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.

Might I say finally?

At least, it looks like one Mobile Carrier in Canada understood; don’t stop charging for access fees, just hide them in more expensive plans. I admit it doesn’t really change anything. TELUS’s new charging model isn’t very different than previous prices in the end, but the jump to an all included price that doesn’t hide service charges is an appreciated change.

For example, say you take the Clear Choice iPhone 50, a 50$ plan that gives you 150 local minutes and a choice of extra features, like doubling minutes or 1000 outgoing text messages and unlimited incoming, which unfortunately means Canadian providers have, as rumored, started to charge for incoming text messages (total rip-off) and 500 MB of data (also a total rip-off). Well, that’s it, that’s all you pay, 50$.

On the other hand, Bell has an almost identical iPhone plan that looks cheaper; 45$ (the difference being that you only have one extra option; favorite 5 numbers. But add on top of that the system access fees; 6.95$ and the 0.75$ 9-1-1 emergency service fee, and you get a fabulous 52.70$ (not mentioning the fact that the 9-1-1 service charges can be as high 1.28$ depending on the province, in this case New Brunswick). So, who’s cheaper now? Note that, however cool TELUS’s new scheme may be, Bell’s higher cost plans totally kick TELUS’s ass, really.

And on Rogers, well as always, it’s even higher, coming in at 57.58$ for the same thing TELUS offers. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention Rogers’ best matching plan to the highest Bell offers, coming in at 105$, doesn’t even manage to match the Bell’s offered minutes and unlimited text messaging plus the unlimited favorite 5 numbers for 95$. Good luck Rogers, cause really, you’re total rip-off. I hope nobody ever buys an iPhone again from Rogers.

If you read a lot of journalistic articles, chances are you have stumbled upon the marks “i.e.” and “e.g.”. Chances are you probably also never thought you never truly knew what they meant.

The confusion is obvious when you take a good look. First and foremost, we have the dreaded “i.e.”. Most people either pronounce it “I E” or “in example”, both of which are wrong. “i.e.” is actually an acronym for Latin “id est”, literally “that is”. The grammatical sens of a phrase may thus be very different if you interpret it wrong. Besides, “in example” is wrong grammar. You should always use “for example”.

Second but not last is “e.g.”. Much in the same way, “e.g.” is not read by its sounding which is similar to “example”, but rather as the Latin “exempli gratia”, literally “for the sake of an example”. Because of its close meaning, reading “e.g.” as “for example” is generally accepted and can be used in situations which require such a construct.

Very often we overhear Standard in International. The technical definition of international is that it is something pertaining to two or more nations at the same time. As a web site owner, being conscious of your audience is important, and that audience can turn out to be more than just American.

This is why you have to learn to speak internationally, and probably the biggest obstacle is Time Notation, for which there is generally two solutions.

The Standards Solution

One easy way to cater to an international audience, if you happen to have one (Google Analytics is a very good way to find out), is to simply put everything in standard notation.

For example, when announcing an live web event, you could use dates like these: 2010-02-07

This normally confusing notation, is 02 or 07 the month, can never be because it’s part of the IEC standard for dates, so it’s YYYY-MM-DD and because it is the only date format that starts with the year.

However, English isn’t Japanese, and we were conditioned to naming months by their name, and not by numbers, so using the IEC standard notation is not the best for readability because we have to constantly translate the middle number to a month.

The same happens with time. We could use the standard 24:00 clock, but it wouldn’t cater to France which uses an h instead of a colon, like this: 24h.

The Local Solution

One real solution is to take a good look at your audience. Is it international? Etc.
Although you can do that by studying demographic statistics, the language you use is an easy way to determine what standard to use.

For example, French-speaking communities practically never use p.m and a.m with a 12 hour clock (the exception being Canadian French, although the 24 hour notation is still common). Most people in France that have never been exposed to American English will look at you weird if you say p.m. or a.m. as they probably never heard that before.

So, adapting is the key. For example, on AMV-Canada’s web site, I used a mixed representation for the different populations that goes like this for live show: 2 p.m PST, 5 p.m. EST and 22:00 in the UK. While this may look bizarre at first, it is unambiguous as Canadians and Americans will read the part they need easily while skipping a different notation for an piece of information not important to them and the British will do the same by simply reading their version.

It’s also better to avoid writing dates without the month, and to avoid things such as UTC -05 when denoting Eastern Standard Time (EST). You’d be surprised at how many people don’t know what UTC or GMT are, even EST is sometimes not known.

If you’re American, avoid naming web events with TV notations like 8/7c as these are not only majorly unknown to every other English speaking country, but they are also not the same time across the entire United States. 8/7c effectively equals 8 EST, 8 PST, 7 CST and 7 MST, but if you live on the East Cost, you might have meant 8 EST and 5 PST, 7 CST and 6 MST.

However, Local Adapting requires some research into each country’s way of specifying dates and time.

Well, surprise, you didn’t even see it update… and you got Google Chrome 3 already. I guess you’ll just have to wait for TechCrunch to make an article. I’m pretty sure they’re as much taken by surprise as I am.

Along with Mac OS X Snow Leopard comes a great surprise for all HFS+ lovers. Apple now includes an HFS+ read-only driver for Windows with Bootcamp. You can only get this if you have a Snow Leopard disc however, but it’s so cheap it might be worth it if you don’t require write functionality.

If you do require write functionality on Windows with HFS+, have a look at MacDrive. It offers a cheap solution for lone PCs in Mac-centric environments.

MediaTemple’s Twitter account recently linked to a very interesting article on CSS support in email clients.

Now, while every knowledgeable techie in the industry knows email has always been a crappy platform when it comes to content, the results of the research conducted by CampaignMonitor is surprising. On a total of 65 CSS rules, Gmail only supports 33 of those, with 1 with partial or buggy support, and on top of that doesn’t support any Style or Link element in either the Head or the Body.

I mean, what? My favorite email client is actually one of the worse? Maybe not, let’s look at some other stats:

Hotmail supports 43 rules, 10 more than Gmail, and does support Style and Link elements in either the Head or Body (like the majority of recent mail apps). Yahoo Mail is the 2nd most advanced of Web Mail applications, supporting 53 CSS rules. Of course, Yahoo Mail supports the Style and Link elements in the Head and the Body too. Why Gmail’s lack of support for Style/Link elements is worrying is because only one desktop email client lacks this support too, IBM Lotus Notes 6 and 7. Version 7 was released in 2005 with a level of support already well surpassed by Outlook two years earlier, so go figure at how late Gmail is.

Coming in at a surprising 60 rules support, only missing 5 not so important rules (except 1, the e:hover pseudo-selector, supported by both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail but not Gmail), is AOL Web Mail.

And then you have Apple’s foray into the web mail space with Mobile Me, with a competitive support rating in at 52. However, it does not support Style or Link elements directly in the body, despite supporting them in the Head, although this could be seen as an effort to promote more standard HTML and CSS practices in emails by Apple rather than an actual lack of support.

On the desktop side, things are both expected and unexpected. Apple’s integrated OS X Mail app lacks support for only one of the rules, rating in at 64, while Mozilla Thunderbird is the gold standard by supporting it all, not surprising as Thunderbird runs on Mozilla’s Gecko platform, the same thing that powers Firefox. In fact, it is most likely that Thunderbird has an email rendering engine leaps ahead of other clients because of that.

On the unexpected side of the desktop comes Outlook 2007, with less support than 2003, Windows Mail which basically has the exact same rendering engine as Outlook 2003, and probably the most unexpected one, Entourage 2008, Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac per say, which has the exact same level of support than Apple Mail, making it highly suspect of using the same engine. I wonder what’s going to happen to that with Office 2011 for Mac, which Microsoft said will get rid of Entourage and have the first Outlook for Mac.

On the mobile side of things, the landscape is widely different and special. The iPhone is the most advanced, with support than Mobile Me, although not quite on par with Apple Mail, just 3 rules behind. Android Email is far better than Android’s Gmail app, actually coming in second with the Palm Pre not far behind.

Android Gmail comes slightly under its Web-based Desktop Client with 31 supported rules, followed by BlackBerry, which only supports 23 rules, making it the worse email client, for exception of Lotus Notes 6 and 7 that support only 11 rules. Yes, even Windows Mobile 6.5 and the very old Palm Garnet OS have better support, which brings in the question, why is the BlackBerry considered the epitome of enterprise communication? Of course, if you’re in the industry, you know why (there’s plenty of valuable reasons), but still, even more modern BlackBerrys not intended to save you bandwidth, like the Storm, have the same horrible render engine. In my opinion RIM products have just been getting worse over time. I guess being Canadian doesn’t make you competent in technology.

So what’s all this jargon of talk means for you?

Well, whatever situation you’re in, it means email is one of the worst communication material to send any kind of non-raw data. Just looking at Gmail’s growth and Thunderbird’s near non-existent market share shows how unimportant display has been in the email world and how you should maybe think of only sending text in your emails after-all.

Although as a fan of standards support, I would consider going Yahoo Mail Plus instead of using Gmail. But is it worth the effort? Gmail is so useful for so many reasons, and blends so well with Google Docs and stuff, and all of the Yahoo Mail Plus features are free on Gmail.

I respect Yahoo’s effort, but it might not be the right thing to focus on. Still, Yahoo has as almost as much active email users as Hotmail, Gmail and AOL combined, and a lot of these people rely on their actual Yahoo email address to do their daily messaging. In these scenarios, switching mail service is much harder as you have to give up your address. I know what it is, I’m tied to my Gmail address for my daily needs, and switching to Yahoo can be scary, especially since it’s such an unstable company right now. I’m considering switching to a corporate email address for daily use though, which would get me rid of that switching constraint.

One other hardly-covered aspect of that weakness in email is what newer services like Google Wave could bring, or even Twitter or Facebook. The odds are there, although for Google Wave it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better; pointing at the face Google Wave is a Google product after-all, and Google surprisingly is a horrible company when it comes to HTML standards (just look at your source on Blogger, or Google Docs…)

When you boot up Snow Leopard, you might be surprised to find your total disk space bigger than it was before. Your 320 GB hard-drive might have suddenly jumped from a mere 299 to a near full 319. What happened?

No, your drive space didn’t magically get bigger because of an magic trick by Apple, rather, the way the disc size is reported has been changed to fit new data representations standards.

Traditionally, like most companies, Apple used to report the data the wrong way, or the old way, depending on who you talk to. The wrong/old way says that any multiple of the “byte” measure x1000 and up is actually 1024 times its value. For example, 1 KB (Kilobyte) would equal 1024 B (Bytes). However, in the new standards, given confusion with SI units which normally represent 1000 of a given item and not 1024, 1 KB has been rectified to be 1000 B. To illustrate the other measure still widely used in the industry for reasons beyond the scope of this article, a new measure was invented. In the case of the KB, we call this one Kibibyte (KiB).

Some Linux distributions chose to change their measure from KB to KiB, MB to MiB, GB to GiB, etc. and retain the same numbers. Others, like Apple, have chosen to avoid potential user confusion with the added small “i” and change the numbers instead to correctly represent a GB for example, as 1000 MB, and so on. Other manufacturers like Microsoft have yet to change and still use the wrong measures.

What happens to the hard drive is that advertised disc sizes are always in standard SI format GB. 320 GB is thus really 320,000,000,000 B. However, the way your OS, such as Windows, reads it, is typically the wrong way, GB (Giga) as GiB (Gibi), meaning 320,000,000,000 B reduced gives 298 GB, which is in fact 298 GiB. If you ever wondered why the advertised size of your disk was always smaller in real life, that’s the real reason.

Chapeau, Apple, for making it right.

Oh wow, who saw that coming. In 2009, it just seemed the browser I met with the same dull logo would stay with it forever. Well, lucky us, our docks and task bars will stop being poluted with the crappy red O logo starting Opera 10.

I really like the new O. It still stands out like a sore thumb my Mac’s dock crowd of icons for its rash color and lack of complexities, but alass, a bit like that new Firefox logo nobody saw (yup, they actually changed the colors and depth a bit since 3.5), it’s better, only in this case, way better.

Not withstanding the browser itself, the designers (Ian Hickson I think) at Opera Software are doing a good job with Opera 10. It’s coming out as a neat browser, although the lack of native looks is truly exasperating. Mind you, Apple does a so so job at making its components follow a real standard look, but the delicious generation style is at least more thourough on OS X apps than it is for its Windows XP counterparts.

You know the Quick Connect thing on FileZilla? Is it clogged up? Do you wish you didn’t have to start over and erase everything? Your wish has come true. Follow the instructions bellow. All you need to know is a bit of XML, but it’s so easy it’s not very complicated to figure out.

Windows XP

1. Go to C:\Documents and Settings\your_user_name
2. Click in the address bar and append the following to the current URL: \Application Data
3. It should look like this: C:\Documents and Settings\Pacoup\Application Data
4. Double-click on the folder named FileZilla
5. Open recentservers.xml with a raw text editor (e.g. Notepad)
6. Head over to the XML Step of this guide

Windows Vista & Windows 7

1. Go to C:\Users\your_user_name
2. Click in the address bar to activate the URL field and append the following to the current URL: \AppData
3. It should look like this: C:\Documents and Settings\Pacoup\AppData
4. Double-click on the folder named FileZilla
5. Open recentservers.xml with a raw text editor (e.g. Notepad)
6. Head over to the XML Step of this guide

The XML Step

It’s only a matter of editing the right tags. Simply follow this before and after and you should figure it out. If not, ask your local geek or search Google for some very basic XML tutorials.

Before:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<FileZilla3>
    <RecentServers>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
    </RecentServers>
</FileZilla3>

After:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<FileZilla3>
    <RecentServers>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
        <Server>
            <Host>your_2nd_ftp_host.com</Host>
            <Port>21</Port>
            <Protocol>0</Protocol>
            <Type>0</Type>
            <User>your_user_name</User>
            <Pass>xxxxxxx</Pass>
            <Logontype>1</Logontype>
            <TimezoneOffset>0</TimezoneOffset>
            <PasvMode>MODE_DEFAULT</PasvMode>
            <MaximumMultipleConnections>0</MaximumMultipleConnections>
            <EncodingType>Auto</EncodingType>
            <BypassProxy>0</BypassProxy>
        </Server>
    </RecentServers>
</FileZilla3>