Coding Horror has a great article about CAPTCHAs up which cna be found here. I have seen / heard of programs that defeat captchas but ideas like the turing porn farm (read the article about this) are a smart way to defeat captchas or any other human / machine difference engine but not widely implemented (yet). I also like to bring up the point that CAPTCHAs prevent the visually impared from validating themselves. I have seen some websites that have an audio clip that the visually impared can use to validate but this is fairly uncommon.

I keep trying to hammer home the message of having layered security measures. Even so I am still bad / lazy at it. I like that microsoft has included request filtering right into asp to help prevent xss attacks. This filtering means that someone can not submit a comment to a blog that contains something like this: <script>alert("Ping");</script>. While that is not harmfull you can see the power of it. But security is like an onion and should have many layers. Although we rely on having the request filtering on what happens if someone finds a way around it? Are...

Well this weekend my neighbors invited me over to do carve some pumpkins. Apparently last year I got a bit of a reputation for having a good pumpkin (we had a Rick James pumpkin. There is no photo as some stole it!). My ex was the one that carved it but I guess I gotta keep the title. See if you can guess which one is mine?So if you can not tell its a computer pumpkin. It has 2 wireless antennas for horns, some power supply fan grills for eyes, a floppy drive for a mount, and a power cord...

Last night I talked at Edmug about Adept's SQL Diff tool. One of the questions asked was "how much?" I was incorrect in my quotation so thought I would let everyone know that a personal license costs $240.00 (USD I assume). My appologies for the mistake.

Well they finally got me. Tonight I will be presenting at Edmug along with Donald Belcham, Justice Gray, Christina Gray, and Steven Rockarts. The presentation should be an interesting change as Edmug has never had a panel presentation. Tonights presentation will be about our favorite tools. So besides Nunit which should be everyones favorite tool, I decided to do a presentation on Adepts SQL Difference tool which I use regularly to compare two databases to generate my scripts for the next environment. While it should be a simple tool and presentation I have been supprised at how many people do not...

I have been taking a ninjitsu class in the west end (of Edmonton) for the past couple of months now which has been a ton of fun. The instructor is starting to cover some basics again so it is a perfect time to start in the class for anyone interested. You can then become part of my elite squad of ninja death coders. I am currently the only one so now is your chance to get in on the ground floor. For those interested shoot me an email (dave at solidhouse.com)

So last night I went to one of my favorite punk bands of all time.... Pennywise. I have never seen them live and well they are probably going to retire / not ever return to edmonton again. First of all the venue was REd's. What a hole. I have never been to a show there and I hope that I never have to go again. We drank in the lounge that they have there by the arcade while the opening bands were playing as well.... they suck. They had one bartender there and a sold out show. Took 20 minutes...

I have been following the security focus mailing lists for years now so it is interesting what kind of trends you notice (SecurityFocus.com is now owned by symantec but has lots of great security articles and mailing lists). One thing I have noticed is the lack of opperating system vulnerabilities. There used to be windows worms, tcp overflows in *nix, etc. but not anymore. I really wonder why this is. Well here are my theories.1. Age. Developers of opperating systems are now quite experienced and know that their are hackers out there and really code with this in mind.2. XPSP2....

I have to give the edmug guys a hand for organizing such an awsome event. The presenters were awsome, Venue was awsome (put coders next to coffee and all is well), turnout... awsome. You guys did such a great job I really can not think of anything that could have been done better! I seriously mean that.As for the presentations.... well awsome (note: I do not own a thesaurus but awsome is a pretty accurate word). From seeing Justice and Steve show what the fuss is about ruby, Neils excelent examples of using oo techniques and patterns, and JPs suprising...

Jean-Paul was one of the first people whos presentation blew me away. Everytime I see him talk about something I learn something. Even his MVP presentation on thursday night taught me some new things and I thought I had a fairly good handle on MVP. Today JPs talk was "Generics : They’re not just about collections". I instantly thought "well what more can you do with them". After seeing this that would be like me saying "well what more can you do with... matter". I was blown away by the ingenious uses that were demonstrated and all the different ways...

I guess it is up to me to fill in the blanks from the other room at Edmonton Code Camp. I saw Neil Bourgeois's presentation of OO Programming in .NET for Procedural Developers. I have discovered that even though I uses "classes", "objects", and "inerhitance" I really do not know how to do it well (if JP has taught me anything it is to be humble about my abilities). But I digress. Neils presentation started with a fairly simply application of a dog dating service. When he opened up the code I thought to myself "hey I have seen code...