Amazon just released a new web service, S3, this week. I’ll admit that I have the urge to write something that makes use of it. There are quite a few people bitching about it on various forums, saying that the price a too steep if you’re going to store hundreds of GB; that may be true, but how many people are really going to do that?? I could see myself using a couple GB, and at $0.15/GB per month it seems quite cheap. The fact that there are no startup fees and you pay only for what you store/transfer make it very appealing.
-
Tornado
As many of you are aware, the Springfield area was hit pretty hard by 2 tornados late Sunday night. Each of these destroyed parts of the city. While there are some areas that are now completely unrecognizable, I wanted to let you know that we were left untouched. We heard the winds and the transformer blow, but there was no damage to our house or the houses of our family members who also live in town. I thank God that no one in the family was greatly effected and that no one in the city was killed.
-
ldifde.exe
Learned something worth remembering and passing along today at work regarding the utility ldifde that microsoft ships with both Windows Server and ADAM.
I was attempting to import an ldif file into ADAM with ldifde but the file kept getting spit back at me with “Invalid DN Syntax”. I had imported this exact same file a couple weeks ago on another identical machine, so it wasn’t making any sense. The command I was executing included a macro of sorts (#configurationNamingContext) but it wasn’t getting expanded like it should have, causing the import to fail.
After some investigation, it appears two different versions of the utility are shipped, and only the one in the C:WindowsADAM directory seems to work with the macros. I had been running the command from a different directory, so the version in system32 was getting used and causing problems.
So, if you’re trying to import and ldif file into ADAM, be sure you’re running ldifde from the correct location!
-
Managed Spy
Some of you developers out there I’m sure have heard of our used Spy++ to investigate windows messages. Microsoft has posted Managed Spy which does some of what the original app did but for managed .net code.
-
Rain
I’m sitting here working with my window open listening to the light rain outside, and the birds chirping away. It may look like crap outside, but it sure sounds great.
-
Hello
I just wanted to submit my first post as a hello to all who read the Johnson Blog. Now that I have my own password I will make a point to post regularly.
-
Welcome Ana
In an effort to actually make the subtitle of the blog correct, I have given Ana an account so she can start posting!
-
ADAM update
Last I mentioned, I was learning about the benefits of Active Directory Application Mode. The code is 95%+ complete, and the solution is working exactly as I wanted. ADAM has fit in wonderfully and is providing a very good foundation for an authorization and authentication system.
There really haven’t been many problems, other than a very small universe of documentation. The .NET 2.0 class library has some great additions for dealing with security descriptors (System.Security.AccessControl) and directory services (System.DirectoryServices) in general. Without these namespaces, it would have been a bear to deal with.
When tasked with building this stuff, I first looked at incorporating Microsoft’s Authorization Manager (AzMan) which can also sit atop an Active Directory. It provided a lot of what our solution needed but lacked one critical piece – the ability to have a security hierarchy. It only allows you to define a flat list (technically a hierarchy of two levels) of operations to secure when we needed a tree. So, building our own on ADAM has been working out great!
-
C#
About a week ago, a coworker and I ran across a nifty C# operator that neither of us has seen before: the “??”.
We both know and use the ternary operator (“?”), but it took a quick look in the MSDN documentation to learn that A ?? B will return A if A is not null, B otherwise.
So instead of X = (A == null) ? B : A; we can write X = A ?? B;
That’s all for now class.
-
Update
The piano was delivered on Friday, courtesy of Gene Grman Music. Ana is now able to practice almost daily which she’s really happy about. And I no longer have to listen to that damn electronic keyboard she has been practicing on!
I’ve never in my life been able to read music, let alone ever tried to play anything remotely musical. But this piano has been very interested and I’ve since purchased a few books on how to read music and introductions to piano playing. I find that whenever I sit down to practice, several hours goes by without me knowing it. I must say, I can see progress in just the few days I’ve played around on it, and that makes me happy.
The Johnson Blog 