October 2004 Blog Posts
This week I gave a quick one hour overview of ADO.Net to the developers I am currently mentoring. When I covered relationships within datasets, basically a primary / foreign key constraint I was asked where that would be useful. Aside from enforcing data integrity on inserts and deletes you can use relationships to make nesting asp.net repeaters easy.
If you look at my spam pages you can see there is an obvious data hierarchy, each month has a collection of days which show a daily spam count. Rather than send a request to the SQL server to give me...
One of the nicer things about the .net framework is its support for cultures, if you're running on a UK machine dates are handled in UK format, if you're in France date displays will display Lundi instead of Monday. By using satellite assemblies for string resources your software can use culture specific information with no extra work and if you want to do the same in asp.net then components like Localizer will do the work for you. But there's a little problem...
I recently produced an appointment calendar for the wife so she can allow her clients to see her availability...
I use NewsGator as my RSS reader. Now they've made the web edition free for everyone it becomes a bit more useful. You can see related feeds, get recommended feeds, and syncronise your subscriptions across multiple machines. Best of all I can now use their internal ratings code and add their nice rating system to my site.
Apparently I beat everyone else to this apart from Greg "Mr NewsGator" Reinacker . Makes a change for me to do something cutting age blog wise.
There is no real documentation as yet, just a response to the forum post I made. Greg said
I'm actually...
When I started this little ego site it didn't take long for referral spammers arrived. First it started with lots of domains by spammers em3, pushing ordinary porn and spyware. Then there was spanking porn referrals. It changed to female libido pills. Now it's "herbal" sleeping pills. I do keep a record of the spammers so they never get linked to, boosting their google ranking.
Interesting evolution here though, your day starts by looking at naked women, then finding one to spank, then drugging her so she's actually turned on by your porn browsing and spanking her and then to help...
Hugh at gaping void discovers that my MP, Boris Johnson has a blog. However he seems to be impressed that it's there, rather than it being useful.
I like Boris, he's the only MP I've had that's written back when I've emailed, however the Boris blog seems to be nothing more than another carrots on the relentless Boris publicity train. He has a grand total of two articles about constituency matters, one from this month and one from last month [edit: I had originally read this as Sept 2003, I was wrong, apologies]. The rest of the site is press releases,...
The bank I'm mentoring a .net migration for has banned pretty much every blogging site, weblogs.com (there goes scoble), blogs.msdn.com and even the spanking new wallop. When you get the banned message you get a handy reference list of what they're banning;
Adult/Sexually Explicit
Chat
Criminal Skills
Alcohol & Tobacco
Finance & Investment Gambling
Glamour & Intimate Apparel
Hacking
Hate Speech
Personals and Dating
Remote Proxies
Streaming Media
Usenet News
Violence
Weapons
Web-based E-mail
The idea of Scoble in "Glamour & Intimate Apparel" is ummm .... errr ....
Oops. It appears at some stage Visual Studio lost the event for the "save comment" button. It's back now. Too late for Hugh to comment though. Damnit. That would have been a small amount of kudos!
Slashdot today talked about the "Whopping-Big Data Theft At U.C. Berkeley. As the database included Social Security Numbers and other information useful to identity theft a lot of comments where made about how it could have been protected. One comment stuck out for me
Now, why in the world they were handed a bunch of social security numbers (instead of MD5's of the numbers) to store is a mystery to me
A lot of people believe calculating a cryptographic hash is a protection method for data. It is, and it isn't. A hash is a one-way encryption algorithm. Given the...
This was the main street where I live yesterday. As you can imagine traffic is rather back logged. Or water logged. (insert other bad puns here)
Doc Searles has been discussing branding and blogging;
"Ever notice that the companies that tolerate, and even encourage, blogging... also suck at branding?"
This makes sense. In order to have a good brand, a brand that everyone recognises, branding must be strict. It must be rigid. It must be enforced. It must be anal. You can't have people running around willy-nilly using it, slapping a logo up here and there. Funny how a company who has an image of being creative and breaking moulds such as Apple will have to be complete facists about to branding. There has to be a trade...
It seems a lot of .net blogs are full of the "wonderful" news about Edit and Continue making it to C# (yes Peter, this includes you). The general feeling is its a great addition. Call be old fashioned (one of the more polite things I'm called) but damnit NO.
With test driven development your logic errors should have been caught before you feel the need to fire up a debugger. Heck getting to a stage of using a debugger may well be an indication that your tests cases suck. Surely the changes you make to data on the fly to make...
SPF is a great anti-spam method. It verifies that the SMTP server sending an email is authorised to send email on behalf of the domain in the FROM: header. However programmers don't seem to be helping. dasBlog and Wallop, as well as other numerous web applications, including ebay send emails using the address you give them. So when I sent out wallop invites to hotmail addresses they bounced.
Diagnostic-Code: smtp;550 207.68.176.8 does not pass SPF requirements for domain wallop@idunno.org
Damn right it didn't pass. My mail server is the only SMTP server that should be sending emails from my domain. So what...
HTTP modules are great. I finally implemented the blogger api as one, using the excellent Cook Computing XML:RPC library from Cook Computing. The problem comes when you create applications under your root application. This is a common enough scenario and necessary sometimes (for example nGallery needs to be in its own application because it uses its own authentication modules). The problem arises when you add HTTP modules and handlers to your root application. Suddenly you discover that your new application needs them too.
But wait, there appears to be a solution, the <remove> functionality, or even <clear> You would think that...
So Microsoft are jumping the blogging and social networking bandwagons with Wallop.
Rumour has been rife as, like gmail, it's invite only.
Today Scoble was giving out invites (he is, himself, a one man
Microsoft community). I snagged one.
Worry number 1, I had given a tagged mail address, scoble@, which became my login. I was branded now,
a giant scoble tattoo on my ass. I managed to get it lasered off though.
...
Not content with the slashdot reaction
Scoble
asks what sucks about Microsoft products. Oh boy. That's going to fill his hard drive up.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm a generally happy Microsoft user. A lot of my posts on Slashdot get
marked as trolls. I'm currently overseeing a .net migration for a large UK bank and mentoring a few
of their staff. But ....
IE. If it wasn't for lack...