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Vista Sucks - a Microsoft-Platform Developer Speaks

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2007, March 14 - 10:54pm — Webmaster Tips

ASPnetresources.com has a couple of articles about how "Vista Sucks".

I think that it's interesting when a developer on Microsoft platforms like ASP.NET comes out and says things like:

"This is about the best way to describe my experience with Vista: it simply sucks!"


Windows Clip Art - The BSOD

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2007, February 24 - 6:59pm — Webmaster Tips

I found some old clip art that I made with Inkscape after a bad experience where Windows would give me the Blue Screen of Death every time I shut my laptop down.

The Windows Blue Screen of Death clip art is below. I am releasing these masterworks into the public domain, so feel free to post them on your Web sites. A link back to this page would be appreciated, but is not necessary.


Microsoft Windows Vista: Bad Vista

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2007, February 10 - 8:59pm — Webmaster Tips

I found a great site today called Bad Vista. The purpose of Bad Vista is to stop Vista adoption by promoting free software.

Microsoft Windows Vista's fine print apparently severely reduces the control people have over their computers:

Vista's legal fine print includes extensive provisions granting Microsoft the right to regularly check the legitimacy of the software and holds the prospect of deleting certain programs without the user's knowledge. During the installation process, users "activate" Vista by associating it with a particular computer or device and transmitting certain hardware information directly to Microsoft.


How to Install Yahoo Messenger Without Admin Access

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2007, February 5 - 8:51pm — Webmaster Tips

Many people arrive at this site looking for information on how to install software without admin access, especially Yahoo messenger. I'm assuming that the visitors are using Windows — so here is the answer:


Ruby and Cygwin

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2007, January 27 - 12:44am — Webmaster Tips

I was using Cygwin for a script that incorporated a Ruby one-liner in it. I was having trouble because I kept getting the error message No such file to load -- ubygems (LoadError).

The answer to the Ruby/Cygwin problem is here.


Crapware at the Mall

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2007, January 21 - 8:54pm — Webmaster Tips

I went to the mall today to find a sturdier laptop bag. I've had my current laptop bag for fewer than three months and it's already falling apart.

I couldn't find a decent laptop bag, so I took a walk through the software section of the store. Here are some photos, taken with my cell phone:


Extracting and Reconstructing URLs from an IIS Log

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2007, January 14 - 3:27pm — Webmaster Tips

IIS logs are often configured to output the filename in one column and the query string in the following column. An example of a line from an IIS log is shown below, with a highlighted filename and query string:

2006-10-19 00:22:41 66.249.65.99 - nnn.nnn.nn.nnn 80 GET /products.aspx item=12345 404 0 Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html) - -

Unfortunately, the default settings on IIS do not seem to output the actual full URLs requested. It may be useful to get a list of URLs that were accessed by Google in order to process them further.

The following one-liner does the following:

  1. greps a log file that contains only hits from search engines for 404 errors. This will give a list of every "404 Not Found" page that search engines are visiting.
  2. It then uses the cut command to extract columns 8 and 9 — in this case, the page (/products.aspx) and the query string (item=12345).
  3. Then it uses awk to print out http://www.example.com/[filename]?[query string]
  4. Because not every requested page has a query string, sed can be used to remove the ?- that will be found on hits that don't have a query string

(NOTE: I've used backslashes to escape the end of the line — the following is a one-liner, but because of this Web page's formatting, I'm displaying it on multiple lines.)

grep [[:space:]]404[[:space:]] se_access.txt | \
cut -d' ' -f8,9 | \
awk '{ print "http://www.example.com"$1"?"$2}' | \
sed 's/\?-//g' > 404_errors.txt

The final result is a file named 404_errors.txt that contains a list of URLs that are being requested on a site by search engines that don't exist. The example above would take the following line from an IIS log:

2006-10-19 00:22:41 66.249.65.99 - nnn.nnn.nn.nnn 80 GET /products.aspx item=12345 404 0 Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html) - -

and convert it to the following line:

http://www.example.com/products.aspx?item=12345

A list of URLs that send 404s is very useful for debugging sites. The list of URLs can be processed further as needed.

Ten Things I Hate About Windows

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2006, December 29 - 8:59pm — Webmaster Tips

Some people think that Microsoft Windows is easy to use. After using Linux for a couple of years, I find Windows XP to be outdated and clunky. Here are 10 things that I hate about Windows. They are in no particular order — I dislike them all. I have more than 10, but to keep this post short I'm limiting it to 10. Feel free to add more in the comments.


Microsoft Hosting vs. Linux Hosting

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2006, December 21 - 9:30am — Webmaster Tips

A common question when starting in web design is, "should I use Linux hosting or Microsoft hosting?"

If you don't already have a preference, I recommend using Linux-based hosting. (For example, Site5 Web hosting.)

Linux hosting, and in particular the Apache server, is the most common setup that you will encounter when working on web sites, especially when starting out. The configuration is often referred to as LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The "P" also sometimes refers to Perl or Python.


Free Software for Windows

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2006, September 27 - 12:36pm — Webmaster Tips

If you are a Microsoft Windows user, check out a web site called OpenSourceWindows.org. It has a great list of many free programs that you can download.

There are free programs for Web browsing, instant messenging, email, rss, podcasting, filesharing, media playing, word processing, photo editing, ftp, personal finance, 3D graphics creation, games, and much more.

An even more comprehensive list of Free open source software for Windows can be found at osswin.sourceforge.net.

Also check out the Best 46 Free Utilities web page for more free software.


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