wireless internet

I'm sitting here in my hotel room connected to the Internet. I was lucky to the fact that my computer was able to scan and find an open wireless network. I don't know where my connection is coming from nor do I know who's paying for it. But it's nice that it's available.

While pondering about this I thought of a wild idea. One of the things that we would all like is a truely wireless internet. If I could just walk around and just be connected and not have to worry about it that would be just great. My thought was if enough people opened thier wireless networks we might have a system that provides adequate service. If you drive by my neighborhood you'll probably be able to connect to my wireless network. If i visit San Francisco I could connect to somebody else's network. Now assuming we put in some check points like firewalls and maybe bandwidth throttling or something to protect our personal networks this might just work out. It could almost be like an open-source distributed wireless network. A system where we aren't totally relying on some big corporation's monopoly. I don't know if the idea would fly but it sure would be sweet!

EOW - End of Week

I'm running on empty. For the last week or two I've been on a coding binge which resulted in many late nights along side not being able to sleep in. It's all for the good though. I'm really enjoying what I'm doing.

Right now I'm building "Smart Clients" for our project at work. It's giving me a good opportunity to really learn Windows Forms programming and different deployment scenarios. Currently I'm working on extending the DataGrid control to allow combo boxes and other controls to appear as a cell on the grid. I looked at a few 3rd-party data grids but decided not to include them in my project because I want to keep the dependency list short. (I already had an episode with deploying Crystal Reports over the web)

I'm leaving on the Amtrak to San Francisco tomorrow morning at 6:00AM. It's about a 4 or 5 hour trip from Hanford, CA so I should arrive sometime around noonish. I'm looking forward to the VSLive conference. It should be a educational experience.

Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components

"Forgot to mention Nikhil's book: Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components. For those of you that don't know Nikhil wrote the ASP.NET data controls, was one of the principle dev leads for all of the ASP.NET controls, and is just a super star all around developer." [http://www.simplegeek.com/2003/02/06.html#a169]

Sweet! ASP.NET Server Controls has to be one of the most practical features of the .NET framework. I'm sure there are developers out there who know how messy writing full blown web apps can get with a basic scripting language. ASP.NET provides a full blown OOP environment for developing sites with. Sounds like this book might be able to help out with extending that environment. I'm just surprised there are so few books covering this subject right now.

Smart Clients

I've been building a couple of proposals at work based on "Smart Clients". This technique offers some really great advantages like no touch deployment and small DLL's. They are essentially .NET User Controls embedded on a web page.

Given your clients have the .NET Framework this has potential of becoming a common way of delivering applications. At my last job we developed our entire product with ActiveX controls on web pages. In most cases it was fine but sometimes we would rack our brains out dealing with DLL Hell issues. Hopefully we'll have a few minor issues with .NET smart clients.

I've been researching Visual Studio.NET wizards. I'd like to build a project type for Smart Clients. There are a couple of basic steps involved so it should be fairly easy.

It's working now.

I think I got things working now. I wrote a little bit about it.

blogging ventures

I'm liking bloggerPro. It's very responsive and has a few new neat features like "Upload File" and "Post as Draft". I'm currently in the process of integrating Blogger with CityDesk. I like the publishing feel of CityDesk and the ubiquitous blogging of Blogger. I just got to get the two systems to play nicely.

ahhhh....

It was a nice crisp morning ...

Smashing the Stack

I was having a discussion about buffer overflows with a co-worker the other day.  I was describing to him how I was in awe by the ability of those who are able to get the overflow bits to work out in a way able to call a different address of code. The friend of mine, who let's just say happens to have a past with software vulnerabilities, responded to me in the respect of, "Na...it's really no big deal". He recommended that I read an article written by a "friend" of his:

"Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit"

Shell code is the stuff that's stuffed into memory and executed by a buffer overflow.  With a set of basic tools like a C compiler and debugger one is able to take command of a system without much effort.
So I came back to my friend and said, "Okay...B***y.  You're right...it's not a big deal =)"

VSLive 2003

I just registered for VSLive 2003 in San Francisco.  Scoble mentioned a .NET Blogger's dinner the Saturday night before the event. Anybody interested in hooking up?  I'll be in SF from Feb 8 thru Feb 15.  Email me if you're interested: richard@caetano.com

Testing 1, 2, 3...

hello world - testing with bloggerPro