Development

Tools for debugging http and https traffic

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:14:00 GMT

I spend a lot of time troubleshooting web applications. My Swiss army tool of choice for all network related issues is WireShark but it falls short when it comes to analyzing SSL encrypted traffic.

FireFox takes forever to load compared to IE7 but its wide range of add-ons can be a life saver at times for developers. I am a heavy user of:

User Agent Switcher which quickly lets me change the user agent of the browser
SwitchProxy lets you quickly swap between proxies. Proxy configuration scripts are great if you always use the same proxies but I frequently have to force a specific proxy to test different web application behaviors.
LiveHTTPHeaders plugs into FireFox so it is able to see all the http traffic in real time. You can filter the request using regular expressions and see https requests in clear text!

Fiddler is also able debug https but it relies on a "man-in-the-middle" approach which has some limitations.

Community Days Milano 2008: 09-10 July

Egil Hogholt — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:35:00 GMT

The agenda is not finalized yet, but I am sure Community days 2008 will be as interesting as the past events.

I doubt I will attend the free event this year as I do not program in .NET at work. I still do some coding for fun but it is hard to justify two days away from work just for fun :-)

I will try to attend some Microsoft events to stay in touch with friends but you are more likely to see me at Python conferences in the future...

Contexts made GTD work for me

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:20:00 GMT

I have played around with GTD for several years. It has worked reasonably well but I recently learned that I have done one thing wrong: I used categories instead of contexts. They sound like the same thing but using context has made a big difference.

In the past I used categories like: "personal" and "work". It works for grouping tasks together but it is a bad idea when you have to choose the next thing to work on as it says nothing about the "context" you require to do them. I could have a personal task like "scan letter" that I actually have to do in the office where I have access to a scanner.

Defining real context makes it very clear what you should work on at any given time. No need to scan through the tasks and discard the ones you cannot work on as you are missing something. These are the contexts I use the most

Computer
Home
Person A/B/C etc: Something to do/discuss the next time I meet the person.
Office
Waiting: Anything I am waiting for ends up in here. I review it on a weekly basis to make sure I'm not loosing track of something

You can find plenty of good contex suggestions here.

Seeing a long lists of things to do regardles of context is just overwhelming and causes stress, so I have extended poToday to use context as well. Changes in version 3 of poToday

Support English date formats
Added a "move to no date" feature
Added context support (using the categories in Outlook).
Support for different screen orientations and sizes

Free essential guides for SQL Server

Egil Hogholt — Sat, 03 May 2008 08:19:00 GMT

SQL Server Magazine has a set of free essential guides regarding many SQL Server tasks. They are targeted at people that are new to the topic and they are short and to the point:

The Essential Guide to Business Intelligence Reporting: Choosing the Right Tool for the Right Job
Virtualization of SQL Server 2008
The Essential Guide to Reporting Services Tips & Tricks
The Essential Guide to Disaster Recovery and Virtualization
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Backup and Recovery
The Essential Guide to Jump Starting Your SQL Server Skills
The Essential Guide to User Continuity
Special Report: Perspectives on SQL Server Sprawl
The Essential Guide to Solving Server Sprawl
The Essential Guide to Analytic Dashboards
The Essential Guide to Antispam Solutions
The Essential Guide to Choosing a Clustering Alternative
The Essential Guide to Table Partitioning and Data Lifecycle Management
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Skills for the Oracle DBA
The Essential Guide to SQL Server Management Fundamentals

Registration is required for the guides I had a look at.

Google App Engine

Egil Hogholt — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:48:00 GMT

Got a great idea for a web site or web service but not the resources to host it? Why not try Google App Engine:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

I am not a big fan of Python as a language, but the service is too cool not to give it a try.

Thanks to Omar for the link.

Installing Ubuntu on Virtual PC 2007

Egil Hogholt — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:50:00 GMT

I was trying to install Ubuntu 7.10 on Virtual PC 2007 but I got this nasty screen when it went into graphics mode during the setup:

It turns out that Ubuntu sets the color depth to 24 bit which Virtual PC doesn't like. This detailed step by step guide shows how to fix the video and mouse issues so Ubuntu works on Virtual PC 2007.

The short version to fix the graphics problems:

Hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 when the screen goes in tilt to drop to a console
Change DefaultDepth 24 to 16 in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 to go back in graphics mode
Hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 to reload XWindows

Microsoft 2008 launch in Milano 28/2 and 29/2

Egil Hogholt — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 08:59:00 GMT

The Microsoft 2008 product launch will take place in Milano 28/2 and 29/2 and will have two separate tracks for IT Professionals (TechNet) and Developers (MSDN) but you can move between them as you wish.

Judging by the presenters it should be pretty good, and it's worth participating just to get the free software kit:

Windows Server 2008
Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition
SQL Server 2008 Standard Edition (CTP with voucher for getting the final version)

You can find the other dates of the 2008 launch tour here.

Living a spam free life with Gmail

Egil Hogholt — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:11:00 GMT

The anti spam filters in Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live Mail are not bad, but they are no way as good as the anti spam filter in Gmail. It is just fantastic. I hardly use my Hotmail account so the majority of my mail is spam:

Last autumn I migrated all my mail to Google Apps. It took me a while to upload my 4.5GB of mail but it was worth it. Instant search and "zero" spam. Since New Year I have only received 1 spam mail in my inbox!

The best feature though has to be the threading. It makes it a lot faster to catch up with e-mail and see the context of long e-mail threads.

Some Gmail productivity tips:

Learn the keyboard shortcuts (did you know that you can “mute“ a thread by pressing “m“?)
Make sure you get early access to new Google Apps features
Use Greasemonkey for Firefox, and install these plugins:

You can use Gmail as your mail reader even if you have another email server like Exchange by adding another account.

Adobe Acrobat 2.0 for Pocket PC fails installation without error

Egil Hogholt — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:24:00 GMT

I did a hard reset of my Windows 5.0 mobile device yesterday as it no longer wanted to synchronize files and notes. I did a partial restore of my data (notes, tasks, mails) using the excellent Spb Backup program as I had the same problem after a full restore.

That meant reinstalling all my apps but that didn't take long until I tried to install Adobe Acrobat 2.0 for the pocket PC. I hardly ever use it but it is handy for bringing along receipts of hotel reservations etc.

The setup started ok with the usual security warning but it failed without giving any sort of error. I even tried the Italian version... It actually installed OK but failed to run which just confirms that it is a bad idea to use localized software. It is impossible to improve software by localizing it and it frequently introduces bugs.

I have done hard resets in the past but this time I restored my data before I reinstalled my apps. That turned out to be the cause of the problem. The Acrobat 2.0 Pocket PC install fails if it find s the Adobe Reader Users Guide.pdf file in the My Documents folder. Deleting the file fixed the problem.

Apps I currently run on my HP rw6815:

References:

Adobe Forum

Assembly load error in SQL Server 2005 after attaching DB

Egil Hogholt — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:59:00 GMT

I recently migrated a Microsoft SQL Server database from one disk drive to another using the sp_detach_db and sp_attach_db stored procedures.

It was on the same machine so I was surprised when I got this half English, half Italian error message:

An error occurred in the Microsoft .NET Framework while trying to load assembly id 65733. The server may be running out of resources, or the assembly may not be trusted with PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS or UNSAFE. Run the query again, or check documentation to see how to solve the assembly trust issues. For more information about this error: System.IO.FileLoadException: Impossibile caricare il file o l'assembly '..., Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' o una delle relative dipendenze. Errore relativo alla protezione. (Eccezione da HRESULT: 0x8013150A) System.IO.FileLoadException: at System.Reflection.Assembly.nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(String assemblyString, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(String assemblyString) The statement has been terminated.

Turns out that the DB had a couple of CLR stored procedures and that they refused to work after the move. SQL Server could find the assemblies but it was still unable to load them. The trust configuration was OK as well.

The problem was that the commands were executed from the SQL Server Development Studio using an account connected via windows integrated security. As a result the DB was attached using the current user, not "sa", as the owner of the DB.

Using sp_changedbowner to set sa as the owner fixed the problem.