Category: Cool Stuff

IIS: Redirection from non-www to www domain

08/082008

The problem today, is that we have a great asp.net website but search engines are indexing the http://greataspnetwebsite.com instead of http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com, this is commonly seen on the web and there are several ways to archive a good result for making the non-www to www domain. This redirection should be a 301 Permanently Moved, otherwise you will might lose your search engine indexed page or become duplicate content for your non-www and www domain. Here are easy steps how to archive a quick and clean Permanent Redirection using IIS.

Consider the case where we already have a website in IIS called: greataspnetwebsite.com

  • Go to IIS Manager
  • Create a new website that point to the same directory as your existing one
  • Select the newly created website, open the properties box
  • In the option button “When connecting to this resource the content should come from” should be change to “A redirection to a URL“
  • Specify the URL http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com
  • Select the check box that says “A permanent redirection for this resource.”

BarCamp Mauritus

06/132008

BarCamp Mauritius

This is the first barcamp in Mauritius. It has been organized by Mauritius Network, and will take place from the 20th to the 21st of June 2008.

For information on what is a barcamp 🙂

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Read more here.

On the menu of this rendez-vous:

  • Blog Creation
  • Web 2.0 Application Demos
  • Multimedia Workshops
  • Historicals of information technology
  • and much more…

You can register for this event here.

Virtualization using VirtualBox

06/062008

Microsoft Virtual PC, which is a quiet efficient tool but needs licences to work with. Today while browsing the web i came to get accross a free open source alternative: VirtualBox

I installed it, had a copy of Linux Ubuntu and created it new virtual guest OS, it took me about 1 hour to set everything up.
From VirtualBox website:

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

That said, I seriously encourage any developer, who needs Virtual OS to run, to either to make a development platform or doing test.

Here are some screen shots of running Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

Creating your South Park Avatar

05/312008

South Park AvatarSo, you are a fan of South Park and you want a fancy avatar like mine. It’s quiet easy and free. Just to to the South Park Studios website. Where by the way you can view all the 174+ episodes of south park.

Now to go the Avatar Creation section. You will find below the procedure to create a fully fancy south park character. You can try it yourself afterwards.
Step 1: New Character

Click on the New Character button on the bottom of page and then choose your character charcteristics:

Female, Male, Canadian, 4th Grader, Kindergartner

Then click Select to go to the next step


Create a new Character

Step 2: Choose your skin type

Step 3: Choose your accessories and be creative

Here are some random creation that i came up with 🙂 you can download and use them as you wish.

Click to see larger Click to see larger

Click to see larger

Click to enlargeClick to enlargeClick to enlarge

If you want to post your creation here, don’t hesitate send them to me, I’ll gladly put them on this post.

Annoying software: a rogues’ gallery

05/212008

Found this little article while reading some newsletter this morning:

Here is a little preview.

Adobe Reader
What does Adobe Reader do? Displays PDF pages. How does it do it? With as much bloody-minded bureaucracy, delay and needless interaction as possible. Perhaps it’s because we humans have been spoiled by books, where the gap between wanting to read something and reading it is as short as the time taken to lift the cover. But Reader’s incessant updates (demanding you reset your computer — why?), thundering great list of modules to load …

Apple
Oh, Apple. You created a domain where humans came first. You took usability and distilled it into an art form. Now look at you. iTunes is a music player the size of a fat-bottomed whale that gobbles resources like krill. It spends half its time trying to sell us stuff and the other half trying to stop us using it. But that’s not as bad as your auto-update policy: slipping us stealth copies of Safari under the cover of important version updates to iTunes and Quicktime….

Windows Update
Your machine will reset in four minutes. Your machine will not shut down until these five updates are installed. You must restart your machine now. You will install Microsoft Genuine Advantage. Please wait while these updates are installed. Please shut down all applications before applying this update. Pop! New updates are ready to be installed. And now that we’ve stopped you doing whatever it was you were doing (like we care)…

Read the entire article from zdnet: Annoying software: a rogues’ gallery