Recently I have started donating to more charities. What I have really liked is that most of them support online donations now which I love. I recently sponsored my sister in the breast cancer walk here in Edmonton online through a very well done site (Congrats to my step-sis and step-mom for doing a 60km walk over two days for this good cause btw). The site showed how much the person had raised towards their goal. A nice feature was that you could leave a message with your donation that appeared on the persons profile page which was nice. A...

Everyone has deadlines which keeps us motivated to work. Personally I can not seem to work without one. The problem is that when a deadline approaches quality seems to decline. You start coding faster, testing less, and missing some of the minute points of spec in my experience. Although it is semantics I like to have a target window for a task that allows the developer to feel they have a bit of room to move other than a set date in time. Clients and deadlines are when things get ugly. When something does not get delivered by that date...

a few years ago I discovered a great project called the world community grid. The project is a distributed computing project that uses your free cpu cycles to help solve some of our major problems. Distributed computing is basically the breaking up of a task to run on multiple computers. So instead of needing an expensive teraflop server to analyze something for years, it can be run on thousands of slower computers but when combined do a massive amount of calculations.Two projects have already been completed. The first project was analyzing differnt smallpox cure candidates. The second project was analyzing...

For many years I have had trouble with people thinking that passwords were the answer to security. Granted they make it so that joe user can not log onto your computer  without knowing or guessing your password. But for anyone with skills passwords are circumventable and the circumvention gets quicker / easier all the time. I am going to focus on cracking windows passwords for this article but the techniques are the same in almost any situation.Password OverviewNT based opperating systems store your password in an encrypted hash on the disk. This used to be done by taking the password...

Seeing as how I have been partying like a rockstar lately (hence the lack of posts). I thought I should at least look the part. So I picked myself up this:... now I just need to learn how to play more than a few notes.Cheat Commando's Rock Rock On!

 Service Pack 1 for vs2003 is finally here and all 156mb can be downloaded from ms's site here. A list of bugs fixed can be found here.

Stats for internet usage for 2005 were just released and so I thought I would share some of the interesting facts. Full article can be read here. Also I have a thing against stats so I will play a bit of devils advocate on it.-Alberta has the second highest internet usage in the country at 71%. This does not mean that people use it often. It could mean that someone had used the internet once.-88% of hoseholds with an income over $86,000 use the internet. Compared to 61% below that line. I assume that most people surveyed are under this...

I have been reading the ever-classic "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". I am a bit behind the times on picking this one up as it was published in 1995. Still a good read if you have no idea about patterns. All the examples are in c++ which is a little hard on the some of the pure .NET developers who have read it. Also some patterns use multiple inheritance which we don't have in the .NET world. I did happen to come accross this site which has all the patterns from the book updated to use .NET and...

One thing I have noticed is that there are numerous ways to debug javascript with visual studio. I thought I would share some of them that I have found over the years.In internet explorer you can go to view->script debugger->Break at next statement. This will cause the debugger to run when the next javascript statement runs in the browser. This is not a feature that is enabled by default. To enable it you will need to go to the advanced tab in internet options and uncheck the "Disable Script Debugging" option and restart IE. This is the method I use most often. Force javascript to...

I hate hate hate web development and for some reason I do it all day and night. Maybe I do it so others don't have too. I am such a hero. The reason I hate it is that it was never meant to do what we are doing with it now. The sheer amount of technology introduced to accomplish such a simple thing as showing someones email inbox takes thousands of lines of code and multiple technologies. I know that I have been on projects that get extended way past there initial design (the current app of 3 years I...