Enkompass 11.30 unfit for ASP.NET hosting

After facing various issues with Enkompass, I’m giving up on it and moving to Plesk. I shall document the issues to remind myself not to go back to Enkompass until the issues are resolved. Hopefully, this also serves as a guide to those evaluating whether Enkompass caters to their needs.

1. Enkompass supports only one ASP.NET application. There is no way to configure virtual directories or new ASP.NET application in subdirectories. This is a blocker if you wish to have a different application, say landing page on www.example.com, and a separate blog application on www.example.com/blog.
2. The workaround for the one ASP.NET application limitation is to use subdomains. Each subdomain supports one ASP.NET application. So you can have a landing page on www.example.com and your blog on blog.example.com.
3. However, I need to secure all communications, so I had to install an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS. SSL works on a per IP basis. There are two types of SSL – one which secures one domain only, and another called a wildcard certificate that secures multiple domains. Enkompass supports only one dedicated IP per account, so getting many one domain certificates is not an option.
4. As for getting a wildcard certificate, Enkompass does not allow me to change the host field of the CSR to *.example.com, so wildcard certificate can’t be used as well. Moreover, there are reports that even if you are successful in generating a wildcard CSR using WHM, when accessing the HTTPS subdomain, web pages from the main domain get served out instead.

Enough of Enkompass. Simple interface, crippled internals.

Programmers are Tiny Gods

Derek Powazek says Programmers are Tiny Gods. Maybe this explains why some people call me god? =P

To support long file name (>260 char), get a wider (>260 columns across) monitor

Though Windows Explorer has gotten flasher with each version of Windows, it still stumbles on the long file name that NTFS supports…

Windows usability dropping

Windows Vista, Office 2007 and IE 7 all had their user interface revamped. However, I find the new interface harder to use. In Vista, the Start button is gone. The button had been named Start so as to let new computer users know what to do after they switched the computer on. I had tried Fedora Core 2 before. The first time I started it up, I was lost on how do launch programs. There is no Start button! Only after some exploring that I realised that the "Hat" is the start button. This is low usability, and Windows had headed this way. Bring back the start button! In Office 2007, the menu had made its way for the ribbon. However, the file menu is nowhere to be found. There's no ribbon to save or open documents. Many people got stuck because of this. The file menu had gone to an unusual location - the top left corner - that used to be program icon that brings up the context menu. This is a confusing design. In IE 7, the menu and toolbar became some horrendous hybrid, mixing icons and text in a way unseen before. It takes time to find where the command you want is located. This is a departure from the consistency that Microsoft had been enforcing throughout the years. Lack of consistency increases the learning curve for using programs. I now use Firefox. Please bring back the usability, Microsoft.

Unpaid to Learn

I am currently working as a freelance programmer. My employer has this policy that he will not pay me for the time taken for me to learn. This might sound reasonable at first, however, as days into the project, I felt an eerie connection with the programmer who is paid per-line-of-code. I could not rationalise such a connection until now. Programming is a very vast skill set by nature. No matter how experienced a programmer is, he is bound to face situations where he has no knowledge about. Hence continuous learning is a must and cannot be avoided. Not being paid for the time to learn means incentive for me to just code and hack my way though the project, rather than learning the proper way to do things. This is not too different from the paid per-line-of-code programmer who writes the following

string[] s = new string[2];

for (int i = 0; i < 2; ++i)

{

    switch (i)

    {

        case 0:

            s[0] = "Hello ";

            break;

        case 1:

            s[1] = "World";

            break;

    }

}

as opposed to

string[] s = new string[2] { "Hello ", "World" };

13 versus 1 line. I believe that people should be paid to learn. This will help bring up the quality of work.