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Dan Bright's .NET Weblog

October 2003 - Posts

  • OT: My first impression of Serial ATA

    Well, today I was out at CompUSA and I saw a pretty nice deal on a 120GB Maxtor SATA drive with the 8mb cache...

    Now I really don't *need* any more storage space on my machine (360GB is enough even for me), but I have recently been having some problems with my Promise ATA RAID card.  The card is fine if you just want RAID to mirror or stripe and you are running Windows, but if you want to run Linux (mono anyone?), or (and this was my biggie) if you want to make a nice image using Ghost or Drive Image you are just plain out of luck.

    So I decided that since my new motherboard has built-in SATA I'll give it a shot.  I haven't really seen the performance yet, as the drive is formatting as I type this, but I must say, the tiny drive cable is nice.  Especially coming from having to pay way extra for rounded IDE cables.

    Once I finish this PHP project I have to deliver on Monday morning I will switch the new drive to my primary & install Windows on it.  One of my good friends told me it took him about 15 minutes to install Win XP Pro on his new system with SATA drives.  I can't wait to see this...

    Posted Oct 25 2003, 05:54 PM by DanB with 1 comment(s)
    Filed under:

  • Crypto Random Numbers

    Note to self (and anyone else it will help):

     
    public static int GetCryptographicRandomNumber(int lBound, int uBound)
    { 
      RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
      // Assumes lBound >= 0 && lBound < uBound
      // returns an int >= lBound and < uBound
      uint urndnum; 
      byte[] rndnum = new Byte[4]; 
      if (lBound == uBound-1) 
      {
        // test for degenerate case where only lBound can be returned
        return lBound;
      }
      uint xcludeRndBase = (uint.MaxValue - (uint.MaxValue%(uint)(uBound-lBound))); 
      do 
      { 
        rng.GetBytes(rndnum); 
        urndnum = System.BitConverter.ToUInt32(rndnum,0); 
      } 
      while (urndnum >= xcludeRndBase); 
      return (int)(urndnum % (uBound-lBound)) + lBound;
    }
     

    Thanks to Kevin Stewart for this.

    Posted Oct 16 2003, 10:57 PM by DanB with no comments

  • Transcending the MCAD exams?

    Well I finally got around to getting the C# Transcender exams, and I just finished my first Web test.  Much to my shock I did well.  Much better than I thought I would in fact (I'm horrible at these darn tests). 

    Since I have seen many posts in the past about my fellow ASPNETWebLoggers taking these exams I wanted to pose this question to the community: Has anyone used these tests as a study tool for the MCAD/MCSD tests?  If so how would you rate the practice questions compared to the real deal?

    Also, a couple of my pals from work told me I missed a great user group meeting tonight.  The topic was Flash Remoting, and my friend Ghayth IM'ed me this link to give me an idea of what it's been used for.  All I can say is wow.

    And of course (severely off-topic):  Matrix Reloaded DVD's hit the shelves today... And this one has a whole DVD of special features!

    Posted Oct 14 2003, 10:28 PM by DanB with 2 comment(s)
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  • .NET does Rock!

    I just finished listening to the .NET Rocks show with ScottGu and I am pumped!  IntelliSense in the inline code view of ASP.NET and also in the xxxx.config files!

    Ooh, I want in this beta program so bad I can taste it!

    Posted Oct 08 2003, 07:41 PM by DanB with 2 comment(s)
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  • Weblogs @ ASP.NET Searcher

    I just threw together a quick & dirty little search app that uses google to search the http://weblogs.asp.net site.

    Check it out if you need it.

    http://www.danielbright.net/ASPNETWeblogsSearch/

    Posted Oct 06 2003, 08:17 PM by DanB with 1 comment(s)

  • No to all?

    Ever get one of those messagebox prompts with the options: Yes, Yes To All, No, Cancel?

    Where is No To All?

    I will tell you!  Hold the shift button when you click no and it will apply that to all following dialogs in the current operation.

    Posted Oct 06 2003, 08:16 PM by DanB with 9 comment(s)
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