Thursday, November 22nd, 2007
This is an interesting problem that my wife had at work recently. In a VBA-based program, the Left function suddenly stopped working with an error along the lines of "type data mismatch". Being that this is a native function to VBA, my first thoughts were that it was caused by ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
My wife's workplace is a through and through Windows shop running on Microsoft Access. As they have expanded, they have begun to bump against the inherent limits of a file-based database like Access. Currently, they are considered switching to a commercial server-based database such as MS SQL Server, but I ...
Posted in Programming | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
One of the things that came up recently at work is a way to resolve IP addresses to hostnames client-side without any server calls. Here are some of the possibilites that I thought off :
o Using Javascript to call Java's java.net.InetAddress class to resolve (only works in Mozilla and Opera, ...
Posted in Website | No Comments »
Thursday, May 4th, 2006
After over two years of work and arguments, the IETF finally published the RFCs for SPF and Sender-ID. They are as follows:
RFC 4405 - SUBMITTER SMTP extensions to be used with Sender-ID
RFC 4406 - main Sender-ID draft
RFC 4407 - PRA algorithm (which is what Microsoft was trying to patent - ...
Posted in Spam and Email | No Comments »
Friday, March 10th, 2006
Wired ran an article today by Lawrence Lessing singing the praises of a new Microsoft protocol called "InfoCard". I took a quick look at the technical reference and it seems very straight forward AND is all build on a bunch of OASIS and W3C standards for web services. So far, ...
Posted in Standards | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 15th, 2006
DESKTOP APPS BUILT LIKE THE WEB
One of the upcoming big technologies in Microsoft's new OS ("Windows Vista") is XAML - an XML language for defining user interfaces. Mozilla also has a similar one called XUL. All of these are trying to accomplish the same thing - make rich applications run ...
Posted in Website | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006
Blogs and magazines have been abuzz recently with the upcoming "RIM Killer" released by Microsoft targeted at Blackberry users worldwide. The actual functionlity is known as "Direct Push" and is described in one of Microsoft blogs.
In essense "Direct Push" is a propertiary protocol running over HTTP. However, unlike RIM's solution ...
Posted in Mobile | 1 Comment »
Saturday, January 14th, 2006
After struggling to find WPA2 drivers for the Microsoft Wireless PCMCIA adaptor (MN-520) for a newly rebuilt laptop, I decided to post instructions as to where to find them. Especially, since this product has been discontinued by Microsoft and for some obscure reason removed them from Windows Update.
Anyway, to instal ...
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Sunday, July 31st, 2005
I had the the Microsoft MN-520 Wireless PCMCIA Card for some time but have never yet used a router with WPA support. With the move and a new wireless setup, I decided to use WPA-PSK for better security over plain WEP. Much to my suprise Linux did not support WPA ...
Posted in Linux | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 24th, 2005
According to the records in the IETF's database (here and here), both SPF and Sender-ID anti-spam proposals were tentatively approved by the IESG (the "approval board" of the IETF) as experimental standards RFCs. It remains to be seen whether any of them will actually put a dent into spam.
Posted in Spam and Email | 2 Comments »