May 2008 - Posts

• PDC Registration Open

  With TechEd 2008 Developer happening next week in Orlando it might be too late for you to set up your travel and arrange your work schedule to go but never fear, Microsoft has a different conference you might be interested in. The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is comming to Los Angeles in October 27-30th. You can register at http://www.microsoftpdc.com. I have been involved with some of the planning for the event (a small part to be sure) and I am really excitied about some of the things that will be talked about. PDC is where Microsoft talks about products that will be coming out in the next few years to help us understand their roadmap and what to expect. I am sure that some of the sessions will cover the hot topics in the industry including: The Live developer platform "Cloud" computing "Oslo" and what it means to developers The next generation of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework I also wouldn't be surprised to see things like Windows "7" and other future products/technologies talked about. I plan on attending and hope to see you there as well. Posted May 30 2008, 04:33 PM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Events

• Files From Last Week's Launch Event in Salt Lake City

  I just wanted to post the files that I used when doing the demonstrations in my Office session for last week's launch event in Salt Lake City. These are the completed demonstrations that show the services that Rob wrote, using Word, Outlook, and ASP.NET to consume those services, and to update the data in the office applications.   SLCLaunch.zip (1.18 MB) Posted May 28 2008, 08:43 PM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Events

• Debian OpenSSL Vulnerability

  I got this from an issue of the RISKS digest. The real problem is that we don't know what OS is used when we purchase a certificate. It might be a good idea to contact the vendors you have purchased certificates from and make sure that you are not affected by this.   DSA-1571-1 openssl -- predictable random number generator Date Reported: 13 May 2008 Affected Packages: openssl Vulnerable: Yes Security database references: In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2008-0166.   More information:   Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.   This is a Debian-specific vulnerability which does not affect other operating systems which are not based on Debian. However, other systems can be indirectly affected if weak keys are imported into them.   It is strongly recommended that all cryptographic key material which has been generated by OpenSSL versions starting with 0.9.8c-1 on Debian systems is recreated from scratch. Furthermore, all DSA keys ever used on affected Debian systems for signing or authentication purposes should be considered compromised; the Digital Signature Algorithm relies on a secret random value used during signature generation. ...   http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571   Posted May 19 2008, 11:31 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Security

• UCNUG Meeting Wednesday Night

  I want to remind everyone about the Utah County .NET User Group meeting on Wednesday. Here is the text from the reminder e-mail I sent out: Join us on Wednesday, May 21 at 6:00 for our monthly meeting. As always we will meet at the NuSkin NOC located at 1175 S 350 E, Provo. Jonathan Turner will be speaking to us on Silverlight. The presentation will focus on Silverlight 2 and will cover the following topics (based on time and interest) - The differences between the different Silverlight versions - What you need to develop Silverlight applications - What your users need to use your Silverlight applications - Creating a simple Silverlight application that includes the following    - Some of the built in controls    - Custom handled user interaction (mouse/keyboard input)    - Simple animation    - Simple multimedia (sound/video) Jonathan received a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science from BYU. His thesis involved integrating machine learning into user interfaces for controlling robots. He has worked for Aradyme Corp. as a software engineer doing data conversion, for Neumont University as an instructor, and currently works for Caselle Inc. as a senior software developer.   Posted May 19 2008, 09:59 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Events

• How Would You Answer This Question?

  This is a little off of the typical content for my blog but when I saw this I thought I just have to share (and besides its Friday so you deserve a little break). I got an e-mail asking me to take a survey. It was a web based survey from a company I know so I decided to try it out. Almost all the questions were the typical questions with answers on a scale of 1-7 with 1 being the dislike/no answer and 7 being the like/yes answer. Then I got to a question with this for the possible answers.   I sat there for a minute analyzing the numbering scheme. I tried to find a pattern like 1 in the middle with the numbers concentrically arranged around it. I also looked at an odd/even distribution. It isn't like they just reversed the numbers and the questions above and below it were in the correct 1-7 order. Finally I decided that it was taking too much of my time and I should just skip the question. Unfortunately all of the questions required an answer. Normally I would have just closed the browser window and decided that they weren't worth the time but this time I decided that a little random data might give them something to think about and just chose the 1 button. I don't know if I was indicating I wanted them to do it for me, I was ambivalent about the whole thing, or that I want to do it myself but it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they start asking about the results and why this one question seems to be outside of the expected values. I am sure there will be some finger pointing and questioning of the database or the web programmers. I am truly sorry for any grief I might cause those people. In the end I think they will have to throw the question out or get some high priced behavioral analyst to decide if I noticed the changed number scheme and clicked on the number I wanted or if I just blindly clicked the position I expected my number to be in. That would be some feat of mind reading. Posted May 16 2008, 11:31 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Personal

• Update to Live Search

  Sometime over the weekend the home page for Live Search at http://www.live.com has been updated. It is a lot cleaner and loads a lot faster. I have only done a few searches with the new page and don't have any feel for changes to the search results. I like the new clean interface but to be honest what I really want are good search results. If I just wanted a pretty interface on the search page I could go to http://www.msdewey.com or http://www.tafiti.com to get a pretty interface on the search engine. Posted May 12 2008, 11:03 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Technology

• Internet Explorer Gains Market Share

  According to ComputerWorld IE gained a small market share in April. It is the first gain for IE since October and comes after Apple attempted to push Safari out via automatic updates. I didn't do that well in statistics but the numbers seemed relatively small and might just reflect that there is some settling in the marketplace as people pick their favorite browser and use it. The article points out that IE6 gained in popularity. That tells me it wasn't a whole slew of new Windows Vista machines. I am hoping it wasn't a lot of people who gave up on Vista and went back to XP but that is certainly also a possibility. If that were the case I would expect the numbers to change as those people download IE7, Safari, or FireFox to their XP machines. Of course as we all know and are reminded of almost every time we watch the news, statistics can be made to tell almost any story that we want. Posted May 06 2008, 02:48 PM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Personal

• Microsoft to Give Up Buying Yahoo! --- For Now

  I just saw that Microsoft is not going to sweeten the deal for Yahoo! any more than it has and has decided against a hostile takeover. I am not sure what Microsoft would have expected to gain but with all the moves that Yahoo! has made lateley to make sure that it is an unattractive takeover target I guess it is the best for Microsoft. When they start talking companies of that size and the different cultures there are a lot of factors to take into consideration. I am sure I am not aware of even a small part of them so my opinion probably doesn't count for anything. I guess that is why Steve Balmer and Jerry Yang get the compensation packages that they do and why I am nowhere close to getting paid as much. Posted May 03 2008, 09:08 PM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Technology

• Everyone Loves to Hate Spam

  I saw a piece in the RISKS digest at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.13.html#subj4 that says spam (unsolicited e-mail) has hit its 30 year anniversary. I also saw an article this morning off the MSN home page http://tech.msn.com/security/article.aspx?cp-documentid=6679669 talking about spam. With all the doom and gloom messages that spam is a major problem I have to admit that I am happily living in my protected world not having to deal with the problem for the most part. I used to get tons of spam at my Keane account until they installed a filter. I then went down from 300 or so spam messages a day to around 20. That number was much more manageable. I don't know what Advaiya, Microsoft, hotmail, gmail, or the other places where I have e-mail accounts does to stop spam but I see very few messages. Perhaps I have just gotten lucky with not having my new e-mail in an article or other place where it can be picked up on-line and added to the spammers lists? In any case I think we can all agree that getting any kind of message whether it be for a product we don't want, a job offer from the company we swore we would never work for, or the nagging hints from our boss that we have a project due it isn't the kind of thing that we want a lot of and especially first thing in the morning when I typically find the most spam in my inbox. Just as an aside, since I mentioned my experience with my Keane e-mail account. I have recently been told and have tested that it does not send back a message that the account has been closed so people sending to it are probably thinking that I am ignoring them. The truth is that I haven't been able to access the account since August when I left Keane. If you are trying to contact me on some matter you can contact me through my blog here and I will give you a better e-mail address to reach me at. Posted May 02 2008, 08:45 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Technology

• Expression 2 Released

  Yesterday Microsoft released version 2 of Expression Studio. You can find a lot more information at http://www.microsoft.com/expression but some of the key new features include Silverlight support Importing Adobe Photoshop files Support for ASP.NET AJAX Convert XAML into WPF user controls New codecs Image slicing I think there is probably something for everyone in the package. Posted May 02 2008, 08:30 AM by Scott Golightly's Blog Filed under: Technology