We threw a glam Christmas party on Friday at The Regent club in Nis to mark that magical time of year, one of our all-time favs.

The party kicked off at 7.30 pm. A local band was playing well pretty much everything we wanted to hear. We had a lot of guests attending the party as our friends joined too.

It was great fun chatting, dancing, singing and drinking wine till the small hours. A nice way to end 2007. Below is a happy snap. We’d rather not cram all the photos here, so check out the rest on Flickr.

So, what’s Christmas without discounts? We decided to take a moment to share with you the moments of pure delight that holidays bring…cool decorations, get-togethers, piles of presents under the tree, discounts popping up all over the net and at Troxo most certainly.

We have come up with a 40% discount on IISGuard for all of you looking to improve the performance of your IIS servers. The nicest thing about this tool is that it can easily help you pinpoint websites and scripts that give you a headache.

Good to know is that it logs all requests, both active and finished. The offer ends on December 31, 2007 so hurry up before the clock strikes 12:00 and happy holidays from Troxo!

As we like to code to music here at Troxo we wondered about the effect it has on the brain. We have come across many studies here but one by Teresa Lesiuk, Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, immediately grabbed our attention as it dealt with the effect of music listening on software design in particular.

The study, which involved 56 developers from four different Canadian software companies, was implemented in the participants’ actual work environments over five weeks.

It showed that people produce more quality work while listening to music and they finish their work faster when listening to music. It also stated that work environments with music help enhance employee moods. You may download the full text here.

The beneficial effect of music listening on work efficiency gains even more importance when you take a look at this study by Yuko Fujigaki which states that stress is present throughout almost all phases of software development.

Oblivious to such a tremendous effect of music on work performance, we asked some of our developers and designers what music they listened to while coding. Basically, our tastes differ to some extent but we all agree that we love having it around.

Ivan, Senior Software Architect: While I’m working, I prefer listening to classical music. It helps me stay focused on problems and tasks I’m working on. Vivaldi and Mendelssohn are my favorites.

Sasa, Senior Software Architect: I prefer listening to music while coding and that is a natural working environment for me. The list of my favorites is very long, but what I always love listening to is good old rock. Pink Floyd is very soft, easy and makes a good working atmosphere.

Classical music is inspiring and I sometimes put it on too. When I’m deep into a problem, music just fills the empty space around, brakes the silence and makes me more relaxed.

Dejan, Graphic Designer: At the creative stage I love to put on loud energy-filled music such as Prodigy or the UT2003 soundtrack created by Starsky Partridge and Kevin Riepl (favorite song Chemical Burn).

When doing xhtml/css I tend to listen to softer music like Air, dZihan & Kamien, Kevin Yost, James Blunt, Nelly Furtado, Amy Winehouse. Jazz anytime: Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, Chareles Mingus, Miles Davis…

This post was written to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, (K. 448) to measure the disputed Mozart Effect.

We are back from Synergy ‘07, Microsoft’s 6th IT conference organized in Novi Sad. It was a nice experience as we like to stay on top of what’s going on in the IT industry in the country and beyond.

To this end, Damir and Ivan hit the road for three days at the biggest IT event in Southeast Europe.

The organizers did a great job. We picked up valuable information on the latest technologies and those in the pipeline, mingled with like-minded developers and of course, we had fun.

We came across this Web 2.0 – related video and we really like the way its author explained some of the web 2.0 elements.

We develop websites and services compliant with web standards and are supportive of efforts leading web development into the future.

The video was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, US. Enjoy!

Out little contest has ended. We said 10 free licenses, but we made it 15. We got a big turnout which is why we added a few more licenses.

Thanks to everyone who entered. We promise to have more surprises some time down the road.

We want to express our love to visitors to wheel.troxo.com, so we decided to organize a fun contest to give away a hundred IISGuard licenses. Ten quickest emails to info [at] troxo.com with the subject "Give me my 10 servers IISGuard license" take them away.

Update – July 09, 2007: we have already given away 10×10 licenses. Due to a high interest in this campaign, we are extending it and we will give away five more IISGuard licenses for ten servers.

Update – July 12, 2007: until the end of 10th of July we gave away five more licenses for ten installations of IISGuard. The campaign is now over, but we have given away a few more licenses to those who had applied before we put out this update.

We’ll have more surprises down the road for those who fail to reach the top 10 so don’t despair.

The ultimate goal of IISGuard is to save you a lot of time finding and isolating problematic sites that cause server-wide problems. Subsequently you can provide better response times to problems and keep your customers happier.

This piece of software comes in very handy when you take a look at a recent research from Google that subjected 4.5 million pages to in-depth analysis. The company’s Anti-Malware team looked at 70,000 domains that were either distributing malware or hosting attack code.

Websites running Microsoft’s web server software are twice as likely to be hosting malicious code as other websites, wrote Google’s Nagendra Modadugu, in a blog posting. Around 450,000 were capable of launching drive-by-downloads sites, sites that install malicious code, such as spyware without a user’s knowledge.

A further 700,000 pages were thought to contain code that could compromise your computer.

The rise in web-based malware has been aided by the increasing role the internet plays in everyday life, the report says. With the number of sites hosting malicious code on the up, combating the issues is something you do not skip today. Read the rest of this entry »