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!

I wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year 2008! Thank you for your support of the Open Source project, for your pacience if we did not get a bug fixed within a day and for the time you waiting to get your huge feedlist loaded - sorry for that

But as Dare Obasanjo wrote, we will get a new release 1.6.x running on CLR 2.0 only out these days so there is a good chance the annoying issues you may have considered get fixed meanwhile.

Also a warm welcome to the new team member Oren - looks like he was just waiting for the moment we start using the newest bits - CLR 2.0 and above - to jump into code, thanks Oren! Think, we will have a good time next year too...

I really like that animation movie:

(source: information r/evolution movie @ information aesthetics)

Today I helped a coworker to get the local mapped network drives using WMI instead of COM Interop/native windows API. Just to keep the code as a reminder and help others with the same problem I provide it here.

The result of the code below is in general the same you will get if you hit the "net use" command at the windows command shell prompt. For further infos and reading I suggest http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394173.aspx (Win32_LogicalDisk; MSDN WMI Reference); for immediate results of query the WMI you should use Scriptomatic (download from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=09DFC342-648B-4119-B7EB-783B0F7D1178&displaylang=en).

Little bit optimization is yet possible providing the drive type in the WQL as a where clause parameter, so here it is:

/// <summary>

/// Container for Share entries

/// </summary>

public struct SharePathEntry

{

  public string Name;

  public string Path;

  public SharePathEntry(string n, string p) {

    Name = n;

    Path = p;

  }

}



// for other types see: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394173.aspx

const int NetworkDriveType = 4;



public static List<SharePathEntry> GetLocalShares()

{

  List<SharePathEntry> allLocalShares = new List<SharePathEntry>(); // a container 



  WqlObjectQuery objectQuery = new WqlObjectQuery("select DriveType,DeviceID,ProviderName from Win32_LogicalDisk");

  ManagementScope scope = new ManagementScope(@"\\.\root\cimv2"); // local WMI namespace

  scope.Options.Impersonation = ImpersonationLevel.Impersonate; 

  scope.Options.EnablePrivileges = true; 

  ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher(scope, objectQuery);

  foreach (ManagementObject share in searcher.Get())

  {

    int driveType = Convert.ToInt32(share["DriveType"]);

    if (driveType  == NetworkDriveType) {

      object objName = share["DeviceID"];

      object objPath = share["ProviderName"];

      if (null != objName && null != objPath)

      {

        allLocalShares.Add(new SharePathEntry(objName.ToString(), objPath.ToString()));

      }

    }

  }

  return allLocalShares;

}

It seems we hit the high border some days ago: the overall download counter at SF is above one million for the favorite newsreader...

Thank you all, that love the project - you are the real motivation engine!

You may have noticed we released v1.5.0.17 of my favorite feed reader (and refreshed the installer meanwhile) - for the coding guys we now have even more:

Thanks to the folks at atlassian we are now have the comfortable source browsing tool running on the SF repositories (CVS with the CLR 1.1 code and SVN for CLR 2.0). Most I like the diffs view and RSS link in the top right - there the circle closes (subscribed).

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 read about portable apps (applications, that are running from a stick without any further installation) in my favourite magazine and it just took a hour to set the sources to get RSS Bandit running from a stick:

There is at least one issue left: the .NET framework must be installed at the machine running the portable Bandit...

Tomorrow I will walk to different machines to get it more tested.

Just because requesting the Handle (IntPtr, see remarks section) will create the handle internally in case it is IntPtr.Zero and may cause issues on disposing or closing! How to get around? Just use the this.IsHandleCreated property...

I really like the two Sudoku games (one easy, one heavy) ever saturday in our local newspaper -  there are yet only three heavy games I could not solved over the last months and it is really fun. So maybe they are not really "heavy" - who knows.

But now I read this post about how to solve every Sudoku using XSLT (another variant), using SQL and regular expression. Ouch - where is the fun? If you know the algorithm to solve one, it can be expressed by every language poeple like to program. I would more like the algorithm to generate new Sudoku games...

Today I could track down an annoying issue: on some installations of the newer version of RSS Bandit (starting with the first betas of 1.5.0.x) it starts using 100% CPU time on a thread. As we started also to use lucene.NET with this new release I guessed it was a related issue, I was right. But as we run into multiple issues with lucene it was not obvious as a separate problem. So here it is:

We used a slightly modified version of lucene.NET to include the available language dependent analyzers and stopword filters. Before we released, I already fixed some obvious issues I got with e.g. french stemmer. Now we got more with the CJK (Japanese/Korean, bug report) and possibly Chinese analyzers. It looks like it get into a state it never returns. The attached debug callstack was very helpful to got the direction to search for! I found this: TextReader.Read(char[], int, int) was called and the return value checked against -1 only, not against 0 (zero). So I run over all analyzers to find all the places I have to change that code and here it is: the modified lucene.net.dll (zipped, 142K).

To all users that run into the problem: can you test the modification, please? Just download, unzip into the installation folder, restart Bandit. Please report here (or as comments to the bug reports mentioned above) if it help - so we can refresh the installer for the major public.