Hahahaha aHAHAhahahahaaa... apparently XP Service Pack 3 wasn't fully tested on Apple laptops and the installation fails without a little hacking.  That's one of the funniest things I've read in a long time.  Thanks Iain :-)

Windows SP3 on macbook with bootcamp | note to self

One very good reason why I used to use my own blog was that I could be fairly confident in the security of my code.  I wrote it, and I knew that I had to keep the code as safe as possible from the obvious known hacks.  It also afforded me a chance to learn a bit more about how sites are hacked and what you can do to prevent it.  So it came as a surprise to me today to learn that there was a patch released yesterday to plug a very basic vulnerability in BlogEngine.Net.  I guess we can't all be perfect.  In fairness to the guys, the patch was released the day after it was reported, but its still worrying.

I guess I have to let go of my innate distrust of other people's software and trust that they know what they're doing.  Its either that or I have to start getting serious about looking at the source code I put on my server right from the start. The problem with that is that there is actually quite a lot of code to look at, and the codebase is getting bigger.  I've been looking at the new releases as they come out, and playing with them on my dev server.  However, I have been waiting for a major update before upgrading the code on my live server.  I guess this counted as that!  Anyway, passwords are now changed everywhere... just in case ;-)  Back to our regular scheduled program.

I have this tool that I use sometimes to packet sniff XML stuff.  I keep forgetting the name of the damn tool, and for some reason always think it begins with a "P". It doesn't, it begins with "F", and its called Fiddler.  F. I. D. D. L. E. R. Fiddler.  I have no excuse in future for forgetting the name of the tool, disregarding the fact that I have downloaded it to my server. Fiddler can be downloaded from http://www.fiddlertool.com.

I spent eleven years of my life working at AOL.  That's just a little under a third of the time I have lived.  In all that time, we made some pretty cool things.  We made some pretty shit things too, and I helped to make a lot of them.  The mail guys from Dulles went and build a version of AOL Webmail using a technology called SilverLight.  SilverLight is a Microsoft product that is roughly equivalent to Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash.  It allows rich Internet applications that typically run in a browser.  It is cross browser and cross platform compatible, which means it should provide an equal experience on all browsers and all operating systems.  It has just hit version 2.0, and while the first was very limited in what it could do, the second seems to be awesome.  I'll be playing with that a bit in the near future I think.

This product was demonstrated at MIX08, and you can view that presentation here.  You should be aware that this is a very technical demo, with only a few minutes close to the start where they show you the new UI.

An old friend and colleague from the AOL days has started up a new blog. James is the guy who used to write those fantastic interactive CDs we did from time to time. He's started a blog in the last few days, and is going to place code snippets there from time to time.  The first post is up now...

How to use Ampersands in Actionscript loadVariables function...

This is a test of the XFN Markup. XFN is a MicroFormat for signifying relationships on the web. As it stands at the time of publishing, you won't see any difference with these links.  Visually they will look like any other link on the page. However, when I upload the new style sheets you will see small icons to the right of each of the links below.  Those icons will illustrate the relationships between me and the (fictional) people below. MicroFormats are very small additions to standard HTML that are used to signify things like relationships (and other concepts) to people who can read them.  Typically they require something to indicate their presence (like the images you can't see below), but that doesn't require any additional software.  I've got some cool graphics to be uploaded that will show these relationships really well.

This is a friend I have not met.
This is a friend I have met.
This is a colleague I have not met.
This is a colleague I have met.
This is a sweetheart or muse I haven't met.
This is a sweetheart or muse I have met.
This is me.

That's not really true as I have updated my blog many times during the last week.  You can't see the updates yet though simply because they're in the new blog engine.  There's a bunch of updates that are all going to happen at once. 

The first is that I'm going to roll out BlogEngine.Net.  This is a full featured and flexible platform that (while still being very young) seems to suit my requirements perfectly.  It supports all of the usual features you would expect in a modern blog and is built in C#.  There are a couple of things I would change though, which is one of the things that makes this package so useful.  Its published under a Shared Source license, so I can change the things I don't like.  The second thing is that James is going to re-design the UI on this blog for me.  If you're familiar with his work then you know what a big deal that is... I bow down before the designey brilliantitudeness of the Marett.  So when both of these two things are done then I'll roll out the new system.  Its likely to be a couple of more weeks yet though.

LINQ is awesome!

   1: // Get the data from the database using LINQ

   2: var topTen =

   3:   (from bl in lpcsql.Blogs

   4:   where bl.PostType == 1

   5:   orderby bl.ID descending

   6:   select bl).Take(10);

   7: // Bind data to the repeater.

   8: objBlog.DataSource = topTen;

   9: objBlog.DataBind();

  10: // Check if its me, and if so activate the Edit and Delete controls

  11: if (User.IsInRole("Administrators"))

  12: {

  13:   for (int post=0; post < objBlog.Items.Count; post++)

  14:   {    Label lbl = (Label)objBlog.Items[post].FindControl("EditControl");

  15:     if (lbl.Visible == false)

  16:       lbl.Visible = true;

  17:     if (lbl.Enabled == false)

  18:       lbl.Enabled=true;

  19:   }

  20: }

  21: lpcsql.Connection.Close(); 

I just came across a great post from Paul Vick (the guy in charge of Visual Basic development at Microsoft) about the popularity of VB.  Linkage