Well, I have just finished a very frustrating 3 afternoon slog, doing battle with an IIS 6.0 server running Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite version 2. I am happy to report that I got it working fantastically. Here is the result of my labours:

# These rewrite rules took 3 afternoons to write!
#Please do not edit them without saving them first.

# uploaded files
RewriteCond Host: (?:www\.)?example\.com
RewriteRule »
^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)/files/(.+) /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2
RewriteRule ^/files/(.+) /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 [L]

# Redirect wp-admin to ensure it has a trailing slash
RewriteCond Host: (?:www\.)?themegacentre\.com
RewriteRule  ^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ /$1wp-admin/ [I,RP,L]

# Rewrite admin areas etc to the right files
RewriteCond Host: (?:www\.)?themegacentre\.com
RewriteRule »
^/([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-admin|wp-content|wp-includes|wp-login\.php)(.*) »
/$2/$3 [I,L]

# Rewrite all other requests to the wordpress index.php files
RewriteCond Host: (?:www\.)?themegacentre\.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} »
!(wp-admin|wp-includes|wp-content|wp-login\.php|/files/)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php [I,L]

# Linebreaks which are not supposed to be
# there are marked »
# please remove them if you've just copied and pasted!

It is beautiful. It is ingenious. It is untested with uploaded files, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Please note that these files were not placed in a .htaccess file, but in the httpd.ini which is located in C:\Program Files\Helicon\ISAPI_Rewrite on that particular server.

I hope it helps someone out there who is currently pulling out their hair in terrible frustration!

Any questions or comments, please let me know. If you find a bug, or make an improvement, or find a feature that these rewrites don’t support — please tell me!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Bing search engine instead of my usual Google. Bing is Microsoft’s revamp of Live Search, which was its revamp of MSN search.

I’ve never really liked Microsoft’s offering to the search engine industry, mainly because I don’t like its online presence. I hate MSN, I hated hotmail, I don’t like Live mail. I think they are all inferior products, and I really can’t understand why people don’t make the switch to Google’s online products. Up until now I would never have given Microsoft’s search engine another look, but I don’t like things staying the same for too long so I thought I’d give it a spin.

Firstly, I think Bing is much prettier than Google. They have a new background image every day, and the whole design is obviously more deliberate than Google’s 1990s colour scheme. I appreciate that. I never liked Google’s boring logo, nor its ugly results page.

Also, the images search function is light years ahead of Google’s. With Google you get 20 pages of about 100 image thumbnails that you have to laboriously scroll through. With Bing you get a sidebar of thumbnails which is refreshed with Ajax. You never have to leave the page, and you can still view all of the thumbnails it finds. I like the efficiency, convenience and cleverness of it.

They’ve copied Google’s novelty logo idea. Google puts up a special image for Christmas, New Years’ and special occasions, like famous scientists’ birthdays. There the focus is on learning more about, e.g., the famous scientist. With Bing, it’s more about you using their search engine, which I don’t like. It’s a sneaky way of promoting yourself by promoting someone else. It’s funny to see how deep that runs in Microsoft. They’ve resisted web standards, preferring instead to release their own proprietary codes, right up until IE7. I really hate this tendency in Microsoft.

As for what was going through their heads when they called it Bing, I can only hazard a guess. It’s a dreadful, awful name. Interesting to see that they’re stepping away from all their other branding (Microsoft, MSN, Windows, Live, etc).

I hate, and will always hate, multimap. This is probably irrational, much like my hatred of Yahoo. And there’s video adverts on the main page. I hate video adverts.

As for the quality of its search results — obviously the most important thing — I haven’t really looked into it all that much. I guess my expectations in that area are mostly unconscious ones, so I’ll continue to do side-by-side comparisons for a while till I find out what I prefer.

So far, Bing doesn’t feel like proper searching yet. I must confess I don’t really care. (It’s not exactly the most hugely important question in life, is it.) What wins is whatever works easiest. Bing is pretty and excellent with images and media, but has a dreadful name. Google has a boring design, but it’s familiar.

It’ll be interesting to see how it all pans out in the long run. My personal prediction is that in a year or so they’ll have another rebrand (they’re on their fourth as it is). We’ll be introduced to “Swish”, or some other equally silly name, but unless they do something fundamental to searching online muchbetter than Google it will fail to raise much interest.

Maybe pay people every time they use Bing. And change that wretched name!

At work I have to access a hard disk that is on the network — it sits in a totally different part of the building. For the past A MILLION YEARS I have been trying to access files on it because Windows is being a jerk and not letting me access the stupid thing. It says the user name is not found.

Well today I found how to clear the details that Windows had saved so that I can login again with the right details.

Go to the Control Panel. Open then User Accounts applet. Go to the advanced tab, then click the Manage passwords button. (I made an image).

A list will appear with all the things you have stored passwords. Simply click on the one you are having problems and remove it. Praises be to God.

Hey, whenever you find a clever program or website or some piece of technology (sat navs, iPhone, whatever), always remember that the computer is not clever. The computer is a dumb machine. It has the same amount of intelligence as a rock, it’s just a bunch of switches. Literally. That is all a computer is, a bunch of switches.

The computer is not clever: the programmer is. Google is clever because the guys that set it up are clever. Clever at computers (their search engine was revolutionary when it first came out) and clever at business (they didn’t sell out to Microsoft or Yahoo when they came up with their search engine).

Your iPhone is not clever. The developers at Apple are clever. They’re the ones that designed it and pushed it through the polishing process. A piece of technology that’s simple and easy to use takes twice as much ingenuity and innovation (or more than that) to make than a complicated, hard-to-use product.

You know, I think I might be switching allegiances. I’m getting sick to death of Firefox’s unpolished stupidness, I might just drop it completely and move over to Safari. I’ve already dumped Thunderbird because it couldn’t wrap text properly, and I’m just about ready to do the same to Firefox. You know it’s bad when the only thing keeping you on it is a third-party add-on (Web Developer).

I’ve tried installing the British English dictionary, but it still insists that “color” is spelt correctly. I hate the fact that even though it’s been ported to the Mac OS, it hasn’t bothered to change the appearance of the widgets (buttons, text inputs, drop-down menus). That to me is laziness. You’re making a Mac application, guys, show a little bit of respect for aesthetics. And drop your own spell-checker, use the native Mac one. Surely that’s easier than writing your own, anyway!

Good luck with version 3, see you then.

My colleague’s computer is currently displaying this message:

Keyboard error or no keyboard present

Underneath it reads:

Press F1 to continue or DEL to enter SETUP

I hate it.

That is all.