Publishing to Arvixe via Visual Studio Publish in two steps

For non-mission critical sites, it is sometimes convenient to deploy directly through Visual Studio 2010's Publish feature. I use this for a couple of simple sites hosted on the very cost effective Arvixe shared hosting.

1. Create a remote management password on the Arvixe control panel by opening the control panel, drilling down into your website configuration, and clicking on the Management tab. Enter a password for remote management and accept the change.
   
2. In Visual Studio, right click on the web project and click Publish. Then fill out the publish dialog as below, and click Publish:
   
   
   
   

Sound for Ubuntu 10.04 on the Compaq Presario CQ56

After installing Ubuntu 10.04, and then every time the kernel updated, I had no sound. The operating system seems to detect the card, and I can set the volume, but no sound is played through the speaker.

I hope the next point release gets a fix for this, but in the meantime, this page has the solution for next time I need to update the kernel:

InstallingLinuxAlsaDriverModules.

The technique I use is to execute the following three lines at the command line, and then reboot:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-alsa-driver-modules-$(uname -r)

Don't forget to reboot!


Note that you may hit the following error, which means that the package has not been created for the newer version of the kernel. The solution is usually to wait a few weeks for the package to be created and try again.

Couldn't find package linux-alsa-driver-modules-2.6.32-37-generic

Which browsers should I test in?

I needed to answer the question "Which browsers should I test in?", but was frustrated by how difficult this was to answer in Google Analytics. After months of frustration and not being able to easily give solid figures from our websites, I knocked up a one-page site that aggregates the Analytics data of the logged in user and allows them to play around with various scenarios to decide which browsers to test in. Most importantly, this uses data from the target market, not from a generic or randomised sites.

Please note that this site uses the Google GData JavaScript API, so none of your Analytics data is sent to my servers.

The site is here:
browsertest.info

One day sales site - example of jQuery widgets and QUnit unit tests

I have made a small site that uses some Javascript features such as drag and drop so that I could try writing QUnit unit tests. The tests were refreshingly easy to write, including testing things such as dragging and dropping by simulating mouse clicks.

The site allows users to view popular one-day sale sites in New Zealand, and the tests can be found here.