Thinking Out Loud

WinZip Encryption for Business

2010-10-22T11:02:00.000-07:00

Email is not the most secure method of sending sensitive data over the internet. However, there is a sensible and easy solution to this problem.

Sender
Before sending your files, use either WinZip or PKZIP to compress your files into a single small ZIP file. Next we need to right click on the file, select the option to encrypt using either 128 or 256 AES technology, and enter the shared password that you will give to the recipient. Once completed, we can send our new zip file to the relevant contacts.

Recipient
The files can be retrieved by the email recipient, by using either WinZip (10 or higher), or ZIP Reader (a product of PKWare) to extract the files. The recipient will be prompted to enter the password you supplied when you created the file.

Hope this helps you in the search for a secure way of transferring files over the Internet.

Norval

ASP.NET pop-up menus do not work in Internet Explorer 8.0

2010-04-27T16:02:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across one of those Microsoft glitches that we jokingly categorize as "A feature not a bug." ASP.NET pop-up menus that are commonly used on most websites for the main navigation bar, does not work. When you hover over the menu, you get a white box instead of the expected sub-menu options.

There are two ways of resolving this:

Place a meta tag in the header of your web browser to emulate IE7: <meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"/>
Install a patch on the webserver. This patch is available from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962351

Hope this information helps.

Problem loading VMWare Server on Windows XP

2010-02-27T05:27:00.000-08:00

For a few weeks now, I have been experiencing a intermittent problem connecting to my VMWare Server installation. After doing some investigation on the VMWare community forum, I was able to successfully reach my VMWare login screen.

The solution was to open the Windows Services window, and set the "VMWare VSS Writer" service to automatic startup.

Hope this helps.

Unable to acces ASP.NET website running in VMWare Server

2009-10-09T14:10:00.000-07:00

So you have just deployed your new website for testing in a VMWare server session. However, you are not able to see the website, when you type that address in your browser. See the following troubleshooting list:

Check to see if the firewall in the OS of VMWare guest is blocking incoming request. To test it you could fully disabled the firewall, and if it works, configure the firewall to only allow traffic to the relevant web server port.
Verify that the web server was started and configured to use the correct directory for the web root directory.
Verify that the database connection string is correctly configured

These are a few quick items to look out for. However if you have come across other things that could cause connectivity problems, please add your comments below.

Regards,
Norval

Compiling ASP.NET Applications for Deployment

2009-10-07T14:31:00.000-07:00

The process of compiling ASP.NET application is surprisingly simple and available free of cost to all developers. In the same windows folder that contains your asp_regsql.exe and aspnet_regiid.exe applications is a program named asp_compiler.exe. "Sounds reasonable".

So how do you compile with it?
There are several parameters and options that this executable takes to compile an application, however the most basic command to compile an website that will be deployed in the root directory of a new webserver is (I will use the command that I executed on my computer):
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_compiler.exe -p G:\My_Workspace\tobecompiled_CBX -v / G:\My_Workspace\compiled_cbx

In this example, -p refers to the full path to the directory containing the website to be compiled, -v refers to the virtual directory (which is the root directory in this case), and the last directory path (G:\My_Workspace\compiled_cbx) is the folder to which the compiled website will be copied.

Once compiled, you can zip up this new folder and install it on the production webserver. The only requirements is to make the relevat changes in the web.config to get stuff working, for example to connect to the correct database.

Hope this article helps,

Regards

Sent using my blackberry from …

2009-09-03T09:51:00.002-07:00

If you are a non-BES blackberry user, you have probably being annoyed by the the message ’sent using my blackberry from ’ that is automatically placed at the end of your emails.

Well I have found the solution, and its easier than you think. Use the following steps to reset the signature for each of your email accounts:
# Browse to https://bis.na.blackberry.com/html?brand=vzw. Replace vzw with your own provider. In Jamaica, I test this link by replacing ‘vzw’ with ‘cwjamaica’ and I was able to successfully login to Lime’s (formally known as Cable and Wireless Jamaica) account. I’d imagine this would work for other providers as well.
# Login with the account information you typically log into Email Settings on the handheld.
# From here, signatures can be edited, email accounts can be added, removed, etc.

I must say thanks to Aaron Brazell for providing this useful bit of information.

ASP.NET Error - Wrong number or types of arguments in call to

2009-09-03T09:51:00.001-07:00

While setting up a new GridView inside an ASP.NET webpage, I got the following error:

ORA-06550: line 1, column 7:

PLS-00306: wrong number or types of arguments in call to ”UPDATE_SCHEDULE”

ORA-06550: line 1, column 7:

PL/SQL: Statement ignored

My GridView accesses data from an Oracle 10g Express database, through an SQLDataDource (with its Provider set to OracleClient). What was happening is that the stored procedure was expecting 4 input parameters, but my gridView had 5 columns defined with the “readonly” property set to FALSE. This meant that when the update command was executed in the GridView, it would attempt to send 5 values to the stored procedure.

So the solution to this problem was simply to set the “readonly” property for all fields that do not participate in the update procedure to TRUE. Works great now.

Installing ASP.NET 2.0 Website, with connectivity to Oracle 8i or higher

2009-09-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

I had the “joy” of installing an spanking new ASP.NET application that connects to an Oracle 8i database. The application uses both SQLDatasource objects from the visual development toolbar, and SQLCONNECTION objects in the C# code-behind file.

Now for the real interesting part. To install this application you must install the ODP.NET client on the application server. But unfortunately there is a known bug in the Oracle installer that result in your web page vomiting the following error message:

System.Exception: System.Data.OracleClient requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or greater.”

The problem is that ASP.NET does not have permission to access the Oracle Client DLLs” located in the Oracle Home directory. So to resolve this problem (and I hate doing this) I had to give “Everyone” permission to access the Oracle Home directory for ODP.NET files.

So the problem was fixed right? wrong. The following error message was displayed:

“ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified”

The problem was that I specified a Oracle Service Name as the datasource in the connectionstring, i.e. “Data Source=MyDatabase; Persist Security Info=True;User ID=myuser; Password=mypassword” . So I had to setup a new service name called MyDatabase in the TNSNAMES.ORA file for the oracle client. You could either use the provided Oracle Net Manager, or modify the TNSNAME.ORA file directly. It is usually found below the Oracle Home directory in the subfolders NETWORK/ADMIN.

So that was my adventure for 3 days. Hope this article saves you from this trouble.

Norval

Error using include() to access another .php file

2009-09-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

Today I came across a very interesting error that many php developers may experience at least once in their life. In trying to make my web pages more maintainable, I decided to use the include() function to call another .php file. This file is used to generate the top menus on an intranet website. The problem was that when I added the include() function, my Apache web server displayed the underlying PHP code of the included file. For example,

. . . .

The solution to this problem was very simple. At the start of the php statement, I needed to use the character sequence “
. . . .

Hope this helps

How to use an existing table stucture to create a new table

2009-09-03T09:45:00.000-07:00

Creating a new table in Microsoft’s SQL Server Database is very simple. To create a table called example1, we do the following:

CREATE TABLE dbo.example1

(name NVARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY,

description NVARCHAR(200),

activity_date DATETIME)

To create a new table using an existing table, use the SELECT INTO command. For example I will create a table called example2, using example1 created above:

SELECT * INTO example2

FROM example1 WHERE 1 = 0

Need to Know: Installing FreeBSD on VMWare

2009-09-03T09:44:00.002-07:00

There are many websites on the internet to guide you through the installation of FreeBSD. What alot of sites do not state clearly is how to setup the network interface of FreeBSD under a VMWare session.

I recently installed FreeBSD and found that I was not able to connect to the internet. I type “ifconfig” on the command line and did not even see the beautiful “eth0″ network interface, which the is the name linux normally assigns to my network interface card. After much searching I discovered that VMWare uses a network emulation driver called “lnc” which is rumoured to be deprecated in FreeBSD 7.

So having discovered the key to the treasures of the network, I quickly typed “ifconfig lnc0″ and found the “lnc” interface:

lnc0: flags=108843 mtu 1500

inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe38:7dea%lnc0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0×1

inet 198.18.153.167 netmask 0xffff0000 broadcast 198.18.255.255

ether 00:0c:29:38:7d:ea

So all I had left to do was to retrieve an ip address from my DHCP Server by typing the command “dhclient”.

All’’s well in the world of BSD

Part 1: How to setup incoming dial-up connections in Windows

2009-09-03T09:44:00.001-07:00

This is not as hard as it sounds. Dialup connections are a regular part of most IT organizations contingency plans. It also allows IT administrators to remotely connect and manage branch offices.

There are many programs available on the market to create a dialup server, with varied agendas. However, we will be using the “free” dialup functionality that is available in Windows. To setup up a dialup Windows server, perform the following steps:

1. Physically install the modem, if it is not installed already
2. Open “Network Connection” from the Windows Control Panel
3. Make a new connection
4. Select the incoming dialup connection option
5. Follow the instructions in the rest of the wizard

Wow that was quick.

Now you should have a fully operational dialup server, but we have not talked about security. This new dialup option has opened a can of worms where security is concerned. This is why I will have to write a follow-up article on securing your new dialup connection.

Norval

Choosing a web hosting provider

2009-09-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

To date, I have used three (3) web hosting providers. I have found each to have their unique strengths and weeknesses. Below is my attempt at documenting the pros and cons for each.

Godaddy.com Deluxe Hosting (June 2006)

Godaddy.com provides an excellent platform to build your website providing all the usually addon applications, such as blogs and content management systems. My only issue was that they gave you a set limit on the amount of bandwidth available for page requests.

Also, Deluxe hosting is a shared hosting plan, and as such I found that my webserver took a long time to load when it was inactive for a few hours.

Yahoo!! Hosting (December 2008)

Yahoo!! provides unlimited email, bandwidth and disk space. You really have alot of room to grow, and I found the customer service to be excellent. The only issue I had was that they did not allow you me to fully utilize .htaccess files to secure my website. I am still not sure why that is, because with this I can hide my file extensions, create SEO optimized URLs, and much more.

Mosso’s (owned by Rackspace) Cloud Sites (March 2009)

Mosso provides an excellent platform to scale your website. It runs on cloud computing technology, which essentially means that they run your website on a set of servers that can alocate resources as needed. So if you expect a massive increase in website traffic as a result of a news story, or the DIGG phenomenon, they can scale up the resources assigned to your application, and then scale down when the traffic returns to normal.

The only issue I experienced with them is that sometimes the computer nodes in the “cloud” become unavailable. I am not sure why that is, but it results in my visitors seeing a “node not found” or “node busy” error.

I will try to update this post with more comments as time progresses.

XMING: free unlimited X Window Server for Microsoft Windows

2009-09-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

Posted by norval on May 23, 2009 under Technology | Be the First to Comment

Need a great way to access Unix applications from your PC desktop. Xming is the answer. It provides you with the ability to work with your favourite X Window applications as though they were right there in your windows environment.
Screenshot of a multi-window Xming session

Screenshot of a multi-window Xming session

To install simply run the Xming setup program. Once installed, launch the Xming server from the start menu. This will load the application in listen mode, so instead of seeing a window open, you will see its icon added to the system tray.

Next, start PuTTY or your favourite SSH utility to connect to the Unix box. Once you have logged in, perform the following steps:

1. On the command line, type “export DISPLAY:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:0″ and press Enter. This will tell Unix the ip address of the X Server as well as its display number, i.e. the Xming server running on your computer on display 0.
2. On the command line, type “xterm”. This will establish a connection to the Xming Server running on your windows computer. you will also see a console window being opened on your windows desktop

Its as easy as that. You are now able to launch any number of X window applications in your windows desktop. For more information go to Xming website.

Good Skill

Norval

2009-07-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
I have decided to move my blog to a new home. "Blogger.com" provides a new home in which I hope to contribute to the growing body of information available on the Internet. I will be adding the previous technical posts to this account over the next few days.

Regards,
Norval