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Retro

We are Nintendo!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX4MdXF3OWI]

This is a great example of reverse psychology advertising. We care because we want to beat them. They obviously don’t want us to beat them but want us to keep trying. Ultimately they are right we cannot beat them, logically it would be better not to try as it is a futile endeavor. Or am I reading too much into it?

Internet

New google is available for testing by developers

Google has announced on the official webmaster central blog that the next version of Google search is available for developer testing. It looks the same but there have been radical changes to the underlying algorithms this should make the results more relevant and better quality.

You can find the new search engine at:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

At first glance,it’s downgraded my site :-( not too happy with that… Bing anyone?

Hacks, Internet

Have you taken the blind search test?

You might think that you prefer Google,but what would you choose if you didn’t know what search engine you are using and just had to choose based on the results?

Now you can find out at http://blindsearch.fejus.com if you do try it please leave a comment with what you’re results are I’d love to know.

Finally we can have answers…

Coding

Image button found guilty of not being valid xhtml horror!!!

The .net image button seems so innocent but a trip over to w3c.org and the html validator soon exposes the terrible truth. Prepare yourself for this, sit down, have a large brandy ready… It renders border=”0″ even though you haven’t put one in there yourself! try it! Put any xhtml 1.0 transitional site into the validator:

http://validator.w3.org/

And watch in utter horror while your site is rejected as a bad example to kids everywhere.

So what is going on here? And is there anyway out?

Well after some digging I found an excellent article:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netfxbcl/thread/ac098c63-61ff-4b53-b5ad-72cb2eb0f7f2

It turns out the validator is unrecognised as a browser type to asp.net and so is presented with html 4.0 instead of xhtml, hence the border=”0″ debarkle.

Is there a workaround? Yes there is either don’t use image buttons or put this in your web.config:

<browserCaps>
<
case match=W3C_Validator*>
TagWriter = System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter
W3CDomVersion = 1.0
</case>
</
browserCaps>

A solution to a weird problem, but necessary if like me you want that green tick :-)

Coding

Flash Video not running on IIS 6 windows server 2003

Seen this one before but while chatting with some (tech) friends I discovered most seemed to think that this should just work out of the box, well unfortunately it doesn’t. But adding support on you windows driven website isn’t that hard, just a few short steps. So I thought it might be useful to explain here:

You need to add the .flv MIME type to IIS:

First click on the site to configure in IIS, right click – select “Properties”.

Under HTTP Headers Tab, select “File Types” button under the MIME Map section and select “New Type”

Lastly Type “.flv” as the associated extension and “video/x-flv” as the content type and Select “OK”

There you have it, flash videos should now work on that site. See you later

Cheers
Dave