jfw.id.au

I get the Australian IT ‘ping’ email and I have to comment on a story in today’s issue. Apparently KinderStart are suing Google for “downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning”. Now I’m not very up to date with this whole search engine thing, but I’m pretty confident that you actually have to have content on your site to get ranked.

I mean seriously, correct me if I’m wrong, but having a shitpile of links to other sites that you frame with your own header does not really consititute an information rich site. If anything that looks more like an attempted set of doorway pages to me, and we all know that this is frowned upon. Don’t we?

Obviously the smart people at KinderStart.com don’t understand this. Obviously Google is exacting some form of baseless punishment on the wonderful KinderStart.com site and they should be brought to justice for this heinous crime. The answer is obvious to anyone in the Litigious States of America, sue them!
Just a hint here folks, if you want good search rankings it pays to have good content.

For anyone that is interested, the Australian IT story can be found here.

I’ve been struggling with a compilation error for a few days trying to compile PHP on a new server. The error I had been getting was ” undefined reference to `assertionfailed’” and I had not had much luck tracking down an answer.

Until just now. I found this post on a mailing list that said PHP hasn’t upgraded their module for the 2.2 libcyrus. The message was from back in May 2003, but it was in a thread regarding a similar problem to mine. I figured I’d give it a go as there wasn’t really anything to lose if it didnt work. And just because I was compiling PHP linked to an older version of Cyrus-IMAP didnt mean that I couldn’t use the updated version for the IMAP server.

I downloaded cyrus-imap-2.1.18 and installed it to a different location to where I have my main Cyrus-IMAP install. Then adjusted my PHP configure line to point to that version. Reran configure for php with my options and then compiled it. It all compiled and installed cleanly.

I still find it a little annoying that to compile a PHP release that is only 1 month old with IMAP support I need to revert to a version of Cyrus-IMAP that is over a year old. There have been 9 releases ahead of the one that I needed to use. I mean come on guys, how long is it going to take before PHP is upgraded to a newer version of Cyrus-IMAP??

I’ve recently starting working in VS.NET 2005 for some development that I am doing for a client.  This is the first time that I have undertaken anything using the 2.0 Framework and the updated IDE.  Having done a fair amount of development in VS.NET 2003 I have been using nDoc quite a bit.  I was quite dismayed to learn that nDoc was not compatible with the 2.0 Framework.

A little digging lead me to Jonas Lagerblad’s post about a improvements he has made to a port of nDoc 1.3.1 for .Net 2.0.  I am about to install this as it will give me the docs that I need for now, but I would be more comfortable having a complete version.  As yet I’m not doing anything that is not covered by this version, but that may change soon as I become more comforatble in the 2.0 Framework.

I was googling a little more about this to find feedback from others that have used this version and came across a nice little post on  Fabrice’s weblog. Someone representing themselves as the “main developer of NDoc 1.3 and the titular admin of the project” indicated that a complete rewrite has been undertaken for the 2.0 Framework and that the new version is in alpha testing at the moment.  Hopefully it won’t be too long until the new version is available.

This is just a mini rant about Visual Studio .Net 2003 and it’s inability to be concise and clean when creating HTML and CSS.

It understands the clean shorthand notation as follows

padding:6px 0;

but insists on turning that into

PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 6px; PADDING-TOP: 10px;

I can see no good reason for this, and no way to stop it.  At half passed midnight on a Monday morning I’m at work finalising some content for a project that is supposed to go live in less than 24 hours and I’m fed up with the cruft that VS.Net is producing.

At work we run a Cisco PIX that is also a VPN Concentrator. For the last month or so I have been using the Cisco Windows client software for connceting into work to do any after hours tasks. A couple of recent events have forced me to re-evaluate the method I use to connect in. Primarily, the windows service that is installed with the client has been randomly refusing to startup correctly with no apparent reason. Secondly, I’ve recently purchased a laptop and with it dropping into hibernation or standby whenever I walk away for more then a couple of minutes (something that happens often with a small child) I keep getting disconnected.

I have a small LAN with 2 servers and 2 client machines. The 2 servers are Wallace, a Centos4 installation that basically runs the network, and Gromit, a windows 2003 server for basic development testing and the beginnings of my HTPC. The 2 clients are my norbert, the desktop in the office, and puddlejumper, my reently acquired laptop.

I got the official Cisco client installed and working on Wallace, with 1 small exception. I could not for the life of me manage to get the rest of the LAN able to make use of the connection. I started to google for options and quickly found an article on Linux Resources on the Dartmouth College math faculty website.

This page in turn lead me to the vpnc information for Dartmouth, and I eventually ended up find a couple more helpful articles on configuration of vpnc.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

I have a client who’s website I am now responsible for. This site suffers from “too many developers” syndrome, in that there are some very different coding styles througout. The unfortunate thing is that by reading through the code you can see that most of them have absolutely no idea what they were doing.

I’ve found instances of horribly inefficient JavaScript where 3 functions are defined for each record in a result set and the Primary Key field is appended to the function name to make it unique. None of these repeated functions did anything different. None of them used any of the information from the recordset other than the Primary Key field. It was effectively just a window.alert('Are you sure?'); type function.

I’ve found inefficient ASP where a query is performed, the record set is looped through and counted, the query is closed, and then it is redone. All just so that the number of returned records would be known before the record set was processed. Never mind that the record set can be interogated to find out how big it is. Never mind that even if that was not possible, you could have processed the record set, perform a MoveFirst and then start again without having to destroy the recordset and recreate it.

I think I’ve just found the piece de resistance - storing information in session variables just for the sake of it. A Page that I am currently reworking sections of has the following brilliant piece of coding

Session(”CustomMessageSmall”) = “error about credit card payment failure”
response.write Session(”CustomMessageSmall”) & “<br />”

I could understand putting the message into a session variable if it was being used on another page somewhere, but it’s being used on the very next line. I mean seriuosly guys, lets not make the server do any more than it has too.