Personal
Just me rambling about my personal life. Boring stuff really.
As Scott wrote last week, using a punny title I have to admire, he and I (among many others) were both the subject of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Looking through my logs, it looks to actually be a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack coming from multiple IP addresses. The attack appears to actually be an attempt at a SQL Injection attack, but for his blog, which stores its data in XML files, that is entirely pointless. For my blog, which doesn’t do any inline SQL, it’s also mostly pointless. So far, the SQL injection part of...
It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally ready to release Subtext 2.0. As I mentioned in April (was it that long ago!?), this is scaled down a bit from our original 2.0 plans. But even so, we have a lot of new goodness in here. It’s not just a bug fix release, though there are plenty of those too. Highlights With this release, Subtext has top notch support for Windows Live Writer thanks to some check-ins from Tim Heuer. Enhanced MetaWeblog API implementation to support providing a "slug" URL name for...
It’s a quiet friday afternoon with all of our devs in training today, so I figured I’d take a breather and respond to this meme I’ve been tagged with by Simone, Keyvan, Steve and others. How Old Were You When You Started Programming? Have I even started really programming yet? I guess I got my first taste when I was around eight with my first computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer. That sucker could display 9 colors, all at once, believe it or not. My programming experience back then was pretty minimal. My dad and I mostly spent hours...
I credit Google AdSense for really opening up the possibility for small blogs to become sources of passive income. Look around the web and you’ll see nearly every blog sport an AdSense ad or two…or three. For most people, it amounts to a bit of pocket change - maybe enough money for a coffee or an occasional indulgence. But soon, the lure of adding more ads from other ad networks overwhelms publishers and soon blogs start to look more like the movie Idiocracy. A while back, Jeff Atwood wrote about how content is becoming dwarfed...
…and the feeling’s right. If I can muster up the time and motivation, I like to try and post lighter more humorous fare on Fridays such as my recent RAS Syndrome post. On this beautiful Friday day (is that redundant too?), I started off fresh out of ideas (and motivation) so I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post at all, until this was just handed to me. Which Software Blogger Do Girls Like Better? In this post, Nick Berardi takes a quick look around at the demographic information collected by Google’s new ad planner....
I did another interview with those wild and crazy guys, Carl and Richard. My first time (show 261) being on .NET Rocks was back in August of 2007 when I talked about Subtext, Open Source, and my blog.
This time (show 339), the interview focused on my experiences with working at Microsoft and the work I do on the ASP.NET MVC project. Notice that my profile pic hasn’t changed at all. I should do something about that.
I haven’t listened to it yet as I hate hearing myself talk. Even worse is seeing myself on video.
In any case, if you are interested,...
If ever someone was undeserving of having others spend their valuable time translating his blog, it would be me. But hey, some people from the http://blog.joycode.com/ site went ahead and did it anyway. I must admit that I’m very flattered that anyone would put the effort in. Before this, I learned that Subtext powers MySpace China's blogs, and now my blog is translated to Chinese. As David Hasselhoff says, “I’m big in China”. (To my Chinese audience, that is a joke. I am quite small.) Technorati Tags: Chinese,China,Blogging
UPDATE: This was an April Fool’s joke. I actually stated this in the bottom of the original post, but in a very small font, which some people noticed. :)
I’m totally done with blogging. Hanging my blogging hat and never looking back. I started blogging on http://haack.org/ way back when around 1998. I tried to include a Wayback Machine archive link, but some domain squatters put a robots.txt file onto haack.org. Bummer. Shoulda held onto that domain.
If you follow my twitter stream, you've probably noticed I've been lamenting about blogging lately. A lot of bloggers, myself included, put an unhealthy amount...
LazyCoder (aka Scott Koon) is organizing a little drinky drink this Wednesday around 6:00 PM-ish at The Three Lions Pub. This is just an informal gathering, not the huge production like the Hanselman Geek Dinner which requires eating at a mall food court because some three hundred plus geeks show up. (Did you know his last geek dinner was covered by the Seattle Times online?). No, this will be a smaller intimate affair. Here’s your chance to get me sloshed by buying me beers in order to slip your pet feature into ASP.NET MVC. If it’s a really crazy...
My family and I recently moved into our new home after a two month stay in temporary housing. One of the perks of moving is when your stuff is delivered from storage, it feels like Christmas again. “Oooh! Look at all the boxes I get to unwrap. Hey! I have a Stereo just like this one!”.
I have a tendency to get distracted by the things I’m unwrapping. For example, I found a few of my old college Math textbooks. I started thumbing through the Complex Analysis, Abstract Algebra, and Number theory books and they seemed like total gibberish to me....
You don’t so much return from Las Vegas as you recover from Las Vegas. Right now, I am recovering from my Las Vegas trip. Recovering from Vegas Nose caused by the extremely dry air and massive second hand smoke inhalation. Recovering from the sensory onslaught they call casinos. Recovering from the fake kitschiness and manafactured excitement as people sit like zombies feeding machines their life savings. Yet despite all that, I still love the place. Maybe because despite the bad things, Vegas is really the Disneyland for adults with a slight bad streak inside that yearns to get...
Well today I turn old. 33 years old to be exact. A day after Hanselman turns really old. It seems I’m always following in that guy’s footsteps doesn’t it? Oh look, Hanselman gets a blue badge so Phil has to go and get a blue badge. Hanselman has a birthday and Phil has to go and have a birthday on the next day. What a pathetic follower! What’s interesting is that Rob Conery’s birthday was just a few days ago and we’re all recent hires and involved in MVC in some way. Ok, maybe...
No, the title of this post isn’t suggesting that L.A. is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route. It’s pretty much already one big freeway already, isn’t it? ;) Seriously though, I am going to miss this wonderful city after spending the last fourteen years here. A lot of people look at L.A. as a place they could never live. I thought that myself coming from Alaska, but boy was I wrong. I think the weather alone is enough to move to L.A. Perhaps the only place with better weather...
UPDATE: We released Subtext 2.0 which also includes the fix for this vulnerability among many other bug fixes.
A Subtext user reported a security vulnerability due to a flaw in our integration with the FCKEditor control which allows someone to upload files into the images directory without being authenticated.
As far as we know, nobody has been seriously affected, but please update your installation as soon as possible. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
The fix should be relatively quick and painless to apply.
The Fix
If you’re running Subtext 1.9.* we have a fix available consisting of a single assembly, Subtext.Providers.BlogEntryEditor.FCKeditor.dll. After you download it...
UPDATE: This code is now hosted in the Subkismet project on CodePlex.
Not too long ago I wrote about using heuristics to fight comment spam. A little later I pointed to the NoBot control as an independent implementation of the ideas I mentioned using Atlas.
I think that control is a great start, but it does suffer from a few minor issues that prevent me from using it immediately.
It requires Atlas and Atlas is pretty heavyweight.
Atlas is pre-release right now.
We’re waiting on a bug fix in Atlas...
Wired News has a very interesting article on History’s worst software flaws.
It makes me think of my worst software bug when I first started off as an ASP developer right out of college. I was working on a large music community website and was told to implement a “Forgot Password” feature. Sounds easy enough. I coded it, ran a quick test, and then deployed it (that alone should rankle your feathers).
We didn’t quite have a formal deployment process at the time. A few days later, we find out that the code never sent out any emails, and never...
My former coworker who wrote that 2600 article I mentioned recently sent me this link to a GameSpot review of SkillJam Arcade.
This is the last project the both of us worked on while at SkillJam. We essentially developed all the back-end support and integration into the existing tournament engine for the mobile version of the games. It is quite satisfying to see our work reviewed in a major online publication. Most of the work I have done in the past wasn’t geared toward the consumer market and thus wouldn’t be featured by any reviews....
This is what I was working on before the siren call of independent consulting lured me away.
The new product, which Philp projects to go live next month, will be known as SkillJam Mobile. For the initial product launch, SkillJam Mobile will be separate from the SkillJam.com site, giving users separate log-ons. Philp said the company hopes to combine the two sites in the future.
SkillJam Mobile will offer what Philp calls multipack gaming, an innovative concept in the mobile space. Most carriers have games on their systems but are able to deliver them only one at a time....
UPDATE: I cannot help you move to Alaska. This post was written in 2004. If you want to move to Alaska, please don’t contact me. Try looking for information at the official Alaska homepage. Thanks!
As a relocated Alaskan, I read Rory’s post about moving Canada to the right a bit so that Alaska could join the “lower 48” with amusement. I don’t think that idea would go over too well with Alaskans, as we...er...they take great pride in their independence, not only in spirit, but in location. Not only that, it could affect the fishing season, and you...