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XAuth
Meebo, the web-based IM service, have proposed a new standard called XAuth. Using a new feature of HTML5, similar to cookies, an authentication token is stored in ‘LocalStorage’ within the browser. Therefore this will only work with modern browsers (IE8+, Safari4+, Chrome3+, FF3+). You can see a demo of Meebo’s proposal at http://www.meebo.com/xauth and also there’s [...]
Would Twitter’s user model help combat email spam?
As Twitter grows, so the number of potential spammers to my daily tweet stream increases. Twitter’s user model is the saving factor in all of this ‘noise’. It prevents me from being overwhelmed and could have important advantages over existing legacy internet services like email. In this blog post I’ll look at whether other internet [...]
When did you last ask an Aardvark a question?
Not too long ago, companies chased the illusive ‘Web 2.0′ buzz-phrase which seemed to only consist of glossy icons and sticking ‘BETA’ somewhere on your new site design. These days it’s ‘social networks’ that is the ‘must-have’ feature for the success of any new online service. Social networks have their uses in finding out what your [...]
Speedy MIME Image decoding using HTML
I’ve been working with our Esendex Email MMS service which forwards any inbound MMS picture messages to an email address. As the picture is MIME encoded I needed a quick way to check the image included. Thanks to a post by Zmeeagain I found the very handy trick of pasting the Base64 encoded text into [...]
Avoid Google keyword detection picking up Firefox ‘aq=’
For those of you who are monitoring or stripping keywords from referrer strings from Google you may be seeking out the query string parameter ‘q=’. Beware that a simple string match on ‘q=’ could lead you to match on the additional Firefox parameter ‘aq=’. This appears in a Google referrer string if the search terms [...]
TechEd : Day 1
Greetings from Barcelona. Today started in the afternoon with the keynote speech from Jason Zander which has introduced new functionality in Visual Studio 2010. A very honest bloke who was brave enough to demo us Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7. Not just taking the safety off, but practically taking the tightrope away as well. [...]
Using MSBuild to deploy a website cross-domain
The task: to have an automated build process which would take the fresh built files and deploy them on a remote web server. The challenge: the remote web server was not in the same domain as the machine with Team Build on it. Initial research found plenty of helpful advice on how to do a [...]
Remote Desktop Connection Smart Sizing
If you use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) a lot then you might be interested in an option that’s not available via the GUI. ‘Smart Sizing’ allows you to scale the screen to the size of the RDC window rather than the default option where the remote desktop gets cropped. If you open a new [...]
C# Abstract Exceptions
We’ve just been writing some new exceptions based initially on an abstract Exception class. When the attempt to write a catch statement to catch all exceptions which inherited from this abstract base class it wasn’t behaving as expected. The gotcha here is that C#/.NET doesn’t allow you to catch exceptions from an abstract class. If [...]
Is Microsoft’s future ‘delicious’?
So have you had chance to see Microsoft’s (supposed) answer to Apple’s excellent Get A Mac adverts yet? Well in case not, I’ve included it after the break. So I get the fact its got people talking because its obtuse, I get the fact that its not tying them to advertising one product but seriously [...]
