February 2006 Entries
Thanks to John Robbins for the link to If broken it is, fix it you should, an awesome blog about debugging your code. I wish I knew about this blog a long time ago when I was looking at dump files practically every day
Here is a link to some really good FREE hands on training courses for SQL Server 2005. Enjoy
I have read an really enjoyed both The Tipping Point and Blink, so I'm glad to see that the author Malcolm Gladwell has started a blog. If you like those books, check out some of his articles from the New Yorker here. Thanks to Anil Dash for the link...
Here's another brain dump that might be useful to lots of people. Have you ever wanted to search a whole database for any keyword or number but had to go through it one table and column at a time? Well, here's a great link that shows how to search all columns of all tables in a database. It has come in very handy for me on more than one occasion lately. Thanks to Narayana Vyas Kondreddi for the procedure...
An interesting landmark coming is coming our way, sometime this weekend it is estimated that we will break the 6.5 Billion population mark. Wow. Check out this Wired article for more more info and this US census site for up to date estimates on the US and world populations. Current Worldwide estimate: 6,499,176,172Current US estimate: 298,158,354...
I've been getting into the security and cryptography space more and more recently, mostly because it's what I'm interested in but also in preparation for my upcoming presentation at the Vancouver Code Camp. I had downloaded this presentation on Cryptography and PKI for Passive Security by Rafal Lukawiecki to watch this weekend but spending time with the missus took precedence, so it will have to wait for another day. I have only watched the five minute preview, but it looks great. Check it out though,...
Testing all those blog search engines. brrreeeport this! Tag: brrreeeport
There are some more .NET security related webcasts coming up, this time brought to you by the good folks at MSDN Canada. It's the Security On the Brain series and it's going on throughout March, so sign up if you're interested in secure coding. Oh, and you can win an Xbox 360 too
The Northern Voice conference this weekend was really fun. I found most of the sessions to be very interesting and thought provoking. The Geek Talk session introduced me to a bunch of new tools I need to check out. Robert has a good list of what was covered in the session. The session on Citizen journalism was also very fun, even though we were squished up in the back of the room sitting on the floor. The last session of the day on Blogging, Passions and Personal Expression was the most interactive...
This is awesome stuff. It's a cool touch screen multiple input interface that rocks. This really is Minority Report like. Check out the video here. Thanks to Chris Sells and Richard on Mondays for the link
We're here at the Northern Voice 2006 conference in Vancouver. There have been some very cool presentations so far. We just listened to Eric Rice talking about Everything Casting, audio, video etc. It's something that I've been thinking about for a while and Erika is interested in, so look for that kind of stuff coming sooo... More to come from the conference later... Tag: NorthernVoice
Thanks to Savas for the link to a cool Greek .NET site. Learn more tech and brush up on my Greek at the same time. Talk about killing two birds... What are the good Spanish language .NET sites out there
Speaking of the Vancouver Code Camp, it looks like the number of people signed up has surpassed the 200 level, so anyone signing up now is going to be on the waiting list. There's still a chance to attend, so if you're still thinking of signing up, better do it now. Oh, and you don't have to go to code camp to to go the the geek dinner. Drop me a line if you're up for it. Rory's going to be there, so that means a good time will be had by all...
I've been fairly busy lately studying C# and working on my code for Vancouver Code Camp. On the first go around for the section on using a salted hash, I had used the Random class to test the code and make sure it all works. But, since the Random class is not truly random but only pseudo-random, this is not the best way to create the salt. It has the effect of making the salt predictable, and hence defeats the added level of complexity which the salt is supposed to add. So, here is not the best way...