As many affiliate marketers will be aware, cookies are quite important to their business. It is quite common to test links to merchants and then check your cookies to make sure the link is functioning properly. I was doing this myself just the other day when I decided to try and find the cookie directory on Windows Vista. As it took quite a few google searches I thought I would list the directories and explain the difference as no one seems terribly clear on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Techie and I as well as a few friends went to Bar Camp a while back now. I think being a little pessimistic we slightly dismissed the whole thing due to the lack of business awareness it seemed. Now having time to reflect the one thing that I did enjoy was the events ability to increase awareness of new trends. It was really hard not to notice that every 2nd person seemed to have some interest in Ruby on Rails. After looking into this further I have decided to explore my findings.

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Recently having installed Windows Vista onto my development computer I am coming across a few things that have changed since XP. For example, Microsoft Script Debugger now no longer works, or at least crashes Internet Explorer when it’s installed. (update :see comments)

I thought however I would keep an open post and keep adding the solutions to things that I have found. The first is View Source Editor, as I am using a 64 bit version of Vista, the View Source Editor is now stored in a different location in the registry.

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Ever been running a complex script and have firefox alert you every 10 seconds or so, just to let you know that a script is running and would you like it to continue?

A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script right now, or you can continue to see if it completes.

It does get quite annoying sometimes, considerably when without the pop ups the script would take half the time to execute. Obviously there are benefits to keeping this quite low for security reasons, on the otherhand if you just want to increase it a little here is how you do it along with other useful tips and tweaks :

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Those of you who know me will know that I am not particularly fond of flying. There is certainly something not quite right about being that high above the ground, travelling at 400mph in a metal can sitting beside 2 colleagues who take pleasure in hearing creaking noises, things that don’t sound normal and pointing them out to me, thanks Tweag. I don’t really like take off and mid flight turbulance doesn’t help much either. I think the biggest fear of flying for me, is if something was to go wrong, theres a long way to fall.

 An argument I often hear is, well it would be over in an instant. How exactly is that supposed to help my fear of flying !!!! If I was happy with that, there would be no fear.

However the thing that baffles me most, is myself. I have a fear of flying, yet just last year I knocked up just over 40 flights and so far this year I have been on 6 Flights and 2 helicopter journeys and it’s not even the 20th of January yet. I wouldn’t say I don’t have a choice really, but most of the flights are necessary.

So what is the point of this post, I’m not sure really but I thought I would share the irony of the frequent flyer. There is one saving grace to all this, I discovered BA Terraces/Lounges yesterday and Chris seemed quite keen too, so I’m thinking more visits to there will help me relax, theres always hope.

The art of making a good cookie has only befallen a few in the supermarket and retail industry. There is nothing worse than buying cookies and getting a rock hard, biscuit like texture with no chocolate bits,  or whatever the flavour that you have purchased. Below is a guide for British consumers on the advantages and disadvantages of cookies from each store.

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It would be fair to say that the last post PHP vs ASP, was slightly one sided due to the fact that ASP is almost extinct now. However that is not to say people still don’t use it when there are other options available. Obvioulsy a fairer comparison would be PHP vs ASP.NET and this is what I discuss next.

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When I moved jobs, like most people I had to learn a new language. Lucky for me my boss was one from the modern era who was capable to understand that learning a new computer language for a programmer is not a major obstacle. I’ve had so many interviews in the past where they ask “so do you know xxx language”, and my reply being “no, but it wont take me long”, and still they refuse to hire me because of time needed to train. Nonsense! It takes most programmers at most a week to have mastered a new language!

Anyway rant aside, the new language I learned was PHP, in a sense learning php is more like learning a new framework; Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP commonly known
as LAMP. After using it for a short while I realised all the time I had spent in the darkside was wasted! Here is why:

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One of the latest advancements in affiliate marketing is a new model titled Revenue Share. Quite simply it encourages affiliates to work together in order to gain a sale, the commission made from that sale or lead is then divided between the affiliates that helped. The rest of this post will cover how it all works at a more technical level.
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This year I’ve been involved with a couple of projects that required aggregating data from several different companies XML feeds. Initially the XML calls were made one after the other in a traditional sequential manner. However it soon became apparent that this was not really feasible as each search took in the region of 10 to 20 seconds to complete and with 4 or 5 companies this was increasing the wait time for the user to over a minute.

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