The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Registration Keys

    Over the weekend I finally spent some time to tackle the problem of registration keys.  Particularly, generating them.  The last piece of software I attempted this was WakeUp! Alarm Clock, with a very cheesy, homegrown routine for creating a key tied to the user’s name.  I never ran across any cracks/keygens for WakeUp! but I’m 99.999% sure that that’s because I charged a meager $5 for it.

    With Chef, however, I’m planning on a steeper price tag and don’t want to make the mistake of using an easily cracked scheme.  So, I turned my attention to the cryptographic services provided by .NET and now have a simple and, what should be, effective solution using public key cryptography.

    I haven’t integrated it into the application yet, but that shouldn’t take too long.  Once the code is in place, I’ll start strong naming the assemblies and even obfuscate them.  The obfuscation will prevent the casual snooper from using a tool such as Reflector to simply copy code and recompile it into a working replica of Chef.  The strong naming will then ensure that someone cannot release a cracked version of my assemblies with the registration limitations removed.  Pretty cool I think.

    Today I spent some time reviewing several payment processing options.  Currently, RegNow is the leading candidate.

  • New Category

    Just created a new Tech subcategory called Chef to put all of the Chef software related items.

  • Internet upgrade

    This week we received a letter in the mail from Insight Communications, our cable provider. At first I just thought it was a bill, so didn’t open it right away.  But when I did, I found out that we are having our internet upgraded for free, this month!  Our current service is something like 384kb down and 4Mb up and will be going to 1Mb up and 10Mb down.  Wooooo!!

  • Beta by Thanksgiving?

    A while back I tossed around the notion of having a beta of Chef available for testing by Thanksgiving.  So far I’m doing quite well with this goal.  Now that the setup situation has been resolved, I can work on a few other issues that have to be done before I add the few final features that will be in the 1.0 product.  It may not be too far-fetched to see the first beta available in the coming weeks, so if you’d like to give it a try I would be very appreciative.  Just shoot me an email or comment here.

  • Chef, Sql Express, and Installers

    Over the past week or so I have been reviewing the landscape of Installers that I can use to get Chef installed on people’s machines. The landscape has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked, with a lot more small install authoring tools available. Before, it was just InstallShield or Wise Installer – now there’s NSIS, InnoSetup (I know, not new..), AdvancedInstaller, and several other viable tools.

    And after carefully reviewing many of them, I’ve run into road blocks with my setup needs that can’t be fulfilled without spending upwords of $500. So I now have a setup using Visual Studio 2005’s deployment projects. It’s not quite what I wanted when I first started down the road but it’s not too bad either. In fact, I may actually end up liking this method a bit more. Read on for details.

    (more…)

  • 2-0

    We won again tonight, 2-1.

  • Soccer

    Tonight was our first soccer game.  We won 1-0.  I’ve never played soccer in my life and was the goalie.

    Now I’ll explain why the hell Ana and I (and Jay, with Katherine joining next week) ended up on an indoor soccer field.   At my work a group of people have been fielding a team for a few years now.  They play at the local indoor soccer facility against other people who don’t play soccer professionally – think along the lines of intramural sports.  Three of these guys sit around me at work and suckered me into playing this year with them.  I’ve turned them down repeatedly since I’ve never once kicked a soccer ball, let alone play a game.  So now the four of us (Ana, Jay, Katherine, and I) will be playing soccer for the next month and a half.

  • Tickets

    I noticed on Friday that Garrison Keillor is coming to the Sangamon Auditorium here in Springfield so I purchased a pair of tickets for Ana and I to see him.  For those that haven’t heard of him, or Prairie Home Companion, or Lake Wobegon – google them.  He’s a great storyteller that can make the hours pass with is voice.  We can’t wait to see the show.

    I then noticed that Yo-Yo Ma is going to be at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra next April, so I got us a pair of tickets to that too.  I enjoy a lot of his music and he should be awesome to listen to in person.

  • Visual Studio Addin

    At work yesterday I created my first Visual Studio Addin.  Now that I know how to do it, I’m going to create one for something I’ve always wanted: launch windows explorer on a folder in the solution explorer.  There apparently used to be a powertoy for this feature, but that was for VS2003.

  • Justin’s a Gamer

    Last week, Justin Long proclaimed his desire to be a gamer. So he ordered a new PC and it arrived early this week. It’s kinda hard to be a gamer when all you have at your disposal is Minesweeper and Solitaire, so he had to order Myst IV and Battlefield 2 (to join us in games).  Well, Myst arrived yesterday and he spent the rest of the day playing it.  The guy who says he’s usually in bed by 10 was up until 1 this morning and had no recollection of time passing.

    We’re not too sure if this is better than his last great pasttime: Beer drinking at Spammy’s.  I’ll keep you posted.