Al Priest’s Blog

Fantastic footage of cars skidding on ice.

from the Worth1000 competition ‘Apple’s next product’

I’ve spent a short while today upgrading my Pub Finder to use the Google Maps 2.0 API. I’ve also added indexes onto the data set to improve the speed.

Finding any one of the 5,149 pubs now in the database is now even quicker so there’s no excuse to drink in a dodgy pub.

Spent a while trying to get sub-projects opening within Visual Studio today where the root project has SSL security setup. Every time VS tried to open the sub-projects it would error with the message “Secure channel failed”.

Figured it out eventually - you need to add a location element to the web.config for the get_aspx_ver.aspx to allow anonymous access in the sub-projects.

E.g. your webroot is ~/ and you have the authorization element set to deny anonymous users:

[xml]



[/xml]

Then your subproject is within the folder ~/ProjectA. When you open ProjectA .NET will redirect to the login page for the web root. If that login page is under SSL, then VS.NET will fail. So add this to your web.config:

[xml]







[/xml]

I’ve got my Google Maps / Beer In The Evening mashup working again. Seems I completely missed the Google Maps API V2 changes which broke the layout and the ‘link to this pub’ links. Unfortunately I still can’t get my CSS to expand the map to the available screen size so if anyone has any suggestions, please leave a comment!

I’ve moved my from Blogger to Wordpress tonight. It was incredibly simple as the latest release of Wordpress includes import functionality. The categories functionality, plugin capability and customisation features of Wordpress seriously outweigh those of Blogger.

I used this blog post to guide me in changing my Blogger settings, and also this blog comment to get all my posts moved over completely. I’ve also installed a plugin for syntax highlighting code - Source Code syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress.

Only in Kenya of course. Another fantastic flash animation from the folk who brought you Magical Trevor…

Personally I think Laydeez : The Story of Eurodance was better, but then I’m slightly biased

Since buying my MacBook a few weeks ago i’ve found that my evenings at home are now pretty quiet. That’s not to say that things on the MacBook don’t work - far from it, it boots amazingly quickly, gets on the Internet - first time, every time - and has not needed reconfiguring, updating, patching, driver installing, etc. etc. whatsoever.

When I need Windows I run Parallels, wait for the PC to boot, then wait for Windows Update to install this weeks ‘import security updates’, the AV product to update itself, and the firewall to update itself.

No wonder so many of my colleagues who also use PCs throughout the day are switching to Mac OS X for their home computer - the darn thing just works!

This is interesting, a port scanner written completely in Javascript. It creates a series of image objects and points the URL to an image file which would be found on a default installation of some web servers. Once found, the script could be modified to do something malicious to that webserver using any well known exploit.

Obviously, most production servers would be secured so won’t have this default file, however development servers might not be so secure.

The problem is that this isn’t something that can be secured against easily as so many websites use late-loading images by Javascript. The only solution I guess would be to prevent the types of files that the image could point at, but that would break lots of apps.

So until something changes, secure all your servers. [found via New Scientist]