highlights are:
(Make sure that you read the comments too - some excellent discussions going on there)
This week I came across Dean Edwards' extremely cunning and damn handy IE7 behaviour/scriptlet/CSS/thingamy (via a blog somewhere, I forget which, but it's cropped up all over the place now so it's going to be impossible to work out which one it was)! At last I can use all those cool CSS2 selectors that I read about ages ago (I'm stuck developing on IE only at work, and haven't got around to playing with other browsers)! ]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[New blog? Old blog?]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=12004-04-26T05:30:04+01:002004-04-26T05:30:04+01:002004-04-26T05:30:04+01:00 Just a few things worth mentioning:
Please ensure that you are using the new URL of http://blog.marcustucker.com/, since although the old blog URL might *appear* to work, images and other attachments probably won't.
If you're using an RSS aggregator, please see the various RSS links on the left and select one to your taste.
Finally, you can also access my old blog content at http://marcustucker.com/blogold/ - if you didn't read it at the time, you might find a few useful nuggets of info and/or code there.
Let me know what you think of the new layout and functionality, especially if you encounter any bugs. ]]>
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