Try a freestyle training camp this summer
After you have finished that urgent project and posted the last minute customer changes live up to the website, you might like to think about where you will spend your holiday this summer. Of course you could queue at the airport with all the other beach wanabes clutching swimsuits and sun factor. Alternatively you might like to head off to the eternal snows of Europe’s glaciers to learn the gentle at of freestyle skiing.
While most of us spend our summers working on our tans, Jenny Jones, who won gold in the Winter X Games, a freesports version of the Olympics spends hers working on her freestyle skills at training camps on Europe’s glaciers or down in the southern hemisphere during their winter.
In this snowboarding article from Guardian Travel, Jenny picks out the best summer camps for women who want to stay on the slopes all year and improve their skills. If you are a complete beginner you can find training in the basic rules of riding kickers, rails and halfpipes. Or for the more adventrous there are Freeriding, Backcountry or custom courses which cater for Skiers and Snowboarders
For more information check out the Website of the Skiing and Snowboarding specialists McNab Snowsports . They offer Freestyle Performance clinics with 6 days of Freestyle coaching from top British Freestyle riders and Coaches.
You may still need the swimsuits and sun factor as, according to snowboarding champion Jenny from Bristol, the afternoons are all volleyball, bungee jumping, football or just the pub, and no one takes themselves too seriously.
IIS File Upload Problems
Last week a user reported a problem with a file upload on our Intranet which has otherwise performed flawlessly for years. They browsed to the file and selected it as normal, but when they clicked upload “nothing happened”. This is an in-house developed Content Management System, written in classic ASP, and the user is a competent content manager, so user issues did not seem likely. At first we suspected file permissions, as there had been some moving around of directories by system support, but this usually results in a 500 error to IE users with Friendly Errors turned on.
Eventually through perseverance by the user it was determined that files greater than 200 Kbytes would fail, but smaller files would upload OK. At last something to Google!
It turns out that by default Windows 2008 server limits file uploads to 200KB in size. To overcome this limit you must edit the ASP Setting as follows:
- Login to your server
- Open Up IIS Manager
- Click on ASP
- Expand the Limits properties
- Change the default 200KB for the helpfully named Maximum Requesting Entity Body Limit to the required value.
Once you have saved that change the upload limit will increase for all the websites on that server. Remember, if you are running clustered servers you need to increase this value on each server in the cluster.
Facebook pay up in case settlement
According to the Guardian, Facebook have paid up to $65m – $20m cash and a 1.25m shares – to end a lawsuit in which Mark Zuckerberg, now its chief executive, was accused of stealing the idea for the social networking site from a company called ConnectU.
The case, brought against Zuckerberg by three former classmates, Divya Narendra and the brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, had threatened to derail Facebook.
For more on this story click here to read the Guardian article
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
Although published back in the last century, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide a valuable resource for developers and web designers, and should be mandatory reading for all development teams, designers, business analysts, and anyone drawing up specifications.
The guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities, but more importantly how make that content more available to all users, whatever user agent or browser they are using. Although developers are encouraged to use new technologies that solve problems, they should know how to make sure their pages still work with older browsers and people who choose to turn off features.
Recently I had cause to grateful for Guideline 6, which states “Ensure that pages featuring new technologies transform gracefully”. This encourages you to build sites that are accessible even when newer technologies are not supported or are turned off.
My gratitude was prompted because I had cause to access the Web from behind a corporate firewall, where security policy blocked all client side scripting. This wiped out JavaScript validation, on-click button handlers, clever Ajax page loader and anything except plain vanilla HTML. Fortunately the application I was using at the time still worked because it provided alternative ways to load, edit and save the data.
Sure it didn’t have the flashy stuff to automatically wrap my text in valid tags, but hey, hand coding HTML can be therapeutic!
TechCo Supports a new Site to Fight Leprosy
There is a new site available on the Internet to help in the fight against Leprosy. TechCo Systems are assisting with this venture as a way to put somthing back into the community. This new leprosy elimination campaign was launched to coincide with World Leprosy Day on 25th January 2009. To see this new site, visit End Leprosy Now.
Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Protection, 2008
The Cool Vendor in Infrastructure Protection annual report for 2008 has been published by global analyst firm Gartner Inc.
In naming the five infrastructure protection vendors that represent, “new directions in their market spaces,” Gartner defined the challenge for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and other security decision makers by stating that, “significant changes in the enterprise technology and threat environments, including the growing use of IP telephony and consumer devices, are driving innovative new approaches to infrastructure protection.”
The named vendors are
- Bit9, Cambridge, Massachusetts (www.bit9.com)
- Damballa, Atlanta, Georgia (www.damballa.com)
- Palo Alto Networks, Alviso, California (www.paloaltonetworks.com)
- VoIPshield Systems, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (www.voipshield.com)
- Yoggie Security Systems, Tel Aviv, Israel (www.yoggie.com)
Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are:
- Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before;
- Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology);
- Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.
To see the full details click on Cool Vendor in Infrastructure Protection annual report for 2008