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November 05, 2007

Google-hosed?

We all know what a googlewhack is, and that they're increasingly hard to find.

But what happens when you turn to Google for an answer to a problem that you're working on (say... trying to get VMware's Web Management Interface to work in IIS7), and the third entry in the list of results is a link to your own site/blog?

Only, you know you don't have the answers - otherwise you wouldn't be looking on Google. Sadly, at that point, I think you're hosed. And you know it. Hence, googlehosed. Maybe the 'rule' for being googlehosed should be that you know you're google-hosed when you see one of your own entries/posts on the first page of results - especially if it's BEFORE you start scrolling?

Sadly, however, this happens to me more often than I would like. I just never expected it for something as simple as getting the VMware web admin portal working in IIS7...  

Posted on November 05, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 12, 2007

More Vista Spoutage

Nah. I won't bore you with more of my anti-Vista ranting.

Suffice it to say, that if you read news/blogs of any sort, you've seen that there's really starting to be a mounting backlash towards Vista. More and more people are announcing that they're not impressed with it, and there's more and more talk of downgrading back to Vista. And not just geeks and IT folks either. But non-geeks as well.

Okay, one small-ish, but valid, rant:
Strangely enough though, I just can't seem to leave it alone. The other day I applied Vista SP1 - hoping that it would somehow let me use my network attached scanner. No love. (Honestly Vista/MS, the earth is no longer flat. There are thousands of all-in-one printers out there that are 'network' attached instead of bound to a USB cable somewhere. Yet there's no friggin support for these scanners in Vista???)

But enough of that.

How about an interesting insight instead?
I've been reading Mário Romano's blog for a while now. It's a great mix of stuff that I frequently find worthwhile to read. (Most blogs I subscribe to I just glance over.) He had a very interesting post recently. So, even when you don't hate Vista, there's really not all that much to love.

Posted on October 12, 2007 | | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

July 26, 2007

Wikipedia Entry of the week: Wonk

I was pretty sure that I was using Wonk correctly (to describe a nerd/fan-boy/geek who knows lots of stuff about something), but wanted to check Wikipedia just to make sure.

The last entry/use for wonk almost made me fall out of my chair:

Wonk is used to designate a fork with just a single tine, in the line of twook, threek, and fork.

Maybe I need to get out more, but that was seriously funny...

Posted on July 26, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 15, 2007

Shout Out to Hosted-Projects.com

No, I'm not an actor. No, I don't even play one on TV. I'm also not a paid spokesman for Hosted-Projects.com, but I just needed to give them a shout out for providing such excellent service.

I've posted about them before (back when I did my brief series on products/services that rock), and if you don't remember, they provided hosted Subversion (along with project and bug tracking) at great prices with excellent up-times and speeds.

I'm grand-fathered into one of their older packages (300 MB with three repositories for $10/month - more than ample for my needs), but their new plans start at between $7-$15/month and offer a lot of bang for the buck.

What makes them so great? Awesome service. I've been working on a dev project for VSSDK.com for a while now and had an SVN repository hosting source control for that project on a different server. This week I was able to get a .dump of that Repository (shout out to Kris Hering on the quick turn-around for that one), and then wanted to upload it to Hosted-Projects.com to move the entire repository over there.

Not only was Hosted-Projects.com able to import my entire Repo in literally a matter of minutes after my request, but they also completely re-purposed one of my existing repositories in order to meet my finicky requests in easing the transition.

In short, if you're using SVN and need hosting, you're stupid if you don't look into using Hosted-Projects.com. You can't beat them for the price (I've never had a problem with them being down or unavailable), and their service rocks.

Posted on June 15, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 07, 2007

Google's FUD on IIS being less Secure

Great article on the notion that Google tried to put forth recently that IIS might somehow be less secure than Apache.  (Which is total crap as IIS 6 is amazingly secure - which this article points out.)

Posted on June 07, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 25, 2007

The Visual Studio SDK

So, what's Mikeey doing to keep himself occupied of late? Well, other than the Longhorn Roadshow (which has been a hoot), I'm busily working on a bunch of stuff focused around Visual Studio Extensibility.

Keep tabs on my efforts here: www.vssdk.com.  

Posted on April 25, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 23, 2007

Great Resource For Localhost Connection Issues

Fellow ASPInsider Steve Schofield (who will also be presenting the IIS Track in some cities with the Longhorn Server Roadshow), has assembled a killer list of things to check when it comes to Localhost connection issues.

Bookmark it - you know you'll need it.

Posted on March 23, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

March 16, 2007

Ajax: Links Round-up

Over the past few months I've had the chance of creating two full-blown presentations for Microsoft Technet/MSDN dealing with AJAX. (Each 'presentation' was a for an hour long presentation with accompanying demos - I'll post links to them if I ever see them become available on the MS site.) The first presentation dealt with Ajax Security Best Practices in general (i.e. not just focused on Microsoft's AJAX offerings, but AJAX in general). The second presentation was a round-up of ASP.NET AJAX Best Practices.

In the process of creating those sessions, I ended up doing tons of online research, which resulted in hundreds of links. What follows is a filtered/aggregated list of some of the resources that I used - though this list is by no means exhaustive (and many of the links in the Intro section are pretty obvious - but the other links are all excellent).

Introduction

AJAX Defined
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

The Benefits of AJAX
http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3554271

http://dotnet.org.za/adam/archive/2005/04/12/17006.aspx

AJAX has been around for a while

http://www.axentric.com/posts/default/8

AJAX Architecture
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

AJAX Still suffers from the same problems as other application development
http://dotnetslackers.com/Ajax/re-42465_Why_some_of_.....

Code Management and Extensibility

JavaScript best practices

http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/articles/goodpractices.php

Unobtrusive Coding

http://ajaxpatterns.org/Why_Ajax_Patterns

http://ajaxpatterns.org/

http://softwareas.com/ajax-patterns

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_font.asp

http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/clear_links_to_1/

http://www.asp.net/CSSAdapters/Default.aspx

http://ajax.asp.net/docs/

ASP.NET AJAX Behaviors and Extenders

http://ajax.asp.net/docs/tutorials/ExtenderControlTutorial1.aspx

http://ajax.asp.net/docs/tutorials/IScriptControlTutorial1.aspx

Benefits of Unobtrusive Coding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unobtrusive_JavaScript

http://digital-web.com/articles/separating_behavior_and_structure_2/

http://www.bobbyvandersluis.com/articles/goodpractices.php

http://snook.ca/archives/javascript/clear_links_to_1/

Accessibility

W3C Accessibility Guidelines

http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/

Accessibility in General

http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2006/.....

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/whats-next-for-web-accessibility
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/gbs.html

http://blindconfidential.blogspot.com/2006/05/quagmire-of-web-accessibility.html

Accessibility and AJAX Applications

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2005/09/06/web_development

http://www.washington.edu/computing/accessible/accessibleweb/ajax_accessible.html

http://www.maxkiesler.com/index.php/weblog/comments
/how_to_make_your_ajax_applications_accessible/

Progressive Enhancement / HIJAX

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijax

Scalability

AJAX and Scalability

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2725.aspx
http://www.relevancellc.com/2006/4/21/ajax-and-server-scalability-theory-and-practice

UpdatePanels and Web Services
http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2725.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/archive/2007/01/31/the-asp-...

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/archive/2007/02/01/on-updatepanel-...
http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/Article/46630AE2-1C79-4D5F-827E-6C2857FF1D23.dcik
http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2006/02/23/537681.aspx

Micro Caching

http://aspalliance.com/251

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.caching.aspx

Security

General AJAX Security

http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1868

http://www.it-observer.com/articles/1062/ajax_security/

http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=949&p=1

Security Best Practices

http://webdesign.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.tec...

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/dmorrill/archives/ajax-and-information-security-10026

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302417.aspx

Validation Problems
http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=949&p=4

ASP.NET and Web Attacks

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/....

Cross Site Scripting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSS

http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/xss-faq.shtml

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/PAGHT000004.asp

http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/ajax/cross-domain-xhr

XSS and CSRF

http://sla.ckers.org/forum/read.php?3,3843,3871#msg-3871

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSRF

http://sla.ckers.org/forum/list.php?4

http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html

Anti XSS Library from Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=...

Anti CSRF Measures – ViewStateUserKey
www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-06/BH-US-06-Gallagher.pdf

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-US/library/system.web.ui.page.viewstateuserkey.aspx

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ViewStateUserKeyAndInvalid
ViewstateWhenPostingBackDuringFormsAuthentication.aspx

Defense in Depth and ASP.NET Authentication/Authorization
http://cyberforge.com/weblog/aniltj/archive/2004/10/09/685.aspx

JS and CSS ‘history sniffing’

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/08/i-know-where-youve-been.html

XMLHttpRequest Best Practices

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/28861

http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2006/07/my-black-hat-usa-2006-presentation.html

http://www.darknet.org.uk/2006/04/ajax-is-your-application-secure-enough/

http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr/ajax/cross-domain-xhr

Xml Poisoning

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/system.xml.xmlreader.
canresolveentity(VS.80).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/system.xml.xmlresolver(VS.80).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/system.xml.xmlsecureresolver(VS.80).aspx

http://forumsystems.com/papers/Anatomy_of_Attack_wp.pdf

Microsoft Patterns and Practices: Improving Web Application Security – Threats and Countermeasures

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms994921.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=....


Additional AJAX Attack Vectors

http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=949&p=1

Posted on March 16, 2007 | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

February 21, 2007

Score!

Free download: Microsoft Web Application Stress Tool.

Benefits
- Easy to learn. Futzing with it for 4-5 minutes is about all it takes to get a feel for how to use it.
- Platform agnostic. It's a web stress tool, not an ASP or ASP.NET stress tool. (Though the latter is all I ever use it for)
- Portable-ish. It's tiny for starters (10MB or so). But it saves test results and such in access databases, and you can even save, export/import your scripts. Shiny.
- Did I mention easy? There are a ton of stress tools/applications/suites out there. They all typically impose a decent learning curve.
- Along with easy of use, it's EXCELLENT for quick-ish/ad-hoc performance testing and is perfect for use in presentations.

Time was you used to have to 'know' someone to get your hands on this piglet (I somehow have a copy of version 1.1 - which I'm not seeing as a download from MS' site). That, and I was worried that it might have been retired. But it doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

Update: Turns out that the 1.0 version on the MS site is actually version 1.1 - which is nice (and, I guess, down-grades my special-hood-ness). Also, if you want to throw this tool on to Vista, you'll need to move a copy of msvcp50.dll from your \Windows\System32\ drive on an XP machine over to the same folder on Vista - otherwise the installer will barf. (But once you move the .dll, you're good to go... )

Posted on February 21, 2007 | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

February 15, 2007

5 Things you Don't know about me

Well, I got tired of waiting around for the cool kids to tap me. So yes boys and girls, I'm committing probably one of the biggest faux-pas that the blogging world has ever seen - by tapping myself. (The shame.)

1. Dropout. I'm a high school drop out. Yup, I couldn't stand High School (though I did get plenty of sleep during class). High school was just unbearably booring, lame, and got in the way of learning... so I ditched it. I then had to work my butt off to get accepted to a prestigious university where I actually managed to swing the Dean's Honor Roll one semester, and also was fortunate enough to swing partial scholarships for my Junior and Senior years due to my great grades. At one time I actually had the grades to make Yale, or the University of Chicago... but then I bailed to work with that series of tubes and dump-trucks known as "the internets".
2. Khoomei. I've got major issues with Mongolian Mouth music [sample 1, sample 2 - though those these are technically both examples of Tuvan, not Khoomei]. Well, the truth is that Mongolian and Mongolians just fascinate me beyond belief. And I think Khoomei is a perfect embodiment of that fascination. As crazy as it sounds, I frequently program to it - it's a great sound but doesn't demand enough of my attention to distract from what I'm doing. I, um, hate to say it... but I frequently find myself almost, um, 'rocking out' to it while working. (Maybe volunteering this info in a post was a bad idea... and maybe now I know why no one has nominated me...)
3. Tolkien. I've *cough* read the Lord of the Rings more than 25 times (mostly as a youth). I lost count of how many times I've read the Hobbit. As a matter of fact, my first actual forays into publication actually came from my wild passion for all things Middle Earth. (The stories were just great, and Tolkien's mastery of languages and philology just blow me away.) And yes, I was insufferable/snobby when the movies came out.
4. Languages. I love languages. I speak fluent French, used to be conversant in Arabic, grok lots of German and could be mildly conversant if necessity required, and have studied Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Swahili at great lengths. I've also spent probably thousands of hours pouring over the dictionary focused on etymology - and I just love Greek and Latin. One of my absolute all time favorite books in the world is Kenneth Katzner's Languages of the World. In high school (before I dropped out) I think I had it permanently checked out of the library. When I dropped out I bought my own copy.
5. Sports. I hated sports as a kid in school. Probably because nobody picked me to be on their team. Hmmm, kind of like this stupid meme.

Sharing the Love
Since I never got tapped, I'm not sure if it's kosher for me to tap others... but I might as well. I'm already knee-deep, and I'd love to know some things about some other people on the blogosphere:

My Best Bud Carson.
   Actually, screw him. He got tapped 2x already and _KNEW_ that I've had this post waiting for like a month now. Miserable cuss, no way I give him one of my 'self-appointed' taps. No link love for him.
Brian Hitney
    Brian and I are former veterans in the war on chaos that was Coldwater Creek.
Jon Sharp
    Once upon a time Jon and I made things sing at Altiris.
Adam Sills 
    He's always got great insights either as blog comments, or via newsgroups.
Ali Parvaresh
    I don't know anything about Ali other than that he's from Tehran and linked to me the other day - so back at you Ali.

Posted on February 15, 2007 | | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

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