On Saturday, I finally got the chance to do something I’ve long waited for – Sky Diving. That’s right. Climbing well past the height where airplanes allow you to remove your seatbelts. Jumping from said perfectly good airplane. Throwing myself to the ground at 120 mph. As soon as we landed, all I could think about was doing it again. We picked http://www.skydivekapowsin.com as our drop zone, as they offer the best rates, the highest jumps, and a great view.
KBCafe recently posted an entry, “Desparately seeking C#.” I’ve gotta say, there’s a desparate shortage of technical jobs in Toronto, let alone C# jobs. Let’s not forget about salaries – the job market in Toronto pays a LOT less than jobs in the US. Even taking into account crazy cost of living in some US cities. In July of 2002, I graduated from the University of Toronto with a specialist (Hons.
In an earlier post, I wrote a brief overview of Monad’s three main security features: Not allowing users to double-click on Monad scripts by default Requiring that all scripts be signed by a trusted publisher Requiring that users explicitly invoke scripts in the current directory The discussion was helpful, but a little abstract. How do the security features of Monad compare to those of other shells? How exactly do Monad’s security features prevent a scripting virus attack?
Well, Scott and Omar have been busy again, and have just released DasBlog 1.8. It’s added a few helpful new features, and plenty of themes. The upgrade went painlessly as far as I can tell – be sure to let me know if you see any issues! I’ve set “BlogXP” as my theme – it sure is beautiful. My pet peeve of the old “Discreet Blog Blue” was that the sidebar would float all around, and generally mess with layout.
Just as a reminder, the second Monad technet webcast is happening right now (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277852&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US. I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here. [Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]
If you’ve read Adam’s post ("Preparing for Slashdot",) you probably read how we worked to inform the Slashdot crowd via early entries in the discussion. Luckily, they were moderated up fairly quickly, and people were able to continue commenting with quite a bit more basis in fact than the original article provided. Often, this is called “Astroturfing,” alluding to “fake grass” in a grass-roots movement. Scoble brought it up, as have some internal discussions over the past few days.
F-Secure has reported on some recent work by Second Part To Hell on a Monad scripting virus ("First Vista Virus Found"). It’s a misleading title, as it’s an issue that affects any vehicle for any executable code on any operating system. There’s an excellent treatment of shell script viruses on Virus Bulletin that covers this issue, but predates it by 2 years: Unix Shell Scripting Malware. The fact that MSH is used as the execution vehicle is really a side-note, as it does not exploit any vulnerabilities in Monad.
Just as a reminder, the first Monad technet webcast is happening today (9:30am PST to 11:00 am PST): http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032277850&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US. The next one is next week, I’ll post a reminder then, as well. I posted more about the Technet Webcasts here. [Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]
I recently stumbled upon this blog entry that expanded on a piece I wrote a few days ago: Command Line Shortcut for Repetitive Operations. (Hankatsu?)’s entry is in Japanese, so I don’t know what it says. In fact, for all I know, he or she could be making fun of me. In any case, the code included with the blog entry shows a quck way to download sequentially numbered files from the internet – such as File001.
Josh Ledgard recently wrote an excellent post: Two Ideas to Cut off Duplicate Questions in Online Forums. It deals with a problem that clogs almost every technical community: some users treat the group as their personal support oracle. This happens in online forums, mailing lists, IRC, blogs, and more. Heck, I’d say that 70% of the questions posted to our internal Microsoft mailing lists could have been solved with a few minutes of research.