Author Archive
Cisco VPN Mac Client
I needed to get VPN access using a Cisco VPN client over the weekend. I didn’t have access to the PC version so I decided to search for a Mac version if there was one.
Thankfully MacUpdate came to the rescue and I found a Mac flavour of the Cisco VPN client and I was able [...]
A little SugarOS on your Plesk?
There are many quirks which are picked up by using a website management package like Plesk. My remote Linux server has this installed by default on it, and it does simplify a lot of basic operations. It does become difficult when standard Linux / Apache information doesn’t help because Plesk rearranges things into its own [...]
Stored procedure error handling in SQL Server 2000
Today, we’re continuing work on our multipart message aggregation upgrade for a future Esendex release.
One part of the investigations this morning has been looking into how we manage the database access as we add parts of an incoming message to it for later processing. As we have multiple servers processing inbound messages, there was [...]
Of spam and things…
It’s been a few times this last year that I’ve been the victim of a domain spam attack. Sending email appearing to be someone else isn’t a difficult thing to achieve. Yet when someone takes one of your domains and sends spam, well I was going to say on my behalf but I never asked [...]
Checking it out
I have a feeling that a lot of small to medium development operations will still be using Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe to manage their central code-base despite its limitations.
Given that Microsoft have since addressed this hole in their development offerings with the excellent Team Foundation Server which offers a seamless experience within Visual Studio 2005 and [...]
Have you got the Bug?
Being involved in web development work, I have to have a wide range of browsers installed to make sure what I’m creating is accessible to as many people as possible. Whilst I still have a soft-spot for Opera, it is without a doubt that Firefox is the Swiss Army Knife of all browsers.
The ability for [...]
Credit card regular expressions
Following on from my previous post about credit card authentication with regular expressions, I thought I’d share my other discovery.
The BIN Ranges list I found showed a list of Visa cards which were designated ‘ATMOnly. Figuring these would be a good thing to filter out during validation.
There’s plenty of regular expression help about joining pattern [...]
Maestro, music please
We’ve been working on a change request to add Maestro to the credit cards that we accept for ecommerce payments. Switch started in 1988 but has now merged with the Maestro network owned by MasterCard in the UK.
Until recently, if you took Switch payments then UK customers who had new Maestro cards would still be [...]
Credit card validation
I’ve had my first delve into card processing and some of the simple techniques that you can use to validate a card before submitting details to a bank / online card processing service.
XP’s Command Prompt retains old environment variables settings
The following post is courtesy of the IMMWITWIGIOTSS Society to save your brain while it’s still pressing Snooze at home.
Logic would dictate if you update the PATH environment variable then you’d hope the next command you uttered from the command prompt window would use this updated information. You can keep typing ‘echo %PATH%’ till the [...]
