Adding support for SVG to IIS Express

I’m currently building a HTML 5 website, using Microsoft’s www.beautyoftheweb.com as inspiration.

Taking inspiration sometimes means “borrowing” some of the graphics and styles on a site you like and incorporating them into your own work. For the purposes of education, this isn’t always a bad thing.

One of the things I borrowed was a rather nice SVG background image, that sort of looks like glass. I just downloaded that image and added into my MVC project. The thing was, that no matter what CSS I tried, I couldn’t get the image to actually display. Some investigation into the issue revealed that IIS Express is configured not to actually server SVG files. It returns HTTP 403 status code.

In order to add support for SVG, the MIME type must be added to the IIS Express configuration. Thankfully, this is easy.

  • Open a console application with administrator privilages.
  • Navigation to the IIS Express directory. This lives under Program Files or Program Files (x86)
  • Run the command appcmd set config /section:staticContent /+[fileExtension=’svg’,mimeType=’image/svg+xml’]

This will add the necessary MIME extension to IIS so it will serve SVG files without issue.

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A Backup! A Backup! My kingdom for a backup! Service, that is.

With my discovery yesterday that my Carbonite backup did actually include any video, I rushed to include all my video in the backup. Carbonite the calculated I had an additional 240GB of data to backup! This was in addition to the 94GB that I have already backed up to Carbonite over the past eighteen months. I have a lot of data. Well, okay, maybe not that much. I’m sure there are people out there with terabytes of data. Bully for you. For me, I have just over 300GB of data.

Anyway, let me not dwell on size 😉

Faced with 240GB of data to backup, I quickly realised that Carbonite might not be the solution for me. Why, you ask? It’s because the backup speed I get with Carbonite is low. Really low. In an eight hour period, it will backup about 1GB of data. As a Plusnet customer, I have a data cap so I like to upload during the hours of midnight and eight A.M. This way, any data transferred doesn’t count against my cap. It’s considered off-peak hours. To this end, I have Carbonite scheduled to run between those hours and I just leave my PC running overnight.

Given the volume of data and the upload speed, you can see where I’m heading with this post. At the current speed, it would take roughly 9 months to upload my current data. Assuming I never downloaded another song or movie. Not good. I did some research on the internet and found a lot of people confirming the poor upload speed. Carbonite do throttle the upload speed based on the amount of data you have already uploaded, but I was seeing people getting as little 35KBps. People were talking about their backup times in years. This seemed to confirm my poor upload experience.

Some quick “Binging” (I know it’s not a real verb yet) provided me with some alternatives, Mozy being the most frequently mentioned one. The only bad thing I could find was that Mozy was useless in an OS Reinstallation situation. I spend some hours this morning checking out some of alternatives to Carbonite.

Provider Storage Upload Speed Cost Comments
Mozy Home Unlimited (2GB free) 8.4 mbps £4.99 a month Awesome upload speeds. Nice UI. Doesn’t support reinstallation or migration.
BackBlaze Unlimited 100 kbps $5 a month The UI to choose what to backup is rubbish as it assumes you want to backup everything!
CrashPlan Unlimited 600kbps £4.99 a month Beautiful UI and supports migrations. Slow upload from UK, but I’ve read people getting excellent speeds in the US.

All of the four solutions (including Carbonite) have their pros and cons. I think the biggest issue is that I’m in the UK. London to be precise and as a result, I’m trying to backup files to US data centres. Mozy has a UK data centre and that is reflected in the upload speed. In the time it took me to shower this morning, I had backed up 2GB of data. Mozy offer 2GB of storage absolutely free, whereas the others offer a time based trial.

Given I have about 300GB of data to upload, Mozy is the obvious choice. I reckon I can do about 25-30GB a night, so should be backed up in about two weeks as opposed to 9 months with Carbonite. If I every have to restore my machine, Mozy requires some tom-foolery to get the backup working again, but with the speeds they provide, this shouldn’t be a major inconvenience.

I’m going to sign up to Mozy on a monthly basis and see what the situation is again in a months time. I’m interested to hear from anyone with experience doing online backups here in the UK. Please leave me a comment describing your backup solution!

Carbonite not backing up my videos!

I was shocked to find out this morning that the online backup service, Carbonite, doesn’t automatically backup videos anymore!

According to their GetSatisfaction page, they claim that user’s requested this feature as it was the reason for huge backup files. That’s fine and given that I now have 127GB of video to upload, I understand the issues. People might have slow connections and want to get the important stuff done (family photos etc.). However, I signed up for Carbonite over two years ago and at the time they backed everything up!

Buried in all that text however, is a method that will allow you to actually select the file types you want and Carbonite will then back them up.

Just right click on a file of the type you wish to back up and select Properties. Open the Carbonite tab and you should see this screen.

image

You can now check the “Back up files of this type” option and hit okay. If a file of that type then resides within a folder you have marked for backup, it will include all of them. Useful for videos and other files that you have a lot of that Carbonite doesn’t automatically include.

I now have an extra 165GB of data to backup which is going to take quite-some-time!

More email woes!

As some of you know, on Saturday, I accidentally deleted an email regarding a review of my iPhone app, Caffeine Club, by emptying my spam folder.

I sent emails to all the review sites again, apologising for my mistake and asking that they get in touch with me again.

This morning, however, I noticed that I hadn’t received any emails since Saturday, which is very odd. Not that I’m that popular, but usually there are some general emails from Monster.com and other sites that I’ve subscribed to. Even my spam folder was empty. It was only this morning that I remembered a recent domain transfer has occurred.

I logged in to check my domain and discovered, to my horror, that none of the MX records had been transferred! This basically meant that Hover.com were receiving my emails, but there was no corresponding account to delivery them to! What a disaster. I’ve hopefully rectified the issue and should start receiving email before the day is out.

I’m not one-bit impressed by this development. I spend several hours submitting my app for review and it’s very possible that NONE of the sites have been able to email in the past 24 hours. Hover are supposed to take care of everything. How could they have missed domain records?

The moral of this story? I should have just stayed with GoDaddy and not listened to Leo Laporte telling me how great Hover.com is.

Introducing Caffeine Club video

Today, I worked through my first little “intro” video for Caffeine Club. I did it using Apple’s Keynote and iMovie applications. Took about four hours all in all. I got the inspiration from the GiveABrief introduction video (an app that never made it to the App Store!) and some music from the Penguin Cafe Orchestra that I heard on Master Chef last week rounded it off.

You can check it out on YouTube here – http://youtu.be/jG4KKkuABfM?hd=1

Tip-o-the-day: Don’t delete spam!

Yesterday, I submitted Caffeine Club to four app review websites yesterday morning.

This morning, I logged into GMail and automatically hit the “delete all messages” in my SPAM folder and as Gmail was “working” to complete my request, I noticed an email regarding my app. Of course, a split second later it was gone.

Face-Palm

GMail doesn’t allow the recovery of emails you “delete forever”, so I have no idea who sent the email, other than the name Jon. I’ve gotten in touch with the four sites again and hopefully they’ll forgive my rather large email fail and get in touch with me again. That will teach me.

My Netduino .Net microcontroller board has arrived

Having only ordered it on Thursday morning, I was surprised to find that my Netduino microcontroller board had arrived. This is a controller that uses the .Net Micro Framework. It’s somehow not as big as I imagined!

IMG_0384

I still have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I have a block of holidays, thanks to Kate and William, coming up so I will have plenty of time to experiment!

UPDATE: I found a book on programming with this microcontroller, but unfortunately it’s not quite finished. http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920013037. Luckily I can read it on Safari Books Online here http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/9781449301972. If you have an account and are interested, you should check it out.