Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
It’s official kids, November, the month of the moustache, is going to be my month of the moustache as well. I am taking part in the fundraising event known as Movember (http://au.movember.com/) in which i will rejoice in the god given right of growing a porn star moustache. Movember is an international cause to raise money and awareness for Prostate Cancer and Male Depression. Time to get involved!
Well this week i started work on my new development machine – a 64bit Windows 7 machine mmmm tasty. Everything has run perfectly smoothly until i hit one weird little issue. While attempting to generate a new data layer for a SQLite database using Subsonic i received nothing but errors – Another simple fix which I'll show you in this post.
I was recently read a blog post recently by Eric Spiegel, that made it to Slashdot where he asked the question: “Are software developers naturally weird?”. I think deep down everyone who works in IT is a bit weird, and i will repeat Eric’s remark: “Go on admit it”. Whether it is something tiny or their complete character, you can usually put your finger on something out of the ordinary. My REAL question is: Is everyone weird in some way once you get close to them?
While working on a recent Flickr/Google Maps mashup i needed to make it as simple for users to share their Flickr photos as possible. What is easier than simply asking them to enter the Flickr photo page URL? Using this I'll show you a simple way to use RegEx to retrieve the photo ID part of the URL using c# as well as a JavaScript RegEx version for your ASP.Net RegEx validators. Lets get to it!
ASP.Net Script Services and Web Services are an incredibly powerful tool for providing rich dynamic sites using AJAX. As good as they are, there are times when you want to access them in alternate ways. Combine JQuery, JSON and ASP.Net Web Services and you have a combination that rivals the A Team – lets take a look.
If there is one blogging related tool that I've come across lately that i think has been a game changer it would have to be Windows Live Writer. However some people are using either a custom written blog engine (like me) or are using a blog engine that doesn’t support Live Writer. If that is the case i will show you a simple way to integrate Windows Live Writer support into you blog with WebServices and the MetaWebLog API.
There are times when the invention that we all call E-mail just doesn’t cut it for sending information securely. It is because of this that in every case where information really needs to be sent securely E-mail is not usually the medium chosen to send it. As most developers know though there are times when you have to bite the unsecure E-mail bullet. I’ll show you a way to solve this conundrum and at the same time probably keep your current e-mail client.
If you have ever had to setup or manage an Umbraco installation you will know both the pleasure and the occasional pain that it can bring. Umbraco is part of the growing list of “oober cool” up and coming Dot Net CMS that are getting attention in the “get it up quick” world of marketing driven sites in the market place (Ford Australia for example). I recently had to upgrade a clients installation from 3.0.5 to 4.0.2.1 and the story that follows will hopefully help someone in a similar position so that they can revel in the same relief that I do currently.
There are many times when there can be a requirement to disconnect users from your Microsoft SQL database. Sometimes you can have bad code keeping connections alive that shouldn’t be, other times your simply want to restore a backup or do something that requires no users to be using the database. Reasons aside, I’ll show you some simple SQL to make it happen.
This is a quick one today. I was recently working with a web application that runs a spider to index content on a bunch of intranet sites. The client was a large company with a very security conscious IT team, that had locked down all intranet access from the web server server in question. Luckily Dot Net supports proxies in a loving fashion, and I'll show you how.