Have you ever needed to login to webmail, a support ticket system, online gaming or in fact any site where you have multiple logins or simply need to login as someone else to check something. This is usually a pain in the backside, as you have to logout as your current user, then login as someone else, then remember to logout and login as yourself again.

Thankfully with the current browsers there is now a simple solution to this called “Private browsing”, which allows you to open a new (private) browser window which is isolated from your normal browsing  and does not record any data such as history, cookies etc. As well as being useful for hiding your browsing activities from your spouse or when using a public computer in an Internet cafe, it is also great for the aforementioned purpose as well.
many of you may have noticed this option in your browser but never been sure what it does or even tried it out.

In Firefox 3.5+:
Start private browsing from tools menu or press CTRL+SHIFT+P
more details here...

In Google Chrome:
Open  Incognito Window from tools (wench)  menu or press Ctrl+Shift+N
more details here...

In Internet Explorer 8+ :
Start In Private browsing from Safety menu, or press CTRL+SHIFT+P

more details here...

In this new private window you will now be able to login to any site as a different user and also remain logged in as yourself in your normal browser window. Remember though that cookies are not saved, so once you close the window you will no longer be logged, regardless of whether you clicked any “keep me logged in” box.

I had a very weird problem today. I downloaded a CSS menu from http://13styles.com and no matter what I did I could not get the GIF images to display (using IIS7 on windows 7), all I got was "HTTP Error 401.3 – Unauthorized".

I checked the file and folder permissions, nothing wrong there and permissions were fine, authentication in IIS was fine, I was stumped.

After much head scratching I finally decided to check the file attribute properties and discovered the cause.

The "Encrypt contents to secure data" option was checked. Unchecking this and re-saving solved the problem.

It seems I must have enabled encryption on my drives at some point, and even though it is now disabled, new files are still being created with this option enabled, which obviously plays havok with images on web pages.

Anyway hopefully this may help others from a lot of head scratching over this one.

I just can't seem to get away from this weird and wonderful tech issues that don't seem to affect anyone else or at least not enough for them to show up on google, I must be some sort of magnet for these things.

The latest bizarre episode was my Broadband connection at my office, which started to become rather unreliable, constantly dropping, becoming slow and then eventually died altogether and has been down for the last month. The router would connect for a few seconds and then disconnect again, so not enough time to do anything.

I replaced the router several times, all cables, ADSL filter, AC/DC adaptor, unplugged all other equipment from the router and phone line, nothing worked.

Finally my ISP sent out a BT engineer to do a line check, he fixed every possible problem he found on my line and at the exchange, so I now have a perfect line with an even better download speed than I had before.

The engineer even connected up his own BT Broadband router and connected to BT without an issue. So it appeared the problem was with my ISP, but they didn't have a clue what it could be so I decided to transfer to a new provider, after much careful consideration I chose Zen based on their good reputation and number of positive reviews for their business broadband.

My new ADSL was connected today, so I came in to the office with anticipation, only to be deflated again when I realised the problem was still there.

So I got on to the phone to Zen and literally within 10 minutes the problem was solved.

The first thing the guy asked me was if I had any other electrical devices near my router or the wires and if I did could I turn them off, which I thought seemed a bit odd but I did it anyway, and by heck my router came to life, the ADSL light went green and I had Internet access.

So it turned out to be by Snom 360 VOIP phone, some how it had developed a fault and was emitting waves at a frequency that was interfering with my ADSL, yes even when it was not plugged in in to the router.

It seems like such a simple thing, but I doubt I would ever thought of doing this myself as the possibility of my phone being the cause even when disconnected would not have even occurred to me, and obviously did not occur to my previous ISP either, so so I have to give Zen top marks for their tech support and this is why you pay more for a quality service.

On the cfdeveloper server a user today reported he was unable to connect to his database getting the following error on his site.

This left me scratching my head for a while as I could find no problems, until I tried to connect directly to mysql from the web server to the database server and got the following message back.

I didn't realise this about MySQL, but it appears it will block a server if too many errors occur. Simply running 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' on the MySQL server resolves the problem.

I thought this worth posting as I couldn't find anything else n google.

I have just migrated a client site from CF to their own dedicated VPS running Railo on Apache Tomcat.

One of the issues that arose as a result is that when visiting their site auctionnews.co.uk an automatic 302 redirect occurred redirecting to auctionnews.co.uk/default.cfm which is the default page for the site.

Now I knew this was not IIS so it had to be Apache Tomcat causing it, after Googling I found numerous other people with this issue but no solution. The only suggestions I found seemed madly over the top, like re-compiling the Tomcat source with new directives to creating a custom servlet.

I then just took a step back and thought there must be a simple solution, and remembered that Tomcat has its own set of default files and wondered if this might have something to do with it. I checked the web.xml and of course default.cfm was not in the list as this is not a common default file, so I surmised that Tomcat must be getting the default filename sent to it from IIS and was thus redirecting to it, so perhaps simply adding default.cfm to the <welcome-file-list> might resolve the issue.

Eureka I was right, adding <welcome-file>default.cfm</welcome-file> to the m<welcome-file-list> resolved the issue and no more redirects.

So to summarise, if your default document is only set on the webserver it gets passed to Tomcat which does a redirect. If the default document is specified in Tomcat's <welcome-file-list> it will simply forward to that document with no redirect.

Considering the lack of Google results on this topic hopefully this simple solution might stop others tearing their hair out