Hopefully this article will save someone a little bit of time trying to get OCCI to work with CGI on Solaris. It is one of those things that is not documented (until now) anywhere, but can be "learned" the hard way. Recently, I had to use Oracle OCCI library in an Apache CGI program for one of my clients. Sounds like a simple task. I went out and hacked away a simple test driver to test the OCCI libraries: #include <sys/types.h>#include <unistd.h>#include <stdio.h>#include <time.h>#include <iostream>#include "fcgi_stdio.h"#include <occi.h>using namesp... [More]

Well, you can try to do this the hard way by converting the MP4 basedformats to mpeg 2 or vob and package/burn them into DVD discs.  This canbe very time consuming and you still have to use physical discs to beable to play them on your DVD player.There are tons of companies with templated websites :) that try to sell their video conversion software.  I'm surprised they are still in business.There is much easier and simpler solution to playback of Internet videofiles.  You have to get a Media Player hardware device.  You can use ebay to getno name one for $20-$30, or get a b... [More]

To setup a Blackberry device to access the Internet is very easy these days; thanks to the latest desktop software from RIM. In my setup I used Blackberry Bold activated on Rogers network. In the past, you would have to buy some third party software to access the Internet. Some of these could set you back $50-$100. This is not longer the case. So, how to setup your laptop/desktop computer to use Blackberry devices to access the Internet? You'll need a standard USB to mini USB cable and the latest version of RIM's desktop software. Blackberry released version 5.0.1 of their desktop softwa... [More]

This exam was long, it covered a lot of material. The hardest .Net exam by far. 50 questions and 3 hours.I used Microsoft Self-Paced Training Kit book to study for this exam. It took me over 2 months to study, 2-4 hours every day. I went chapter by chapter, doing the end of chapter exercises. But I was not ready for this exam.One thing you should do before you start studying for this exam is review ASP programming. That is of course if you have not done much of ASP or ASP.NET programming. Concepts of web site setup, configuration, simple forms, database connectivity should be reviewed before d... [More]

One of few legacy leftovers that was never dropped over the years is the common use of www domain prefix. It is not a problem per se for us humans, but SE bots have mind of their own. When traversing a non-www and a www version of a web site, apparently, google and other bots are treating them as two separate web entities, even if content is identical. This causes confusion in SE databases and in a worst case a drop from the index. To avoid this confusion, web site operators should redirect their non-www traffic to www version of the website, or redirect the www version to the non-www versi... [More]

One of the reasons I switched to blog engine was the fact that blog engine is relatively SEO friendly. Looking for ways to optimize my pages, I found this little extension http://oberdata.com.ar/blog/post/2008/06/15/SEO-Pack-for-BlogengineNET.aspx that allows you to configure title and description for each post. It is very basic but at least your pages will have some unique title and description. This little extension does not support Blog engine's non-post pages, but it is a good start. Next on my plate will be to extend this to generate keywords dynamically based on the word count inside... [More]

I've been using Google's Blogger platform for few months now. It is a great platform to start blogging; it offers lots of widgets that can be installed with just point and click interface. I was attracted to it because google is running it and because the service is free. However, there are number of things that I did not like: constant javascript errors, non-compliant HTML, lacking SEO features, inability of storing files on the blogger site, or running server-side scripting. Basically, it is a good blogging platform but if you want to have more control over your site, well, good luck. ... [More]

Twitter was nice enough to provide us with a Javascript JSON widget to retrieve one's public timeline. Twitter widget constructor has a bunch of parameters that you can change to customize the look and feel of your widget. However one critical, in my opinion, element was left out and remains hardcoded. Font definition should have been exposed in the widget construction, or at least the CSS classes should have been properly documented.Here is how the twitter widget can be invoked: <script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script> <script> new TWTR.Widget({ ... [More]