Geocities is closing down

This morning I received a notification from Yahoo that our old friend, Geocities, is closing down. Geocities provided hosting for my very first html page that was posted online. For a while the web site, currently at http://alen.appspot.com, had its home at Geocities. The design, background, and text on the current web site are still pretty much what they used to be in those days. I feel a bit sad that Geocities' days are over and hope this means a new beginning for some other services that will mark the current years.

Open Source HTML Parser for C# (.Net)

Html Agility Pack - Home

This is an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports plain XPATH or XSLT (you actually don't HAVE to understand XPATH nor XSLT to use it, don't worry...). It is a .NET code library that allows you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams).

4 GB of RAM on a 32-bit Machine

Below is a page from Microsoft that explains memory management in Vista SP1 on 32-bit machines. As I am in the process of getting the 4th GB of RAM and maxing my system, the article makes an interesting reading.
I have already applied PAE setting with BCEditor but don't know if it is really necessary now. I have AMD64 system with socket F and it should support more than 4GB of addressable space.

The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed

Part of Appspot Down

Last night, for the first time ever, my web site on appspot.com was down. The URL was returning Error 500 - Server Error. The other web site on the same domain was up and running.
This is the first time I see a part of Google faulty. I thought something might have happened with my application so I tried to upload the site again but was unable to.
Anyway, everything is up and running again this morning. This is a small dent in Google's (so far) 100% reliability and uptime. :)
I have to say I'm greatly thankful to them for providing this service and performance for free. They're really making the web a better place.

CSS Shadow

The page below contains many CSS samples. A very nice CSS-only shadow is simple and effective solution if you need a quick shadow on a div element.

Stu Nicholls | CSSplay | CSS simple fluid drop shadows

Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE'

I just had the following error while trying to run an ASP.Net application under IIS:

Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE'.

The situation is - I'm setting up an asp.net application to run on my local machine. Running it with a development web server was OK at first but then I needed to use my browser from another computer. This prompted me to set up the application under local IIS instead of the development web server, which accepts only local connections. Trying to set up a tunnel with an SSH server did not work.
So, to set up an application under IIS first I had to give access permissions to Network Service user to access the folder used as the root.
The second thing, that actually caused the error above, was to set up the login for Network Service in the SQL Server. No additional settings necessary at this point.
And only these two settings set up the web site for access from other computers.

Browser Shots

A really useful site that provides images of how sites render in different browsers.
Enter the URL and let the site renders the page in the selected web browsers.

Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test - Browsershots

Image Cropping with jCrop and ASP.Net

Great example on how to bind together image upload and cropping with jQuery, JCrop, and ASP.Net. Also some references and tips, like where to get IntelliSense for JavaScript files in Visual Studio 2008, link to jQuery on GoogleAPIs for better caching, etc.

Upload and Crop Images with jQuery, JCrop and ASP.NET

JavaScript Debugger for Visual Studio 2008

Intellisense for JavaScript files is available for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 through a hotfix available at the link below. This is extremely useful for debugging jQuery (and other, of course) JavaScript libraries.

Visual Web Developer Team Blog : VS2008 SP1 Hotfix to Support "-vsdoc.js" IntelliSense Doc Files

Focus-Follows-Mouse in Windows

There is a very simple change in Windows to enable natively-supported functionality of focus-follows-mouse. This is similar to default functionality in most desktop managers in Linux (or X-Windows system).

"Focus-follows-mouse

Believe it or not, Windows does support focus-follows-mouse, though
there is no GUI configuration exposing it. Instead you must edit a
registry key and then log out and back in for the change to become
effective. You can use regedit to edit the key.

On Windows NT, set the following registry key to have a value of 1:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse\Active Windows
Tracking

On NT it has some bugs: some apps auto-raise on focus, and alt-tab
doesn't move the mouse.

On Windows 2000, XP, or 2003, you need to change a binary-valued
registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control
Panel\Desktop\UserPreferencesMask

This is a little-endian bitmask. For focus-follows-mouse, add the
flag 0x1. For example, my XP SP2 laptop originally had a value of
9E 3E 05 80, which is 0x80053E9E. To activate
focus-follows-mouse I changed to 0x80053E9F, or 9F 3E 05
80 in regedit.

According to http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/18/
you can also achieve raise-on-focus by adding the flag 0x40. I
haven't tested that as I don't like raise-on-focus."

Source: Making Windows Usable

So, it is the first number that gets increased by 1 in regedit.