April 2003 Entries
You've probably already relaised this :-) But I'm in the process of writing my first
article on .NET for future publication to this site.
It's an article about using nested repeaters bound on to a DataSet with a relation.
I'm trying to make it a simple as possible but it's really tough to get the level
right - a balance between being condescending and being too technical...tricky. So,
what I intend to do is publish it with a comments section appended so I can get feedback
on what perople think (if anyone ever reads it :-))
It's easter sunday and I got to thinking about my family - my nephews will currently
be feeling ill with severe chocolate overdose... So thought I'd upload the one good
picture I ever took.
Click for the HUGE version...It's a picture of my nephew Barry, taken last summer
on Irvine beach - about 5 minutes from my family home. A total fluke, this is the
raw version, there's no photomanipulation involed :-) For the interested, the island
in the background is called the Ailsa Craig (which I've just found out means '"Fairy
Rock")...
I'll upload more pictures in a kind of gallery thing later.
What is 'The Zone' -
is it
a form of the trance autistic people sometimes experience. Do hairdressers have
a 'Styling Zone'. I love it, it's Zen like (I practise
ZaZen meditation
or at least the dumbed down self-help form). 'The Zone' is a place you can reach
while coding where your brain starts working at a pace and with concentration that
you rarely experience. It's relaxing, you can work an eight hour day, get home and
feel more refreshed than when you started. Odd. Good night...
I trained as a Scientist...psychologists are kind of paranoid about being strictly
scientific since it used to be an 'art' - so now all psychologists applyt scientific
method with some rigour. Science is an odd creature and many scientists define themselves
as being the opposite of religious people.
I've always seen science as just another religion...a way to explain what people see
around them using the context currently available to them. Humans have always done
that, when ancient civilisations saw the sunset they took it as the sun entering the
water - their context didn't has the informational content necessary to allow them
to reach any other conclusion - were they wrong to have this belief? No, they were
right at the limit of their understanding, what they believed was entirely consistent
with the facts before them.
Modern science does exactly the same thing - uses the best information available to
provide an explanation of what they see in terms suitable for the current context.
Take for example the human mind...currently it's seen as a simple chemical /
electrical / biological interaction - all at scales we understand and can believe
in at the moment. However, as technology advances we should all expect to have our
beliefs challenged and ejnoy the experience - take for example the Quantum
Theory of Mind - very difficult to prove, but why not? Should we really expect
the process of evolution to ignore a whole level of scale?
Anyway, what does this all come down to - simple, with all our knowledge and belief
in the power of science we really know very little - we have a limited and incomplete
undestanding of even the most basic processes of our own bodies (case in point - we
still die!).
All I'm saying is that we don't know everything - the future is exciting - think of
everything waiting to happen!
Just read this article about
a Microsoft interview.
I also had an interview for a job at Microsoft a few years ago now (in
my case, a PM job in one of the server groups).
I met Mark Anders in
the book shop at the 1999 ASP professional conference in Islington, London (I'll miss
those Wrox conferences!) and we got to talking about some security stuff - he was
pretty high up in the ASP.NET group at the time -it was totally embryonic back then
and he was still investigating what people's view were on some things.... Anyway,
long story short, I was invited over to Redmond.
So, I flew over, got to spend a few days in Seattle, had a nice tour of Microsoft
and eventually got badgered for a day.
One of my major problems is that I'm VERY Scottish - you may not understand what this
means for direct, vocal communication - but imagine if you will, Billy Connolly at
twice the speed (though I have a Barry Whitesque baritone :-)) - very drunk and with
a bag of marbles in his mouth - that's pretty close.
Add to this the fact that I was very nervous - had just discovered Starbucks (6 large
espressos!) and was still jet-lagged well, I would have appeared to be talking some
odd lost language.
So, during a single day I met 8 separate people in several different buildings - a
few coding questions (simple things like writing a search and replace algorithm...the
usual), which I was pretty good at. There were some 'invention' and creative questions
- again pretty good.
Then came the problems!
I am what's technically called absolutely bloody appalling at maths, and especially
maths puzzles when under stress - coupled with that fact that I has started speaking
Serbo-Coratian did not bode well.
There were questions about flow rate of cars over a bridge ;at this speed, how many
cars pass across in 2 minutes, one about balancing balls (which I got the answer to
through lateral thinking, not the maths approach).
Anyway, I was asked if I'd consider a job in testing - said no...and basically decided
that I'd had it with large development groups.
This really coloured my view of Microsoft - it also helped me understand a bit of
how it works...
They were looking for Maths Geeks - in this instance at least - I'm not one, I'm more
of the old school hacker (in the correct sense :-)) I like thinking about the code
I write and shaping into a product people want to use - for me it's not a mathematical
exercise, lots of people hate this approach - and most of the people I met at Microsoft
didn't seem to understand it.
Lacking creative thinking is a major problem for security in web based systems and
over the years, testing, writing and analysing these systems, it seems to be one of
the major reasons problems occur in such systems.
Developers need to think more creatively about their applications, place yourself
in the context of a person trying to break / subvert the security of your code, set
limits for points where user input has all been validated - the application firewall
- that's your safety zone.
It is really fairly easy to do this, if you set limits on what your application accepts
as input.
-
Validate all the time, client and server.
-
Check for bounds in testing (what happens if you enter too many characters in
a form field?).
-
Catch every error everywhere you accept input from outwith the application - be it
from the user or from the database (they can go down!) .
-
Set sensible error codes for later code to check - lots of applications fall over
simply because they fall out of sequence - with some essential method having not returned
the correct value. Set break points in code where if a condition is bet, some abort
sequence takes place (reporting the error to the user, a redirect...etc...)
-
Simplify - this is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING! Complex code hides it's problems, keep
your code readable,make your variable names obvious, insert comments indicating expected
pathways and occurrences into the source. Make single class files with names the same
as their contained class. Just keep it simple!
Anyway, enough rambling....later...
Just finished watching Antz...what's remarkable about that film is how much it's a
Woody Allen film...are the people who did Antz the same as the Shrek people? I guess
it happned with Shrek too, that was basically a Mike Myers film.<br/> Anyway,
I'm also reading Woody Allen the complete prose at the moment (see the bottom for
the link). he is really surreal and funny, I always got the funny, but I'm just starting
to get the surreal.
I'm currently in the planning stages of several .NET articles - so my question is, what would you most like to know? I do plan to write an article on the use of Nested Repeaters with DataSets with internal relations, and an article on T-SQL based ultra-efficient paging (and I apologise, when I say T-SQL it always refers to Sql Server). My main interests lie in high-performance, highly scalable and easily maintainable architectures for Web applications.
I also have an interest in encryption and security when applied to web based apps (I used to do a lot of security consultancy and analysis for commercial ecom sites), I may do a quick article on easily interchangable Passport & Forms based authentication modules.
Why sould you take any notice of anything I think - well, been a software architect for J2EE, ASP & .NET web based, high capacity applications for the past 3 years, before that I was an ASP developer with occasional daliances into Perl and PHP - as well as creating a couple of high performance encryption algorithms in C++.
I've won several awards for web-work and have acted as mentor to almost a dozen junior coders over the years.
Umm...try this
Not pretty is it...well you did ask for it!
Fairly new to this whole Rss thing, but my feeds are all bust...try one, any ideas
how I can fix them?
It's Saturday morning (the time is odd because the host in in the US)...I need to
find something to do.
Choices currently are:
-
Shopping - Saturday before payday - probably a bad idea!
-
Coding - I have some work to do for work; writing a forum system for this portal we're
developing - I need a rest from that to be honest - getting the whole T-SQL frenzy
thing (where you wind up doing everything in T-SQL stored procs - evil)
-
Working on this site, hmm, tempting - I plan to buy a little (literally I
have a very small house) server to host it on when payday comes round which
I'm going to run with 2003 server...
-
Watch TV & drink cheap red wine - also tempting, but boring!
-
Go to the cinema - that welcome to Collinwood looks interesting.
'Course what I really should be doing is reading my MCAD book - I really need to read
through the thing (
)
, it's a pretty excellent book just huge and offputting (bit like myself :-)).
Have a listen too BoneCracker by Shocore...fantastic stuff - which I admit I saw on
Smallville
Still good though! Kind of Prodigy Lite ©. I miss the Prodigy...listening to Mindfields
while walking in the sun..ahh youth :-)
Incidentally, ever wonder why after all this time networks are still getting cracked http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30324.html,
that's why!
I intend to add a fair old whack of content to the site over the next few days (I'll
also work on some sort of design). Promise I will! This site's primary reson for being
is so I can share stuff I discover in .NET, this could be articles my friends
and I , links to decent .NET sites and book reviews (I have a book addiction and read
pretty much every book released on .NET).
So that's the plan, I'll also add links to other dumb stuff...such as:
Dumb cartoons - check out StrongBad and the DVds with commentary (in flash)...
Joel Veitch very funny flash stuff. Viking Kitties ahoy! Funny suff, have a look at
the gaybar video...
It's Friday night, at home and bored again.
So, anyone reading this thing?
Well, guess I'd better explain who I am if you are...I'm a 6ft 3in 20 stone Scottish
male who lives alone in the centre of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Haven't settled on a career yet and am writing web sites until I find one (for the
past 5 years) though I do fancy trying to be an architect (of buildings)..probably
not the sort of thing you can just 'have a go' at...bit dangerous.
I've been having a midlife crisis from the age of 5 and there seems no sign
of my discovering the meaning of life. I wouldn't mind the loose definition of life...at
least it's give me a start... Ok, meaning of life maybe a bit much...what else?