Monthly Archives: August 2010

New windows in Internet Explorer opening not full screen

Is Internet Explorer driving you nuts by opening up in a smaller window, offset from center on your screen, when it should be opening full-screen?

Yes, this is a really annoying “feature” in IE, and it is not easy to figure out how to get IE to stop opening windows in this small mode. This often happens if you click the “restore down” window and resize the window smaller. From that point on every window you open will be in this new small size.

How to fix this…?

1. Close all existing IE windows
2. Open a single new IE window. Maximize the window and go to any web site like www.google.com
3. Make sure the site loads fully.
4. Click the “Restore down” icon. This is the second button from the right in the top right of the IE window. This will pop the window down to the smaller size.
5. Now grab the window top bar and move it up to top of the screen and grab the bottom right and expand out the window to manually resize it to full size on your monitor.
6. Close this window.
7. Open IE again.
8. RIGHT click any link and “open in new window”. New pages should now open full-size.

Serve static content from a cookieless domain – Google Page Speed Tip

Ok, so you are using the Google Page Speed plugin for Firefox and you can’t figure out how to clear the “Serve the following static resources from a domain that doesn’t set cookies” issue so that you score better…

First off, since we are using the Windows platform for our hosting, this entire post is making a big assumption you are too. If you are using some other platform or don’t have complete console or remote desktop access to your server, you can read on, but you’ll need to figure out this on your own.

The main thing you need to do is to REGISTER A NEW DOMAIN – or use one you’ve never used before – to specifically use for image and non-html things like JS and CSS.

If the web site is at this-is-my-site.com you should register this-is-my-site-static.com or something similar. YOU MUST register or use a completely different domain name than the base site.

Why is this? Because the way browsers store and cache cookies locally, even if you create a subdomain of your existing site, like static.this-is-my-site.com, the Google Page Speed score will still detect that that domain accepts cookies, and this will not suffice. Pick a domain that you’ve never used or hosted before and this will work fine. Keep in mind your web site visitors are NEVER going to know your images on are a different domain unless they start poking around in your HTML source code anyways.

This specific information will reference IIS 7.0, so if you are on an earlier version feel free to comment and I will see if I can pass along the settings.

So now that you’ve got your new and unused domain name ready to do, setup a new web site instance on your web server, preferably the latest OS such as Windows 2008 server.

DO NOT START the site after you set it up. Bind the site IP to the new domain name.

Bind it to the NO-MANAGED-CODE Application pool.

On this specific site you created, double click HANDLER MAPPINGS. Remove ASP, ASP.NET, PHP or any other script based handlers that appear here. ISAPI ones are OK to keep.

Start the web site instance.

You’ll now need to copy over your images to the new domain (via FTP or however).

Copy the following types of files

  • All images – png, gif, jpg
  • CSS files
  • favicon.ico file
  • JS files

In your HTML on your base site you’ll need to update ALL the image, CSS, JS, Favicon, and JS references to point to the server. You should know how to do this if you can get this far. We are talking HTML 101 here… 🙂

If you’ve done this all properly, re-run the Google Page Speed plugin and it should remove these issues off your task list and change them to “green checks”. If it doesn’t you probably have some script engine enabled on the domain and it is setting a cookie automatically (like ASP.NET). Remove it off that site.

Here at Amixa we use a dedicated server with all the script engines (ASP, ASP.NET, etc.) completely disabled to “serve cookieless domain content”.

Getting your old Logitech webcam videos working on Windows 7 x64

So, do you have old AVI videos from an old USB or Parallel Logitech web cam? I did, and I happened across them recently – but they won’t play in Windows 7 because the CODEC’s cannot be found.

These videos dated to around 1998 and I wanted to watch them, however I could not figure out how to get the video working under Windows 7 x64 due to the obvious codec issues. After much research, I found out that the correct codecs to play my videos – specifically the Intel Indeo IV41 codec – are indeed present in Windows 7, but they are not hooked into the registry.

(NOTE – ONLY FOR Windows 7 x64). You’ll need a different solution for x86 Windows 7. ** use at your own risk, of course.

Download This File, unzip and DOUBLE CLICK to load the settings into your registry. A reboot may be needed.

When you are done, double click on the AVI files from your old Logitech webcam and the videos should play fine!

I hope this saves some of you time – it took me a few hours to track this down.