I have always thought that participating in any social behavior online should require a day course in netiquette and creative writing (for every language you wish to use online).

We developers are typically a proud, strong-willed group of people with somewhat stressful daily activities and the dealing more with code than human interaction keeps us… in a certain mindset — if you will.

It is extremely easy to be taken out of context in online discussions, especially when there is any sort of disagreement at play. Real life emotions have a habit of bleeding into our words and needless conflicts tend to arise.

In my years online I have observed that most common source of heated online discussions stems from the use of sarcasm. Many Developer Community members seem to forget that sarcasm does not translate well though the use of words alone.

Emoticon‘s, while extremely cute, do not effectively reproduce the helpful indicators of human facial expression’s commonly associated with sarcasm. Further to that, its important to understand that cultural ideals and perspectives on sarcasm vary widely.

While at times some of us may have aspiring dreams of becoming famous actors, drama is best left to the professionals on broadway and out of our communities.

Please do your part and encourage growth of the community as a whole. Consider your Opensource developer etiquette before initiating your communication and if all else fails, please refer back to this extremely helpful resource on How-To Follow Proper Netiquette Rules.

If your running across this error in your error logs, there may be a simple solution for you.

This 403 error is usually caused by having AllowOverride set to All.

You can either fix this by Chmod’ding all your files to 644 (not very elegant) or paste the following into your apache conf file, replacing your “AllowOverride all” rule: AllowOverride none Order deny,allow Allow from none

Just a quick tip, but hope this can save you some time!

Last night all severs running Windows 2003 R2, IIS6 and ColdFusion/ASP.Net were sabotaged! Actually, any windows based web application making use of the IIS6 application pool was affected and guess who killed them… Havoc is consuming the inter-webs while non-technical users are asking the question; “who killed my web site”?

The answer, It was the boys over in Redmond, WA. Quite the debacle ( Fail Whale ) for Microsoft.

After installation of the following updates:

• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974318)
• Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool – December 2009 (KB890830)
• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973904)
• Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB971737)
• Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973917)
• Security Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB974392)
• Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Server 2003 (KB976325)

We noticed multiple occurrences  the following warnings in the System event viewer:

A process serving application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ’3524′. The process exit code was ’0xffffffff’.

These warnings were immediately followed by a lovely error:

Application pool ‘DefaultAppPool’ is being automatically disabled due to a series of failures in the process(es) serving that application pool.

With these messages at hand it became apparent that one of the Windows Security Updates was to blame. Looking into the specifics of each of the updates I had conluded that the suspect was “Update for Windows Server 2003 (KB973917)“.

While I am still working to identify possible solutions for affected servers independently, removing Update 973917 has restored service temporarily for a number of my clients.

Anyone else see the Humor in this?

Take a lesson from this; Windows Automatic Update is kind of like a friend who secretly wants to cause you problems, because its fun….

Updated on December, 9 2009 at 1:59pm

The official response… get this; Microsoft wants us to reinstall Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 on the affected installations to bring all IIS6.0 components up to date. Seems like a Cop out to me. Sure it would fix the issue but this is going to cause a lot of man hours for a number of companies.

Just in case anyone else runs into the same issue, I though I would try and save you some time. The Canon Digital Rebel does not have a driver for use with Windows Vista x64, or at least I was unable to locate one. However I was able to get the native Windows PTP driver to identify the camera correctly by changing the cameras menu settings for communication from normal to PTP.

I have noticed that this method seems a bit unstable (you get the odd crash/blue screen) but at least its working!

Slides from “Geek Meet: Web Typography and sIFR 3″

Anyone who has spent time with FFmpeg and its plethora of compile flags and dependencies I’m sure would tell you “its a real pain in the ass!”.

Although its not available through the default yum libraries you can save yourself a huge amount of time by using the FFmpeg install available through the DAG repository.

First you will need to add DAG to your YUM repo by adding the latest RPM Forge release if you do not already have it on your system, I like to use the RHEL RPM:

Now all you will need to do to get FFmpeg running is one line through shell:

To test your install type:

If you need to access the binary from a script, it should be located in /usr/bin/ffmpeg by default.

Apple is nice enough to shield its users from the clutter of hidden files on our systems. However, any web developer who works with those files I am sure could tell you what a pain it is to not have those files available though finder.

Anyone ever tried to publish a web app to production only to forget about the .htaccess?

Open a Terminal windows and type to show hidden files: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE killall Finder

Open a Terminal windows and type to hide hidden files: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE killall Finder

What do these lines do? The first will update the Finder setting that controls the view option for hidden files. The second line will force finder to restart so the setting can take effect. Do note however if you have any finder windows open; they will close!

Source: Logic + Emotion

Comscore as well as Nielsen Netratings estimated Google’s U.S. search engine market at more than 60% in July. While the market research firms have come up with substantially different numbers for their July report, both agree that Google now runs more than three times the numbers of searches of its closest rival and more than twice the searches of Yahoo and Microsoft combined. Comscore and Nielsen Netratings posted market share numbers for Google at greater than 60% for the second time this year. However, while the April result could have been considered as a blip, the July result fits the pattern of Google chipping away market share from its rivals, bit by bit.

Nielsen Netratings estimates that Google was used for 60.2% or more than 4.8 billion of 8.0 billion searches started by U.S. users during the month of July. Comcast came up with a 61.9% share for Google and 7.3 billion searches of a total of a total of 11.8 billion. Both Yahoo and Microsoft keep losing ground: Nielsen puts the two companies at 17.4% and 11.9%, Comscore at 20.5% and 8.9%. Google’s market share gains appear to have accelerated in 2008, with much stronger growth than in previous years. According to Nielsen Netratings, Google had a market share of 46.2% in July 2005, 49.2% in July 2006 and 53.3% in July 2007. Over the past year, Google was able to increase its market share by almost seven percentage points – more than in any other 12-month period before.

Source: TG Daily

In partnership with Mozilla Labs, as part of the Labs’ browser concept series, the user experience gurus over at Adaptive Path are attempting to conceptualize a possible path of evolution for the future of the Mozilla web browser; code named Aurora.

Aurora presents a number of very interesting visual approches; however, it also — to me, highlights the current state of data overload that users experience with today’s web. Although this browser interface and its control mechanisms are fairly effective ways to navigate through massive amounts of data it almost seems to highlight a much larger problem.

Is our appetite for data on the web out growing the “Browser”?

I eagerly await the future installments of the Aurora videos. Especially Part 4, which would look to be a touch interface to the browser.

Keep in mind this is a colaborative effort. If any of this type of work interests you I would urge you to meet Mozilla Labs’ call for participation and weigh in on the conversation.