God I hate Microsoft ActiveSync...

10:40.15 - Wednesday 20th October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Title says it all really, and for once I'm not the only one experiencing problems. I had 3.7 installed which came with my Axim X30 and the damned thing would occasionally flip it's lid, whacking the CPU load up to 100% and basically causing my machine to crawl around on its proverbial knees.

I initially tried a small program called ActiveSync Toggle to try and close AS (after finding that I couldn't kill WCESCOMM.EXE using Task manager) but that wouldn't play ball for me. I had some success changing the task's priority to 'Lowest of the Low' but that still left it able to consume all available CPU time (and thus generate heat on my laptop), although it would at least now hand it over to another task without any hassle. Small mercies I guess.

ActiveSync 3.7.1 wouldn't get past 92% of the install until I quit everything, unplugged the cradle from USB and quit a few more programs for good measure. Now I have it installed but AS-Toggle still doesn't work, and AS itself still consumes 8-9% of my CPU time even when it isn't doing anything. Setting priority to low gets it down to 6-8%, but that's still a lot just to display that bloody icon in my system tray.

Website Promotion Rethink

13:14.44 - Wednesday 20th October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

I'm currently converting my website promotion routines and pages into PHP. The initial reason for this was that I no longer need to have the keywords in a particular file anymore - this had originally lead me to use DBase which itself was a hangover from my ASP days, which is why the main core page was written in ASP in the first place.

This is all well and good, but the SQL implementation in ASP doesn't - as far as I can see - provide a means to extract records in a random order. I wanted this feature in particular so that I could make the indexing aspect of my site appear to change more frequently, which helps convince the search engines that it's a more active page, and hence more important than a static one. Up till now, the sites in the promotion list have always appeared in the same order with me at the top (yay!) but my actual customers further down. I want to give everyone a shot at the top slot, hence the random record output requirements. Still with me? Jolly good.

I've started by creating a subdomain for the promotion script to reside on. Only 1MB of space is assigned since there are only going to be two scripts, and the rest of the data is now in a MySQL table instead of a file. I'll use phpMyAdmin to administer the thing as well, since it doesn't really seem worthwhile creating an all-singing-all-dancing administration area for such a simple site.

Once the new system is in place I will have to go through all of the promoted sites and change the links to the new central database, but that's no biggie really. The only one I don't have access to is Loki's site and he can do that one himself anyway. Once all that is done, the behemoth will roll on as before, gleefully crushing all that stands in it's way. I may also decrease the re-indexing period from three days down to two, or even one, so that sites get bumped up even quicker. We'll see.

Incidently, one of my major clients disappeared from Google while I was away because I hadn't included a single promotional META tag in the entire website - quite a major oversight. This situation has allowed the site to slip from it's no.1 position on Google to almost nothing. Oops!

Domain Registry Services Scam

18:36.37 - Wednesday 20th October 2004   (Link to This Entry)

Had a client here who had received one of these dodgy invoices from the above and who had already paid the requested £60 when he came to me to find out why his domain had not been renewed. I took the opportunity to give them a quick earbashing on their crappy 'LivePerson' website thingy (where I was told they do not issue refunds) but it didn't make me feel any better.

So let me see - they haven't updated this guy's domain, but they're not gonna give a refund? Isn't that fraud? Obtaining money by deception? What? How come these c*nts are still in business anyway?