Incidentally it's not just Conversant served pages that suffer from Freeserve's broken cache. I needed to trick the cache by appending a '?1' to the Updated Manila Sites URL to get the most up to date copy of that page.

Microsoft's Q209354 - HOWTO - a spoofed URL so it's not a genuine Microsoft howto. Had it been genuine they would have gone up in my estimation ;-):

This article demonstrates how to read the fucking manual, as popularised by the RTFM directive.

It's amazing how quickly these links get circulated. I received an e-mail with the link at 14:50pm GMT and I posted this weblog entry within a couple of minutes and almost simultaneously one of my students - Gordon - also posted the link on this site here.

I am having severe problems of getting up to date content out of www.smeed.org when connected thorugh my daytime ISP Freeserve. Freeserve are using a transparent cache. The culprit is Network Appliance - Products - NetCache. Here's the evidence from a traffic transcript:

>000091BA> HTTP/1.1 200 OK  
>000091CB> Age: 605  
>000091D5> Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 11:17:31 GMT  
>000091FA> Content-Length: 19449  
>00009211> Content-Type: text/html  
>0000922A> X-Pad: work around browser bug  
>0000924A> Server: UserLand Frontier/7.0b25-WinNT  
>00009272> Via: 1.1 webcacheMP2 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1DEBUG2), 
>000092A8> 1.1 webcacheM07 (NetCache NetApp/5.0.1R1DEBUG2)  

Using Freeserve I cannot reliably update and edit the pages on this site. It seems that NetCache is insisting on serving stale pages. I didn't use to have this problem so perhaps Freeserve have changed their configuration. Hopefully, it's just a case of adding a suitable header server-side.

Apropos my cache investigations the Cacheability Engine at web-caching.com is a great tool:

This service allows you to check Web pages to see how caches will handle them.

On Monday I admitted that...

...I'm still of the old school that believes that good programmers are born with that gift. Whilst not necessarily an advocate of 'programming as an art form' I have taught enough students C and low-level programming over the years - probably in excess of 2000 students - to conclude that some have a natural ability in programming and some don't

Yesterday a Slashdot | Where Is The Line Between Programmer And Artist? thread started up. I'm pretty sure this is just coincidence ;-)