I’m seriously happy about Opera right now. Not only have they succeeded at keeping up with the technical updates, their browser is now finally another proud owner of a native shell on Mac.

This whole native shell movement really makes my eyes happy. Afterall, we did go from 9.6 to 10.5:

From the left to the right, Opera 9.6, Opera 10.1, Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha for Labs.

10.5 also has a nice addition, smoothly animated tabs à-la-Safari.  We might see additional changes by the time this hits release, but it really makes me want to use Opera more. (Note, Opera 10.5 has other interface change niceties not covered here, but you get the gist of it; more animation and coolness, including for the first time being able to tab through checkboxes on Mac)

A note on speed

Opera Software proved once again that sheer technical expertise can surpass open source communities, as well Google on that note. On my computer, I got 393.2 ms for Opera 10.5 and 428.4 ms for Chrome 4 in the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, and it’s apparently even faster on Windows but I didn’t test that yet. Amazing.

In my new career as a Java developer, as I’m French, I’ve been using the siteduzero.com’s Java tutorial. Actually, that’s just when I didn’t want to get my big Deitel and Deitel book out, but seriously, forget about SiteDuZero’s crap. I’m really sorry for the author, but as a message to you: “Your code sucks”.

All that said, if you want a serious and reliable source to learn Java, just try Java Tutorials! It’s an official publication from Sun, it’s free, and it’s more than complete (check out that massive index). You can even buy it in book form.

The only hiccup with this is the coding style. While K&R might be Java conventions, it might not be your cup of tee. I know, I’m allergic to K&R too and I prefer Allman. If you really can’t look at Sun’s code, there’s always Deitel and Deitel’s Java books.

Note: This does not cover Java EE. For that go to the Java EE 5 Tutorials (lol, it’s amazing really, they have it for like everything).

Well, after trying to find out via Google, I gave up with the stupid answers from dumb ASP.net programmers such as “VBScript is not a server-side language” or “you can’t run .asp on IIS 7″.

Sure…

So for the curious, here it is:

1. Start
2. Search for Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
3. In Debugging Properties, set “Send Errors To Browser”  to true
4. Don’t forget to click “Apply” under the Actions panel on the right

That’s it. IIS will now shoot the runtime errors directly into your browser window instead of saying something went wrong with the URL. I’m pretty sure this is on by default in previous IIS versions, hence the confusion.

You might also want to turn on “Enable Parent Paths” in the Behavior section, which will enable the ..\ relative path notation. Frankly I don’t know why this is turned off by default… but hey, we’re talking classic ASP here. It’s not like Microsoft really cares.