However, today I came across this uncorroborated post that Yahoo ads might be distributing malware.

Thinking back, I saw a broken Yahoo ad on their site yesterday, and in place of the ad was an iFrame with the typical IIS error message and something about localstart.asp. I thought nothing of it at the time. But today it dawned on me that there was some recently reported huge IIS SQL Injection Attacks… I am not sure if one plus one equals two in this instance, but to be on the safe side I have turned off all Yahoo ads from my site.

My proxy apologies if you experienced any oddities.

(Photo curtsey of Choubistar via his flickr account)

… wait for it …

Ok, it’s probably not really true ^_^. The laptop was likely left over from a previous, non Microsoft, presenter. According to a few comments from people who said they were there, Ballmer’s slides were from an automatic slideshow which was probably not running from the Mac. But still, I find it pretty funny.

I woke up Saturday with an idea (which is actually a joke at our house now, “Guess what honey, I have an idea!”). I wanted to have a podcast of news bits that I could listen to while I did my morning routine - the catch being I wanted it daily, and I wanted to control the shows overall subjects at will.

That desire, along with my new found Automator curiosity, led me to throw together Rohan Times Radio News ( :-D ). It’s an automatic process that takes an RSS feed, reads it, and makes a podcast out of the stories. To get the content I want, I am using yahoo pipes to filter and sort the feeds, and then republish the feeds as the shows teleprompt.

Here is a basic overview of how it works (sorry for the oddities with the movie, youtube seems to be doing odd things on upload lately):

One of the coolest parts about this is it basically requires no code (I did, however, use a bit of code to have finer control).

I don’t think I can publish the podcast for the world, as I think it would be seen as a copyright violation, but if you are interested in this let me know.

The .net web.config file is kind of a pain when working with source control and multiple developers. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to keep conflicts to a minimum, and allow for each developer to have different configurations (which is required for the current development environments).

So here is the crux of the problem. There are user defined setting in that file that look like this:

<appSettings>
...       <add key="OLAPCString" value="Provider=MSOLAP; Integrated Security=IIII; Data Source=QRSTUV;Initial Catalog=WXYZ;Cube Name=ABCD;"/>
...
</appSettings>
<connectionStrings>
...       <add name="ConnectionString" connectionString="Server=127.0.0.1;Database=TheDB;uid=TheUID;pwd=ThePWD;Max Pool Size=100; Connect Timeout=300;"/>
...
</connectionStrings>

There are many settings in both appSettings and connectionStrings that need to change based on the developers environment, but we also want to have a base version.

Setting it up with the developers directly adding / editing web.config will have web.config conflicting constantly. Often daily, eating into development time. As people add things to the file other developers will have to readjust the connection strings etc for their own environment. It gets really old really fast.

appSettings has an attribute “file” that lets you specify an external file that can override settings in the appSetting section - which is great. If that file exists, and a setting is defined there it uses that one, if the setting is not overwritten it uses the default one web.config.

That’s great, and solves half the problem, but what about connectionStrings? Well, there is an attribute “configSource” which allows you to have an external file but it’s an either or choice. You either define something in web.config or in an external file - it doesn’t override like in appSettings.

I am left scratching my head as to why that would be. It doesn’t make any sense. Why can’t you do the same thing as with appSettings (Well, Rob, because it simply is that way - he said to himself).

So, from what I can tell, we either:

1. Leave the connection strings in web.config and get svn conflicts

2. Move them to an external file, put the external file in svn and still get conflicts

3. Move to an external file, put a comment in the web.config and if someone adds something to connectionStrings (or we get new developers) have them add it to that comment and tell the developers to add it to their local file.

This seems overly complicated.

I tried to dance around this by doing something like the following on startup:

//get the developer defined connection string
string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings.Get("ConnectionString");
//set the "real" connection string
WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnectionString"].ConnectionString = connectionString;

but, of course, the connectionStrings connection string is readonly. Sigh.

I even tried adding entity references to the web.config in order to get around it:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>
<!DOCTYPE configuration [
<!ENTITY server "192.168.1.100">
]><configuration xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0″>
…

But that doesn’t work either for several reasons (I even tried to find a version of the schema to try to use a hacked version, but I couldn’t find one).

Square peg round hole.

Anyway, until we are enlightened, we’ve just decided to do the override for appSettings and just “waste” time dealing with the inevitable connectionStrings conflicts.

Anyone have any suggestions? Or is just a limitation of .Net development?

(On a positive note, the ability to completely override these sections, the configSource setting, makes doing deploys quite nice)

I stumbled on a Git hosting provider today called github. The prices are good, and they range from free (for hackers), to $12/month for small teams, to $100/month for large companies.

If your company does outsourcing to countries where the net connectivity is sometimes sketchy, you owe it to yourself to checkout Git. The distributed nature of the program allows for better collaboration in those types of environments.

Because each “clone” of the repository can still commit, even when the network is down people can still work, and re-sync when the network comes back up.

The other gem I spotted today was a Git Textmate bundle which makes using Git in Textmate as easy as using SVN. Here is a screens shot:

You can install the bundle by following the steps on Gitorious (You need to have the command line version of git installed first).

And lastly, I said before that “git doesn’t have a UI and you need to be comfortable with the shell”, but I was incorrect. If you run the command git gui from within a git directory there is a simple but effective UI. Here is a screen shot of what it looks like on Mac OS X but it works on Linux and Windows as well:

I find the Textmate bundle nicer for most day to day activities, but git gui frequently comes in handy.

You can add the gadget to your iGoogle home page (which I am starting to dig), and access it from any operating system from just about any where in the world:

Or if you use the Google side bar in windows, you can add it there too.

You can even embed the Gadget on your own web site.

A new word is shown almost every day (Monday through Friday), posted at 6:00 am PST.

VLC is a media application that can play almost any kind of media file - it’s a great program.

The security report says upgrade to the newest version to fix, but there are reports that the newest version also has the bug.

So it’s best not to play untrusted movies with subtitles until they get it sorted (or download the nightly build).

Sigh.

I was lucky enough to start working on this new gig doing some C# coding, and helping to get a close-to-done-but-still-a-ways-to-go project over the finish line. I’ve been feverishly coding for the past week (well, aside from Tuesday when I got hit by a car. But that’s another post I guess.) so I haven’t had much time to post or reflect on the experience - so here I go.

The coolest part about the situation is: I didn’t have a mobile computer running windows (just some test servers) so I had to go out and buy a new Macbook Pro - I just had to, I had no choice you see :). I now have a blazingly fast Mac, and a blazingly fast Windows laptop (and Linux in VMWare too). I love this computer - it’s unnatural. Bye bye G4.

I have to say, I thought working in Windows all day was going to suck horribly. It doesn’t. It’s not as good, or as pretty, or as fun as coding on a Mac (sorry, it’s not), but it’s not too terribly bad either.

(Here is a shot of my desktop for proof)

Helpful Software

Here are some applications I found that make coding in / using Windows… dare I say it… fun.

XKeyemacs - This is the best application on the planet for Windows. It makes windows emulate emacs key bindings everywhere. It is so awesome to be able to scroll firefox pages with ctrl+n. And it’s not just for moving around either ctrl+w, alt+w, alt+y, ctrl+k, ctrl+x ctrl+s - all of them work, everywhere. It’s great (if you like that kind of thing).

Google desktop - The gadgets and clock are pretty neat, but the thing that makes this rule is "ctrl ctrl". It works somewhat like Quicksilver… well not really… but it’s a nice application launcher / spotlight-ish tool.

Putty - To get back into unix land (ssh into servers)

Filezilla - (not the server the client) There are quite a few free ftp programs out there. I just happened to have found this one. It’s a really busy UI, but it’s good.

Windows Live Write - blog poster that works with quite a few blogging engines. Aside from the fact I can’t find a way to edit previous posts, this is probably the best WYSIWYG blogging tool I’ve used.

StarDict - hover over Chinese characters to look them up in a dictionary.

iDisk Utility - get access to your .mac iDisk from windows. (you have to be a .mac member to get it).

Paint.Net - I am sure everyone know about this one already. Free, simple graphics editing program.

ClamAV - free virus scanner, oh yeah I need one of those on this side :-/

Trillian - which, aside from the name, I don’t really like the application. However, it supports a lot of protocols (just not jabber in the free version) - it’ll do.

Miranda IM in my opinion a better multi-protocol client than Trillian. In addition to a more intuitive UI, it’s open source, and it supports gtalk / jabber protocol without having to pay.

Thunderbird - email client.

MacBook Pro + Windows XP Tips

By the way, the only reason I went with XP instead of Vista Business (aside from the deafening cries of "don’t do vista"), was because Vista Business recommended minimum disk space is 15GB  and XP was around 1.5GB. Less seemed better when you are dual booting.

Here are a couple tips on using Windows on a MacBook Pro.

* If you are going to run windows on your shiny Macbook Pro, and you are going to do serious stuff, don’t do virtualization. It’ll make you cry. For example, for this project I need to be running: vs.net 2005, the project complied and running, tomcat, IIS, MSSql, ArcIMS, a few administrator tools, and all the other extra bits (email, IM, etc). There is just a lot less headache when you just boot camp and let windows have the full computer - and it’s been performing very well.

* To choose an OS at startup hold down the alt/option key.

* To take a screen shot in windows (there is no print screen key on Mac), use one of: Shift+fn+F11 or Shift+Alt+Fn+F11. If you have a USB or bluetooth full Mac keyboard, F14 or Alt+F14.

* Esc+F12 rolls up the active window like old school Mac OS 9 - I didn’t even know windows could do that.

I think that’s all of my notes I wanted to jot down. If you have any tips or software suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Ustream.tv is an interesting service. Using Flash it lets you broadcast (stream) live from your DV camera or web cam. So, you can have your own live “TV show”.

One of the bonuses of setting up your own channel is you get your own IRC room with an embed-able Flash client. Very useful for people to ask quick questions about your applications or services without giving out your personal information.

Here is what the client side of the service looks like.

This service does have potentially many uses (aside from any narcissistic tendencies):

* Free meeting broadcasting
* Teaching / Online classes
* Interviews
* Get yourself used to being monitored all the time

It’s a free service, and I think it has the potential to be a a “youtube killer” (you can record the streams as well for later broadcast).