I have been doing some with XSL transformations, and VBScript has been my enemy recently. What little grey matter still knows Visual Basic 6 is hit and miss for VBScript. In my case I was trying to create a case statement which in VB can be formatted as follows:

Select Case Numb
    Case 32 to 50    'This is legal in VB 6
    Case 65,66,67,67
    Case Else
End Select

Unfortunately you have to do something like this in VBScript…

Select Case Numb
    Case 32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50
    Case 65,66,67,67
    Case Else
End Select

… not very elegant but I am not sure if I have any options.

I was recently having some problems with setting up POP email at home and I wanted to verify what port were open and I realized that TELNET did not appear to be installed. As we are not using Vista at work I do not tend to have much need to dig past the obvious stuff for very long.

Apparently Vista installs without telnet by default and you must explicitly enable it:

• Open ‘Control Panel’ and select ‘Programs’.
• In the left column, select ‘Turn Windows features on or off’.
• Check the box next to telnet, and wait...

I ran a quick telnet command (telnet mail.someplace.com 25) that clearly showed that port 25 was being blocked by my cable provided router. After asking them to open it I was sending emails like it was going out of fashion.

I was away from home this Christmas and realized that I was missing the highly anticipated Basketball game between the Lakers & Celtics. As we were in a house dominated by women (who dislike basketball) at a ratio of 5-2 the odds of watching the game was at best remote. It was then that I remembered that we have access to AT&T Web Remote Access which gives me the opportunity to remotely program and record programs from the web or my mobile phone. I love this!

I briefly mentioned about SkyDrive (25gb free), however, I am not sure I really realized the variety of free online storage at my fingertips. These are my current crop of favorites:

• GMail\GSpace: 7.3gb (20mb max file size)
• Windows Live: Hotmail - 5gb; Sky Drive - 25gb, Live Mesh (Online Desktop) 5gb; – Total 30gb (sky drive 50mb max file size)
• 4 Shared : 5gb  (100mb max file size)

That is a grand total of over 40gb online storage for free!

I am purposefully not including Yahoo’s claim to unlimited email storage as they specifically search out people who are attempting to use it as online storage and shut them down.

Any other suggestions?

FriendFeed appears to be a Twitter clone that improves on the original, it allows you and your friends to chat about the minutia of life and get updates about each other regularly (not attractive to me, but it takes all sorts). I was looking through the API documentation just wondering what they may have available and this was the blurb they produced on authentication.

If you are publishing data to FriendFeed or if you are requesting the feed that includes data from a user with a private feed, your HTTP requests must be authenticated.

All FriendFeed users have a Remote Key to provide third party applications access to their FriendFeed. A FriendFeed Remote Key is just like a password, except that it is only used for third party applications, so it only provides access to the functionality defined by the API. Users can easily reset it if a third party application abuses the API.

 

All requests that require authentication use HTTP Basic Authentication. The username should be the user's nickname, and the password should be the user's Remote Key.

Now this fledgling company is being endorsed by some interesting bloggers, but I think the lack of an OAuth implementation is a real problem. They are getting around it by effectively giving you a public password (referred to as a Remote Key), this is quite separate to your actual password.

There are a few problems I foresee with this approach. Firstly you only get one Remote Key and if you want to stop access to your personal data for one particular app you must reset the Remote Key. Unfortunately when you reset your remote key you actually reset it for everyone and therefore need to update the key for everyone. They could get around this by providing management of multiple keys to multiple third party apps, that way you could cut access to any given app without disrupting others, but who would honestly want to do that.

Secondly this practice still plays into the basic problem of the password anti pattern, even though this is a a public password the level of control given means that this is still the basic user name and password paradigm. Either way we look at this it still better than the Twitter security option, where Basic Auth rules supreme, real account passwords are given out, and session cookies last forever, I will not go into detail about Twitter as this method is appropriately lambasted here.

I was completing some Spanish translations this week and got a bunch of errors in QA (missing characters), I basically forgot to convert the characters with accents. This ‘note to self’ will ensure that I will remember to search and replace next time.