HeartattacK : General Software Development

FTP Woes and....FireFTP to the Rescue!!

HeartattacK — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:50:00 GMT

I'm running Vista x64 sp1. I've had IE 7 and then IE 8 (b2) installed. I tried uploading via ftp from a)Windows Explorer, b)Visual Studio ftp, c)FireZilla, d)SmartFTP. Small files uploaded perfectly but even 150KB files kept timing out and retrying. Active/passive didn't help. Nothing helped. I tried for 28 hours to upload a 340KB file. It was infuriating. I tried from another ISP's connection. I tried from XP. Nothing worked. God knows why. I contacted tech support, they said it was a problem on my ISP and that my connection was poor. While I agree a 100kbps upload isn't good at all, I do expect to upload 100KB in a few minutes and not failing for hours. I can't be too sure about their response as people using my ISP DO upload via ftp. I sent my files to a friend in the US and he graciously uploaded for me. He mentioned it was slow. And then I needed changes on my site. Enter frustration.

Well...just now I found a brilliant solution that's just plain mind boggling. I learned of FireFTP, an ftp plugin for FireFox. Now, (this may surprise a lot of folks), I don't like FireFox much. On my dev machine, it's painfully slow loading pages from the VS dev server compared to IE7 / IE8 / Chrome. But this is one thing I'll always be using for ftp from now on. You see, FireFTP is slick, fast and it uploaded my 350KB file in 25 seconds flat(!) - something the bigger players failed to do.

I'm guessing this is coz of some OS configuration or firewall or whatever. I tried turing off vista auto tuning. Nothing helped. I faced the same problem from XP though. I wonder if it's my good buddy Kaspersky that's causing me the pain. I did try turning off the firewall, but that didn't help either.

Anyhow, I'm glad I found fireftp. I noticed some people on the forums were complaining about slow ftp too. I hope fireftp can help them too.

EDIT: As Josh points out...I really should have posted this link here:

http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

FireFTP: The BEST and SIMPLEST FTP software I've EVER used - and one that just "works".

There you go :D

Kaspersky and ‘Banner’s

HeartattacK — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:10:00 GMT

What a coincidence...my second post on my blog is also about Kaspersky. Why do I keep running into the weird things? Anyway, this should also hold for many web content filters.

Last night I was finally playing around with the most excellent urlrewriter.net. I'm on IIS7 on Vista x64 SP1. I'd always thought (for unknown reasons) that this thing would be tough and would give me a headache with my images and stuff. I followed the Gu's awesome tutorial over here , and as usual, the hard thing became easier (thanks Scott). I wanted extensionless urls and I had IIS7 - just to get over my php faithful friends who always sneered at us for those .aspx extensions.

Well...I added the reference, created the form control provider, hooked it up with the browser file and put the stuff needed in web.config. It worked great, except for themes. More on that in my next post.

Well...great except for one thing: everything was turning out exactly as I wanted after initial tweaking (again, next post), but for some god forsaken reason, the three images that make up my site banner were not getting displayed. They displayed fine when browsed through the VS dev server, not so after deploying to IIS.

This took a few hours of hair pulling, as I could see no logical reason why it'd display bucket.png, but not banner.png. I even tried putting an image tag of the files on the page. Nope. Didn't work. And worst thing was that there wasn't even a red cross. How could the browser "find" the file (no red cross), and yet display nothing?

I created another test site, this one without urlrewriter.net. Same problem. Banner_left.png displays when viewed from the dev server, doesn't when viewed from IIS.

Another whole hour, and for some reason, I thought of my dear old friend and protector, Kaspersky. I go into settings>>content filtering. I see that Banner Add Blocker is running. I see I have nothing under white lists and blacklist. I click the link 0(total 0). And sure enough, I get displayed a LOT of default filtration rules. Quite a few rules are dedicated to remove anything and everything that has anything remotely connected to the specific word "banner" (ban, banners, bann, bannerz...). I go to the whitelist tab and add "localhost". Everything works :)

In the end, I decided to change the images' names, as I highly doubt any Kaspersky user would actually add my site to their whitelist to see my site banner. Still, if you're having similar trouble with your web filtering software, I hope this helps. It would've certainly saved me a few hours of playing around with IIS settings.

Hey Kaspersky, Stop Slowing Down My VS

HeartattacK — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:39:00 GMT

I'm finally starting off this blog about a month after Joe gave it to me...yay, awesome, yahoo (or should that be MS yahoo?).

One thing that has always frustrated me was that whenever I install Vista (or XP), everything is zippy and fast. Gradually, things become really sluggish. Then, it becomes so unbearable that I have to reinstall the darned thing. The thing that slowed down the most (or at least, is a frontline contender for slowing down) seemed to be VS - the one thing I needed the most (well, maybe after IE). This really was getting on my nerves, and I blamed it on my hardware. So imagine my surprise when, after a recent upgrade, it seemed even zippier than before, but the sluggishness "somehow" returned. Now don't get me wrong - when I say "upgrade", I mean a total renovation - a quad core Q6600, 4GB of DDR2-800MHz (5-5-5 timings to boot), 2 10Krpm Western Digital Raptors in RAID 0, HD 3870 and a Thermaltake PSU that broke my back as well as my bank - some of the best things I could buy back in last September (the HD3870 was bought later). And then I found the culprit.

I've always loved Kaspersky, awesome little thing. But, like any other antivirus, it likes to check every opened file and make sure it's safe. This is all fine and good, but I don't think there's anything lurking inside my .cs files just waiting to pounce on my system. So, I go ahead and add VS to my trusted stuff, give it full permissions, and tell Kaspersky to not even monitor files opened by VS or any of VS's activity. And guess what, it's been months now, and VS is still as zippy as when I first installed Vista. I went ahead and put some other obviously-not-virus-carrier programs into my safe zone, and they work like a dream, too.

I always thought that turning the antivirus off for VS wouldn't give me "that" much of a boost since I had some kick-ass hardware. Boy was I pleased to be proven wrong. I installed Vista x64 in February, and not a single frustrating moment since then.

I use Kaspersky, but the principal should hold for all other virus guards if they have a trusted apps feature or something.

Hope that helps.