Google AdSense demo professes support for Obama whilst dragging Hillary Clinton's name through the mud.. [More]

I just wanted to give a quick update explaining the lack of posts here for the past couple of weeks. Basically my trusty Compaq V3030CA laptop bit the dust about a week and a half ago, after a series of increasingly serious problems finally took their toll. After a bit of research, I discovered that there were several lines of HP and Compaq laptops that had an issue with the default BIOS, and HP was offering a "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" that essentially offers an extension of the manufacturers warranty.

It turns out that the default BIOS for these particular laptops were configured to turn on the case fan when the processer (an AMD Turion x64 in my case) reached a temperature of 55° Celsius; a perfectly acceptable temperature for that chip. Unfortunately the rest of the components in these laptops depended on that fan for cooling, and by the time the Turion chip reached 55° (which takes a while because the chip runs quite cool) the rest of the components in the machine were literally cooking themselves into premature failure...

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After letting Service Pack 1 install overnight, I logged in to my machine this morning looking forward to exploring some of the new features added to IIS 7.0. Unfortunately there was a small problem with one of the local web applications that I host from my machine.Simply put, the application refused to start in IIS, and each attempt to start it resulted in a modal pop-up informing me that the process was in use. I quick peek at the error log showed the following.... [More]

Since the IE development team releasing the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 for developers last week, I've had the chance to play around with this latest incarnation of the Internet Explorer family. While most of the focus has been on the improved support for web standards, which is immediately evident even in this early beta, there are many more new features and enhancements that are making IE8 look like its shaping up into a solid browser.. [More]

After having to deal with UNIX timestamps in an application I am currently developing, I realized that there's probably a few people out there who are wondering how to convert a UNIX timestamp into a useable System.DateTime in a .NET application. Well the good news is that it's quite simple. All a UNIX timestamp represents is the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 12:00:00 AM.... [More]

The worlds most appropriate and descriptive alt attribute as used within an article on one of the major newspapers in the UK.. [More]

It appears that within the past 2-3 days the popular social book-marking site del.icio.us has started blocking the major search engine spiders from crawling their site. This isn't a simple robots.txt exclusion, but rather a 404 response that is now being served based on the requesting User-Agent. This raises some questions as to the intentions of del.icio.us, and perhaps Yahoo! With Yahoo! recently integrating del.icio.us bookmarks into its search results this could an attempt to enhance the effectiveness of that new feature by preventing competing search engines from indexing content from del.icio.us.. [More]

Defining custom error pages is a convenient way to show users a friendly page when they encounter an HTTP error such as a 404 Not Found, or a 500 Server Error. Unfortunately ASP.NET handles custom error pages by responding with a 302 Temporary redirect to the error page that was defined. In this post I explain how to create a custom HttpModule that allows you to use custom error pages while preserving the original HTTP status code and avoiding the 302 redirect to the error page.. [More]

There has been a flurry of reactions to the IE8 development team's recent announcement about the new version-targeting meta declaration that will be introduced in Internet Explorer 8. In an article I posted on the Metamend SEO Blog yesterday, I looked at how this feature could bring IE8 and Web Standards a lot closer together and find the ideal balance between backwards-compatibility and interoperability. Many, however, did not share my optimism and saw this as another cop-out by Microsoft that would continue to hold back the web standards movement. Being that this is a topic that involves both Internet Explorer/Microsoft and web standards I naturally came across a lot of heated discussion. As I read more and more of this discussion I was once again reminded about how so many people take such an unreasonably hard stance on the issue of web standards and browser support. When it comes to a topic as complex as web standards and interoperability it is crucial that one considers all factors, both theoretical and practical, otherwise the discussion will inevitably end up taking a "your with us or against us" mentality, that does little to benefit anyone.. [More]