robbie » site

ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ

robbie — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:51:41 +0000

Admittedly 5 hours behind the curve on this one, but I just randomly stumbled on this on google trends. looks like someone’s got a new googlehack on the go - in the form of the clever upside down ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ. what is interesting is that this term doesn’t seem to have existed prior to today, so to get it into the top search spot in just a few hours is significant. a deliberate mass google search? would need an impressive bot-network to pull off the millions of hits required though (or a viral network of lots of people with time on their hands). perhaps a google trends vulnerability then? hmm. either way, having hit the top spot – i’d now expect blogs to punt the search frequency back up after this initial spike. which is perhaps the real hack…

wordpress ‘pretty’ permalinks

robbie — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:25:36 +0000

one thing about brinkster that cannot be criticised is their support. over the last 7 years i’ve had nothing but responsive - 24/7 – usually within minutes by email and now instantly via their live support. not only is it quick, its also technically knowledgeable – even at the first line. when there are issues, they get escalated very quickly to technical specialists who, in my experience, sort things out there and then. having wasted a good hour searching for how to make wordpress permalinks pretty on brinkster’s IIS, i asked them the question. you cant…

Hello, For security reasons on iis we do not install a url re – write engine.

Thank you

Really? Ah, that’d be why then.

new site

robbie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:30:56 +0000

well now, first post in almost 5 years – and no, I’m not between contracts! I’ve just finished migrating the both the company site and my blog over to use Expression and Wordpress respectively. Previously, I’d hand-crafted both myself, which partly explains why I’d only ever update/blog on those rare occasions I had the time. in a previous post i complained about lack of standards compliance in tools, and that was the primary why (in 2001) I chose to do it myself. Luckily things have moved on since then, and I’m impressed by Expression which is a perfectly nice little tool that permits full control over the output. indeed it sells itself on its standards support and, as it’s available via msdn subscription, i thought I’d give it a try. Remarkably, it generates output identical to that previously, but provides simplified management via templates and master pages. i use a single .dht (dynamic html template) in which one defines static content (which applies to all pages associated with the template) and then those areas where each instance page can override template content. it works with .aspx also, meaning dynamic and static content can share the same html basis, without recourse to using master pages just for textual layout. clearly designed for non-programmers - it’s a doddle to use.

As for Wordpress, my choice was admittedly made for me by my hosting provider, who support it, but it seems perfectly adequate after a days use. It imported the rss output from my old handcrafted blog without any problem, and I’m sure I could style the output to closely match the look and feel of my old blog and current company site. if I had the time and inclination. but hopefully i’ll have time to blog, rather than write xhtml and css in future though…

bandwidth

robbie — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 11:59:59 +0000

thanks to google and recent newsgroup posts, the hits on this site have gone through the roof over the past week, using more bandwidth in a day than was previously used in a month. so to conserve that expensive resource i’ve consolidated the site a bit and zipped up all stray documents. in an uncharacteristic act of madness, I also removed the old files, which will mean some broken external links (doh!).

log parser

robbie — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 11:59:59 +0000

as is not uncommon, my ISP uses load balanced web servers, which can make log file analysis a bit of a pain. i prefer to use WebTrends, whose fascist licensing policy would mean purchasing the most expensive edition plus extra licenses for each load balanced server whose log files i want to report on. i dont think so.

enter the excellent Log Parser 2 which is also part of the IIS-6 SDK. it’s a simple command line util that can parse, query and convert web log files using SQL syntax, and it can also consolidate multiple server logs into a file that webtrends will happily consume without insisting on extra cash.

logparser "SELECT * FROM d:logs*.log TO d:logsall.log ORDER BY date, time ASC" -i:IISW3C -o:W3C

this takes all my current extended IIS logs, consolidates the entries in date time order (otherwise webtrends can become petulant) and produces a single log file in W3C format. sweet. as an aside in a previous post i’d estimated that the site should view as intended in over 96% over broswers. interestingly, based on site stats, the actual figure exceeds 99%.

server side smtp

robbie — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 11:59:59 +0000

Finally got round to updating all client ‘mailto’ links to a server side C# SMTP implementation. though pretty basic it works well enough, despite my ISP’s constant tinkering with the web servers config.

privacy statement and p3p

robbie — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 11:59:59 +0000

I finally made the site P3P compliant, and it was a bit of a hassle:

i created an html privacy page, handcrafted the required xml policy reference and policy files and added the meta element to them on all my pages. it would validate okay, but IE peristed on blocking some files and issuing a privacy report warning.

the only thing i hadn’t done was to implement the ‘compact’ http header, which is optional in terms of P3P, so I supposed IE must be looking for that. but then, i thought, that couldnt be right – hosted static sites – of which there are more than a few – couldnt possibly generate that header (without access to the web server’s admin), and if IE was basing its checks on that, then…

well, wouldnt be the first time a browser vendor ‘interpreted’ the standard for their own commericial ends; and the msdn doco says, “Internet Explorer 6 uses these compact policies to filter cookies based on a user’s privacy preferences“.

hmmm. without either a header, a meta element, or a ‘well known location’ – /w3c/p3p.xml – (all of which are optional in the spec) there’s no way for a user agent to determine the presence of a P3P policy or not. and that’s one of the problems i have with the spec – to be be successfully implemented, to enable the implementation of the spec, specific requirements surely have to be placed on user agents, and here it falls downs. for the most part the P3P spec is only five things: an xml locator file, the xml policy file, a ‘well-known location’ for the previous two, an http header extension (the so called ‘compact policy’), or an xhtml extension (e.g. meta element). the msdn link above suggests that the first four are required to stop IE blocking and issuing a privacy report warning.

however, after some experimenting setting cookies both with and without the header, it turns out i hadn’t added the optional tag in my policy reference file, and that’s what IE was really looking for. if only the doco had been clearer and right…

browser test results

robbie — Thu, 03 Jul 2003 11:59:59 +0000

After some discussion in the bar last night over my use of CSS-2 for positioning and strict standards compliance in this site, I’m putting up the results of the browser tests…

Summary of Results

The site displays well at 800×600 (even better at higher resolutions) in all major browsers on all major platforms, the site degrades gracefully in older broswers with loss of presentation, but not content. Based on current browser stats, this site should display as it is intended in over 96% of current browsers. Testing was conducted online using the excellent BrowserCam. Tests were performed using the following configurations:

Internet Explorer 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 on Windows 2000
Netscape Navigator 4.78, 4.8, 6.2 and 7.0 on Windows 2000, Macintosh, Linux
Opera 6.0 on Windows 2000 and Macintosh
Mozilla 1.3 on Windows 2000 and Linux
AOL 7.0 on Windows 2000

open for business

robbie — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 11:59:59 +0000

Well, at long last I’ve finally got round to getting this properly up and running. Its taken a while, primarily thanks to too many other things happening, rather than effort, but still has a way to go. Today I put together the new site structure, layout and initial content.

I intend to put here certification resources, technical papers, code samples and the like – there’s not a great deal at the moment, but it’s a start…