Brennan’s Blog

A word to the wise, do not use a USB drive enclosure. It is fundamentally flawed and I will explain why.

So, I am having one of those days. Nothing seems to be working as it should. I read blogs via Rojo.com which has been flaky as usual but lately it has been offline a lot lately as they have added more "features" which only serve to make it suck more and more with each release. I am also using MSDN heavily lately and some of the documentation pages on there cause a Server 500 error. It normally goes away after a while but it is persisting today. It is annoying because the problem is becoming more frequent. It has been buggy ever since they added the new community content wiki. So anyway, I had to get to the MSDN documentation in another way.

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I have been watching this bubble up slowly over the past 8 years. My first exposure to a form of identity management was PGP which has never become a widespread technology despite the efforts of many. PGP is an implementation of public key encryption just like SSL which has been a part of web browsers nearly from the beginning when Netscape developed SSL 3.0 over 10 years ago. We have used SSL to buy products do our banking online ever since.

These days with identity theft and phishing exploits there is a very real need to finally create a functional solution for identity management. A couple of months ago Microsoft released their branded solution Cardspace with .NET 3.0 which has been included with Vista. And this week Microsoft put their weight behind OpenID. (see OpenID Gets a Boost From Microsoft ) All of the recent activity is adding up to identity management finally taking off.

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I recently read about how you can implement an interface either implicitly or explicitly. I have always used the implicit declaration without knowing the difference. The explicit declaration causes it to be masked from the instances of the implementation class. If you cast the implementation to the interface you can access the explicitly declared interface methods. In a way it acts like a access modifier like the public, private and protected.

In the code sample below I have created an IDog interface which can Bark, Run and Catch. And then I have 2 classes which implement it, Terrier and BullDog. The BullDog class explicitly declares the Run method. And as you can see in the screenshot to the right the Run is not available from Intellisense.

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A shocking and disappointing story on Digg points to an interview will Bill Gates. He claims that the MacOS X is compromised daily while you would be hard pressed to find a single Vista exploit in a month. This comment is amazing and completely inaccurate given the track record Apple and Microsoft have had the past 7 years. And in just a matter of a few hours there are already nearly 400 comments on this Digg story. In that same timeframe a normally hot story may get 150 comments, so clearly the Microsoft Chairman has struck a sensitive nerve.

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I read a post by a disgruntled computer user yesterday complaining that the latest Vista features were not exciting or a compelling reason to upgrade. It annoyed me. Now I have not been planning to upgrade to Vista. I can see there are some really "cool" features, but they are really in the "shiny object" camp in my opinion. What I really want people to do is change their attitude about the operating system. It is there to run the applications and that is it. Our expectations have grown to the point that many expect an upgrade to the latest OS release should make your life more fulfilling and exciting. I just want a system which allows me to run my applications and then stay out of the way.

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There are some angry people out there who are upset about the decision by Yahoo to start restricting accounts on Flickr.com. Someone asked if there is a way to download their photos from Flickr. I happened to write a little software the other day to pull a Flickr feed and parse the output. This software just saves some of the photo information locally to display a gallery, but it could be modified to instead download and save the files. What I do not know how to get around is the limitation on the size of the feed. It seems it shows less than 20 photos at a time. If there is a way to get to all of the files for a given user id I would be able to find a way around this limitation.

Perhaps one way to help you make this work is to tag your photos with tags like set1, set2, set3 and so on and limit them to 15 per set. If you know a better way to do this, I would appreciate the tip.

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I have been reading Pro Javascript Techniques by John Resig. It is an excellent book. I have also started reading his blog. He recently posted Hacking Digg with Firebug and jQuery. I did not know about a couple of things that he covers. First, I did not realize a bookmarklet in Firefox could load a remote script library. Second, I did not realize that Firebug could do all of that. You have to watch his video.

Now that I am equipped with those techniques, I decided to try it out on CNN.com. The following bookmarklet prompts you for a new headline and then changes it for you with a nice fade in effect. This is all due to the features in jQuery which comes in at 20k. It is really a very impressive Javascript library.

CNN Headline Changer (save as bookmarklet)

It has finally been released. Go and get ASP.NET Ajax 1.0!

To get a jump start on doing Ajax with ASP.NET use the training videos.

I have been using 2 external drive enclosures with 350GB drives but as I add more movies and music and virtual PC images to the drive they have gotten pretty full. Today I ordered a 500GB drive and I was going to order it from CDW but I ran into some trouble. Since I moved this past year it still had my old address associated with my account. I thought that was OK since most sites give you a way to specify a more current address during checkout. That was not the case. I dug around and found the "address change request" form which allows me to request the change, with some sort of delay. It seems there is no way for me to pop in and make an order and be on my way with CDW. So I looked elsewhere.

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I use Remote Desktop all the time to work inside of my development systems hosted by Microsoft Virtual Server. I use the host system to browse the web for documentation and searches as I work and when I need to copy some text from the web browser I find many times the link between the host clipboard and the remote clipboard is broken. In the past I have read that somehow the remote clipboard utility, rdpclip.exe, gets locked and no longer allows the clipboard to be relayed between the host and the client environment. My only way to deal with it was to use the internet clipboard, cl1p.net. I would create my own space and use it to send content between environments. But that is a cumbersome step if you are doing it frequently.

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