Nik's Technology Blog

Installing Hardware RAID on Windows 7

nik.makris — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:43:06 +0000

Like a lot of Windows fans I pre-ordered Windows 7 and built a new PC ready to install it on; I chose a motherboard (MSI DKA790GX) that, like many on the market, has a hardware RAID controller on-board allowing you to take advantage of redundancy with RAID 1 and/or benefit from faster disk access with RAID 0. Read more about RAID.

I had already installed Windows 7 before I remembered I wanted to set-up a RAID 1 array. I tried to get the RAID array working with Windows already installed but soon realised I would have to set it up prior to installing Windows 7 because Windows kept hanging on boot-up because it was lacking the RAID controller drivers.

The supplied manual doesn’t explain how to get RAID up and running unfortunately.

RAID Controller Set-up

So here’s a quick guide to installing hardware RAID on a motherboard that features a RAID controller. These steps assume you are performing a clean Windows 7 install rather than an upgrade, and they might differ depending on your system set-up, but the general principles should be the same.

Download the RAID drivers for your motherboard from the manufacturer’s website and save them to a memory stick.
Back up all your important data!
Turn your PC off and unplug it.
Install 2 hard disks preferably with identically capacity into your PC.
Turn on your PC, press the delete key or F2 key when prompted to get to the BIOS menu.
Find the option to select the RAID mode, save your settings and exit BIOS.
On reboot you should see a new menu option to enter the RAID controller settings. Enter the key combination when prompted to get to the RAID controller menu.
Create a new RAID array selecting either RAID 0, or RAID 1.
Select the disks that will form the array, save the settings and exit.
On reboot press the delete key or F2 key when prompted to get to the BIOS menu.
Check the boot sequence of your PC and ensure your optical drive is top of the list.
Insert your Windows 7 disk into the optical drive and exit the BIOS.
On reboot press any key when prompted to boot from the optical drive.
Windows 7 should start installing.
Select your localisation settings and click next.
Click “repair your computer” and click the ”load drivers” button.
Insert your memory stick and browse to the correct driver and install.
Exit back to the Windows 7 install menu click “Install now” and on the next screen click “Custom (advanced)” to perform a clean install.
When you are asked where you want to install Windows 7 you should see that the 2 RAID hard disks are now visible as just 1 drive.
Add a partition to the new drive so Windows with be able to recognise it.
Continue installing Windows as normal.

IE6 – Why Web Developers Should Support the Browser

nik.makris — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 17:52:46 +0000

There seems to be so much fuss surrounding support for aging Microsoft browser Internet Explorer 6 lately, both from the web developer community and big corporations such as Google and Facebook. There are many websites dedicated to eradicating the browser, a Twitter petition, a joke campaign to save IE6 and a whole lot more…

While I don’t particularly enjoy spending a considerable amount of time per project making sure websites I build are IE6 compatible, I do see the benefit of supporting the browser.

I was in Google Analytics recently and looked at my browser statistics for this site. Visitors to my site are fairly IT literate but Internet Explorer 6 still has a larger user base than Safari, Chrome and Opera with almost 9% share. Looking on the W3C Schools browser statistics, 12.1% of their users browsed the web with IE6 in September 2009.

NikMakris.com Web browser market share Sept 2009

NikMakris.com Internet Explorer browser share Sept 2009

I could make the decision not to support IE6 for my personal site and about 9% of my visitors would be affected, but if I made that decision on a commercial website, I could end up losing out on business, especially since many of the people still actively using IE6 are businesses or public sector organisations who can’t easily upgrade or install an alternative web browser.
Many organisations also have legacy applications that do not work with new versions of Internet Explorer and during a recession many organisations will avoid spending money on upgrades and new software if they can afford not to.

Whilst it might be okay for Google and Facebook to block support for the browser when you visit their own web properties, would a client of yours be happy if you did the same with a website you built, potentially losing them business?

Internet Explorer 6 may be a dog of a browser in 2009, if you’re a web developer it probably causes you hours of pain creating dedicated style sheets and conditional statements. You may even have had to make major template changes to deal with the many quirks of the browser rendering engine, but hopefully in the not too distant future it will become such a small percentage of the web browser market that we can all forget about it and start concentrating on new technologies such as HTML 5!

Learning jQuery 1.3 - Book Review

nik.makris — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:05:00 +0000

My first exposure to jQuery was using other developer's plugins to create animation effects such as sliders, and accordion menus.
The highly refactored and compressed production code isn't the easiest to read and understand, especially if you want to alter the code to any great extent.
After reading a few tutorials, I thought I'd buy a book and get more involved with the jQuery library.

As an ASP.NET developer used to coding with intellisense, I was pleased that jQuery has been incorporated into Visual Studio to allow ease of developing.
I browsed through the jQuery books on Amazon and opted to buy "Learning JQuery 1.3" by Jonathon Chaffer and Karl Swedberg after reading the user reviews.

I've now read most of the book and can highly recommend it. The book assumes the reader has good HTML, CSS knowledge as well as a familiarity with JavaScript and the DOM, but this enables the book to quickly move onto doing useful, everyday tasks with jQuery.

The first six chapters of the book explore the jQuery library in a series of tutorials and examples focusing on core jQuery components. Chapters 7 to 9 look at real-world problems and show how jQuery can provide solutions to them, and the final two chapters cover using and developing jQuery plugins.

Web developers should be aware of web accessibility and SEO issues with using client-side scripting and it is good to see the book highlighting the concepts of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation where appropriate.

"the inherent danger in making certain functionality, visual appeal, or textual information available only to those with web browsers capable of (and enabled for) using JavaScript. Important information should be accessible to all, not just people who happen to be using the right software." - Learning jQuery 1.3, page 94

After a brief introduction into the world of jQuery, what it does and how it came about the book moves quickly on to selectors, which are a fundamental part of how jQuery selects element(s) from the DOM. It also covers jQuery's chaining capability, which coming from other programming languages looks odd at the outset, but quickly proves to be a very powerful technique.

The authors then move on to talk about events. What I particularly like about the way jQuery handles events is that the behavioural code can be cleanly separated away from the HTML mark-up without having to litter tags with onclick and onload attributes.

The examples show how to add functionality on top of your HTML by binding events to elements on the page, which when triggered cause jQuery to modify the HTML to bring the page to life. Techniques are introduced by example, then slowly refactored and improved while introducing new jQuery methods along the way, which is a breeze to follow and learn.

The fourth chapter covers effects such as fading in and out and custom animations, and jumps straight in to cover a useful example of how text size can be increased on-the-fly for ease of reading. The intro also mentions an important usability example of effects.

jQuery effects "can also provide important usability enhancements that help orient the user when there is some change on a page (especially common in AJAX applications)."- Learning jQuery 1.3, page 67

Chapter 5 is all about DOM manipulation and covers jQuery's many insertion methods such as copying and cloning parts of the page, which it demonstrates with another useful example in the form of dynamically creating CSS styled pull quotes from a page of text used to attract a readers attention.

AJAX is the next topic, which interested me enough to create a little tool to load in an XML RSS feed and create a blog category list from the data.
The chapter covers the various options of loading partial data from the server including appending a snippet of HTML into the page, JSON, XML and how to choose which method is the most appropriate.

Table manipulation is next on the agenda and the book discusses how to sort table data preventing page refreshing using AJAX as well as client-side sorting, filtering and pagination.

Chapter 8 delves into forms, using progressive enhancement to improve their appearance and behaviour. It also covers AJAX auto-completion as well as an in-depth look at shopping carts.

Shufflers and Rotators are next and the book starts out by building a headline news feed rotator which gets it's headlines from an RSS feed, typically used by blogs. It also covers carousels, image shufflers and image enlargement.

Chapter 10 and 11 examine the plugin architecture of jQuery and demonstrate how to use plugins and build your own. I successfully produced my first jQuery plugin from reading this book. You can check out my tag cloud plugin and read about how I originally built it before turning it into a plugin that other developers can use.

No defining declaration found for implementing OnValidate(System.Data.Linq.ChangeAction)

nik.makris — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:04:00 +0000

If you happen to be getting an error message like the one below, then read on.

Error 1 No defining declaration found for implementing declaration of partial method 'mvcCMS.Models.WebPage.OnValidate(System.Data.Linq.ChangeAction)' C:\mvcCMS\Models\WebPage.cs 28 22 mvcCMS

I'm using LINQ to SQL designer in Visual Studio to create a database schema and I'm using a partial class to extend the code generated by the designer.

In the example below I am using the pattern used by NerdDinner.com to add business rules/validation to the model classes LINQ to SQL built based on my database schema.

namespace mvcCMS.Models
{
    public partial class WebPage
    {
        public bool IsValid
        {
            get { return (GetRuleViolations().Count() == 0); }
        }
        public IEnumerable<RuleViolation> GetRuleViolations()
        {
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(Title))
                yield return new RuleViolation("Title is required", "Title");
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(Text))
                yield return new RuleViolation("Web copy is required", "Text");

            yield break;
        }
        partial void OnValidate(ChangeAction action)
        {
            if (!IsValid)
                throw new ApplicationException("Rule violations prevent saving");
        }
    }
}

Where OnValidate() is a partial method LINQ to SQL provides which enables us to be notified when the object is about to be persisted to the database, so we can check all our business rules have been met before the object is flushed to the database.

An empty OnValidate() method is part of the designer generated code for your data class located in the #region Extensibility Method Definitions and it seems that these Extensibility Method Definitions only get added to the designer code when your tables have primary keys.

When a table is dragged onto the Object Relational Designer in Visual Studio the classes that are generated will only implement INotifyPropertyChanging and INotifyPropertyChanged if your tables have primary keys. If the classes don't implement these interfaces the code won't implement the OnValidate() method, and if the OnValidate() method doesn't exist your partial class won't compile.

The Solution

The solution is simple. Add a primary key to your database table, delete the associated data class from the Object Relational Designer and then drag the database table from Server Explorer back onto the Object Relational Designer surface.

You should then find the designer generated code now implements INotifyPropertyChanging and INotifyPropertyChanged and the class contains a definition for OnValidate() in the #region Extensibility Method Definitions. Your code should now compile.

Nik Makris is now Google Analytics Qualified!

nik.makris — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:03:00 +0000

I just passed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) test with a score of 88%! I'm now officially qualified in Google Analytics!

If you're interested in taking the test or simply want to learn more about Google Analytics then visit the Conversion University and brush up on your knowledge with the tutorials and presentations before taking the test.

I was actually quite surprised how much there is too Google Analytics and how powerful some of the features actually are, even though I've been using Google Analytics for years I learnt some really useful techniques and tricks.

More about the test

The test consists of 70 multiple choice questions and costs $50. You are given 90 minutes to complete the test, and must achieve 75% to pass. You are allowed to pause the test and continue later, but you must complete it within 5 days. The whole test is completed online, and you will receive a PDF of your certificate on completion, which will look like the picture of mine above. The qualification is valid for 18 months. Read more frequently asked questions about the Google Analytics Individual Qualification FAQ.

Create a jQuery Tag Cloud from RSS XML Feed

nik.makris — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:20:00 +0000

I previously created a jQuery Blogger Template Category List Widget to retrieve blog categories from a Blogger.com RSS feed and create a list of links which click through to Blogger label pages.

I've now taken this code a step further and modified it to calculate the number of times each category/tag occurs enabling me to create a tag cloud from the data, like the one below.

Before I explain the code I wrote to make the tag cloud I'll go through the solution to a bug I found with the original categories code.

You may recall this snippet of code where I iterate through each post and then each category of each post, finally, when all the categories have been added to the array I sort them prior to de-duping them.

$.get('/blog/rss.xml', function(data) {
//Find each post
        $(data).find('item').each(function() {
//Get all the associated categories/tags for the post
            $($(this)).find('category').each(function() {
                categories[categories.length] = $(this).text();
            });
        });
        categories.sort();

I later refactored the code removing the $(data).find('item').each iteration which wasn't required since find('category') will find them all anyway.

I then discovered that the JavaScript .sort() function was case-sensitive which resulted in lower case categories being placed at the end of the list, causing problems when I de-dup them.

So the rewritten snippet of code became:

$.get('blog/rss.xml', function(data) {
     //Find each tag and add to an array
     $(data).find('category').each(function() {
         categories[categories.length] = $(this).text();
     });
     categories.sort(caseInsensitiveCompare);

where caseInsensitiveCompare refers to a JavaScript compare function:

function caseInsensitiveCompare(a, b) {
    var anew = a.toLowerCase();
    var bnew = b.toLowerCase();
    if (anew < bnew) return -1;
    if (anew > bnew) return 1;
    return 0;
}

Creating the Tag Cloud jQuery Code

I start off as before fetching the XML, adding all the categories/tags from the RSS feed to a JavaScript array, then sorting them.

But I needed a way to store, not only the tag name, but the number of times that tag is used on the blog (the number of times the category appears in the feed). For this I decided to use a multi-dimensional array which would essentially store the data in a grid fashion e.g.

Tag Name	Count
ASP.NET	5
Accessibility	2
Blogging	15
jQuery	2

The de-dup loop from my previous categories script now performs two jobs, it removes the tag duplicates and creates a count of each tag occurrence.

Once the multi-dimensional array has been populated, all that's left to do is iterate through the array creating the HTML necessary to build the tag cloud, followed by appending it to a DIV tag with an ID="bloggerCloud" on the page.

Note the calculation I perform to get the tags appearing a reasonable pixel size ((tagCount * 3) + 12).

$(document).ready(function() {
    var categories = new Array();
    var dedupedCategories = [];
    $.get('blog/rss.xml', function(data) {
        //Find each tag and add to an array
        $(data).find('category').each(function() {
            categories[categories.length] = $(this).text();
        });
        categories.sort(caseInsensitiveCompare);
        //Dedup tag list and create a multi-dimensional array to store 'tag' and 'tag count'
        var oldCategory = '';
        var x = 0;
        $(categories).each(function() {
            if (this.toString() != oldCategory) {
                //Create a new array to put inside the array row
                dedupedCategories[x] = [];
                //Store the tag name first
                dedupedCategories[x][0] = this.toString();
                //Start the tag count
                dedupedCategories[x][1] = 1;
                x++;
            } else {
                //Increment tag count
                dedupedCategories[x - 1][1] = dedupedCategories[x - 1][1] + 1;
            }
            oldCategory = this.toString();
        });
        // Loop through all unique tags and write the cloud
        var cloudHtml = "";
        $(dedupedCategories).each(function(i) {
            cloudHtml += "<a href=\"/blog/labels/";
            cloudHtml += dedupedCategories[i][0] + ".html\"><span style=\"font-size:" + ((dedupedCategories[i][1] * 3) + 12) + "px;\">";
            cloudHtml += dedupedCategories[i][0] + "</span></a> \n";
        });
        $('#bloggerCloud').append(cloudHtml);
    });
    return false;
});

Since building this script I've now gone one step further and created a jQuery plug-in based on this code. For more details and the source code see my jQuery Blogger.com Tag Cloud Plugin page.

Setting Up ASP.NET MVC with NUnit for Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition &amp;amp;amp;amp; Visual Web Developer Express 2008

nik.makris — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:50:00 +0000

I've just spent my lunch hour downloading and installing ASP.NET MVC. I also downloaded the sample chapter from Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (large PDF) which walks through the development of NerdDinner.com. I began to create a test ASP.NET MVC project on Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

One of the main positives of ASP.NET MVC is that Test Driven Development is so much easier than with ASP.NET Webforms.

I soon realised when I created my first ASP.NET MVC project however that unless you have Visual Studio Professional or higher you don't get Visual Studio test Unit Framework, which means that to create a test project, you first need to install another testing framework such as NUnit, and configure Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer 2008 to use it.

This is an extract from the book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0:

Note: The Visual Studio Unit Test Framework is only available with Visual Studio 2008 Professional and
higher versions). If you are using VS 2008 Standard Edition or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express you
will need to download and install the NUnit, MBUnit or XUnit extensions for ASP.NET MVC in order for
this dialog to be shown. The dialog will not display if there aren't any test frameworks installed.

I already had NUnit installed, so I began my search for an NUnit extension for ASP.NET MVC, which I found here. Updated NUnit Templates for ASP.Net MVC 1.0 RTM

After running installNUnit.cmd which created the registry entries required by Visual Studio, you need to make sure the registry entries created point to the compressed templates.

Note: If you are using Visual Web Developer 2008, this might be all you need to do. Click on File > New Project and check to see if "Test" appears under "Project types" on the left-hand menu in the dialogue box. If not carry on reading.

Copy the NUnit test templates from the downloaded directory (in your chosen .NET language) MvcApplication.NUnit.Tests.zip to the following folder on your machine:

%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Test

or here for VWD 2008:

%Program Files%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\VWDExpress\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Test

Then make sure the registry entry here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VisualStudio\9.0\MVC\TestProjectTemplates\NUnit\C#

or here for VWD 2008:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VWDExpress\9.0\MVC\TestProjectTemplates\NUnit\C#

Correctly points to the location of MvcApplication.NUnit.Tests.zip. e.g.

Path: CSharp\Test\

Template: MvcApplication.NUnit.Tests.zip

Then close all instances of Visual Studio and open up the command prompt and move to the following location:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE>

and run the following command:

> devenv /setup

Once this has completed, you should find that when you create an ASP.NET MVC project, you will now get another pop-up menu asking you if you wish to create a unit test project for your application using NUnit.

jQuery Blogger Template Category List Widget

nik.makris — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:27:00 +0000

Blogger is a hosted blogging service which allows you to publish your blog to your own URL and create your own custom HTML templates to match your website design.
I have been using Blogger for this blog for several years, and have been trying to find a good way of displaying a list of categories on each blog page.

As yet I haven't found an official way of creating a category list using the Blogger mark-up code, so I decided to write my own widget to do the job for me.

When I say category list I mean a list of all the blog tags/labels in your blog, each linking to a page with posts categorised using that particular tag, just like the examples below.

Blog Categories

Because Blogger is a hosted blogging service you can't use a server-side language to create the category list for your HTML template, instead you must rely on client-side JavaScript.

Thankfully the Blogger service publishes XML files to your website along with the post, archive and category HTML pages. These are in ATOM and RSS formats and are there primarily for syndication, but XML files are also fairly straight-forward to parse using most programming languages and contain all the category data we need to build a categories list.

I chose to use the jQuery library because it makes the process even easier.

The Blogger XML Format

From the Blogger ATOM XML snippet below you can see that each blog item can have multiple category nodes. This means that the code must loop through each blog post, then loop through each category of each post to create our category list, but it also means that we will have duplicate categories, because more than one post can have the same category.

<item>
<guid isPermaLink='false'></guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 May 2009 18:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<atom:updated>2009-05-15T11:35:03.262+01:00</atom:updated>
<category domain='http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#'>C Sharp</category>
<category domain='http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#'>ASP.NET</category>
<category domain='http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#'>Visual Studio</category>
<title>Language Interoperability in the .NET Framework</title>
<atom:summary type='text'>.NET is a powerful framework which was built to allow cross-language support...</atom:summary>
<link>http://www.nikmakris.com/blog/2009/05/language-interoperability-in-net.html</link>
<author>Nik</author>
<thr:total xmlns:thr='http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'>0</thr:total>
</item>

The jQuery Code

The jQuery code is fairly easy to follow, but here is a quick explanation. After the DOM is available for use, I create two JavaScript arrays, one to hold the categories and one to hold our de-duped category list. Then I load in the Blogger RSS feed and iterate through each blog post adding each category to the categories array.
Once it reaches the end of the RSS feed, I need to sort the array into alphabetical order so that I can de-duplicate the categories list I just populated, which is what the next jQuery .each() function does.
All I have left to do is loop through the de-duped categories list, create the HTML link for each category and the append the HTML unordered list to the page.

$(document).ready(function() {
    var categories = new Array();
    var dedupedCategories = new Array();
    $.get('/blog/rss.xml', function(data) {
        //Find each post
        $(data).find('item').each(function() {
            //Get all the associated categories/tags for the post
            $($(this)).find('category').each(function() {
                categories[categories.length] = $(this).text();
            });
        });
        categories.sort();
        //Dedup category/tag list
        var oldCategory = '';
        $(categories).each(function() {
            if (this.toString() != oldCategory) {
                //Add new category/tag
                dedupedCategories[dedupedCategories.length] = this.toString();
            }
            oldCategory = this.toString();
        });
        // Loop through all unique categories/tags and write a link for each
        var html = "<h3>Categories</h3>";
        html += "<ul class=\"niceList\">";
        $(dedupedCategories).each(function() {
            html += "<li><a href=\"/blog/labels/";
            html += this.toString() + ".html\">";
            html += this.toString() + "</a></li>\n";

        });
        html += "</ul>";
        $('#bloggerCategories').append(html);
    });
    return false;
});

Update your Blogger Template HTML to Show Categories

The only HTML you need to add to your Blogger template is a call to jQuery, and this script in the head of your page, plus an empty HTML DIV tag, in the place where you want your categories list to appear.

<div id="bloggerCategories"></div>

You can see the script in action on my blog, or see this code rewritten to create a tag cloud.

An Introduction to Web Development and Design for Work Experience Students

nik.makris — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:36:00 +0000

We have a school student coming into our agency for work experience shortly, so I'm putting together a programme which will introduce him to the various areas of web development, such as HTML, CSS, client-side and server-side code, databases and XML.

It is going to be difficult to cover the various different skills involved in web development in a week, and without knowing what sort of web development knowledge the student already possesses it is hard to determine what can be achieved in such a short time.

However the main goal of work experience is to give the student a flavour of what is involved in the profession, to allow them to make an informed decision on whether such a career is for them.

I've structured the programme as follows:

Day 1 - Introduction to Web Design
Day 2 - Introduction to HTML and CSS
Day 3 - Understanding web servers, web browsers and HTTP and FTP
Day 4 - Introduction to server-side and client-side programming
Day 5 - Overview of databases and XML

Within each topic I have posed questions and tasks, which will require research and learning. For each subject I have provided links to tutorials and online information.

I'm also aware that web development is very much a practical and creative skill, so I've also set a project which will run for the whole week and will allow him to put what he has learned into practice by building a simple personal portfolio website.

I have no idea whether I'm being too ambitious, but surely that will depend on the student's current knowledge and interest in the subject. I think that it can easily be tailored to each student depending on their interests.

I have uploaded a PDF of my programme entitled An Introduction to Web Development and Design for Work Experience Students and would appreciate any feedback.

Language Interoperability in the .NET Framework

nik.makris — Thu, 14 May 2009 13:35:00 +0000

.NET is a powerful framework which was built to allow cross-language support. All .NET code is compiled to Intermediate Language (IL) whether you are developing in C#, VB.NET, J# or any other .NET language. This means it is possible to build applications with modules written in different languages, because when the application is compiled it will all be compiled to a common language, IL.

This means a class written in one language can inherit from a class written in another language, or an object can directly call a method of another class written in another .NET language. Visual Studio also allows you to step through all the different modules in the debugger.

To demonstrate the Language Interoperability in .NET, I'm going to call a VB.NET method from the code-behind page of a C# ASP.NET page. This isn't something you would ordinarily want to do, but its an easy way to show the power of .NET.

In Visual Studio, right-click your website root in Solution Explorer and select add reference. Scroll down the .NET tab until you find Microsoft.VisualBasic and click ok.

This will modify your Web.Config file by adding an assembly reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic to the assemblies list.

To use the VB.NET language within your C# webform you need to add a using Microsoft.VisualBasic; statement at the top of your code-behind page.

In my demo example below I am going to use the VB.NET MonthName method of DateAndTime to get the current month's name and display it on my page using a ASP.NET label control. The bold code below is VB.NET interspersed with C#.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using Microsoft.VisualBasic;

public partial class language_interop : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        int month = DateTime.Today.Month;
        string monthName = DateAndTime.MonthName(month, false);
        labelMonthName.Text = monthName;
    }
}

Does your PC Keeping Forgetting the Date &amp;amp;amp; Time?

nik.makris — Wed, 13 May 2009 13:34:00 +0000

Yesterday my aging desktop PC decided not to boot, and instead displayed this helpful error "CMOS Checksum Error".
In order to get it to boot into Windows I had to press Delete to go into the BIOS settings and change the configuration from "Halt on all errors" to "halt on no errors". Upon saving the BIOS settings and restarting the error disappeared.

Sometimes though a PC with a dead CMOS battery will boot as normal but forget the date and time on each reboot. This can lead to odd effects. For instance I tried to logging into my webmail only to be told the SSL licence wasn't valid, not because it had expired but because my computer thought it was 2001!

CMOS Battery at Fault

Once I got into Windows I got a few "Windows has found new hardware" messages and my system clock had reverted to a day in 2001.
As soon as I saw my clock had forgotten the time and the date, all evidence pointed towards the CMOS battery being at fault. Its funny how a simple little battery that most people don't even realise existed inside their PC can bring a computer to its knees.

Locating & Changing the CMOS Battery

In a desktop PC the CMOS battery is fairly straight forward to find. They normally look like a large wrist watch battery, with CR2032 lithium batteries being the most common. A simple search on eBay will find you a cheap replacement. Just be careful removing and fitting anything on a motherboard, because any static electricity on your body could fry delicate computer chips.

On a laptop or notebook they are more difficult to find and generally more expensive. On my Dell Inspiron you need to lift out the main battery and pull out a small flap to locate the CMOS battery.

Location of CMOS battery in Dell Inspiron laptop

My Dell just so happens to take a 7.2V 15mAh Ni-MH CMOS battery, which again, performing a quick search on eBay will find you a replacement.

Fitting the new battery in either case is very straight forward.

Read more about Installing a CMOS Battery here.

Pictures from Internet World 2009

nik.makris — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:24:00 +0000

Pictures from Internet World @ Earls Court, London, 30th April 2009

Nike+ SportBand Review

nik.makris — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:49:00 +0000

Last year I decided to get healthy and take up running. Being a gadget lover, I had been researching the iPod nano and Nike+ sport kit.

I liked the idea of being able to record my progress, set myself challenges and map my routes etc, see http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/ for more details.

The thing was, I already had an iPod classic which was too bulky to run with, and not compatible with the Nike+ kit. I didn't really want to fork out for another iPod just to take out for a run, so I was pleased when Nike released the SportBand, I ordered one and started my training.

That was about a year ago, and I've been using the Nike+ SportBand for all my runs since, clocking up over 300km in that time.

Review

I thought I'd write a quick review of the product to share my experience with the SportBand and the Nike+ website, which forms an integral part of the product, since all your stats are uploaded to the site.

Hardware

The hardware included consists of a watch and shoe adapter. The shoe adapter is designed to fit into special Nike+ running shoes, which I had already had. If you don't want to purchase Nike+ running shoes search on eBay for "nike+ sensor" you can buy sensor pouches that fit on your shoe laces instead.

Before each run you have to hold down the big button on the face of the watch to sync the shoe adapter to the watch, then after a few seconds when you are ready to run, you just press the same button again briefly to start and stop the clock.

After using this for a while you wonder what Nike was thinking when they designed the watch. First of all its not very sturdy, my LED broke after a few months use (see photo, left-hand side), the angle of the screen and reversed LED display are not at all easy to read when you are running. Personally I would have been willing to pay a little more for a better watch.

Software and Website

When you get back from your run, you simply detach the watch from its strap and plug it into your computer's USB port to upload your run data. The software driver that you install on your PC allows you to calibrate your device as well; however I found that its not very accurate and if you increase your pace you need to recalibrate the device.

The Nike+ website has been produced in Flash and looks visually impressive, but I find it to be a bit cumbersome to use and personally I would prefer an HTML website with embedded Flash graphs etc.

All your runs appear in a bar chart, with a calendar running across the bottom. When you hover a run you get more details for that particular run. If you click on a run you get a timeline for that run with km/mile marker points and your pace at those positions.

You can also map your runs before or after a training session to either gauge how far a route is or to assign certain runs to a particular route. This is useful so you can see your progress over the same route.

The nike+ website also has a social element to it, allowing you to challenge other nike+ users and run routes others have mapped. However the interface isn't as intuitive as it could be. You can also create widgets to allow you to show your training overview on your blog or social profile, take a look at mine on the "About Me" page. They also provide a FaceBook app, but I have never managed to get this to work.

Summary

Nike+ isn't perfect and I think that professional runners should probably look elsewhere, but for people like me who just run to keep fit and don't take it too seriously I find it helps me keep track of my progress and keeps me motivated.

Being a developer it would also be nice to get access to my run data through an API. There are ways to do it, but it would be nice if Nike were to publish an SDK or API documentation to make this a little easier. Services such as Twitter have thrived on 3rd party applications which leverage the Twitter API, what are you waiting for Nike?

TargetInvocationException - Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation

nik.makris — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:48:00 +0000

This exception isn't very useful because it's a general exception thrown when a method invoked through reflection throws an exception, took me a while to figure out what the issue was. Even though I knew the page causing the error.

This exception was thrown by a ASP.NET web form which contained a GridView connected to an ObjectDataSource.

The ObjectDataSource references methods in a data access layer class. These methods then call stored procedures in the MS SQL database.

The code worked perfectly in my development environment.

I have the SQL database set up so that the database user ASP.NET uses only has rights to execute the stored procedures it needs to. The database user cannot run commands against the tables directly, this way I limit the surface area of attack should my application have a weakness that could be exploited.

I double checked the stored procedures were all up-to-date, then double checked all the permissions on the stored procedures, and everything seemed in order, but I still kept getting the stack trace below in Event Viewer:

    Stack trace:    at System.RuntimeMethodHandle._InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, SignatureStruct& sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)
   at System.RuntimeMethodHandle.InvokeMethodFast(Object target, Object[] arguments, Signature sig, MethodAttributes methodAttributes, RuntimeTypeHandle typeOwner)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture, Boolean skipVisibilityChecks)
   at System.Reflection.RuntimeMethodInfo.Invoke(Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, Binder binder, Object[] parameters, CultureInfo culture)
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.ObjectDataSourceView.InvokeMethod(ObjectDataSourceMethod method, Boolean disposeInstance, Object& instance)
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.ObjectDataSourceView.ExecuteSelect(DataSourceSelectArguments arguments)
   at System.Web.UI.DataSourceView.Select(DataSourceSelectArguments arguments, DataSourceViewSelectCallback callback)
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataBoundControl.PerformSelect()
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.BaseDataBoundControl.DataBind()
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridView.DataBind()
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.BaseDataBoundControl.EnsureDataBound()
   at System.Web.UI.WebControls.CompositeDataBoundControl.CreateChildControls()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.EnsureChildControls()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal()
   at System.Web.UI.Control.PreRenderRecursiveInternal()
   at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)
Custom event details:

I then decided to check the stored procedures. Then it dawned on me that one of the stored procedures used EXEC sp_executesql, which requires the database user to have, in my case, SELECT permissions on the actual table itself.

Once I granted these permissions to the database user, the web form loaded correctly.

ASP.NET Content Disposition Problem in IE7

nik.makris — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 13:46:00 +0000

I've just spent quite a while debugging a problem with content disposition I was having with Internet Explorer 7, the code works fine in Firefox but causes this error message to occur in IE7.

"Internet Explorer cannot download xxx from xxx."

"Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later."

This was my original snippet of C# code:

Response.Buffer = true;
Response.ClearContent();
Response.ClearHeaders();
Response.ContentType = docToDisplay.Type.ContentType.ToString();
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=" + Server.UrlEncode(docToDisplay.FileName));
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);

Response.BinaryWrite(docToDisplay.FileContent);
Response.End();
Response.Flush();
Response.Close();

Response.Cache.SetCacheability

I eventually figured out that the following line on code was causing the issue.

Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);

I then did a quick search for "Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);" and discovered another developer who have had the same Content-Disposition issue. Unfortunately for me that page didn't get returned when I was searching for the Internet Explorer error message.

This was the response to the post by Microsoft Online Support:

"Yes, the exporting code you provided is standard one and after some further
testing, I think the problem is just caused by the httpheader set by
Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.No Cache)
I just captured the http messages when setting and not setting the above
"NOCache" option and found that when the http response returned the
Cache-Control: no-cache
header. So we can also reproduce the problem when using the following code:
page_load...
{
Response.CacheControl = "no-cache";
ExportDataGrid(dgSheet,"test.xls");
}
IMO, this should be the clientside browser's behavior against "no-cache"
response with stream content other than the original text/html content. So
would you try avoid setting the CacheAbility or the "Cache-Control" header
to "no-cache" when you'd like to output custom binary file stream?
Thanks,
Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Support"

After removing the Response.Cache.SetCacheability line the file downloads correctly in Internet Explorer.

Create a Simple Windows Service to Request a URL at Set Intervals

nik.makris — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:45:00 +0000

I needed a simple Windows Service to request a web page at set intervals indefinitely. Windows Services are the best way of doing this as they have the ability to start automatically when the computer boots up and can be paused, stopped and restarted. You can also get them to write events to the Windows Event log.

I found this Windows Service sample tutorial on The Code Project and downloaded the code to familiarise myself with the basics. The tutorial lacked a timer and the code to request a URL though so I had to add this functionality.

Visual Studio Standard edition doesn't have a Windows Service template, but you can still create a Windows Service, you just need to do a bit of extra work.

After some research and a bit of coding I added two new methods:

private void ServiceTimer_Tick(object sender, ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
this.timer.Stop();
DoWork();
this.timer.Start();
}

void DoWork()
{
WebClient client = new WebClient();
client.Headers.Add("user-agent", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705;)");

Stream data = client.OpenRead(URL to request here);
client.Dispose();
data.Dispose();
}

I overrode the OnStart() method of ServiceBase to enable the timer and start it. I also overrode the OnStop() method to disable the timer.

The DoWork() method simply creates an instance of WebClient and reads in the URL you want to request.

Then in the constructor I set the timer interval and added an event handler to raise the ServiceTimer event when the interval elapses. The event handler simply stops the timer, calls the DoWork() method and then restarts the timer.

public static void Main()
{
ServiceBase.Run(new Service3());
}

public Service3()
{

InitializeComponent();
// Duration 1 hour
double interval = 3600000;

timer = new Timer(interval);
timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(this.ServiceTimer_Tick);

}

To install the Service you need to publish the project in Visual Studio. Then use InstallUtil.exe following the process below:

Open a Visual Studio .NET Command Prompt
Change to the bin\Debug directory of your project location (bin\Release if you compiled in release mode)
Issue the command InstallUtil.exe MyWindowsService.exe to register the service and have it create the appropriate registry entries
Open the Computer Management console by right clicking on My Computer on the desktop and selecting Manage
In the Services section underneath Services and Applications you should now see your Windows Service included in the list of services
Start your service by right clicking on it and selecting Start

Each time you need to change your Windows Service it will require you to uninstall and reinstall the service. Prior to uninstalling the service make sure you close the Services management console. To uninstall the service simply reissue the same InstallUtil command used to register the service and add the /u command switch.

e.g. InstallUtil.exe /u MyWindowsService.exe

When you install the service on a server you can find the InstallUtil.exe in the .NET framework folder e.g. C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

Can we rely on Cloud services to look after our data?

nik.makris — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:42:00 +0000

With the current trend moving from desktop applications to web applications, more and more of our data is being stored in the data centres of computer service companies around the world, rather than on our computer hard disks like in the old days.

The benefits of storing data in the "the cloud" are that you can access your documents anywhere you have an Internet connection. However, you have to ask yourself what happens if my data go missing?

This month the social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia which I had been using for 2 years or so to store all my web bookmarks suffered a data loss which brought the service down, and it doesn't look like any of their data recovery attempts will be able to resurrect the data and the service.

I've also noticed that occasionally Google Docs has problems retrieving saved documents.

Luckily I was able to use Ma.gnolia's recovery tool to recover most of my bookmarks from the web cache, and have since imported them into delicious.com, but incidents like this should be a reminder to us all that it pays to take care of your important data and not to rely on such services to store data that is important to you.

Of course the hard disk on your computer could fail too, but you all perform regular back ups, so that's not a problem is it... :-)

Since I wrote this post Gmail had an outage and Techradar have posted a similar article as mine here...

Stricter Guidelines for the use of Voucher Codes on Affilliate Websites

nik.makris — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:41:00 +0000

From January 1st 2009, there will be stricter guidelines for voucher code use on affiliate websites in the UK.
The Affiliate Marketing Council (AMC) , part of the Internet Advertising Bureau has issued a code of best practise to avoid putting it's members brands at risk.
The following affiliate networks have so far signed up to the new code of conduct.

Affiliate Window
Affilinet
Commission Junction UK
DGM-UK
TradeDoubler
Platform-Aâ€™s buy.at
Premier Affiliate
Network
Webgains
Zanox

The Voucher Code best practise press release states that affiliates will need to make sure they comply with the following come 1st January 2009:

Using 'Click to Reveal' when there is no valid or current code present is not permitted of affiliate publishers including using 'Click to Reveal' to show any deals/offers/sales instead of vouchers.
Voucher code affiliate publishers must clearly detail the voucher offer that will be revealed by the click.
A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for use online. This code will have an activation date and where necessary a deactivation date.
Voucher code directories must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and discount codes

I'm not quite sure how this will affect sites such as hotukdeals.com which links to vouchers posted by members of it's forum, since they rely on user generated content, which is most probably unmoderated.

Authenticate with MailEnable SMTP using ASP.NET 2.0

nik.makris — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:40:00 +0000

I've recently been trying to send emails using ASP.NET 2.0 on a web server which uses MailEnable. MailEnable had relaying locked down to avoid opening the server up to spammers, but I wasn't able to authenticate with MailEnable to relay emails to external domains.

I tested my code was working by temporarily checking the "Allow relay for local sender addresses" checkbox in the SMTP properties on MailEnable and my email was relayed successfully. However as soon as I uncheck this option I get this error message in the SMTP W3C logs:

503+This+mail+server+requires+authentication+when+attempting+to+send+to+a+non-local+e-mail+address.+Please+check+your+mail+client+settings+or+contact+your+administrator+to+verify+that+the+domain+or+address+is+defined+for+this+server.

I eventually got it working. I changed the authentication type from "MailEnable integrated authentication" to "Authenticate against the following username/password." then I supplied a username and password to MailEnable.
After restarting the SMTP service in MailEnable. I was able to relay emails using the following C# ASP.NET 2.0 code snippet...

using System.Net.Mail;

MailAddress source = new MailAddress("admin@localdomain.com", "Server");
MailAddress recipient = new MailAddress("external@mail.com", "External");

MailMessage enquiryMail = new MailMessage(source, recipient);
enquiryMail.Subject = "Test";
enquiryMail.Body = "Test content";
enquiryMail.IsBodyHtml = true;

SmtpClient smtpServer = new SmtpClient("mail.localdomain.com");
smtpServer.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username", "password", "localdomain.com");
smtpServer.Send(enquiryMail);

Apache Web Development Testing Server Set-up

nik.makris — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:39:00 +0000

I've been setting up an Ubuntu linux machine for web development testing on my local network, but because the machine has only one IP address assigned to it I wanted a solution to be able to serve more than one website without changing the config in Apache each time.

One method would be to use a separate folder for each site but .htaccess rewrites don't work properly using this method and if you write hyperlinks that refer to the root of the site (i.e /contact.php), this can cause issues too.

Anyway, I thought of using different port numbers to distinguish the different testing websites. So one site maybe on 192.168.0.1:2000, another on 192.168.0.1:2001 etc...

You set this up in Ubuntu as follows:

Open a Terminal prompt and type:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/ports.conf

Enter your password and then for each port number you require add a Listen statement on a new line. So your file should look like:

Listen 80
Listen 2000
Listen 2001

<ifmodule>
Listen 443
</ifmodule>

Save the file and then go back to the Terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

In this file you should find a <virtualhost *> tag followed by various commands. You need to copy and paste everything from <virtualhost *> to </virtualhost> onto a new line below.
Then rename the first <virtualhost *> to <virtualhost 192.168.0.1:80> where 192.168.0.1 is the IP address of you machine. Rename the second virtual host to <virtualhost 192.168.0.1:2000> and repeat for as many websites you want to set-up.

Then for each Virtual Host you'll need to change the DocumentRoot to the file path to each website on the local machine.

Once this is done you'll need to restart Apache to see if your changes have been successful. To do this type the following into the Terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Freesat for free HD TV in the UK

nik.makris — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:38:00 +0000

If you haven't already heard about Freesat then you should look into it, I'm not referring to the free satellite service from Sky, but the new not-for-profit organisation set up by the BBC and ITV to help distribute digital TV to areas of the UK where Freeview signals are not strong enough.
If you also own a new high definition capable flat screen TV or are looking to buy one you should also investigate Freesat. Not only will it allow a greater percentage of British population to receive digital TV for free, it also carries free high definition content. Currently BBC HD and ITV HD channels, which are far superior to their standard definition channels.

Essentially you need a satellite dish and a new set-top box or Freesat capable TV to receive the broadcasts. The Freesat service uses the same satellite as Sky, so it is apparently possible to use a Sky dish and plug in a Freesat tuner instead of a Sky box.

According to a sales assistant in my local Richer Sounds every retailer stocking Freesat equipment has to be a registered Freesat installer and they charge a set fee of Â£80 to install the service for you. This install price is set by Freesat and should be the same for each registered installer.

Panasonic have announced the first TV with a Freesat tuner built-in which should be launched in time for the Olympic games, which should be broadcast in HD on the BBC HD channel.

Can Freesat and Sky Co-exist?

What I'm wondering is, can Sky and Freesat be picked up with the same dish simultaneously? If you have a quad LNB on the dish and a additional run of coaxial cable to the Freesat box?

If so, you could have high definition TV in more than one room and you wouldn't have to pay Sky's multi-room fee, you also get to keep Sky in one room so you can pick up those channels not available on Freesat, like Living TV etc.

I asked this question to the sales guys at the Panasonic stand in the Bluewater shopping centre who were demonstrating the new Freesat capable panels and although they'll admit that you can use a Sky dish to receive Freesat, they're not sure about the 2 services co-existing.

If they won't co-exist maybe they can be switched? After all how many people want a second dish stuck to their house?
Personally, I could make do without the garbage US TV shows Sky broadcasts, but it might upset my girlfriend if she's unable to watch her shows :-)

Internet World - eBusiness Legal Tips

nik.makris — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:36:00 +0000

It's been a couple of weeks since I attended Internet World at London's Earl Court and the follow-up emails have started to arrive in my inbox where I exchanged business cards with some of the exhibitors.
The show ran for three days, but I only managed to attend on the last day (1st May 2008).

During the exhibition, as well as general networking, I attended several presentations about marketing, social media, search and e-commerce.
One particular presentation by Nigel Miller of Fox Williams LLP was about legal tips for safe selling online.
This topic will bore many developers, entrepreneurs and start-ups because they don't understand or see the importance in legal issues and just want to get their idea/business or product live on the web.
Having seen the potential problems of ignoring legislation first hand, I was particularly interested in what Nigel had to say.

I'm one of those people who tends to read the odd terms and conditions page or End User License Agreement (EULA) and find that the language these documents are written in doesn't make for easy reading or understanding, so I was pleased that this presentation used simple plain English.

The presentation was not an exhaustive list of the all legal rules and regulations a website needs to comply with, but it highlighted the areas that are frequently misunderstood or ignored completely, it focused mainly on UK rules and regulations, such as:

Sector specific compliance
Web Accessibility compliance
Company information which must be on the website
Intellectual property and ownership
The Data Protection Act (complying with)
Terms and conditions and disclaimers
Pricing errors
Distance selling regulations and consumer rights

Nigel's full presentation entitled "Risky business; legal tips for safe selling online" can be downloaded as a PDF from Fox Williams' ebizlaw^TM website.

Nigel Miller is a partner at Fox Williams LLP.

How to get the BBC iPlayer on your Nintendo Wii

nik.makris — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:35:00 +0000

You can now get the BBC iPlayer on the Nintendo Wii games console!

Before you can start watching programmes broadcast on the BBC over the last 7 days you'll need to connect your Wii console to the Internet (see instructions below) and download the Opera web browser from the Wii Store (Which costs 500 Wii points or about 3.50 Pounds Sterling).

Before you can buy Wii points to purchase the Opera web browser you'll first need to register online at www.nintendo-europe.com and "link" your Wii console to the Nintendo account you just created online, Nintendo have a guide on how to link your Wii Shop Channel Account to your Club Nintendo Account.

Once you've linked your account to your Wii console you need to go to the Wii Shop accessed from the Wii Home Menu on the console and purchase (by using a credit or debit card to buy some Wii points) and download the "Internet Channel".

Once downloaded and installed you're ready to go!

From the Wii Home Menu select "Internet Channel" and navigate to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, you can then use your Wii remote to zoom, pan and scroll around the web and the iPlayer.

You can read more info about the BBC iPlayer on the Wii console at BBC Internet Blog.

To connect your Nintendo Wii console to the Internet with Wi-Fi follow these steps:

Go to the Wii home menu
Select "Wii options" on the bottom left
Click on "Wii settings" on the right
Click the right arrow
Select Internet
Click "Connection Settings"
Select "Connection 1"
Choose "Wireless Connection"
Select "Search for Access Point"
Click "Ok"
You should be presented with a list of local wireless routers, select your wireless router from the list
If your wireless router is secure, you'll be prompted to enter your Wi-Fi password
Click to save your connection settings
Click "Ok"
The Wii will now test your connection and then prompt you to perform a system update, click "Yes"
Return to the Wii menu when prompted

TradeDoubler Affiliate Trademark Keyword Bidding Reminder

nik.makris — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:34:00 +0000

Following on from Google's change of stance, allowing UK and Irish AdWords users to bid on trademarked keywords of other companies, TradeDoubler the affiliate marketing platform has sent its affiliates an email.
The email reminds TradeDoubler's affiliates that even though Google now allows its AdWord users to bid on trademarked keywords, it does not mean that any previous keyword bidding restrictions TradeDoubler's merchants had previously with their affiliates are now a free for all.

They warn that any affiliate activity that goes against a TradeDoubler merchant's terms and conditions will mean action will be taken such as removal from the programme or network and forfeit of commissions.

Use Browser Toolbar instead of Address Bar to Avoid Phishing Sites

nik.makris — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:33:00 +0000

I've just read a post over at Search Engine Journal about statistics from Hitwise UK suggesting British users are increasingly using browser toolbars to search for domains they know already like tesco.com rather than typing them directly into their browser address bar.

I use this technique a lot because I frequently misspell a domain name or get the wrong domain extension for a website. When this happens more-often-than-not you get a holding page, cyber-squatter site, or worst still a site that attempts to mimic the intended destination in order to "phish" log-in details.
When you use a search toolbar to navigate to a domain the top search result is most likely going to to be the real domain.