kindproject

Setting up Windows Ftp 7.5

Posted by jonathan - 24/02/10 at 09:02:07 am

With the release of Windows FTP server 7.5, we finally move on from IIS6 metabase configuration and see some IIS 7 goodness. FTP can now hangout in the same playground as IIS web serving, with the managed code and .config file syntax for ftp administration. Finally, windows ftp supports sftp which has been a long missing feature.

The setup still seems a bit cumbersome to me, but its a configuration that requires n half-hour to setup and then no thought for months. Follow these walk-throughs and you should be on your way pretty quickly.:

1. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/263/installing-and-configuring-ftp-on-iis-7/
2. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/301/creating-a-new-ftp-site/
3. http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/304/using-ftp-over-ssl/

Ip address configuration within the ftp administration, especially in a cloud environment, might need to be set to a specific address and potentially an ip6v address, as opposed to using the “All unassigned” option. Additionally some thought should go into how you want to secure the ftp access. I’ll tend to use ssl and then turn ftp off when I’m not using it, if updates are not frequent.

day of measurement

Posted by jonathan - 08/05/08 at 06:05:32 am

Sometimes you have to stop and ponder good inventions. 218 years ago today the french created the metric system. Despite signing the Treaty of Meter in 1875 and our friendship with the french during the period of the metric systems birth, we Americans still have not adopted this most logical of measurement systems. Look how consistent the metric system is on the right of the ruler. Evenly spaced lines, only three heights and a certain beautiful precision. Look at the chaotic wave of the varying heights of lines on the left of the ruler. The lack of numbering making you count and guess the hash lines in between.

1790: The French National Assembly decides to create a decimal system of measurement. The metric system is born.

This came after the storming of the Bastille but still before the declaration of a republic and the execution of King Louis XVI. But revolution was in the air: “National Assembly” was simply the new name the upstart Third Estate had given itself.

The assembly was acting on a motion by Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. Under the ancien régime, France measured with an inch, foot and fathom (pouce, pied and toise) about 6.6 percent larger than their English counterparts.

The first meter was based on clockmaking: the length of a pendulum with a half-period (a one-way swing) of one second. Responding to a proposal by the French Academy of Sciences, the assembly redefined the meter in 1793 as 1/10,000 of the distance from the Equator to the North Pole.

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions. The gram unit of weight was defined by the weight of one cubic centimeter (aka milliliter) of water.

The new “Republican Measures” became legal throughout France in 1795 and were made compulsory in 1799 when definitive platinum meter bars and kilogram weights were constructed. But resistance to the new measures lasted for decades.

France also used a quasi-metric Revolutionary Calendar with each month consisting of three décades of 10 days each. (Revolutionaries even attempted a metric day of 10 hours of 100 minutes each of 100 seconds each.) But Napoleon returned France to the Gregorian calendar in 1806.

The current International System of Units — or SI, for Système International — is based on the Treaty of the Meter signed in Paris on May 20, 1875. The United States was a signatory, and the metric system is the legal system in this country, although the legal alternate English system remains more widely used. (An online conversion engine can make translation easy.)

The meter was formally redefined in 1960 as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths in a vacuum of the orange-red light radiation of the krypton 86 atom (transition between levels 2p10 and 5d5). The new standard was 100 times more precise than the old. The current definition, adopted in 1983, makes the meter the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during 1/299,792,458 of a second.

That’s 39.37 inches to counter-revolutionaries.

- Wired

that is based . Not sure about you, but I still think a system based Today was the day

critique: how ie8, firefox and opera handle browser tabs

Posted by jonathan - 16/03/08 at 02:03:38 pm

My friends and colleagues from work just got back from the land of sin, Vegas, and posted their review and redux of Mix08. A couple of post about ie8 got me wondering if Redmond has been watching opera and did anything with the tab in ie8. After being burnt on trying to double install ie between 6 and 7 I have yet to download it, but since I now have four machines at work lets sacrifice one for the sake of experiment.

On my box affectionately know as sub-prime, ie8 shows me that the wordy tab instructions of ie7 has been replaced, but only with web 2.0ish gradient language telling me the obvious, “you’ve opened a tab”. This weak phrasing reminds me of the oldie but not so goodie aol phrase turned movie, “you’ve got mail”. Sorry IE8 team, but this is pathetic. Both ie7 and ie8 do not give me anything useful when I hit ctrl+t.

I am going to skip over firefox and delve right into opera because firefox is even worse than ie in that ctrl+t simply gives me a blank address bar and blank page. No instructions nothing useful. Simple, yes, useful, no. In this case the KIMAC has not been met.

My superb memory, ha ha, has faltered since I’m not exactly sure how I came across Opera again, but somehow I heard an interview with one of the oldest players in the browser space and downloaded their operamini to my phone. In general it had a nice feel to it so I recently decided to stuff the pipes of the old laptop with yet another program and download the latest opera. For the most part it has been a good experience. Its tab implementation absolutely rocks.

Opera is on the forefront of the tab. They have a feature called speed dial, invoking the paradigm from a phone where when you instantiate a new tab, ctrl+t, rather than being presented with a blank page like in firefox, or a page which explains tabs (only useful once), opera gives you a 3×3 grid of thumbnails with which you can add your favorite sites. Like a mini favorites/bookmarker it allows you to throw in a reasonable number, nine, sites you might use. The paradigm is easy for non-techies, the number of options is kept manageable and the thumbnails give you visual cues for easy nav. I love this feature.

Click here for a side-by-side comparison of the implementations.

The second tab feature of note is a thumbnail of your other tabs. We have seen this on other sites, such as ask.com, and on the windows powertoy alt+tab switcher, but opera incorporates a thumbnail of the webpage into the hover state on other tabs. This gives you a nice preview of non-focused tabs in a mouse-friendly way, if you are not a master ctrl+tab switcher.

Click here for a view of the thumbnailing feature.

I have had a few crashes most notably when trying to add cookinglight.com to the speeddial, but overall it has taken over as my default browser for everything but web development. There are probably ways to manage this better, but ff has become clogged with development tools, firebug, webdev toolbar, yslow etc that impede on my general surfing not to mention the memory creep.

rehab for asp.net in production

Posted by jonathan - 20/02/08 at 07:02:06 am

Compared to my buddies, Noam and Jason, I have always embodied the old webmaster job title the more them. This means I tend to work the box administration and configuration as much as the code. As I release my day-time code to beta, once again I am revisiting deployment control measures.

Question 1 - Do you manipulate, muck up, mess with the machine config?
I have been burnt by the GAC before <future post/> so I tend to deploy my apps with everything they need right in the bin and app folders. This means I a bit less tidiness, having have extra dlls in my bin and that I make most tweaks in my app web.config but has the benefit of easy deployment. Deployment is not the time you want to be messing with settings!

A recent post I came across from ScottGu’s blog linked to this article, Top 10 Best Practices for Production asp net Applications. I have read similarly titled articles in the past so I went here on a lark, expecting to find nothing new, but I was pleasantly surprised. The number one new tidbit was, “Set retail=’true’ in your machine.config”. Never heard of that before, but if true it does a hat trick:

This will kill three birds with one stone. It will force the ‘debug’ flag in the web.config to be false, it will disable page output tracing, and it will force the custom error page to be shown to remote users rather than the actual exception or error message. For more information you can read Scott Guthrie’s post or the MSDN reference.

I have to test it out, but I wish I had known about it years ago when I worked in a shop with very loose deployment controls. Developers were constantly leaving crumbs on my freshly vacuumed carpet, page level trace=”true” statements. Once tested I’ll then have to figure out how to role out machine.config changes to a web farm since my current company is freakishly spendthrift with the servers.

Question 2 - Do you deploy source code?
In a compiled language such as java or c#, do you deploy source code? My only real working knowledge is in c# so I’ll stick to that domain for now. This question arises as I have some java guys on the team who want to push .cs files to the server to have the “ability to patch code”. For me this smells like a glade plug-in, the scent while nauseating is really covering up the stank of bad source control management.

Fortunately google comes to the rescue as a search for for “deploying source code” gave me this first read from a relatively good source, aspnetresources.

The whitepaper also lists JIT compilation, but I won’t go there. It’s a questionable approach which is outside of the scope of this article. Please, refer to Chapter 4 of the whitepaper, “Deployment Issues for .NET Applications”, to read more about NGEN and JIT compilation.

The white paper mentioned is this, Deploying .NET Framework-based Applications at Patterns & Practices, which is a better source, but the paper is a bit dated being published in 2003. After a quick read that did not really give me anything useful.

After changing search terms, “deploying .cs files”. The first thread, mentions publishing .cs files, but not a single person says they do it. They mostly hawk the web deployment project and/or the web application project, which is of course what I’m already selling.

Dr. Peter A. Bromberg, creator of eggheadcafe says, “I wouldn’t even consider deploying .cs files”. - eggheadcafe

Having read the esteemed Dr Bromberg a few times over the years, that quote is good enough for me, but I am still searching for the article that explains the pros of deploying source. Let me know if you find it and make sure it is a reputable source too.

To top it off here’s my favorite qoute from Jason, invoking a bit of Amy Whinehouse,
“NO NO NO… when you ‘patch’ you create and unpredictable hybrid release that isn’t really anything.”

critique: tadalist

Posted by jonathan - 09/02/08 at 09:02:13 am

While I love 37 signals articles and their strong display of the KISS principle, I can’t help but think that these marketing savvy and self-describe usability experts are given a pass when people evaluate their software. Exhibiting the corporate spin-mastery that is rarely exhibited but exemplified by companies such as apple and google, they have deftly applied marketing, message and pr to dance the cha-cha around issues which which would trip up less skilled companies. As people fondle a product, how do you transform beyond KISS and move into KIMACS, Keep it minimal and complete stupid.

The company chatter mill was discussing the recent blog-talk about the relatively low line count of tadalist. I’m not sure how one can disregard the framework line count and the years of other work which resulted in the RoR framework. Lets take a look at where this task management software is failing me, and ript it a bit.

First off the design seems to follow the personal shit/task list management style of clearing your lists proposed by management self help gurus such as David Allan and Timothy Ferris and The Steven Covey. What happens if you are not the typical type A person and you have a list that is growing like mint in spring, no matter its dead state over the winter it keeps growing back?

Figure 1. - My personal list.
This is a mix of people to call, crap to fix around the house etc. Hmm it quickly grew to around 20 items and seems to hover in this state no matter my relative mix of sitting my fat ass on the couch vs getting jacked up on coffee and “getting things done”.

So in this perpetual state of 20 items, the add another item link (btw, links are for navigation, buttons are for actions, but that is another point), is redonkulously placed in the middle of my list serving as the dividing line between stuff to do and stuff thats done. To rectify this problem I might throw the add link at the top instead. Maybe I’d put it at the bottom of the page, at least I’d be able to ctrl+end to get to the button. Maybe I could split the stuff to do vs stuff done lists in half, thereby pushing the bottom to the bottom, but that might invade on the google ads revenue on the right. In any case the last place the link belongs is in the middle. Finally I could add a keyboard shortcut to add a new item, this might be there but I tried some Usually combo strokes and did not find anything.

Figure 2 - DoubleClick to add an item.
Next, why the hell do I click a link call “add another item” only to expose a textbox, cancel link, and a button titled “add this item”. This design paradigm has the code smell of dhtml click-trickery. If a developer in my shop did this they would face a grilling about why we would force a user to click another link to perform a primary action, adding an item. The clutter of the textbox, button and link does not need to be hidden. This type of flashiness is common for people who are just learning the artistry of dhtml. Remember, just because some browsers supported the <marquee> or <blink> tag does not mean we should have used them.

I could continue on with how the separate click into reorder mode renders the act of prioritization more annoying than I want, or how I do not understand the sorting mechanism on the main my lists page, or how this page is not reorderable, but my point in this dissection is not to catalog the design issues.

While its an admirable but questionable fact that tadalist was written with 600 lines of code, the “simplicity” of this app actually has some critical flaws. An honest evaluation of clickability, and navigation could result in no more net lines of code but a better product. As we move agile into the mainstream look out for more sophisticated methodologies to synthesize client feedback to migrate products from KISS to KIMACS.

human rfid tracking

Posted by jonathan - 28/01/08 at 06:01:33 am

Last year at a dog fair in liberty state park I contemplated having my dog tagged with an rfid chip with one of the major companies that provide this service to track lost pets. Given my wife’s bleeding heart for pets and the shows on discovery channel about all the lost pets during Katerina my usually libertarian self had become comfortable with the concept. Its one thing for animals and quite another for humans.

Flying cars, pill-sized meals, moon colonies, ergonomic, yet-oh-so-revealing space suits; for some of us, these popular predictions for a futuristic 21st century have yet to come to fruition. But some sci-fi fantasies can be made real, as advocates for tracking chip technology have recently demonstrated. The United Kingdom prison system is moving towards an under-the-skin monitoring system for its inmates, and this same technology may be coming to an epidermis near you.

The UK Ministry of Justice is planning a widespread adoption of implanted tracking chips for prison inmates, parolees, and sex offenders. It’s rumored the paparazzi has called for implanting British royals as well to make their jobs easier. Each chip emits an individual Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) code that allows officials to keep tabs on the tagged individual’s location. The chip, which is about the size of two grains of rice and encapsulated in glass, would be implanted within the musculature of the subject’s right triceps muscle (lefties catch a break here). According to VeriChip Corp., the chip’s Florida-based manufacturer, those implanted with the RFID tag would not be able to feel the device under their skin, nor would they be subject to any health hazards (except the nagging feeling someone may be watching them).

- read more @ ohmygov

Seems like VeriChip should have been watching Heroes and implanted the tracking device in the trapezius. Even better they should have gotten themselves a little product placement deal and some celebrity backing. While my baby will not get implanted at birth, I wonder what the odds are that my grandchild will not be?

fumbling around wordpress

Posted by jonathan - 24/01/08 at 11:01:39 am

I like to stay in touch with the people. When it comes to technology that means I test drive the software which non-nerd-tool people use to accomplish a task a software engineer might try and build himself, see blog.a.lish. In this case I chose to enable a wordpress blog through my hosting company, hostmysite.com. I have gotten past just kicking the tires and recently switched over to a calmer theme that I picked up from the best designer I know, forgetfoo. While the tagging structure of asp.net and php are similar, <%= “Hello 1 person reading this” %> to <?php echo “Hello 2nd person reading this” ?>, as a .net guy I sometimes feel like a fresh water fish in a salt water pond.

Only today did I fully realize that when you change a wordpress theme you change the header and footer files as well. To an asp.net guy a theme is a smaller more design oriented concept. For wordpress, a theme encompasses the entire css, js and php code for the site. Any custom code I had added in is gone. Doh! Bye-bye link to stylesheet, all done google analytics code, see you later ad words tweaks.

I put these items back into the theme, and decided to add the following mods to upgrade the the posting experience:

1. css opacity on hover
2. js code to throw in target=”_blank” on all external links

Check out the sample I setup here. If you view source on the html you will see link 3 has target=”_blank” defined already while link 4 does not. If you view the html post js processing, in firebug of course, you will see the target attribute added to the 4th link.

Do you have any custom code you’ve added to your blog for easilbity?

increasing whitespace on a page using opensearch

Posted by jonathan - 03/01/08 at 02:01:49 pm

Having not posted about tech in ages and wanting to add some special sauce to my current day-time site, I went back to adding an opensearch provider. My corporate gig in an enterprise tool which requires as much screen space as I can take. Therefore, I wanted to refactor search to pull the global search box off the page and move it into the browser.
After some googling (here and here and here), I thought about creating an opensearch generator, but as usual I was beaten to it here. Its these little focused tech sites that I love.

Basically, the opensearch provider can be broken down into two components.

1. xml file that defines the search info to the browser
2. link that tells the browser the search provider xml file exists

comment spam part II

Posted by jonathan - 27/12/07 at 09:12:32 am

Strange things happen in order to sell crap on the internet. I posted recently about the joys of comment spam combat since picking up the blog habit again. After posting a few items I was flooded with a 100 items of ridiculousness. I had comment moderation turned on but that does not seem democratic enough to me. I turned it off and opted in for a 3p service enabling the Akismet wordpress plug-in and a captcha filter. My buddy, Noam, informed me he could not post so I turned off these features, but for some reason the comment spam has failed to resurface.

Could the timing be related to indexing? Could it be that the spammers target bigger sites and somehow figured out the relative unimportance of my postings? Could the deluge be right around the corner and I’m just sitting here in Johnstown. Not like I’m going to implement anything soon, but I came across these two interesting posts lately.

NyTimes - Spammers Employ Stripper to Crack Security

Ned Batchhelder - Stopping spambots with hashes and honeypots

are asp.net and webforms dead?

Posted by jonathan - 04/12/07 at 07:12:17 am

I have been struggling to convince my fellow php and java developers of the advantages asp.net. asp.net brought a lot to the table by applying oop to the presentation layer, abstracting html inconsistencies and using object style notation for controls, textbox.text= rather than request.form[”textbox”]. All these things were great in 2002 and seemed much better than the

< %=%> hell we had before. Oh but times have changed. With RIA and AJAX pushing client expectations, the kiddies pushing css like crack in the late 80s and the resurgance in javascript as cross-browser-issue-killer libraries have sprouted up like kudzu in Georgia, is asp.net, webforms and the PageController model dead?

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