Hairy Spider Blog

Looking for programming advice

2007-11-02T09:29:11.4047185-00:00

I have a student in my A-Level maths course who is interested in pursuing a computer science degree.

I have suggested that they have a go at programming. Having very little experience of programming what would be a suitable type of project for them to attempt.

My initial thoughts are some numerical method, however, something more immediate and tangible maybe more applicable.

Finally the source code for multisite

2007-10-24T14:47:13.0501677+01:00

After many requests I've decided to release the source code to the multisite isapi extension.

If you wish please download the source code. Have fun with the code, it's given me months of enjoyment. Any problems, please get in touch in the usual manner.

Extracting a Flash File

2007-09-24T14:01:37.3965595+01:00

Geetesh from Indiezine has just released an interview based around my flash extraction tool. It has raised an interesting point regarding the perceived security that one hase when bundling an object in an office document.

Remember that once you give away your files, you give away your files. It's as simple as that. Whatever security you wish to have you lose it as soon as you make it public. Just live with it.

Please read the Extract Flash article for more information.

Url Rewriting By Scott Guthrie

2007-02-27T20:55:41.2951700-00:00

At last what seems to be a throughly complete reference for URL rewriting in .Net

Tip/Trick: Url Rewriting with ASP.NET

Windows Developer Tools Day

2007-01-19T13:03:03.3550000-00:00

Apparently today is "Windows Developer Tools Day" and because I contributed to the book of the same name, I've been asked to write an entry on my favourite free tool, how it has helped me.

I use a lot of free tools, it takes me ages to install them and as I don't really keep a list it's largely an organic process. However, the tool which really sticks out in my mind is Fiddler. Basically it's a proxy which sits on your machine and logs all HTTP traffic.

So why is this useful, well sometimes you really need to know exactly what is being sent from the server to the client, especially these AJAXY days when requests to the server can happen at any time. Not to mention the rise and rise of web services. All these requests get logged by Fiddler.

The time that really sticks out as a life saver was the development of a web service client windows application which in development and release worked 100% with site 1 however with site 2 the application crashed on every call to the web service. As the development environment was a long way away debugging was discounted so I launched Fiddler and had a listen. It logged the call out, and the return from the server. The BODY of the response was fine, however, when I looked at the HTTP Header there was something very wrong. It turned out there was an ISAPI Filter at site 2 which announced itself by including an invalid HTTP Header.

The filter wasn't necessary so we removed the filter and this removed the problem. Actually I believe that the error was being thrown from a third party component and so it would have been impossible to handle the error other than by fixing the HTTP Header.

So there we go enjoy the rest of "Windows Developer Power Tools" day.

Welsh in an asp.net website

2006-10-02T11:21:55.0166921+01:00

The my valleys house website is bilingual (English and cymraeg.) I'm not a welsh speaker so it did present a challenge. However, the System.Globalization part of asp.net 2 was really helpful. So on my Windows XP SP2 development machine I was able to set the CultureInfo to auto and set the language in my browser to the correct settings and away I went, automatically the site appeared in the language defined in my browser.

This was great, until I came t orelease the site onto the live server at which point Kaboom! no welsh culture info. Wicked, I thought, atleast when I tried to find out I realised that there is support for custom cultures in asp.net 2. Unfortunately you need to own the server that you want to install the culture info - there seems to be no way other than some dubious reflection calls.

So how did I resolve the issue?

I piggy backed an existing culture that was installed on the maching. So in the Application_BeginRequest I find out what culture the client is requesting and if that happens to cy I set the thread culture to be catalans. (Catalans just happened to be the closest alphabetically.)

Argh. Anyway it all seems to be working ok and you can view the welsh version of my valleys house. If you set your browser languages to have welsh as the first entry then you'll automatically get this site.

Maybe someday Windows 2003 will have welsh installed as a culture and I can do this whole thing properly. Windows XP does have welsh but it's only included in service pack 2.

Cor blimey, it's been a long summer

2006-09-30T15:59:01.6831149+01:00

I've started my teaching course and I'm 3 weeks in to a 10 month course. So hopefully if all goes well this time next year I'll be a qualified teacher. I've a mass of work to produce in the the next few months and that's on top of lesson plans and actual teaching.

But before that I'm going to be included in an O'Reilly book. I've never bought an IT book, always preferred something with more of a story, so it's a strange to think I'll be in one of them.

Also I've spent the last few weeks developing a site for Valleys Built Heritage which is an organisation based in the south wales valleys to aid the redevelopment of the area in particular valleys houses.

Where have I been, at school that's where!

2006-07-04T20:32:37.5933564+01:00

Recently I've been running an evening class on a Wednesday night at Wyedean School. It's been invaluable help to me as I prepare to train to become a fully fledged high school teacher in September.

Hopefully, I'll be able to do more work on the site, I've had loads of ideas in the last 4 months, you tend to have time to think to yourself when you're stuck on a motorway for 3 hours a day. So shortly I'll be able to post some new stuff.

Things to look for are an installer for Browser Launcher and something even more incredible.

Windows Live Mail UI update

2006-03-05T10:13:48.8965252-00:00

Atlast there's room to read my mail that I get in live mail. The UI has been updated so that you can go back to the old Hotmail way, stick with the new 3 column way or change to the outlook express way (2 columns with the mail reader underneath). It still selects the top email in your list and sets it as read even if it's new in or is full of spam or what ever. I think that it would be better not to automatically select any email.

There's a little shortcut panel unfortunately there's no roll-over or mouse change on the images to indicate that you can click on them, so a little more work needed there aswell.

Still it's getting better and I have to admit that the spam filter is a damn sight better that it was previously.

An interesting way of analyzing user activity

2006-03-02T09:21:56.4140000-00:00

Dan Zambonini digs further into user activity Plotting the exact X/Y coordinates of clicks on a page.

Not sure how much use it is, but it's a fun set of data to work with.