As you also can imagine by the new batch left side down this page: I'm now a WOT notary! So what does WOT mean? Here is a short cite:

"The thawte Web of Trust (WOT) is a Certification system that allows your identity to be validated for use in your Personal Certificate."

By default if you acquire a free e-mail Certificate from thawte, the Certificate is a general one: your name is not included in the Certificate properties nor in the trust chain. By identity validation (task of a WOT notary) you get a fully personalized Certificate including your name!

I like to spread and support e-mail signing/encryption to fight the Spam - so I decided to support (regional) users to get that personal free certificate to keep the e-mail system up and running: just filter for signed mails. I use it now for some years, believe me: if you once have the Cert., it's really easy to use. So if you ever get a mail sent by me but not signed, just move it to your waste basket...

So come on: sign your mails!

Is I wrote recently, I worked to get RSS Bandit running as a portable application. Now it is time to test it: you can download the ShadowCat Beta 2 release installer, then read how you get it done.

I'm now again at BASTA! 2006, Mainz - Germany. Had alreda some interesting discussions here with some of the speakers, also the SOA architecture day yesterday was very interesting. Lesson learned: SOA is not really new, and it is not a technology. Just a idea to live.

Most interesting session today was about advanced debugging, by Ingo Rammer. He introduced some tools I never heard of and pointed out how to catch the most often issues debugging is used for, such as memory leaks in Windows Forms applications, or how to debug a CLR windows service. We had look inside WinDbg - what a cryptic tool, just remembered my time using the vi/unix years ago...

Most impressive was the keynote by Jason Zanders the "father of .NET Framework 3.0" today: about .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista. Live programming on Vista (RC) in Python using CLR 3.0, WPF and speech support (build in in CLR 3.0). Just one issue: the presentation machine with the slides just stopped working and required a (live) reboot. Lesson to learn: don't use beta software to just show slides

Yesterday in the Germany 8:00pm TV News at ARD: "Dell have to recall 4.1 million notebook computer batteries." Again.

My DELL laptop battery was near by but not in the listed part number range: https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/ (you have to ignore the certificate error displayed in IE7 to read the page). But it should be worth checkin'

Note to myself: must read http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/svn-book.html if I got more than 15 minutes (coding-)free time.

Just got this message from my IE 6 this moment:

Yes, indeed!. Short moment after: yesss, I do. Once again: yes!
Did I got a silent "featured" security update last week?

Today I installed the Visual Web Developer/C# 2005 Express editions and just want to get the simple Homepage template running. The express editions install also the new MSDE 2005 Express (silently) - so I assumed it would run out of the box.

Bang! SQL failure: "Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to a failure in starting the process for the user instance". Yes, I read all the articles I found at the net here and here and there: no success. Now are three hours fighting the problem are lost, out of ideas. I installed all of them as a normal domain user (member of the local adimistrators group) while I'm offline from the company's local network. Is this also a kind of remote desktop issue (and if so: a bug within the OS)? Should it gone if I would work from within the local area network@work?

And: I really miss the system tray console window to control the SQL Server Express engine like that of v2003...

Low cost marketing: So here is the first step -- I blog about:

VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released
This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005. VistaDB is a small-footprint, embedded SQL database alternative to Jet/Access, MSDE and SQL Server Express 2005 that enables developers to build .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 applications. Features SQL-92 support, small 500KB embedded footprint, free 2-User VistaDB Server for remote TCP/IP data access, royalty free distribution for both embedded and server, Copy 'n Go! deployment, managed ADO.NET Provider, data management and data migration tools. Free trial is available for download.
- Learn more about VistaDB
- Repost this to your blog and receive a FREE copy of VistaDB 2.1!

Now awaiting to get it for test...

Simple Single Sign-On [Sam Ruby]

Very often they have the problem to find a good equivalent term/translation to a specific english one. There are allready good sources that may help like wikipedia.org, or simple online translation services like BabelFish. But often the language needed isn't supported there, or the required term. Now google offers a good extension to all the services: define:'s [via google blog]. So you can find out e.g. for RSS also some non-geek definitions (like 'Repetitive stress syndrome').

The formerly geourl.org relaunched/renamed to geourl.info! And needs to re-register the site :-( Sounds like a database cleanup. But now the GeoURL link button works again...
[Thiemo Mättig]

A few days ago I googled around for trust centers offering personal e-mail certificates. Giving up after searching a half hour, because all of them (VeriSign, trustcenter.de, ...) require a fee.

Today I found my account information coincidental in my registration documents with Thawte: I already was in the possession of certificates! However these were already run off and only for no longer valid email addresses. So I renewed my certs and I'm really able to send signed mails: Outlook 2003 handles all that nicely while the older versions had some problems there. And best of the story: nothing to pay for! Now I only need some notaries to get my identity trusted.

Today I mentioned a post at ApfelWiki (german) and decided to test it with RSS Bandit's Remote Storage feature (used to sync. your feedlist/flagged items/search folders with other machines running RSS Bandit). It just works and also supports https: to keep your password a secret. Here is how to setup if you already a member/user of the free services at GMX:

1. Open Tools-Options dialog
2. Select the "Remote Storage" tab
3. Check the "Use remote storage" checkbox
4. Select "WebDAV" from the Protocol dropdown
5. Type https://mediacenter.gmx.net/ within the WebDAV folder url input box (important: it is gmx.net, not gmx.de!)
6. Provide your user name and password you use to login at gmx: e.g. <your account>@gmx.de
7. Press OK

[thanks to schockwellenreiter.de]

During my daily feed scanning today I noticed: MS Research Publications is our time far ahead. Here is a snippet of the feed:

Just watched the WWDC 2004 keynote video [via Steve's blog], then read Omar's comment: he is so right about Tiger (ships in 2005), and Longhorn takes too long to get more focus for now. When I have to buy a new machine for home usage, it will be definitly a Mac, with preferred Tiger installed. For this I can wait the year. Maybe with a new 23" display (the new 30" one is far too expensive for me, but really cool! With the dual-dual DVI cable and 4.1 million pixel resolution...)

Wouldn't a port of mono to Mac OS X (Tiger) with a System.Windows.Forms implementation using the Mac widgets be a cool project?

Lockergnome: Penguins sited in Munich. In reality they will use then a linux distribution at their desktop and run MS Terminal Server session(s) to get their every day applications (e.g. Access and Excel VBA apps). Differences:

1. Much slower than before (via terminal server)
2. If TS is down, no one can work, and: how expensive are TS licenses?
3. IT division is down for all the requests they get from their users to impl. just small additions to the new app running now at linux (or they apply it in Excel VBA to be in time; see point 1).
4. Linux and the main stream apps like Office or Image processing have  community support, but government software?

Nothing against Unix/Linux (on servers).

Inspired by Stuart Hamilton's post I got my first time practice today with Mozilla XUL extension programming: hacked together a working extension for firefox to enable right-click subscription of feeds. The context menu extension for Internet Explorer is already implemented and will be available with the next Rss Bandit release.

These extensions work the same way: if you have a default feed: Uri scheme handler registered, this handler will get called via the extensions. So it should work not only with Rss Bandit, but also with SharpReader, NewsGator and other popular aggregators that support the feed: Uri scheme!
Here are some screenshots:

• Internet Explorer
• Firefox (tested with Gecko/20040206 Firefox/0.8)

Peace!

Update: the link to the extension should now work...

What to write about blank? An empty post? Nope. Today I want to ask a simple question: why does Windows starts always Internet Explorer if you provide the pseudo-url about:blank on the command line? At least one user complains about that in Rss Bandit. I used the following line of code to start the configured default browser:

Process.Start(url);

That works fine as long we have a valid url unequal to about:blank. I'd never configured my default browser over Setup Program Access and Defaults, thought it is not needed because the browsers detect that state by itself. And it seems, some of the web browsers does not handle it well: configuring Firefox over it's options only as the default browser seems to be not enough. IE gets called for about:blank. Switching via Setup Program Access and Defaults does it well: Firefox get's called also for about:blank. What is the save way to handle such cases? A user expects if he says open url in default browser to get it opened in the correct browser, also if it is a empty blank page. So I really have to read/deal again with the registry? The hive HKLM\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet seems to play the role to store the settings of dialog Setup Program Access and Defaults. No other way around this?

[DllImport("wininet.dll", CharSet=CharSet.Auto , SetLastError=true)]
public static extern bool InternetGetCookie (
  string url, string name, StringBuilder data, ref int dataSize);

That's it. To wrap the call we define a wrapper function:

private static string RetrieveIECookiesForUrl(string url) {
    StringBuilder cookieHeader = new StringBuilder(new String(' ', 256), 256);
    int datasize = cookieHeader.Length;
    if (!InternetGetCookie(url, null, cookieHeader, ref datasize)) {
        if (datasize < 0) 
            return String.Empty;
        cookieHeader = new StringBuilder(datasize); // resize with new datasize
        InternetGetCookie(url, null, cookieHeader, ref datasize);
    }
    return cookieHeader.ToString();
}

OK, now we have the cookie content string, that looks usually like this: "KEY=Value; KEY2=what ever". Now we simply create managed cookies by creating instances of System.Net.Cookie. But stop! Did we really have to parse the cookie content string (aka cookie headers) to create the instances?

Again, good news: no, we did not have to do this. There is already build in support provided by the CookieContainer class we also need to set on the HttpWebRequest! The code:

public static CookieContainer GetCookieContainerForUrl(Uri url) {
    CookieContainer container = new CookieContainer();
    string cookieHeaders = RetrieveIECookiesForUrl(url.AbsoluteUri);
    if (cookieHeaders.Length > 0) {
        try { container.SetCookies(url, cookieHeaders); } catch (CookieException){}
    }
    return container;
}

Done

Royalty-free stock photo agency iStockPro has introduced a nifty Browse by Color dialog which lets you find photos that match your layout's color scheme. Neat!
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report]

Right, neat! Some examples: sample 1, sample 2.

A new one on the horizon: dasBlog. It's free, it's .NET based and seems to be the first official code branch of BlogX, that is still the most active GDN workspace with currently 297 members, followed by RSS Bandit (Aggregator), with 180 members.