Tag Archives: java

Free website hosting (with a twist)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I had a customer call, saying he (and his daughter) was having difficulty uploading his new website to his hosting company, and also getting the emails related to his domain name (www.dteducation.net.au).

If he has a straightforward unix hosting provider, then this should be easy…

Well, it wasn’t.

As often happens, people don’t realise that hosting and domain names are 2 different things (which can be combined (but I personally prefer not to).

It eventually transpires that he already had a domain name (from a while ago), and thought he would get a hosting package for it.

He didn’t realise that he had also transferred his domain name over to domainnames.com.au.

At first, I looked at their support documentation. It was a little confusing, but then again, I was specifically looking for information on activating emails and uploading webpages… the email info was ok (but didn’t work), but uploading web pages didn’t make any sense…

I eventually handed this over to Mandy, as I was too busy to look into it at the time.

She eventually realised that he had opted for the free hosting package.

That means that you cannot upload pages. But you can choose from a large range of online templates.

It also means that technical support is limited to email only.

I think its pretty good for a free service… but personally, I would prefer to pay between $100 and $200 per annum, and have more control over my website.

Anyway, even the online template wouldn’t work properly (IE7 would say something about website not found).

A whois showed that the domain name registrar was distribute.it … were they related to domainnames.com.au, or to their website support site (onlinesupport.com.au)? We couldn’t be sure.

After a few emails to support, the problem was fixed. I suspect it might have been a minor configuration issue with domainnames.com.au.

Anyway, I showed him how to use the online templates… and there was the start of another problem:

It worked fine at the office, but the java code for displaying templates didn’t work on the customers PC. I eventually tried on his laptop… and it worked (at last!).

I’m told that the main PC had an infection a while ago (and a local PC store had fixed it)… looks like the disinfection caused some subtle damage to windows XP system.

Anyway, customer is happy to use the laptop for now, so I leave it as it stands.

what is silverlight?

Computer Aid Posted on by

Now here is a question thats been bugging me for a few months now:

What is this silverlight that microsoft are pushing? (and they seem to be pushing hard!)

Curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I did some research.

In a nutshell: its a competitor to adobe flash (and also java, quicktime, etc).

So the next question is: should I bother installing it?

The answer (for the moment) seems to be: no

It seems that there are very few websites out there that actually use silverlight.

And on top of that, there seems to be many questions about microsofts intentions with this product.

MS say silverlight is client and server agnostic. They say it will run on both windows and Mac systems.

Hold on: what about linux?

Most websites out there run linux…

wikipedia have a long technical description about it, but I find the criticism section near the bottom of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight to be the most interesting.

Looks like another attempt to get a stranglehold on the internet (to me, it seems similar to the initial release of MSN… where MS were wanting people to pay extra to access microsofts version of the internet (with extra content that you couldn’t get on the “normal” internet). At that stage, they had absolutely no idea what the internet was really about… I wonder if anything has changed?