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$WEB_CORP has taken on the maintenance contract of a particular site and the client has asked for some changes to be made along with fixing up some SQL injection vulnerabilities. My first step was to GET all the site’s scripts via FTP so I could create a local DEV instance of it and was surprised to see the following: $ ls -1 index*.asp index-old.asp index.11May2007.asp index.11Oct2006.asp index.13March2006.asp index.18aug2006.asp index.20Feb2007.asp index.20Jan2006.asp index.

I’ve been having great fun with tunneling connections through SSH lately and today it dawned on me that I could close another hole in my firewall by connecting to my Jabber server via a tunnel. In the past, when I’ve been working remotely, I’ve made changes to my firewall by connecting to my public-facing machine; from there to my desktop machine through a DMZ-pinhole and once a presence has been established within the “green zone” browsing to the routers web-interface with lynx.

I’ve just committed vdaExtensions 1.1 to SVN: I had had enough of stressing out about minor aspects of the user interface and just went for it and published the application. Only to discover that ClickOnce wasn’t working on the target desktops, doh! The problem was with the assemblies for the ReportViewer class. I have SQL Server 2005 Express installed on my machine and so had no problems with the app getting access to the appropriate libraries at runtime, but it didn’t look like the .

I’ve been finishing off the next release of vdaExtensions seemingly forever and have had all the functionality sorted out for ages and without much in the way of trouble but I’ve been struggling with the user interface. The only contents of my main form are a MenuStrip and the meat of the app, a DataGridView. Throughout the use of the program the DataGridView can change dimensions: information can be added/changed/removed and I’ve also added the ability to show/hide the various columns of the control, with the constraint that at least one column must be visible at all times.

The past fortnight has proved fruitful: each weekday I have risen early, went to the gym and spent the rest of the day at the office plugging away in Visual Studio. It’s been good to get back into developing vdaExtensions: it’s first incarnation was completed in August and I asked a few members of staff to try it out and Phil was the only one to give me feedback, I don’t know if anyone else even used it!

I finally got around to doing something today that I had been meaning to do since I got Kubuntu installed on my home desktop, namely, setting up a virtual machine running Windows XP so I can perform DVD encoding/editing/authoring. I’m a relative novice when it comes to these techniques and I haven’t put enough effort into finding the equivalent native Linux applications, so it is a case of better the devil you know for the foreseeable future.

I’ve just finished hacking new features into a web-app my colleague Kev developed. Yep, I was deep into M$ country but as always nothing beats the sense of satisfaction that problem solving brings (for me anyways.) Any time I’ve went back over my own code I usually ask myself “what was I thinking of here?” so over the past few days I’ve felt pretty much like that what with stepping into some one else’s work and trying to understand what is being done, how it is being done and getting acclimatised with a foreign coding style.

I’ve just published the first release of a little application I wrote to manage the list of internal extension & direct dial numbers of staff here at the VDA. A few members of staff have been asked to give it a whirl and report back. Up until now it’s been the responsibility of one of the admin team to maintain a spreadsheet containing the info and distribute printed copies of it to everyone else.

Well, I’ve started a million different projects and finished none, so in an effort to quell the sense of dis-ease I’ve went back to whatever seemed nearest to completion before I abandoned it… …which has meant getting stuck back into Classic ASP and MS-SQL, not nice for a Linux-fanboy-wannabie like myself ;) Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica has been providing much needed mental stimulation while I at least try to make some progress on this thing.

I made the mistake of blindly installing all the Windows Updates on my machine at work yesterday and so installed the lastest version of Windows Genuine Advantage… When I was creating a Ghost image for of our new desktops I didn’t have access to our legitimate Volume License Code and so just used a pirated one, big mistake! At login this morning I was welcomed with a dialog box like this (not my screenshot):