tOMPSON’s blog

Microsoft now provides all of its Internet Explorer versions in separate downloadable virtual PC images. This is extremely useful for web developers because it allows them to test their applications for compatibility.

If you have got some time left (about an hour or so) I would recommend you to watch the interview Guy Kawasaki made with Steve Ballmer at Mix 08 this week. It is the best interview of Steve Ballmer I have ever seen. Although he said of PR sentences it shows a lot personality. It is really funny to see him talk about his competitors Google and Apple. He is truly enthusiastic about what he and his company does. The monkey dance for web developers is another highlight

PS: I decided to leave the embedded movie although it is based on MS Silverlight …

Today I found this post on problogger.net that made me aware of another Google tool I did not use until now that could be very helpful. I am talking about Google Webmasters Tools. Google Webmasters Tools allow you to see a website from the view of the Google crawlers. This means it is possible to check a lot of statistics like the top queries in specific months or to see what words went into the Google search index.

Another very interesting feature is to list all the external links to the specific page of your site and in total. This tells me I definitely have to get more links pointing to my blog

This tools is a nice addition to the other Google tools I use to manage my blog, which are Analytics, Alerts, AdSense and AdWords.

I am running my own mail server now for over five years. There are a lot of good free email services out there but I am not satisfied with their spam filters. I am getting about 300 spam mails a day and with my current solution only one of them makes it into my inbox per month.

The second reason is that I do not want to delete or archive my mails to often and I want to have access to them anywhere at any time. Therefor I need an IMAP server with a lot of storage. Most free mail services provide this nowadays but did not five years ago. I thought about using GMAIL lately but I am not completely happy with storing all my mails on Google servers.

First I used an old PC that ran in my home office day and night. My home internet connection always had a high enough upload bandwidth to allow that. The mail server was no dedicated mail server for my domain. I used fetchmail to receive my emails from multiple POP3 servers.

About six months ago I configured a VPS machine to act as the dedicated mail server for my domains. I host multiple mail accounts for my family and friends on it. This post explains what I did to configure my perfect personal mail server.
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Today I stumbled upon a nice list of web sites. I knew about 70% of them but I found some interesting new ones … how about you?

I added the shared items of Google Reader to the sidebar of this blog - check it out and read what I enjoyed to read. Some days ago there was a new feature added to Google Reader that allows to add shared items of friends to your list- now need my friends to shared their feeds with me.

There is even a nice page that lists all my shared items.

I want to use this chance to recommend using Google Reader as your RSS reader again - I am loving it!

Today Firefox3 beta was released and I grabbed my copy from here.

I want to use it side by side with my existing Firefox 2 installation. The new version is installed automatically into a separate folder so all I had to do is to set up a separate profile.

I did this by running firefox.exe -ProfileManager from Start -> Run which opens up the the profile manager. Inside the profile manager I created a new profile (I called it “beta1″) and closed the manager.

I changed the target of the Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 1 shortcut on my desktop to

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 1\firefox.exe" -no-remote -P beta1

which starts my Firefox 3 instance with the newly created profile. The -no-remote parameter allows me to run both profiles simultaneously and links from other applications are always opened in Firefox 2.

Today my ISP surprised me with tripling my bandwidth for the same money - now I got 25600 kbs down and 1536 kbs up. Wow! Thats a 25 MBit Internet connection. Thats a quarter of my LAN speed.

I am limited to 40 GB traffic per month - pfu If I exceed this limit they shape my speed  “down” to 16 MBit. I wonder if I find any server with enough bandwidth to use this speed.

Some days ago I was asked by a student if I knew a issue tracking system implemented in ASP.NET. He needed one for a study project.

I told him that my favorite bug and issue tracking system is still bugzilla. Im am using it for every project since five years now. But maybe there are better ones out there now - trac looks nice and has some cool features, I would give it a try.

None of these two is based on ASP.NET so I told him to look on the wikipedia page for issue tracking systems and tell me which one he choose afterwards.

Today I got mail again saying that the chosen one is BugNET. Looks like a good one I never heard of before. If you got the same restrictions or preferences (ASP.NET) this could be the right one for you too. Thanks Werner for this info!

I am using the prototype library for Ajax in my application for nearly two years now. First I transfered XML date between the server and the client as response but then I switched to using JSON. Using JSON is much faster, less data has to be transfered and avoids multiple browser problems with parsing XML (e.g. this one).

Changing my code to communicate using JSON was very simple. I just created a string containing my JSON code using JSON-lib an put it into the X-JSON http header field. This field is automatically parsed by prototype 1.5.1 and handed over to the onSuccess function as the second paramater:

onSuccess: function(transport, json) {
... do something with my json object
}

Everything worked fine until I tried to transfer characters that are not simple ASCII characters (e.g. äöü). These characters were not correctly displayed when dynamically loaded and placed into my page. I was using UTF-8 throughout my entire application (see an earlier post why) and the AJAX response was sent with charset UTF-8 too. So what is the problem?

After doing some research I found out that the there is no standard that allows to set the encoding of HTTP header fields. There is already a discussion going on inside the prototype development team about how to handle this.

I found this mail that suggests a workaround for current prototype versions. I changed my onSuccess method to the following:

onSuccess: function(transport) {
json = transport.responseText.evalJSON();
obj.options.handler(transport, json);
}

This evaluates the response body for JSON notation. On the server side I am simply writing the JSON string into the response body instead of the X-JSON header field.