However, there is a downside to this. As yet, there is no common, more efficient delivery method. Unlike books, which can be purchased and downloaded through either Apples’ iBooks app or Amazons’ Kindle, each magazine packages their own downloader — and those downloads can be huge. There are only so many 500Mb issues of Wired that you can fit even on the largest iPad.

We’re almost there, and this is definitely the device to take us there!

• Cost of the device – iPads are clearly prohibitively expensive for the majority of folks, limiting the market
• Only a handful of truly interactive Magazines, such as Wired
• Delivery format: current crop of interactive magazines are very large in size, filling up a lot of space on the iPad

We discovered with our Intranet project significant speed penalties introduced by loading a lot of dynamic content in via AJAX at the same time. It’s very easy to get carried away and try load everything in with jQuery, but on an initial page draw this is clearly a Bad Thing:

Take our Intranet portal as an example. It consists of 9 widgets, each of which has fully dynamic content. After the portal is initially constructed by the server, loaded by the client, and jQuery has initialised, each Widget then goes and fetches its own content. This resulted in an average 35 seconds until the page was fully ready. Clearly this in unacceptable.

Going back and re-working the widgets so that they “pre-populate” the data server side reduced this time to 5 seconds. Subsequent updates are then performed by jQuery AJAX calls so the user experience is unaffected.

A lot of this is due to locking – only two connections can be made to a web server at once from a single client, so an application that generates many AJAX requests will end up having request queued. Also all those requests going back and forth from the server generate a lot of overhead, not to mention that once all the data has finally been received by the client poor jQuery has to do a lot of work!

So we learned the hard way: be careful how you use AJAX!

Despite uninstalling our previous x64 bit versions of these components, we had issues with the components simply doing “nothing” after a subsequent server restart. Loading pages that made use of any of these server side components simply returned blank values, without any sort of error.

After a bit of digging around, it seems that our uninstalling of the x64 components leaves some stuff in the registry, and in turn causes some sort of conflict with the 32bit versions. So the trick is:

• In RegEdit, Find the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Persits Software\ and remove it
• Uninstall all the components, even if they are 32bit
• Reboot the server
• Reinstall the components
• Reboot the server again

So far everything seems to be working again for us.

So with a deep breath I tried tackling running IIS in 32bit mode again… and discovered a “gotcha” that probably caused our issues the first time around.

It appears when you run the “fix” that turns 64bit IIS into 32bit, Windows isn’t smart enough to realise “yes I really did mean 32bit” and promptly breaks IIS completely – resulting in the ever so popular “Service not available” message for all your precocious web sites. Why? Well, it seems this is due to the .NET framework running in 64bit, regardless of the fix. Thankfully (!!!!) you can install .NET from the command line with 32bit-ness in place…

1. To enable 32bit IIS mode run: cscript %SystemDrive%\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set w3svc/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1
2. Restart IIS (at this point IIS will probably stop serving sites)
3. Reinstall the .NET framework in 32bit mode: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i -enable
4. Restart your server

Very frustrating. We’ve yet to full test this, but we applied the change on our test server and all our sites are working. Tomorrow we’ll add some 32bit components and see what happens…

Let me say this up front: Content Managers are not easy to write!

Thankfully the pain is somewhat mitigated thanks to TinyMCE and a lot of jQuery.

So, if you come up with a fab design with sexy typefaces and a wonderful layout…  and then you can pretty much kiss that goodbye within a browser. After all, you are limited to a handful of rather dull typefaces, and until now there was very little you could do about that….

The solution? Well, over the past week or so I’ve been playing with the Cufon font library.

Cufon is a very clever tool that lets you upload fonts and reprocess them in a format that can then be displayed in almost all browsers. Simply including the Cufon script:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/script/cufon.js”></script>

…the font script (generated via their web site)…

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/fonts/EurostileT_400-EurostileT_700.font.js”></script>

…and a simple jQuery call and you’re good to go:

Cufon.replace(“.myCssClass”);

Cufon will walk through your page and replace all instances of “.myClass” with your fancy font. It’ll even maintain the formatting (including colour).

We’ve tested this on Internet Explorer 6 and 7, FireFox 3.5 and Safari 4.1 and it works like a charm – and ideal tool for a type-heavy publication like a magazine (BiteSizedJapan).

After an impatient wait of a week, mine turned up this morning and I love it already!

Bamboo and MacBook

Bamboo close-up

The Bamboo has all the gesture functionality found on my Apple MacBook Pro’s native trackpad and iPhones, so its almost second nature using it. I find it more responsive that my aging 6″ Wacom tablet that I normally carry with the MacBook. Also the new “paper-like” surface is wonderful to draw on.

So here’s what you have to do to get MySQL 5.1 working with classic ASP under Windows Server 2003 64bit:

• Install the 64bit version of mySQL Server (Windows x64)
• Install the 64bit version of mySQL Connector 5.1 (Windows x64)
• Now the funky bit. Go download: 64-Bit OLEDB Provider for ODBC (MSDASQL)
• Install the Provider
• Reboot the server
• Set-up your ODBC datasource as per usual
• Modify your ASP connection string to explicitly use the new driver:

e.g.:

PROVIDER=MSDASQL; DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 5.1 Driver}; SERVER=myserver; DATABASE=mydatabase; USER=mydbuser; PASSWORD=mydbpass; OPTION=3;

You should now be good to go. If you googled and saw posts about getting IIS to run in 32bit mode as a solution… don’t. It’s a world of pain, and when we tried it made our server really unstable.