Simon Fell > Its just code > August 2003

No doubt you've seen the announcement of the first rev of the Microsoft.com web services. I just whipped up some PocketSOAP code to call it. It uses a WS-Security UsernameToken to pass around your credentials, and whilst your password is digested on the wire, the client gets to pick the Nonce, there's no server challenge part, so whilst you can't work out the original password from a wire trace, there's no need, the included password digest and nonce values are all you need to access the API. Completely open to replay attacks / sniffing credentials, and at the end of the day I don't see how this is anymore secure than standard HTTP basic authentication. On the other hand its a massive improvement over the clusterfuck that is the MS-CRM web services API. (in terms of the API design, not the authenication model, MS-CRM uses IIS's HTTP based authenitication support)

Corn is probably one of the most amazing treats one can grill. It requires in some cases almost no preparation, no eating utensils, and when fresh, doesn't even need dressing. Over the course of countless BBQs, some lucky accidents,... [majordojo] Some corn good eats from majordojo.

Two small blasts near biotech offices in Emeryville, the roads are still roped off.

aka black & blue tooth, I've been trying to get my nokia 3650 configured as a modem for my laptop (via an Ambicom bluetooth adapter), all I have to show for 5 hours of installing & configuring software and hardware is a headache and the ability to send pictures from the phone to the laptop. Considerably under whelmed so far.

ok, which patch killed eVC -> ActiveSync ?

Congrats to Paul and Byrne on the release of SOAP::Lite v0.6

Joe has an interesting write up on PUT with Apache.

Well, its been a sucky couple of weeks for anyone managing a large number of windows machines, makes me glad I don't do sys admin stuff anymore (other than the half a dozen machines at home, but that doesn't count), and especially glad that The Bat! is so much better than Outlook. Thanks to Firebird, Agent & The Bat!, Visual Studio is the only Microsoft app that I spend any serious amount of time using these days. POPFile has positively rocked at keeping all the worm related crap out of my inbox.

• Yerba Buena Gardens Festival continues to run, the SF Mime troop performance was fantastic.
• Brad convinced me to read Redemption Ark despite my misgivings on Revalation Space, and I couldn't put it down, not only was it a great read, it resolved some of the issues I had with RS, and also leaves a few unanswered questions, ready for the next one.
• Also recently read The Hacker & The Ants, Spaceland & Flatland, all excellent.
• I picked up a copy of Senor Coconut's Smoke on the water at the weekend, hillarious, and their Kraftwerk covers are great (Kudos to Kelley for tipping me off to Senor Coconut a while back)

Brent's Safari tip about using the wheel click to open a link in a new tab also works in Firebird.

Scott asks if the PEA Process is backwards. Both Greg and Dare seemed to be involved to some degree or other, the recent Newsgator release included support for reading Pie feeds, as for the rest, well its an open process, whoever wants to get involved is welcome to do so.

I'm currently reading Steve's Pocket PC Network Programming, not finished it yet, but like what I see so far, the connection manager section will come in useful, I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems like it should solve an existing PocketHTTP problem where it tries to make a socket connection (and fails) before the tcp/ip stack is happy (and I've heard reports that under PocketPC 2003, it can take up to 15 seconds post resume before the tcp/ip stack can actually make a connection, yikes!). One thing I was hoping to find, but doesn't seem to be covered is the SSL support that's built into the winsock stack on PocketPC, a pity as the current docs are pathetic to say the least.

• Lots of chatter about msblaster worm on the ntbugtraq list. (disapointed to see server 2003 on the affected list)
• Installed POPFile a week ago, already its upto 94% accuracy in spotting spam, I've been impressed with it so far.
• the browse database/lookup tools for c++ in vs 2003 suck big time, how can i hack the vastly better vc6 browse database back into vs2003. Or even better just take the vc7.1 compiler/linker and drop it into the vc6 ide.
• the dsl outage seems to be over after 3 hours

anyone worked out how to build zlib 1.1.4 with VS2003 (aka VC7.1) ?

Tweaked the pie feed so that modified appears on all entries, and the issued timestamp should now correctly reflect my timezone, not the timezoene of the server running the blog. I'm still in 2 minds about requirement that issued be in the users timezone (using the relevant tz offset),

Despite the earlier concerns that some people had over verbosity, its interesting to note now my pie feed is 14K and my RSS feed is 20K. (although in fairness there are more extensions used in RSS feed, but not 50%'s worth)

If everything went to plan, the Pie feed is now upto v0.2.
Well, looks fine to me, but the validator claims its not valid. I don't get how modified is required for an entry, what if its not been modified?, hopefully xml:base will make a comeback (last time i checked on the wiki people seemed to be for it) and i also hope people will stop trying to subset it (xml:base that is).

I've been working on an ASP.NET app that uses Context.RewritePath to give friendly style URLs (ala mod_rewrite), everything was working great, but have run into a problem where it doesn't play well with smartNav and redirects. Seems smartNav (which I'm slowing growing to hate its implementation (but not the idea), see my earlier problems with large uploads and smartnav) is not handling the redirect request. The chain of events is

1. user surfs to 1.aspx
2. a http module (or global.asax) calls Context.RewritePath("one.aspx") during the BeginRequest event
3. one.aspx displays a web form to the user
4. user clicks on the webform, it does a postback, one.aspx handles the postback event and redirects to two.aspx
5. IE shows a blank page, with one.aspx in the address bar, it appears to just eat the redirect request

This is on ASP.NET 1.1 with IIS 5.0. There's a simple repro case here. Google didn't turn up anything, suggestions welcome, but don't suggest turning off smartNav, I need it.

Sam is looking to do SOAP based digest authentication. I'd suggest you start with the "Basic and Digest Authentication" spec that Rich Salz & Bob Cunnings put together, I did some implementations of this a while back, pretty straight forward.

Finally got around to supporting the <modified> element in the pie feed.

Marc has coverage of last nights Pie dinner. Was great to finally put faces to so many names.