The Narcissist-in-Chief strikes again

Going on four years ago, I had strong vibes from the US presidential elections that the country was being swept by a "Things can only get better..." mood so reminiscent of what we had seen a decade or so before. After a couple of years, my thoughts on progress so far could be roughly expressed as

But even Cyclops never managed some of the not-fit-for-purpose stunts we've seen from the White House in recent months in terms of violating operational security. First leaking details of deep cover operatives in Yemen, and now boasting about Stuxnet.

I have no words.

Links for 8-Nov

Asynchronous programming in .net

• Async programming in F#2 and the PDC announced C#5 compared.
• The F# model in detail. 
• CTP downloads.
• Jon Skeet plays around with the internals of the CTP release here and here.
• Related : continuation passing style and asynchrony i.e. what the compiler is doing for you with await.

Also from the PDC -- what next for Silverlight?

Rx Design Guidelines.

SSL/TLS isn't computationally expensive.

NuGet -- gems for .net has a new name.

The Should Assertion Library.

Sandcastle MSBuild integration.

Computing per-service SIDs without sc.exe

How it's done is well known:

When configured to have a per-service SID (i.e. type of SID either "Unrestricted" or "Restricted"), the service SID is computed as S-1-5-80-{SHA-1(service name in uppercase)}

Here's a quick script to do it, that can be the basis for including the computation programmatically into e.g. installer generation.

So running it we get:

>& 'C:\Program Files\FSharp-2.0.0.0\bin\fsi.exe' .\ssid.fsx MyService
S-1-5-80-517257762-1253276234-605902578-3995580692-1133959824
>

which compares nicely with:

>sc showsid MyService

NAME: MyService
SERVICE SID: S-1-5-80-517257762-1253276234-605902578-3995580692-1133959824
>

where each of the 5 trailing facets is just the decimal representation of 4 bytes of the SHA-1 hash taken as a little-endian unsigned integer.

Links for March

Programmatically detecting screen-readers.

SSL Man-in-the-Middle certificates.

.net 4:

• Changes to events.
• Workflow migration tool.

Reactive Framework:

• Drag and Drop using Rx and WPF in F#.
• Introduction in Javascript.
• JQuery integration.

Continuation passing in C#.

A fluent wrapper for System.IO.File/Path/Directory types.

TypeMock test lint.

Links for 14-Jan

After a long period of snow, slush, ice, cold, gloom and general all-around lack of enthusiasm...

.Net4 beta2 available via Windows Update -- how to opt in.

CSI -- a C# interpreter for scripting

F# -- refactoring to active patterns.

C++ -- C++0x features in VisualC++ 2010.

768-bit RSA key brute forced.

PoSh -- graphical download manager using BITS.

LINQ -- Going functional with System.Interactive (Reactive Framework)

JavaScript -- Gordon : a pure JS/HTML5 Flash runtime.

Links for 16-Oct

Token kidnapping (revisited).

GoGrid -- cloud services in PoSh.

Starvation with Java ReadWriteLocks.

Strongly typed data binding in F#.

Using F# Async constructs from C#.

Links for 4-Aug

Custom configuration in three easy steps.

A neural net library.

Finalizers and the race condition from hell.

The Parser Monad -- in C# and in F#.

Recursion and memoization (F# and C#).

A layer of hurt.

Practical concurrency -- cyclic lock-free buffer.

Concurrency on a single thread.

Getting rid of the Server OS shutdown dialog.

Python dependency injection and mocking.

WCF implementation security Guide.

Asynchronous operations in C# using iterators -- neat idea to turn the flow of control inside out again.

Locking with computational expressions in F#.

FsUnit 0.5.0 -- what it sounds like.

Links for 14-Jul

CLR security team site on Codeplex.

Zermatt -- MSFT claims based identity system in public beta.

Aspects of Functional Programming in C# Presentation and Code.

Mastering F# lists. 

Practical Concurrency -- Read/Write cache. 

Avoiding having to replicate .snk files across projects.

Good use of anonymous delegates. 

C# Mixins.

Cyclone -- safe 'C'.

British Standards in Web Accessibility is being updated.

Strong-naming legacy assemblies -- ilasm hackery.

Google Protocol Buffers -- now open sourced.

MISC language. 

Decimal in JavaScript.

Installing Specsharp (Spec#) on Vista

The Spec# installer gives an error code of 2869 when installing on Vista with UAC active. A little prodding around the 'net led me to this blog comment which gives javascript source for an installer fixer-upper that can be run over the SpecSharp installer and then it runs perfectly happily.

Links for 10-Mar

Dynamic silverlight parts 2 and 3 

The Maybe monad and fluent coding  via C# 3.0 extension methods

Remoting Powershell V1 -- this tack calls winrs explicitly (it's implicit in 2.0)

Capture-recapture code inspection -- a statistically sound way of getting fault metrics

Patching privacy leaks -- a gentle reminder for web apps

Links for 31-Jan

PowerGUI -- extensible PowerShell admin console plus PowerShell IDE (puff & screenshots)

Resources for clean and compact CSS

Practical F# Parsing

DEP/NX APIs added to XP SP3 and later

Native threading API improvements in Server 2008 -- includes a read/write lock out of the box

Links for 22-Jan

New DLR Blog -- view from the inside

ASP.NET + FePy -- and all in Visual Studio Express, even

Cross-site printing

TDD antipatterns -- do your unit tests contain any of these bad boys?

Immediate text to speech in .Net 3.0

Just a little experiment

Custom captcha honeypot

Seeing whether this will attract any bots.

Links for 11-Sep

Continuations made simple

Rainbow tables and passwords -- a resolution

Styling <input type="file" /> with CSS and DOM -- and a little bit of lateral thinking

Links for 21-Aug

Leading by Example -- when making change, eat your own dog-food

Software is not made of bricks -- why project planning and staffing are difficult

User and Password management -- recommendations 

Links for 17-Jul

A series of articles on designing UI code in C#

Bit Twiddling Hacks 

WCF Security samples

Windows Service Hardening

Rethinking Design Patterns

JavaScript in the JVM in 15 minutes  

My PGP key

New Open PGP key July 2022

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My old 1024-bit PGP key (revoked)

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I really need to upgrade this one soon.

Links for 30-May

Icebreakers -- interview questions designed to put you both at ease and break out of the scripted, stilted talk that results in bad hires and missing good hires (from the same source as the "Design a Monopoly Server" question)

Hygienic Macros -- practice safe meta-programming

Top 300 XSS sites -- Hall of Shame

Accessible expanding and collapsing menu&

Links for 21-May

Getting there…

Sins of Software Security

Evolving the Web : HTML5 -- best viewed in Opera (latest public build) which supports some of the proposed new standard

Designing for Web 2.0 

JeffCroft.com: Elegant Web Typography (link to PDF)

Why "Why Functional Programming Matters" Matters -- A good thinking piece.

Consuming OpenID in Python (Django) web apps

Rails Live CD distro

amb special form -- non-deterministic (ambiguous) computation

"inherit" behaviour via expression in IE -- still working around the omissions

Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design

Patterns in interaction design

7 JavaScript techniques you should be using today

New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0

Rails style creators in Java

How to prevent HTML tables from becoming too wide

Conway's Game of Life in JavaScript -- utilizing the Canvas HTML extension for procedural graphics supported at least by Firefox 1.5, Safari 1.3, Opera 9.0 and later versions of these browsers. (It will not work on Internet Explorer.)

Barrier-Free Web Design -- The essence of Accessibility

The problem with Configurability -- Usability is sensible defaults, not a dial for everything.

Code is for people to read 

Strictness and correctness

An Initiate of the Bayesian Conspiracy

Economizing can be penny wise and pound foolish -- Is your code red, yellow or green?

Contrast and Meaning

Browsers will treat all HTML as HTML 5 -- Interesting conformance constraint for the new version

Programming Tip: Learn a graphics editor -- Always good to broaden your skill-set; especially when you have to fake-up UIs

The 128-bit programming challenge -- a piece of the zeitgeist.

Securing Orcas Workflow Services with& CardSpace

What is Good Software Design?

Illiterate Programming

Learn Prolog Now

Style matters

Programming Quotations

Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation -- e-book

More than just writing code

Can software be just like Lego?

SVG browser support

That catches me up to 9-May-07

Links for 20-May

The flood continues …

Solving FizzBuzz using compiler error messages -- or another example of how to use C++ templates as a functional programming tool

Redefining Professionalism for Software Engineers

JavaScript hijacking -- Interesting post and comment thread on poor idioms to use within AJAX/JSON type programming

Sandboxing JavaScript using <iframe> -- a technique to mitigate injection attacks

Hard-core customisation of Visual Studio 2005 -- here used to suppress the auto-generation of #region tags around automatic interface generation (which are a nice idea in theory, but soon turn into undocumentation in practice). Thinking of which

Avoiding Undocumentation -- an oldie, but a goodie

loglibrarian: How I Learn New Things These Days

UAC is for developers 

Don't have a COW, man? What Haskell teaches us about writing Enterprise-scale software -- It's surprising what light a functional language, with immutable values can cast on a problem

Optimizations That Aren't (In a Multithreaded World) -- however... (Damned if you do, damned if you don't...)

The "Yes is No" problem -- with dynamic languages, what you see in the source may not be what you get at run-time

Pick a license, any licence

Breaking 104 bit WEP in less than 60 seconds

CSSVista -- Live editing tool for CSS in Firefox and IE simultaneously

Concurrency Crisis -- Is vanilla OO the right tool for handling inherently concurrent systems?

Less programming -- more skill?

Ruby Threads considered worthless -- mainly because they are interpreter-level (aka green) thread, not ones known to the OS (though that does not apply to JRuby which uses the Java threading library instead.

JavaScript framework for Google Maps

More on HTTP.SYS and its security implications -- a must-read

Free icon sets

PPK on HTML5

Firefox as an IDE

Web 2.0 Accesibility

Typography -- compose to a vertical rhythm

The Language of Accessibility -- build it in, don't build barriers

Prioritizing Web Usabilty -- Jakob Nielsen's latest book

Ruby code that will swallow your soul  -- some of the tricks that that Evil Ruby (Extends Ruby's semantics by accessing its internals from pure Ruby code) can enable

Pattern matching with Ruby -- no, not regexes; but something much more fun

SoftCoding -- A dailty WTF essay piece that spots a problem but doesn't quite draw the lesson from it -- the lesson being that Abstraction is somewhat like Optimization.

What if web apps worked like pin-ball machines? -- an interesting view of web idiom

Markup as Craft -- aiming for maintainability and usability

Guidelines for creating better mark-up 

InfoCards and Identity Stability

CardSpace and Unique IDs 

Agile Project management and Competitive Advantage

From Abstraction to Zipf

What does Barbara Liskov have to say about Equality in Java? -- same reasoning applies in C#

Architect's notes for Varnish -- a different look at storage paradigms

The truth about Lisp

Token Description Service for Cardspace

Walking, talking and quacking in Java -- Duck typing and interfaces

When in doubt, make it public

Mount ISO as CD with a MSFT tool -- self extracting .zip with readme.

[Now playing - Uninstall]