Under certain cases an error message pops up when using Internet Explorer for downloading an Office document or a PDF file via HTTPS, telling that "Internet Explorer Cannot Download". This happens if the web server is issuing additional HTTP headers pragma:no-cache and cache-control:no-cache to prevent the client from caching the website contents locally. If you can exclude trivial problems like wrong access rights and permissions, things may get complicated soon. This issue is documented at Microsoft's Knowledge Base, but there's just a poor workaround that doesn't really help you, especially when you're the webmaster and you just have to use the HTTP headers. This problem occured with IE6 first, but after installing Windows XP SP3 it could be reproduced with Internet Explorer 7 as well.

Here's a trick that helped, provided by Microsoft support (though I cannot guarantee that it helps in every case): save the following lines:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

"SSLPragmaNoCache"=dword:00000001
"BypassSSLNoCacheCheck"=dword:00000001
"BypassHTTPNoCacheCheck"=dword:00000001

into a .reg file and import this into your client's registry - or insert these key/value pairs manually at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings at every client. Since this is a client issue there's no way to handle this problem centrally.

Basically this fix is a mixture of the solutions given in article Q323308.

This is not a Frankenstein scenario, we don't even have to evoke pictures of brain-manipulated people walking like zombies in order to perform the will of their master: no, recent approaches of poking electrodes into the brain deal with new methods in reconstructive surgical procedures. The target is no less than making blind people see again or paralyzed people walk. Where will this development go to? Will we become cyborgs? The institute deliveres interesting details.

"So you want a new job, uh-huh. What's your actual profession? Oh, you're an IT professional, I see... Computers and the like... No, I don't have a clue 'bout computers, I use my spreadsheet and my work processor, that's enough for me. Let me have a look at our database. Do you know Cobol? Here's an insurance company looking for host programmers. No? Hmmm... I've got something here, you know 'Ruby on Rails'? Funny name, eh? Ah, I see, a Web three-dot-oh enterprise, you'll get a fourth of your current salary. No? Hmmmmm.... What? You want to go back into science? Are you really sure? I could offer you another job in an ad agency, they're look for sort of a system administrator who is willing to mow the lawn after hours... No? Gee, you're quite pretentious! Ah! Wait! Here's something for you! You can choose between 'Bio-inspired Exploitation Systems', 'Biometrics', 'Complexity Theory' - that sounds complex, ha, ha - 'Computer Vision', 'Detecting Deviations from Normalcy' - gosh, what's that - 'Information Accessibility, Integration, and Management', 'Machine Learning' - uhhh, that sounds creepy! - 'Network Management and Modeling', 'Pattern Recognition' - I'm quiliting too! - 'Smart Surveillance Systems' and 'Software Engineering'. The employer? They're called DARPA. Well?" (Source)

A funny synopsis of the statements of various advocates for scripting languages. Regular readers here already know my opinion about constructs like Ruby or Python. But let's take one thing at a time.
JavaScript is everything but cool. It's a necessary evil to make web applications look like native software but it's neither fast nor elegant nor secure. Talking about security: PHP is still a security nightmare and it's not 'dominating the server side' because millions of users love it so much but because thousands of providers have it installed by default as there are so many ready-to-use systems available in the public domain. Perl, of course, is my favourite here and everything told by Joshua McAdams is right (with the exception of Perl 6, when will it finally come?). Python's elegance is evoked once more but OOP and no braces isn't enough of elegance for me. Ruby and "Rails"? Maybe for these Web2.0 kids but if you don't know about abstract data types and algorithms you'll be missing all the fun that is programming. Funniest sentence of the whole text is Ruby advocate Bruce Williams' statement I've taken as headline for this post.

The first stable version of Wine is now available - after 15 years of development and beta testing. Fifteen years! That gives me hope: now I'm waiting for Duke Nukem Forever to come.

Hitler's head ripped off! The beheaded Führer!

Sure: you might call it criminal property damage.

But you could also regard it as belated resistance. :-D

Windows Server 2003 SP1 (or higher): if your Scheduled Task is giving you back a result code of 0x80 (instead of 0x0 what would signal that everything's okay), then there's a plethora of possible causes. If you google a bit, you'll find many solutions ranging from exchanging a DLL up to notices that 0x80 wouldn't mean anything at all and that you don't have to care about.

Another possible reason for a 0x80 result code is lack of resources. When you encounter the 0x80 problem, read this fine discussion (I've seldom seen a problem description with so much detail like there) and have a look at the Task Manager of your server. You might be surprised like I was this morning. I erased all crashed tasks and presto! problem solved.

Loyola University researchers created an artificial neural network that is able to predict (at a 90 percent probability) if death row inmates will get executed or not. Most significant factors were gender and school education, so if you're a dumb male you better change something! But the creepy part is that there's a piece of software able to predict one's future. Though the death row of a prison is a somewhat reduced world, it seems to me that further predictions about more important life issues will be possible in mid-future and that you might get a prognosis that you will not necessarily like and that might be nonetheless true. (Source)

My 2 cents on the recent (and future) financial crisis, enriched with a nice documentation of another fallen empire, freshly served at eclectic imaging.

I can feel your pain. Really. There's that itching in your nose, you were scratching your head and your sight wasn't continually focused on the screen. And your skin conductance tells me that. I've seen the wrinkles on your forehead when I tried to explain these difficult formula. Is everything okay with you? I can call the doctor. Is there anything depressing you? Look, we can interrupt this course any time. However, please note that exams are next week. I'm just your friendly teaching software, you know. You can make it if you really want. No, don't do that! Don't put your fingers there! I'll send an emergency e-mail to tech support right now! Sto-
(Source)

A recent study of University of Minnesota researchers found educational benefits of social networking sites, contradicting the results of a Pew study three years ago. According to Minnesota, usage of sites like MySpace and Facebook adjust the computer and technology knowledge of low-income students to that of more advantaged fellows.Especially features like "technology skills, creativity, being open to new or diverse views, and communication skills" would be given by social networking sites. "Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content, and thinking about online design and layout," University of Minnesota
learning technologies researcher Christine Greenhow says. (Source)

I'm not convinced about this. "Thinking about online design and layout" indeed would be needed at many MySpace sites! And what's the worth of these many social contacts you have? Are they real friends or just passerbys of your daily communication walk? I can't see why the pure quantity of contacts in my address book makes me technically affine or why this rises my creativity. I would also make a difference between people that just do the ususal copy-and-paste jobs, take a video from YouTube, some MP3s and presto! from others who really try to tell who they are and what they found interesting! (Design issues wouldn't be a problem here.) Social network sites, as well as the ordinary website, are just tools that you can use for any purposes possible. Thinking that they increase computer knowledge and other skills because they are there, isn't really convincing.

Says Dave Patterson, head of the University of California, Berkeley's Parallel Computing Laboratory at the Usenix conference in Boston two weeks ago. Parallelism would be the future and he emphasized that there's urgent need for software developers to get to know how to write parallel code. But I agree with Andrew S. Tanenbaum who states that taking this next step after serial computing will rise more problematic software than ever before, because things won't be easier when they run parallel. Maybe we should stick to Donald E. Knuth ("The Art of Computer Programming") who stricktly avoids parallelism and just delivers the best in serial computing. So it isn't dead, of course, as you have to be able to write very good serial code to be able to write good parallel code. Besides the question if there will be developers at all with skills beyond PHP and Ruby. (Source)

The Days when Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson released his "Long Tail" and told us that (once more) the Internet would change everything seem to be over. Anderson's much praised theory describes a society that is less 'hit'-driven in products and markets but that allows a lot of niche markets to grow by means of the Internet thus producing an ever growing choice of products - in contradiction to traditional offline markets. This theory gained much attention and was eagerly adapted by marketing people and IT geeks: the first ones because growing niche markets would mean more pitches, the other ones because Anderson's propositions predict more emphasis on the Internet and the people who use and design it. Especially bloggers favoured this idea, since it gave hope that even the shallowest idea would have the potential to create a market, or at least would have a voice. Lots of the recent Web 2.0 hype deals with Anderson's ideas and the fate of many obscure companies is dependant on this doctrine of salvation.

It turns out that things are not that easy.As Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school, lets the numbers speak for themselves: by using rigorous statistics she points out in her article that online and offline shopping behaviour isn't that different at all. It doesn't seem that consumers are eager to break the narrow borders of the common offers in shops, but that there is an element of social conformity in cultural consumption that makes us want to have the same things as all others do, also in online shops. The boost of individuality predicted by Anderson is thwarted by our wish to let others suggest to us what we would like to do.

What does that mean to us, the common Internet users and bloggers? It means that there's a big mainstream with all the bells and whistles we already know from traditional media and that most people find their satisfaction in following this. The tiny rest remains unread - like this blog. ;-) But is this really surprising to you - presumed you're not a Web 2.0 evangelist? (Source)

"Most data on enterprise networks rarely gets accessed after it is stored, largely because users are too busy writing new data to access old data." - every file server administrator knows that. Interesting!

Need to clean up directories that are clogged up with too many old files, and to do this automagically? If you're using a Windows box try my TidyUp script. Here's an example:

cscript tidyup.vbs -f c:\temp -d 20 -i "log|bak|tmp"

This will delete all .log, .bak, and .tmp files in c:\temp. If you want to delete all files in c:\temp, omit the -i parameter. If you aren't sure about the effects of your command, just append the -a parameter that does everything but delete the files. Just read the manual and copy the code.

Software Design / Development at rank 4, Networking / System Administration at rank 10. Whew. Must be my lucky day. Or, perhaps, they have a different understanding of the term 'recession' than me. (Source)

Almost every nation tries hysterically to fill the gaps in the IT job market. Australia doesn't make a difference. The recent strategy is to attract women to the industry by demonstrating what a cool job they can have in IT. This is good and it is not. It's good, because there indeed is an urgent need of women in the IT job market. To work in a male monoculture isn't really funny, not if you're a male geek too and especially not if you're one of the few (Australia: 15% - 20%) women already working there. It's not so good because for many employers hiring women means to pay less wages, thus they create an inexpensive job market as they already did with secretaries and creative jobs. So ladies, think about a membership in the trade union. (Source)

Plain and simple things often appeal to us, a simple design will always find its friends. Less is more, as they say, and in the end is nothing but emptiness. My thoughts on an extremely simple design of a church in Düsseldorf can be found at today's eclectic imaging.

Thanks for your dictionary attack on my mail server last night! Unfortunately you didn't succeed, but practice makes perfect, maybe on another day at a different server.

Listen, asshole: one shot's for free, but if I'll find your fingers once more in the cookie jar, you'll want to never have discovered the Internet. Capiche?