Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

You’d better restart after installing IE7b2 when it asks you too, otherwise you’ll be greeted with the following error message:

“The procedure entry point InternetGetSecurityInfoByURLW could not be location in the dynamic link library WININET.dll”

Internet Explorer 7 beta 2 has been released for public consumption; you can download it yourself from Microsoft. Installation of the ~11MB installer is relatively easy, with three points of interest:

• Windows Genuine Advantage Validation: You are required to validate your copy of windows to install IE7b2 on your computer, which is annoying at best, and a showstopper at worst.
• Microsoft Malware Tool: Microsoft runs their malware removal toolkit before installation to assure that your components are fresh and easy to use. Now you can’t blame IE7b2 because of lingering exploited flaws in an earlier release.
• A new look for the installer, pictured below.

Here is a screenshot of the new themed installer in progress:

Of course, at the end of installation, you are “required” to restart your computer.

GZIP compression saves as much as 70% of the size on a text-heavy webpage. What does this mean for your users? Faster loading websites and less latency. What does this mean for your server? Less load and less bandwidth will be used if you judiciously compress and cache.

In PHP, there are two easy ways to do this. The first is to add the following to your .htaccess file and let Apache do the rest:

php_flag zlib.output_compression on
php_value zlib.output_compression_level 2

The second is to add the following to the top of your php script file:

ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);

Either way, you can check the results of your page online.