Webmaster's Woes

16.3.05

The Rant

My dear boss understands the necessity of technological advance in IT so he buys us top-of-the-line equipement.

A few years ago he bought four or five Microsoft (c) Intellimouse (r) Explorer (tm) USB mice which are still my favourite model (I like the original more than this new v2). Sadly, ALL of them died after a few months of use. Since resurrecting dead electronics was always my hobby I took the first one home and dissected it with a screwdriver and a knife.
The cause of death was very simple: A cut wire.

This could happen to any electronic device, but after the third identical mouse I became suspicious...

Today, when I removed the primary plastic coating around the last of the nest, I noticed that the aluminium secondary wrapping was cut at a certain place and that reminded me, that all the others had it cut there too.
It's where the cable goes out of the mouse, so that COULD be because of excessive usage - Someone obviously thought it would be 1337 to use 6 hair-thick wires for such a dynamic thing as a mouse but... why did this always happen to the white wire when all the other colored wires were made out of six tinies as well???

It is very simple: Because white is a bad color for wires to be.

14.3.05

The Motive

Today, a stupid thing happened. It was so stupid it motivated me to create a blog to tell the world about it:
I created some .NET code to rewrite URL's for my pet project http://driversplanet.com/ .

The thing (rewriting http://site/printers/list.aspx to http://site/someHiddenPage.aspx) worked superb for my home computer, but at work (Windows 2000) there was an interesting problem:

Page would display just fine in Internet Explorer, while my favourite browser, FireFox, demanded to know my username and password, and eventually barfed a HTTP Error 401
401.1 Unauthorized: Logon Failed

This should not be happening :/ I hacked the web.config rewrite rules, wrecked the IIS site configuration and Allowed all types of users to access my computer, but what was the source of this sh*t was a stupid "Printers" share in IIS.

Yep, this is the second time I wished URL's were case-sensitive...

edit: Some people told me, they were case-sensitive.. I just don't know anymore :S