Month: June 2010

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In the past couple of days we have been getting spam from... well... us...B) Not really, but someone out there is sending spam with the support@icetips.com in the From header, like:

From: "icetips.com" <support@icetips.com>

The real sender is from industryd0463@resaleworld.com or some other name at resaleworld.com, but even this is bogus. I have been in touch with them and they assured me that this email address does not exist on their servers and has nothing to do with them. In my case the URL in the email is pointing to http://www.bims.web.tr/index2.html which can't be resolved, and pinging it says it can't be found, but the .tr country extension belongs to Turkey.

The content of the email is text indicating that your account needs to be attended to with a link, something like this:

"REFERENCE: Your Email to .

You recently sent email to a mailbox that requires authentication of the sender to reduce spam. Before your message can be delivered you must confirm that you are the sender by clicking on the link below and then clicking on the "Deliver" button that will be displayed. Once you have completed this step, no further authorization will be required for future emails that you send to this address.

Please confirm your email by visiting the URL

Thank you for your cooperation in helping us to fight spam.

Regards,
icetips.com Account Services
-------------------------"

So if you get an email like this, you can be absolutely sure that it has nothing to do with us and did not come from us!

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Last Monday, Ed Robinson CEO of Aptimize (http://www.aptimize.com) talked at our .NET user group meeting in Redmond, about optimizing web sites. He pointed out one of the tools they use, http://www.webpagetest.org It is very interesting to run this on your site to see how it will perform.

It lists every item that is downloaded, every file, how long it takes to download, how long the server response is etc. It gives you a really good idea how long a website takes to load from various parts of the world as they route the signal through various servers, for example in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand etc. Four things that Ed suggested to make pages faster to load:

  1. Minify css and javascript files and anything else that can be minified. This can drastically reduce the size of those files as it cuts out all whitespace and with js files it also reduces the length of parameters and variable names.
  2. Use sprites for images. This means fewer downloads, fewer roundtrip requests.
  3. Consolidate files that are sent to the browser, such as css and javascript. This also reduces the number of requests to the server.
  4. Compress anything that can be compressed. Here is an article about compression using php or .htaccess Here is an article on how to set compression on the Apache webserver.

I found an excellent writeup of website optimization that explains each of those items in more detail. Ed's talk was only 15 minutes, but by itself, was worth the 7 hour total time for the trip (including waiting an hour for the ferry after missing the last one by 2 minutes;)

We are in the process of slightly redesigning the Icetips website and the plan is to have it up by the end of June 2010 and we will definitely be looking into how to optimize it as much as we can. We all like fast websites and none of us like waiting for a web page to load! It will be an interesting experiment and I hope you will see a much quicker website by the time we are done with it:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

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We have made Clarion 7.2 compatible builds of all our products available for download from our website. You can now go ahead and download the new installs. All subscribers should have received an email from us with the download links. If you haven't please check your spam filter and if you still haven't received it check the email address in your Icetips account or drop me an email to let me know:)

You need to have a valid subscription to be able to download the installs. If you need to renew your subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/renewsubscriptions.php and purchase a renewal. If you do not have an Icetips Subscription, please go to http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php to purchase.

Arnor Baldvinsson

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Softvelocity released Clarion 7.2 yesterday (Friday, June 4, 2010). As I started testing with it this morning, I immediately ran into an old problem with the #RUNDLL template statement which I use in various places in our templates. This was fixed in 7.1 (or around 7.1 somewhere) but before that it would show a harmless GPF message in the output window but would not cause any issues. Well, that was not the case now as it would make the IDE become unresponsive and it had to be killed with the task manager. So this had to be fixed or worked around one way or the other!

After messing with this for a while and not getting anywhere with it, I decided to bite the bullet and reconstruct my old Borland C++ dll in Visual C++ as I have suspected that there are some incompatibility issues between Clarion 7 and the DLLs created by my old Borland C++ compiler. And lo and behold it fixed the problem! Now the new clean installs work perfectly!

I am currently rebuilding all the installs with the new dll and will finish that tonight and will resume testing in the morning. All new builds of our products will be available some time tomorrow!

Arnor Baldvinsson