Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Your website log files contain a mine of information about how it is faring, the vistors basic profile and gaps that could exist (404, 500 HTTP errors, SQL injection attempts etc). By analyzing the statistics and making amends when required, the website can be more focussed towards the target audience. These logfiles that contain the IP address of visitors to your site and the time they came in, among other things, are available at %systemroot%\system32\logfiles\w3svcX\ (where X corresponds to the website number of the website you wish to track) WebLog Expert is a powerful log analyzer that gives information about your site's visitors: activity statistics, accessed files, paths through the site, information about referring pages, search engines, browsers, operating systems, and comprehensive reports. WebLog Expert can analyze logs of both Apache and IIS web servers.

Wiki is in the inventor Ward Cunningham's original description: The simplest online database that could possibly work. "A wiki is a computer program that lets people around the world collaborate to create and update Web pages. The resulting collections of pages are also known as wikis. But there's more to it than that. Anyone who reads a wiki -- yes, anyone -- can also easily make changes, corrections and additions, create whole new pages, and even correct the way the wiki is organized." The largest wiki on multiple subjects is the English version of Wikipedia , an online encyclopedia created by volunteers who contribute information based on their expertise or knowledge. Ward Cunningham is now an architect in Microsoft's Prescriptive Architecture Guidance group, which produces patterns and practices for developers using Microsoft's .Net development platform.

"Q. I need to store integers - account numbers and other IDs - that have 20 or more digits. Storage and retrieval of these integers needs to be accurate, with no rounding, so I can't use the float data type. I've seen recommendations to others in this situation to store the integers in a CHAR(20) field. But I don't want to store my number in a character field because I want them to remain numeric values. How can I store integers that have 20 or more digits as numeric values? A. I suggest using the decimal or numeric data type to store the integers. In SQL Server, the numeric and decimal data types are equivalent. Both data types let you store integers that have up to 38 digits. The syntax for defining a decimal data type is: DECIMAL[(p[, s])] The first number after the DECIMAL keyword is the precision setting, which defines the total number of digits the integer can have. The second number is the scale setting, which defines the total number of digits to ...

The Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization spun off from Netscape, will release version 1.0 of its open-source Firefox browser on November 9. The Firefox Preview Release has reportedly been downloaded over 5 million times. Firefox features: Tabbed Browsing Setup is 4.5MB (Windows) Won’t automatically open a link that’s an executable file (the most common file-type for viruses and Trojan horses) without alerting the user. Google Search built into toolbar Customizable toolbars Developer tools including a powerful JavaScript and CSS error/warning console, and an optional Document Inspector Popup Blocking

SQL Server 2000 comes in no fewer than seven varieties: Standard Edition Enterprise Edition SQL Server CE Enterprise Evaluation Edition Developer Edition Personal Edition MSDE More: SQLMag

Web security blogger Anil John reports about the results of a study on secure passwords : # "... security can be significantly improved by educating users to select mnemonic passwords # Size of the password matters # Entropy per character matters, so instruct users to choose passwords containing numbers and special characters as well as letters." An example of a mnemonic password is "I's12n&Iah" which is derived from the phrase "It's 12 noon and I am hungry" . The regex to handle this: ^.*(?=.{9,})(?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z])(?=.*[@#'$%^&+=]).*$

The easiest way to provide Print functionality for your web-pages and removing the unwanted portions is by building the design of the page using CSS. The trick is to just set the DISPLAY property for a class to the value none and set the value of the media attribute of the link tag to print . Example - .navStuff { DISPLAY: none } <link rel="stylesheet" media="print" type="text/css" href=" print.css "> 4guys... has an interesting article on this

Section 508 is a part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which requires that electronic and information technology developed, procured, maintained, or used by the Federal government be accessible to people with disabilities. All electronic information created or acquired by any federal agency or department on or after June 21, 2001 must comply with these accessibility standards. A convenient Section 508 compliance checklist - http://www.webaim.org/standards/508/checklist

Keith Brown's book ".NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security" is available online