Strings....

Today I was doing some research on the performance of strings in .NET, and as I started a Google search, I noticed in the dynamic search results that there are over a million more results for String Theory than String Bikini. There are obviously too many people using the web for serious work, and not enough using it for more perverse reasons. :-) Just some humor, to start the day.

Internet Explorer operation aborted

For several weeks now, I had been experiencing a problem in Internet Explorer (and just had not had time to research, or correct it). Almost every time I navigated to a page on MSDN, the page would display briefly, I would get an “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://msdn.microsoft.com/xxxx. Operation aborted” message, and then the page would be switched to a navigation error screen. I quickly discovered that pressing the back button would allow the page to display correctly.

Since I work with a lot of Microsoft products, and spend a lot of time on MSDN, this was becoming very annoying. So, today became the today to try and solve the problem. It was occurring on my work PC, but not my home PC. Both are running Windows Vista and IE7. Since one was ok, and the other was not, I thought the problem probably caused by an IE security setting. Rather than digging through IE’s huge list of security options for possible culprits, I decided to search the web to see if anyone else was experiencing the problem.

First, I found this discussion listing a bug in sitemeter.com that had caused issues on a lot of sites; but this bug had already been corrected. The thread also suggested IE addins as a possible cause, but this was not the cause for my issue, either. Another suggestion in the thread was to Reset IE’s options, but this did not fix it for me either. There was also a link to a blog post describing how this error is typically caused by JavaScript manipulation of the HTML DOM. The post stated the problem has been corrected in IE8. Soooooo, I am now running a beta of IE8, which seems to have corrected the problem. Hopefully, it does not introduce new problems!

On my next visit to MSDN, I was promptly greeted with a JavaScript popup message that Microsoft was taking a survey(which was not appearing previously). So, it looks like the survey was the root of my problem, but I have not determined why it occurred on one PC and not the other. At least IE8 seems to have solved it, for now.

Experts Exchange and Google Cache

I really hate the site experts-exchange.com. It seems that no matter what I am searching for, this site appears in the results list. Just when you think you have found the page with an answer to your question, you find out that you have to buy a membership to see the details of the page. Most of the time, I just skip the search result if it is on experts-exchange, but I occasionally overlook the domain name and find myself frustrated again by the site. I suppose that I should just “suck it up” and buy a membership to the site, but I just can’t bring myself to do it, considering how much information is freely available on the web.

Today, a co-worker shared an interesting trick with me. It doesn’t always work, but most of the time, you can click on Google’s cached version of the page and the answers will appear. Nice!