There has always been quite a lot of heated discussion around the question of when to use SSL and when to avoid it while building websites. I have been asked this question a few times myself and finally thought that it would be good for everybody if I just wrote an article on it explaining what the big huff was all about. Obviously if anyone has anything to add or if you disagree with me for whatever reason, then feel free to do so below at the end of this article.

As a web developer you will know just how much we all love hate Internet Explorer 6 – one of the most dreaded browsers and browser versions that still exists in the deep dark corners of the interwebs – and you will probably have figured out that it doesn’t play well with PNG images. So here is how you can resolve this problem. It’s not as nice as an actual browser that can render PNG images natively, but it does work.

I mainly use MySQL these days, so get screwed over for a few minutes when I have to do something in MSSQL that is slightly different when it comes to it’s custom syntax. If you want to show all entries in a specific column and where it is not Null then you can do the following: 1 2 3 SELECT [columnNameHere] FROM [databaseNameHere].[dbo].[databaseTableNameHere] WHERE [columnNameHere] IS NOT NULL

__utma, __utmb, __utmc and __utmz are 4 cookies created by Google Analytics, for a detailed and very informative read, go here and here.

If you want to close a Bandmix account, then: Login to bandmix.co.uk Go to Options – http://www.bandmix.co.uk/account/options/ Click Decline Service Then click the button called Decline Service at the bottom. Click “OK” to the verification popup. Account closed!

Now this is an annoying one. You go to any of google’s sites including any site that has google-analytics.com javascript included in it’s body and BOOM! ..either you get redirected to a bullshit search page you didn’t ask to go to or the browser shows a blank white screen while apparently analytics loads.. It turns out this is actually a virus that infects routers! There are “short-lived-ways” to solve this problem and the one I adopted was to add the following into a windows batch file and run it every bloody time just before doing a google search.

As many of you may know, Chromium is an opensource project that is basically an Operating System built on Linux and is just like working in Google’s Chrome web browser. I decided to take a look at it today and went and downloaded the developer sneak release. It came all boxed up in a 764,994KB (764MB) VMDK Virtual Machine Harddisk file. When it finished downloading I was sadly quite excited as I love trying out new Operating Systems and goodies – being a geeky kind of guy like most guys out there – and after hardly any setup at all it started up.

I needed a quick and easy way to check for the basics of an email address. Does it contain “@” and “.” symbols. This is by no meals a foolproof method, so don’t use it for anything big, but if you want to just do a quick test then here you go: 1 2 3 4 var email:String = "[email protected]"; if (email.indexOf("@")!=-1 && email.indexOf(".")!=-1) trace("false"); else trace ("true");

The first time this ran it took for freakin’ ages! This should take less than a few minutes What the hell is that supposed to mean? Less than a few? 73 minutes perhaps? Rant over..

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error ‘80004005’ [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][Shared Memory]General network error. Check your network documentation. /site/path/to/script/aspfile.asp, line # ..and that’s what it throws you! At about this point you may want to scream, or just be a tad annoyed by that damn machine running your site. Basically your server is either one of two things, and those are: Overloaded Server is “Just Plain Shit” The error is caused because the script is struggeling to connect to the database server – may it even be in the same damn box with same IP and all – and sometimes fails, so shows you it’s overloaded groan.

What the hell does that mean? You can get this error thrown up in your good old trusty Firebug console. It expects a script to be returned as an ajax type datatype. So all you have to do is change your datatype to output as XML.

Mocha is a Java Decompiler and is 100% FREE to use. The readme.txt file in the Mocha distribution offers the free usage license: The distribution archive (file “mocha-b1.zip”) may be distributed freely, provided its contents (“mocha.zip” and this file, “readme.txt”) are not tampered with in any way. I am pleased to be able to make the Mocha distribution available under those terms: mocha-b1.zip (121K) You can visit the alternative download location here.

Error message: Connection attempt failed with “EAI_NODATA – No address associated with nodename”. The above error occured while using Filezilla (Ftp Client), it either means that you do not have an active internet connection, OR it means that you need to clear the private data because the connection to the server was lost while an active FTP connection was still present. Upon reconnection to the server (which is sometimes automatic) you will receive the EAI_NODATA error.

1180 Call to a possibly undefined method navigateToURL If you get the above error when trying to run your flash actionscript 3 file, you are obviously trying to use the navigateToURL() function but have not imported the flash.net library code. The following code before everything will correct the problem. 1 import flash.net.*; ..or a more of a direct unbloated method is as follows: 1 import flash.net.navigateToURL;

I came across this site today and it’s quite an interesting one as it works out the approximate time it would take a desktop pc to crack the password. Check it out here.

It is really easy to create a Timer in Actionscript 3. Instantiate the Timer Class and pass a time in millions of 1000 to it to work in seconds. 1 var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000); Setup an event listener to call a function. 1 myTimer.addEventListener("timer", myTimerEventHandler); Start the Timer. 1 myTimer.start(); Start the Timer. 1 2 3 function myTimerEventHandler(event:TimerEvent):void { trace(myTimer.currentCount+" seconds have passed."); } So altogether we have this.

Google now allows you to add a background image to the google homepage to apparently make it more, like, home.. hmmmm Just by clicking the button at the bottom left hand corner it allows you to either upload an image or select an image from google. For indepth instructions as per Google, check this page out: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=180720&hl=en

I came across a very interesting and quite funny read, take a look here for How to Hire a Hacker: http://www.setec.org/hirehacker.html

Launch Failed! If the program is already running, close it before attempting to run. I don’t know how many times I have gotten this error message while trying to Run a project in Adobe Flash Builder. For all of you stuck with this message and unable to ever get your projects going, there is quite a simple fix to this. All you need to do is open up Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc) and click on Processes, then “End Process” on any instances of “adl.

This is an example of how to create a random number in Classic ASP in order to append to a swf file so that the browser does not cache the swf file. 1 <% Dim SwfRndNum Randomize SwfRndNum = Rnd %> You can then add it to your swf embed code as follow, bear in mind that I am only showing the snippet around the swf file name and not the entire embed code.