The Daily Dump

Apostrophe Protection Society

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 11:46:43 +1000

Um, yes, there is an Apostrophe Protection Society. A quick look at the forums reveals it's quite active too! To each their own I suppose. Myself, I often forget the rules on when to (not) use an apostrophe, so a website that lists them in a readable format is sometimes handy.

Wireless Security

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 10:20:09 +1000

Well last night I finally turned on my ADSL modem's wireless access point and enabled my laptop's wireless network connection. Voila, instant wireless surfing. What took me so long? Didn't I realise it's 2005 and not the dark ages? Well up to now wireless is just one piece of technology I haven't been too eager to try. I read a long time ago about the serious problems with wireless security: fundamental flaws in protocols, high hackability, etc. Since then wireless has been put in the "too risky to try" box, and I've essentially stayed away from it like the plague.

Home Connectivity

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 11:57:47 +1000

Here is a fantastic guide on setting up secure access to a home network (or any network for that matter) using SSH and Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) or VNC. I recently found the need to get into my home workstation from remote locations, and after looking at a PPTP VPN with RDC, a L2TP IPSec VPN with RDC, RDC by itself, and finally SSH with RDC, SSH with RDC seemed to be the most secure and easy to setup option.

ObjectDataSource, Object Nirvana

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 13:04:43 +1000

I've just started an ASP.NET 2.0 project and I have to say I'm very impressed with the ObjectDataSource control so far. I point this nifty little control at one of my service objects (plain objects, not web services as yet), specify the methods for insert, select, update, delete, tell it the type of business object to expect (optional I think), hook a GridView control up to it, and voila, everything is working. No code! You don't even have to specify the parameters for the CUD methods -- it will figure them out itself. I just have the business object as my sole parameter, but apparently it can also do properties as parameters if you prefer that instead.

Reinventing the Wheel

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:26:31 +1000

Well that was fun. I learnt something about Ajax, specifically Ajax.NET, and I got a nice code browser to boot. Inspired by Scott Watermasysk's Cojax, Cojay isn't as pretty, but it will do for now. Cojay is just for demonstration purposes at the moment since I haven't bought a license for the ComponentArt.Web.UI.TreeView control just yet.

Cojax

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:28:37 +1000

Scott Watermasysk has written a very nice code browser he's called Cojax. Very fast, easy to use, and most impressively, he only spent a couple hours on it. Let's hope he makes the source code available, but in the meantime, I'm tempted to have a crack at building something similar myself. What's on TV right now? :-)

Random Thoughts on the Provider Pattern

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:48:43 +1000

I found an entry in Wikipedia on Aspect Oriented Programming (and no, I wasn't randomly reading Wikipedia, I got there from somewhere else... honestly).

I know nothing about AOP, but from this quick overview in Wikipedia it occurred to me that the Provider Pattern is a model for handling crosscutting concerns in object oriented applications. Sounds fancy doesn't it, but it's not. Crosscutting concerns are simply the things that appear everywhere in applications -- things like logging and transactions. The crosscutting concerns get tangled with and obfuscate the core business logic, a.k.a. the business logic concerns. Yeah, everything is a concern in AOP...

All Things Blog

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:50:04 +1000

I'm loving Wikipedia at the moment. Here are some great links on blogs. Helpful if you want to know what they're all about...

What is a blog and where did blogs come from?
What kind of blog software is available for running a blog?
Using a blog client to post entries (optional).
Reading blogs with a news aggregator.
Finding a news aggregator.

If you're interested in starting a blog, don't forget to check out web syndication and Creative Commons as well. Of course the Creative Commons website is also a good place to go. :-)

Syndicate Me

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:26:25 +1000

Atom and RSS feeds for this blog have always been available, but for those folks who aren't using a browser that can automatically detect them (like, ahem, Firefox or Opera), I've finally created direct links to them. See the links? Just over there to the right... down a bit... under the heading Syndication. :-)

For those of you new to blogging (like me), here is a really good definition of web syndication and an explanation of what Atom and RSS feeds are all about. While my Atom and RSS feeds could be used for a variety of (license compliant) purposes (Movable Type automatically includes my Creative Commons license in the feeds), I've mostly provided them for the majority of blog readers out there that use some form of aggregator. Let's face it, I don't blog every day, so why not make it easy for folks to automatically get my content when I finally do write something? It can be a pain clicking on a website several times a week just to find nothing new has been posted.

Google's Secrets

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:48:10 +1000

Some of Google's secrets are out -- and some of them are very interesting reading. For example, the relative high ranking of my Optimising Movable Type for Google post could be in some part thanks to my five year registration of www.adamboddington.com. Who would have thunk it? I didn't expect that, but I suppose it makes sense if the majority of search engine spammers take up one year registrations.

(Did I mention that my Optimising Movable Type for Google post is back in the rankings? Probably not, since I decided I wouldn't blog about that stuff anymore. I don't know what's changed, but it's up there.)

The full analysis is interesting reading, but in the end it mostly confirms what we already know about search engine optimisation. Organic growth of good content will lead to high quality links, which in turn will lead to a handy search engine ranking. The optimisation tips help, but good content is much more important.

The article points out a couple of pitfalls though. One is the length of the domain name registration as already mentioned. The other (well known one) is knowing who is sharing your hosting server. If you neighbour is engaged in dodgy search engine spam tactics, your shared IP address might be banned. Could be a case for getting your own IP block whether you're sharing a server or not.

Thanks to Craig for sending me this link.

Update: 23 June, 2005

There is some interesting discussion on the Google patent here. The actual patent application can be found here.

Version 1.1

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 14:47:34 +1000

I've written a quick update to the SevenCamels.Framework.Configuration library. The first change is to allow regular plugins to be instantiated as needed. The second change is to require all plugins to take their key as their first constructor parameter. The last change is the conversion of all collection classes to typed collections. More details on the three changes can be found below. You can download the latest version of the SevenCamels.Framework.Configuration library, with an updated Example program, here.

Class Overview

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:43:05 +1000

As promised, here is a rundown on the classes in the revamped SevenCamels.Framework.Configuration library. You can download the library here. Please note the license files in the download.

Plugin the Provider Pattern

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 13:20:37 +1000

I finally took a look at the Provider Pattern outlined by Rob Howard in MSDN's "Nothin' But ASP.NET" column. There's a Part II as well which comes with a nifty little code example. It's very similar to some work that I've already done with plugins defined in configuration files, so I thought I would abstract my work out a bit more and see if I could get it to support the Provider Pattern as well. Extending it to cater for providers was pretty simple with a little refactoring, but before I start talking about the code, lets take a look at what the Provider Pattern actually is.

app.config

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 09:17:59 +1000

You learn something new every day. I've always put the config files for my console and windows applications in the "bin/Debug" directory. It's ugly, but it's always worked for me -- up until today. For some reason, with a brand new project, my config file disappeared every time I did a build. I didn't solve that problem, but I did find out that if you put the config file in the project folder instead and call it "app.config", VS.NET is nice enough to copy it to the "bin/Debug" folder for you and rename it correctly when you build. I suspect the "bug" is related to the "feature" but I'm happy now that everything works again -- and better than before.

Trackbacks Killed My Google Rank

Thu, 26 May 2005 11:17:41 +1000

I initially thought someone had finally dobbed me in to Google and let them know my blog was of no redeemable value whatsoever. It seemed my one post that was doing okay in the Google rankings, Optimising Movable Type for Google, had disappeared altogether from the optimising movable type google search. After some investigation though it turns out those damn trackbacks have come back to haunt me.