Virtual Server 2005 note

Note to self - VS2005 R2 admin page only works in IE, not FireFox...

The future of democracy?

Another aspect that is becoming clearer as the days go on is the use of networking sites as a quick and to the point method of registering your opinion on a wide range of social, economic and political issues that can arise from obscurity to a big deal with a number of hours. I mentioned the Canadian government backing down against introducing stronger copyright laws yesterday. I've also found a group on Facebook that is protesting the lack of rental controls for the province of Alberta (Alberta now has some of the highest rental rates in Canada).

Will this protest group be noticed by the Alberta government and will it be enough to influence policy? Maybe. But it may be that the federal government's backing down of the copyright laws were coincidental with the creation of the Facebook group - it was after all at the end of the fall sitting for parliament.

Democracy as it is known today is generally through a representative of some type. Direct democracy, although the most pure form is considered impossible and ill-advised. Ill advised because of "tyranny of the majority", but also because of the number of issues which are of low importance to an average citizen and often require the knowledge or experience of a dedicated professional to make an informed choice. And until recently, simultaneous or near simultaneous voting for anything larger than a village or small town was not technically possible.

However, with the modern telecommunications and virtual places that a person can casually drop in on, we have shifted substantially closer to a more pure form of democracy - but only if the politicians are listening...

"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

2008 is shaping up to be an interesting year in terms how society uses industries that rely on Intellectual Property (IP). So far, in just a couple of weeks into the new year, the traditional music recording industry is pretty much dead, the strike by television writers in the U.S. is still going three months later and already causing havoc with tv habits, and Facebook is again causing waves with Hasbro demanding that Facebook remove the Scrabulous application. Further, yesterday Apple's Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to attempt to move into online download-able movies through its ITunes store.

To me this is interesting - what we have here is the degradation of IP. Essentially, with the digitization of information and the means to rapidly obtain (legally or otherwise) free or nearly free copies of this information, the value of the information has plummeted.

What does this mean for the future? Hard to say. In some ways it is hard to feel sympethetic to many of the effected industries - I mean, what really is the "value" of a recording of music that has millions of copies around the world and can be listened to on the radio, in stores, or in someone's home? Value traditionally is derived from scarcity - but how is mass produced media scarce?

Likewise, Hasbro is making a stink about Scrabulous. Is it directly copied from Scrabble? Without a doubt. However, after more than 40 years on the market, sold around the world, is there really justification for holding the protection on a product that is really very basic - marked tiles and a board with squares on it. (Monopoly is worse in my mind - come on - after 70 odd years, shouldn't it be in the public domain?!).

I suspect there is going to be a revolution in the near future for IP - either courts are going to lock it so tight that use for individuals is tightly restricted, or IP will disappear on items that are meant for mass consumption (this doesn't include patents, although I think that will also need to be modified in the near future if patents are to remain relevant). This is pretty much in evidence after the Canadian government backed down from introducing stricter controls over IP in December after a massive protest group sprung up overnight on Facebook.

I think one result out of all of this will be the hardening of protection of information from being released to the public from government and corporate sources. As such, science fiction writers, in particular William Gibson, was prescient about this - information secrecy will be of utmost importance in the near future for things that are to be kept away from the public's eyes.

Weird things on the net

Occasionally, I'll come across some really odd things while going around on the net. For example, today I was looking up how to open up on Google the following search term:
ASP.NET C# "open csv file in Excel"
The results weren't many, but that is what I expect when refining my searches enough. However the majority of pages that came back were listing pages, such as "http://jl.ucabo.cn/zenwbkv.html" [Don't link to it if you are not prepared for potential security issues], almost all of them from China.

Having enough firewalls, checkers, etc installed on my system, I was curious to see what they were. They are just pages full of text - nothing exciting, just junk words to get search engines to find it... So I looked at the source code, and again, nothing exciting - except that it had a javascript from a server based in Germany (http://goodnserver.info/), near Frankfurt. I then went and looked at the script and found that the script referred a signal to a test page on a server near Washington D.C (http://mystats.name/).

Now, for all the conspiracy theorists out there, isn't it interesting that soon after the U.S. claims that its security systems were breached I find a trail of junk web pages on different servers in China that link back to Washington? Where is my tin hat?

ASP.NET Web Apps - Migrating from 1.1 to 2.0

I've spent an afternoon trying to deploy a web application that I've had in ASP.NET v1.1 on a production server to ASP.NET 2.0. The problem has been that after I deployed the application using the method that I had for 1.1 I got an error similar to this:

Parser Error

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'Namespace.Global'.

Source Error:

Line 1: <%@ Application Codebehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="Namespace.Global" %>

Source File: /cs/global.asax Line: 1

Now, this was driving me nuts. But thankfully I found the reason in this blog - I thought I'd make note of it and explain it again, so that search engines will be able to find this better. Basically it boils down to this: in ASP.NET 2.0, when using VS2005, you must publish the site. Essentially this compiles everything into a neat package that you can save somewhere to upload it later or transfer directly using FTP.

To publish the site, in the Solution explorer in Visual Studio, right click on the Project and select "Publish...". I did this, saved it to my development machine, uploaded to a production server (albeit a sandbox area) and configured IIS.

And so it begins...

Apparently HD-DVD encoding has been cracked and is causing a revolt throughout the web particularly on the Digg.com site. Here is a blog about it:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070502.WBmingram20070502114904/WBStory/WBmingram/

So this is an indirect link to an indirect link to the actual events. Will this send teams of lawyers after me? I doubt it. The problem with info on the net is that once it is disseminated, it is essentially impossible to destroy. The double-edged blade of digital information - it is very easy to replicate and store.

More showcasing

Signed up onto Facebook a couple of days ago (so if you are reading this from an RSS/Atom feed on Facebook - hello!) partly out of curiousity. I had heard about it a couple of years ago when it was restricted to U.S. colleges. Now of course, it is the "big thing" in social networking, and is picking up steam for people like me in their 30s, who of course were the ones to really started using the internet in the early 90s. Some things I like, particularly their raison d'être, which is of course the networking. Some things thought seem limited - for example, there is a drop-down list of "political views", which carry run of the mill stuff - "conservative", "libertarian", "very liberal", etc. But I am fiscally conservative, socially liberal with a strong lean towards environmentalism in political governance. I've been voting Green the past few elections and was considering running for Green in Calgary. So where does that leave me on their list? I put "Other"...



Also, there is a note writing area with the ability to put in rudimentary html for styling - like bold or italics, but it does not allow me to use inline CSS styling, which is too bad, as that could really jazz up notes. So Blogger is a much better venue for writing my thoughts and getting some style with it.

On a final note, it is easy for me to know that Facebook is an American based site - you can put your religion in a part of you profile, which would then be used for social networking. As a Canadian, I notice this because in Canada, this would probably not be asked - Canada is much more secular a country than present day America, and we are also too worried about offending people to advertise our religious/spiritual beliefs.

My best news today is I bought a ticket for Interpol! My first live show at the MacEwan ballroom in nearly a decade... I'll feel old (especially as it is an all ages show) but it will be worth it!

Back on Linux

I finally got a Linux Ubuntu distro to work on my computer. One of my main problems with Linux is trying to get a distro to work on an AMD64 machine with an ATI card. While ATI may be one of the leading video card manufacturers, they suck at getting out Linux drivers. It should not be such a pain to get a system to basic functionallity - even as a professional in computers it is still difficult for me to get things working on Linux. So, after an hour of fighting with the xorg.conf file, I managed to get the desktop working...

Nonetheless, I am impressed at how far Linux desktop has come in the past couple of years. I used to use Red Hats Linux distros as they were easy to install, but because of their refusal to support MP3 players, I've never really thought Red Hat and Fedora were a lot of fun to use. Ubuntu, on the other hand is much more pleasant. One this I thought was really handy was the system automatically found my other hard drive that runs my Window's OS, and places an icon on the desktop that allows me to browse through it - so easy to grab pic, music, etc.

Now back to exploring what this thing can do!

A Failure of the DRM

I was trying to copy Beth Orton's new CD today (which I might add is legal in Canada, as long as it is for personal use) , however I was foiled by the DRM on the disc. Not only that, I couldn't even play the disc!

It seems that the company who published the cd made an agreement to have the DRM stuff hosted on the site www.musiconline.com. However, the site has been down at least for a couple of weeks. The CD itself does have one of the those autorun "install a piece of junk player without asking you", which I absolutely refuse to do, even before the big Sony scandal that occurred a couple of years ago.

So, I figure this is yet another example of the failure of DRM - if it prevents even basic accessing the content, it is more harmful than good. Really, why would a person go through all the trouble of dealing with this, when one can just go to the many P2P services and download tracks and/or the album?

My first impressions of .NET 2.0

I'm finally getting around to actually developing with VS 2005 (although having to use an Access db - I'm not an Access fan :p) and now have to learn all the changes that have occurred in it. For the most part it is the same, but there are some things that bug me. I think the biggest disappointment so far is the GridView - the updated version of the powerful DataGrid in .NET 1.0 & 1.1. The nice thing is that sorting, which was a real pain the the DataGrid is automated. The major drawback that I've found is trying to use multiple DropDownLists as filters for the GridView - it takes a lot of extra work to get them functioning properly. Also, if you are using a view form the db to populate GridView and wish to do editing, it is a real pain in the ass. Overall, I've found so far that a lot of the functionality is hidden, so most of the control is a black box, making it extremely difficult to determine what is going on or how to correct errors that are occurring. Another pet peeve is trying to use javascript files within an aspx page - you now have to create a whole separate class to embed the script if you are using a Content tag page within a Masterpage - it is a lot more work and very redundant!

On a different note, I'm now officially a sysAdmin as well as a developer! Although it is still a struggle doing stuff on FreeBSD, I feel that I'm finally making progress...

Convergence in life

This is off the regular path for this blog but I was fascinated today by a number of stories in the Globe and Mail online today:

• Conservative Clean Air Act
• Garth Turner
• Green Party
• Pine Beetles
  

All of these topics relate through an underlying environmental theme. In brief, yesterday Garth Turner was suddenly kicked out of the Conservative Party caucus to sit as an independent. Officially from the Conservative party, it was that his blog betrayed the party rules of confidentiallity. However, rumours are afloat that he was incensed at the Conservative's Clean Air Act, which was tabled today, which really doesn't do anything (come on - 50% reduction of today's emissions - so not counting any new emissions that will happen as the country's economy grows - by 2050!!?? I have to wait until my 70's to have existing pollution cleaned up??).

Then, reports started coming out through the Globe and Mail and CBC about the Green Party making approaches to Mr. Turner, which he seemed open to at the time of my writting this. Of course, the Green Party is salvaiting - a sitting member would instantly gain them recognition with Elections Canada for debates in the next Federal election in Canada.

Coincidently to the above news items was an article pointing out that Pine Beetles were infesting trees in Grand Prairie, far more north than scientists thought the bugs would get. They blamed this on the fact that Alberta has not had a very cold winter in years, and figure that this is a result of global warming.

Odd, isn't it that all these environmental issues are cropping up in the mass media - could it be that people are finally waking up to environmental issues? I just think it interesting to see how many stories converge on a basic theme, one that is generally under-reported by the media in Canada and ignored by politicians.

New favourite online word

In a flaming contest on CNET - the "iTroll" - a lesser subspecies of trolls, normally associated with Apple products...

Why I won't see dumb movies

Snakes on a Plane. Just for putting that there, Google will link to it along with the millions of other references on the net to it. But I refuse to go see it, even if it is a result of bloggers building a mass hype around it. I refuse to pay for the crap that Hollywood throws out, even if this movie is a parody. That is to say, I'm not against parodies in general - no, in this case it is because they are not really making fun of anything in particular, other than people will spend a lot of money on purely hype.

Demand better movies people! Demand quality for your money!

C# hypocrisy and delgates

After spending more time than what it should have, I finally got a delegate to work with an asyncronus thread. The problem wasn't the code so much as not being able to find clear instructions on the net on how to implement it.

One of the problems is that examples on the net often take the shorthand approach of putting multiple classes in a single file (or at least what could be a single file). For example:

namespace blah
{
class firstClass { ... }

class secondClass {...}
}

the compile can deal with this fine. But if you apply it to a windows form to use in a thread as I was attempting to do, the program crashes as soon as you attempt to go to that form, with the error of "System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException" as explained on MS's support site.

I eventually had to copy and paste to notepad, delete the file and re-create it. I wasn't impressed }:( as this code is being used in production, and although I have backups of it, having to rebuild a file like this shouldn't be necessary.

So I created a class to use for the delegate. The next problem I found was the poor explanation of how a delegate needs prescisly the same parameter names as the method you are going to call (not to mention the same return type). For example:

namespace whatever
{
class Utility
{
...

public void myMethod(TextBox box, string message)
{
box.text = box.text + message;
}
}
}

namespace whatever
{
//I've separated this out to make my point...
class targetClass
{
private System.Windows.Forms.TextBox messageTB;
private string message;
delegate void myDelegate(TextBox box, string message); //notice it matches as above

...

//inside a thread
message = "the message";
myDelegate md = new myDelegate(Utility.myMethod)
this.invoke(md, new object[] {messageTB, message});

...
}
}

This may not be the most elegant solution, but it works. - maybe this will be a bit clearer on how delegates look and operate when being used in threads.

WSE and Thread Safety

I love working in .NET sometimes...

For my application that I'm working on, am using Microsoft's Web Service Enhancements (WSE) for ensuring security of uploading and downloading of sensitive data. However, I also need to implement some thread safety on it, so I don't have the users starting multiple worker threads while the first is still running. SO -

I put in a lock as is commonly used. The lock itself works fine, it will only allow one worker thread at a time to try to hit the server that I am connecting to. But then I get back an uncaught exception which causes problems: System.Thread.ThreadStopException. Now this is apparently an exception that is supposed to not be implemented in a developer's code, is not documented in MSDN, and only occurs "*very* occasionally". So apparently, I have a bug, but I am not allowed to see what it is or prevent it from screwing around with the program. Hmm, this is probably something stupid that will take me several hours to find...

Blogs, Celebrity, and media

Although I haven't posted for several months (moving to a new home and WoW taking a lot of my time), I am struck by the increasing power of blogs in mainstream media and the creation of instant celebrity by some of the most famous bloggers out there. First, there is Amanda, of the Rocketboom fame, catapulted from a star of the hardcore net users to being on tv and in the press. Then, there is Josh Wolf, fighting for his rights as a video blogger - CNET is posting his story and noting that traditional media powers are now supporting his legal fees, which I find interesting.

Both of these are showing the power of blogging and how it beginning to affect even traditional media and how one can go from obscurity to being (a little) famous when fate grabs hold. I do have much more respect for this type of fame than that shown on the various reality shows that tv seems to not be able to rise above. I guess even the masses need something to cling to...

Other evidence of the growing power of blogs was shown in this weeks edition of The Economist, where a fairly large article was published about the increasing use of blogs by professional economists. While the Economist is fairly open to grabbing on to new movements in technology and society, it is amusing to see how what was once considered a thing of online nerds is becoming more and more accepted by media as being a legit way of reporting information.

Of course, the rights and responsibilities of bloggers are still being resolved as several people have been jailed, such as Josh, to people loosing their jobs for blogging, like Petite Anglaise (who I think has a kick-ass layout and color scheme for her blog).

Speaking of layouts and color schemes, definetly time to work on the css for this blog...

Back in action

The first post in five months - just got too busy and was too distracted for a while. Didn't help that I finally bought World of Warcraft in August...

Nevertheless, things in my life are going smoothly as we head into the Christmas season. I've been a full time employee at RTS Services doing a solo software project for our sister company Wespro. It is amazing how much I am still learning, especially as the project I am responsible for involves a windows client on a laptop talking to a SQL server on a database via a webservice that I had to create, with a web application to do reporting and db administration. My XML is finally getting better as I am having more exposure to it.

Last week I attended the Microsoft Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 launch here in Calgary. It was the first big Microsoft event I've attended and it was interesting to see. The amount of money they must be spending on the launch events across North America must be staggering, but I guess they make it back in spades later with the sale their products. Got some worthwhile freebies from it as well as a day of marketing, although I probably won't be wearing the t-shirt that they handed out to participants - I'm not going to proclaim myself as that much of a computer geek =:)

First solo client site is up

Well, I've finally got my client's site, Pinnacle Consulting Services, up and running. I've still got a few pages to go and a php page to upload files to allow for the dynamic creation of a client list, but for the most part it is finished. Thankfully, I'm in negotiations for a longer contract right now and may also get the chance to work for another company (although I don't know yet if they want me as a contractor or an employee), doing stuff related to SCADA - it is in the petroleum and natural gas sector, so I'll be happy if I can get it. As everybody in Calgary knows, this is the sector that really counts for getting experience in, regardless of your discipline.

A busy week coming up with some meetings, a Microsoft presentation on Tuesday and of course my MCAD/MCSD certification group meeting, along with the finishing up of the above mentioned website and writing our a proposal. At some point I should also redesign my corporate site - I've found a lot of graphic design ideas that I want to incorporate into it...

Meanwhile, I'm struggling to determine how to shape my career. Being still in the Junior/Intermediate level, I see conflicting reports in the media about the future of IT, from IT being one of the best growing industry's in the next few years to IT being reverted to mere support for companies with little use for new developers. Meanwhile, companies are always wanting more skills with more years behind each skill just to give an interview to a candidate - going for more bang for the buck I guess. However, from a developer's position, it is ridiculous - we must both be super specialized, but a jack of all trades at the same time. To complicate matters furthers, there are reports of companies now looking for management and business-related skills to further increase the value of new hires. So, should I continue with academic learning? Should I struggle to etch a niche for myself in this extremely fast paced industry where technologies change within months? So far I'm going with the latter, as I feel it is my lack of experience in general that hampers me the most for looking for sustainable employment...

.NET is a go

Well, the Calgary .NET User's Group is finally on its feet after a two year hiatus - we have finally received MCAD/MCSD certification books from Microsoft and we are forming manageable groups for studying for the exams. Also, as one of the managers, I know that we have a speaker booked for the end of June - I just hope that there will be enough interest to overcome the summer lull in interest. Overall though, it seems that the group is starting strong again.

Also, I just wrote the first test in the Last Developer Standing competition that is being put on by Microsoft Canada. I only got 6 out of 10, should have done better, but it is difficult trying to think of software issues in terms and words. Hopefully I'll make it to the next round - I'm not sure how that works - possibly passing those beyond the average?

I'm working slowly on three different projects, one for a friend and two for money. The one that should be taking not much time, a project that I took on the understanding that it was just putting a site back onto the web is a nightmare - missing files, little documentation, no general over-arching plan of what the application looked like originally. It is in ASP and JavaScript - with the number of key files that are missing, it would be faster for me right now to re-write the whole thing in .NET than to try to reconstruct the missing pages...

On the other hand, I got a temp webpage up today for my friend Kyle's company, Rockies Bio-Diesel. Now to design a good page for him, further extending my portfolio for my company. My other client, Pinnacle Consulting Services, still has a temp page, but I've got my client near to choosing a final design for the site after we have been through several different layouts and color schemes. Not what I would like, but my job is to make my client happy. The actual content shouldn't be too bad (*fingers crossed*), and then it is creating some dynamic pages with PHP.

So busy times here in Cowtown for me...

A little sidestep

Ok - a bit of a plunge into the bru-ha-ha of the Gomery Inquiry (A.K.A. Adscam, A.K.A Sponsorship Scandal) here in Canada. From the perspective of an internet user and a blogger, I find the Attorney General of Canada's reaction to Captain Ed's website interesting and somewhat depressing. There may be a media ban in place, but I do not think that this precludes Captain Ed's source from revealing information to Captain Ed. It doesn't really matter who Captain Ed's source is - the fact remains that Captain Ed is writing from a personal blog in America. He is not media - at least, nobody has defined blogs yet (even political blogs) of being media and therefore having the rights and responsibilities that the press have.

It seems to me that companies and governments in the Western hemisphere are trying to play blogs both ways - as a tool to be used when it suits them (like for positive advertising) but not allowing the freedom of expression that is granted to a person who is writing in a personal blog. The guy who got fired from Google for writing his personal opinions is another example. Personally I think that for the protection of the general public, some base definitions of a blog need to be nailed down such as definitions of personal versus special interest blogs and the rights and responsibilities that each type should be accorded. There - politics, law and computers rolled into one...

BTW, yes, I am using the comic the Captain Ed also posts - I find it interesting both from a political side and from the technological viewpoint