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December 2003 - Posts

Wednesday, December 31, 2003 2:02 PM

Series on secure programming

Over at IBM, there's a series on secure programming . It's mainly focused on Linux, but you can apply most things to Windows as well. Thanks to Slashdot for that one. I just discovered (yeah, I'm slow) they also have an RSS feed . Yahoo!
Posted by ptorr | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003 1:12 PM

We really need to work on our web site

Have a look at the home page for Mac OS X . Now have a look at the home page for Windows XP Home . Which would you rather buy? The Mac home page has beautiful graphics, some product descriptions (in fairly colloquial English -- “scads of applications,”
Posted by ptorr | 22 Comments
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Tuesday, December 30, 2003 11:10 AM

What is "innovation"?

Another quickie. Raymond has a comment that illustrates a common theme in the IT industry: it's one rule for Microsoft, one rule for everyone else. And some people would say that's fair, because we have a monopoly on desktop operating systems (and maybe
Posted by ptorr | 16 Comments
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Monday, December 29, 2003 6:48 AM

No such thing as a "free lunch"

Raymond has had a few blogs about privacy policies lately. It has motivated me to write a little bit about a bad experience I am currently having through no fault of my own, although unlike Raymond I don't feel comfortable naming the particular company.
Posted by ptorr | 9 Comments
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Monday, December 29, 2003 1:25 AM

Wet paper bag or industrial safe?

A quick post this time (I promise!) Pop Quiz, hotshot. What's more secure: (i) a wet paper bag holding a couple of stale tic-tacs (site requires Flash); or (ii) an industrial-strength safe holding $1M in diamonds? Is security a property of the object
Posted by ptorr | 3 Comments
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Sunday, December 28, 2003 8:16 PM

I'd like to run Linux, but...

My apologies for not writing much lately; there are a few things I would like to talk about from some recent usability studies we did, but I first need to find out if I can talk about them or not. I'm not worried about getting permission to give away
Posted by ptorr | 20 Comments
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Sunday, December 28, 2003 6:51 PM

Problems with dotWord

It seems that whatever transform Rob did to make WordBlogX work with BlogX doesn't work too well with .TEXT. It messes up hyperlinks, deletes all sections inside angle brackets, randomly adds spaces to things, and generally messes things up. Botheration.
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Tuesday, December 23, 2003 11:56 PM

What I'd like to see in blog schemas

Nary a day goes by when Rober t Scoble doesn't have something on his blog about RSS versus ATOM or some such thing. Personally, I haven't really looked into either format much; I just use Newsgator to read a handful of blogs in Outlook. But I am now working
Posted by ptorr | 6 Comments
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Tuesday, December 23, 2003 9:46 PM

Hacked up using dotWord

I'm posting this with a hacked-up version of WordBlogX that has been trivially modified to talk to the .Text web service instead. Hopefully it will all go well, in which case I can continue using Word to write my posts, and sooner or later Rob will figure
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Tuesday, December 23, 2003 5:40 PM

Testing the web service

This is a quick test of the .Text web service. Please ignore!
Posted by ptorr | 5 Comments
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Monday, December 22, 2003 12:03 AM

Moved to ASP.NET

New home at http://weblogs.asp.net/ptorr/
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Sunday, December 21, 2003 8:59 PM

Moving to asp.net!

This is just a quick post to say I've moved to weblogs.asp.net and after this week won't be posting on gotdotnet any more. Now it looks like I'll have to figure out how to patch up WordBlogX to work with .Text; assuming it has a web service interface,
Posted by ptorr | 2 Comments
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Friday, December 19, 2003 3:00 AM

Testing from InfoPath

Just playing
Posted by ptorr | 1 Comments
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Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:47 AM

Redefining a function in JScript

Taking a leaf out of Eric 's book, I'm going to re-post a question I received in mail here. The question was (essentially): How do you re-define a function in JScript, and keep the parameters intact? Simple! There are (at least) two ways to do it: 1)
Posted by ptorr | 2 Comments
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Tuesday, December 09, 2003 2:58 AM

More geeky language stuff

British English tends to have more irregular forms than American English (learnt vs learned, spelt vs. spelled, etc.) so why don't we say "ust" instead of "used"?
Posted by ptorr | 8 Comments
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Sunday, December 07, 2003 8:07 PM

Doing our own Thing

A book about the decline of language in America
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Saturday, December 06, 2003 4:57 PM

Developers frustrated by Administrators

A link on Slashdot points to a rant about why one developer thinks that administrators are the scum of the earth. There are some good counter arguments on the comments page. It's interesting because we spend quite a bit of time at work trying to make
Posted by ptorr | 2 Comments
Saturday, December 06, 2003 4:21 PM

Collapsing vocabulary

Eric recently had a post that generated a lot of comments about how the spelling of various words in the English language has changed over the years. One thing that drives me batty is the number of people who don't know (or, perhaps more accurately, can't
Posted by ptorr | 5 Comments
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Friday, December 05, 2003 2:47 AM

What does "Save As..." mean, anyway?

There are at least nine different meanings of "save" in an average application; the computer doesn't really know what you mean when you hit that little floppy-disk icon on the toolbar.
Posted by ptorr | 4 Comments
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Thursday, December 04, 2003 8:03 PM

VSTO doc team blogging

VSTO blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/vsto/
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