March 2003 - Posts

• C - A - R - D - S Go Cards Go!

  Instead of cluttering up this place with even more ramblings from myself about the games, I've brought back my Radio Blog with running thought from the NCAA games. Good times. Posted Mar 20 2003, 12:22 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Day One

  Some people go overboard decorating their house for christmas, some people create full out haunted houses for a halloween, and I have March Madness.  From the Daily Quickie: There is no afternoon in sports like the first two days of the NCAA Tournament. I heard a stat yesterday that companies suffer a $1.8 billion productivity loss around the Big Dance. And I think that was just time spent filling out brackets ... it doesn't include The Great Check-Out -- normally hard-working employees frantically refreshing the ESPN.com "scoreboard" page all day long. Just remember the magic keystroke: Alt-Tab.  Don't forget you still have time to fill out a bracket if you want to compete in the .NET Tourney challenge.  Here's the info for signing up. Oh, and if you care, it's on $1.4 billion dollars of lost work. Posted Mar 20 2003, 10:14 AM by Phil Scott with 1 comment(s)

• Micro vs Macro Optimizations

  Scott and Victor had a little discussion about getting the value inside the loop vs outside the loop.  Now common sense would dictate to me that outside the loop would of course be faster.  So, for my own amusement I threw together a little test.  I simply ran their code and tried to figure out which one was faster.  Going through a 12 item array, declaring with the loop (i < array.Length) actually was 2 seconds faster than getting it outside the loop.  Of course, to get a 2 second difference I had to run each chunk of code 500,000,000 times.  The difference may have simply have been the overhead of declaring a variable to store the length.  I'm not too sure, I didn't dig into the IL. My point is that do you feel that this type of micro optimatization is worth it to get a 0.000000004s boast?  I say go with the most readable.  Very rarely do these micro optimizations have any impact big impact, when improvements in the architecture of your apps is where you really start to see some improvements.  Macro optimizations.  Oh, I stole this idea from Brad. btw, the better performing code changes in debug vs release.  outside the loop wins in debug mode (no optimizations), while with the loop wins in release.  Posted Mar 19 2003, 01:26 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• Sudelbücher

  A little bit of an internation feel of things with Ralf Westphal's posts.  He's got a pretty cool word in his title "Sudelbücher."  It's like a journal I guess, but a little more informal.  Found this definition from google: "sort of an informal notebook where you keep your trip expenses, that sort of thing, collections of thoughts, random, flashes, worked sentences." Good word. Based on this post, I think I know what some of the old mainframe programmers here when I'm talking .NET to them in class: "Im Grunde wird der ganze OSI Protokollstack vorgestellt: Sockets (auch Multicast), TCP/UDP, HTTP/SMTP/POP3; dazu dann noch Streams und Cryptographie."  Posted Mar 19 2003, 11:57 AM by Phil Scott with no comments

• Unchecked Buffer

  Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-007 Unchecked Buffer In Windows Component Could Cause Web Server Compromise (815021) Some hole in WebDav that could be exploited, so patch up.  But wait!  What is kinda of interesting is that you could hose your machine by doing so.  If you expand out the "Additional information about this patch" you'll find out that "Versions of ntoskrnl.exe between 5.0.2195.4797 and 5.0.2195.4928 (inclusive) are not compatible with this patch."  "If the patch for this issue is installed on a system with one of these versions of ntoskrnl.exe, the machine will fail on the first reboot with a Stop 0x00000071 message and will have to be recovered using the Windows 2000 recovery console."  Well, "These versions were only distributed with Product Support Services hotfixes."  I barely noticed that little bit of info, just thought it was interesting.  Since this is one of those "zero day" flaws, there are people out there already being affected (the Army being one of the targets you see mentioned). I'd assume there are going to be some admins jumping on this patch perhaps a little too quick. On a related note, can someone point me towards some info on the /gc type stuff in Windows 2003 Server?  From what I understand, things like this and the SQL Slammer worm do not affect the server.  But what exactly happens when an exploit tries to run?  I guess it would just fail, but it seems like the unexpected failure could also be trouble for the server.  Why don't you see more hype about this?  Are they unsure of the technology? Posted Mar 19 2003, 11:36 AM by Phil Scott with no comments

• ASPNET

  I was playing around with some code that we use in one of my Microsoft courses.  Not a complex example, and it assumes you've granted privledges to the ASPNET account datareader for Northwind.  No biggie I guess (this is actually quite common in courses that don't focus on ASP.NET.  Getting into identity might be considered overkill for many of these classes).  Well, this is all fine and dandy unless you are running 2003.  I get a big ol' Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' error message thrown at me.  Bastards!  I have a feeling that I'm going to have to spend a lot more time figuring this stuff out than I did with IIS 5.0.  Anyone have any good links? Posted Mar 18 2003, 08:26 PM by Phil Scott with no comments

• SQL Server System Table Map

  Pretty old stuff, but my partners in crime is teach SQL Server Admin this week, and it reminded me that I wanted to post a link to the Sql Server System Table Map. It's in chm format, so it's pretty easy to navigate with pretty pictures of all the tables and how they are related.  Granted, you should always use the system procedures or information_schema_views, but sometimes you just need to go gonzo and dig into those system tables. Of course the poster is great, but those are hard to come by online (anyone have a link btw). Oh, and just a reminder.  Sign up for the .NET NCAA tournament challenge.  It's easy to do and I have Louisville winning it all, so it's not like this thing is going to be too difficult to win.  Sign up details are here: http://dotnetweblogs.com/pscott/posts/3901.aspx.  Tell your coworkers!  Pick IUPUI to go all the way because it's fun to say "ooooh-eee-poooyeee."  Bonus link: Around 6 p.m. PT on Thursday, the Sports Gal will come home and ask the Sports Guy how he spent his day. He will reply, "I watched games." Then she'll ask how he plans to spend the evening, and he'll reply, "Um, watching games." Posted Mar 18 2003, 05:45 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• InfoPath, No Cure for Cancer. Well...

  A lot of talk about InfoPath.  Just got my beast of an Office 2003 beta kit in the mail, so I've been playing around with it.  I wouldn't say I've drank the kool-aid, but I definitely have sipped it.  Not my favorite flavor, but I definitely see where others might enjoy it.  The place I see it being used are the VB developers.  Now, don't get me wrong VB.NET is my .NET language of choice and I'm not making any excuses why.  I just like it better.  But I also know what's going on with the CLR and all that.  What I'm talking about are the VB developers who still think COM is where those old mice go, and still use DAO because it works for them.  You guys know who I'm talking about.  They really just want a simple interface to connect into whatever date source they might have. Now, InfoPath has been getting a lot of hype for the point at an XSD file and away you go.  And some criticism for it too. Well, imagine that this company mearly needs to talk to another company that has exposed their XSD and you work for a company that needs to submit, say order requests to it.  The only thing you know about .NET is that you can jack up the prices on people when you knock over a bunch of wine bottles.  But you are a power user in Word / Access.  You fire up InfoPath, create the form for doing this and you are done.  Pretty simple.  Now, you DON'T need to connect to XSD.  That's why the hype is been about, but just playing around the only thing I had available to me where some CSV files and Northwind.mdb.  It connected to those just fine.  I'm not quite sure honestly what *I* would use it for.  I would rather throw something together in ASP.NET personally.  But just because I'm not going to be use it doesn't mean it doesn't have a place.  Of course, everyone using it will need Office 2003 installed.  Just like Access.  I don't think Microsoft intended this application to be an Enterprise Development tool, just something between Excel and .NET. Posted Mar 18 2003, 03:35 PM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• Can You Feel It?

  Ok, I went ahead and created a group on ESPN's tournament challenge.  If you don't have a username/password, well, you'll need to signup.  I've never recieve mail from them in the three years I've done this (besides they "hey dummy, fill this out" type stuff I suppose).  After that, click on the second link below and join the group.  It's that simple!  Pass this along to whoever you want, as long as they don't think of those singing Jamacan's when you say CLR.  I'll post reminders until Thursday.  In an act of brilliance, I asked for vacation days in November for Thursday and Friday.  MWwwwwwwwahahahaha. Group name: .Net Password: DonBox Helpful links: Create a new account: https://register.espn.go.com/fantasy/chooseAge?appRedirect=http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/frontpage Already have an entry? Go to your entry page and then click on the following link: http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/group?groupID=26009 Tournament Challenge http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/frontpage Posted Mar 16 2003, 07:11 PM by Phil Scott with 3 comment(s)

• Tourney Time

  I'm going to put together a ESPN.com Tournament Coverage thingy later tonight.  Any .NETer is invited of course, not just people with blogs here.  I know we got a couple guys from Cinci, Scott's a cameron crazy, Jason Bock went to Marquette, and it should be a little fun with some competition. Maybe someone can donate a prize or something (office 11 beta?  polos?  a hearty slap on the back?) And just because I'm a nice guy, here's a tip:  Louisville Cardinals, NCAA Champs. Posted Mar 16 2003, 05:54 PM by Phil Scott with 1 comment(s)