ITauthor

I went Christmas shopping at the weekend in Princes Street in Edinburgh. Princes Street is a long, straight street, with shops on one side and Princes Street Gardens on the other side, with Edinburgh Castle high above the gardens. At either end of the street is a Waterstones. I generally start at one end, spend half an hour or so in Waterstones, then fight my way along, through the crowds to the other end (visiting a few shops, as required), then spend maybe an hour in the other Waterstones, then either get a bus, or fight my way back along and pop in for one last browse. Inevitably I come back with more books than anything else, and usually at least some of them are for me. So at the weekend I spent a good deal of time looking for starter books on C#. The problem was that the books are mainly either all incredibly dry code, code and more code, with no examples of real programs, or, if there are examples, they're all just little command line things. Or they're Visual Studio books that tell you all about how to draw a button and a drop-down list, but don't give you many examples of useful little Windows applications using C# - which is what I was after. Anyway I settled on a couple of books: C# for Dummies and a nice big book on Visual C#. I'll digest these over Christmas. When I was looking for C# info on the web I also came across the following site that has a big collection of links to C# development tools: http://sharptoolbox.madgeek.com/

IE has a vulnerability that allows the owner of a page to disguise the location of a page in the IE address bar. In the example this at: http://www.zapthedingbat.com/security/ex01/vun1.htm the page appears to a Microsoft page, with the address www.microsoft.com. In fact it's nothing to do with Microsoft. I must admit using the domain in the address bar to reassure myself before filling in any online forms. I now use Firebird as my default browser. The trick described in the above link doesn't work in Firebird. But maybe some other trick does. Beware!

When I'm working from home, I use PuTTY to port forward from ports on my computer, to ports on the network servers at work. This allows me to do stuff like reading my mail using Thunderbird and browsing the company intranet. Until now I've been using IE as my default browser, but I've switched to Firebird (for no particular reason except, perhaps, that it's probably slightly less of a security risk, and it conforms more rigidly to W3C standards). However, when plugged in the URL:port for the company intranet, Firebird spat back a terse message saying that that port was blocked for security reasons. I at first assumed this was ZoneAlarm doing its business. But after digging around in ZoneAlarm and finding no reason why it should be blocking this port on Firebird but not IE, I did a Google search and found the following useful page about Mozilla port blocking: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/PortBanning.html The port I was using (picked at random) was indeed on the blocked list. I switched ports and it works fine.

In a recent posting to his weblog, Russell Beattie lists some of the things he'd like to get round to doing, then comments: Obviously I don't have 1/10th of the bandwidth to get this all done or even started even if I was a much more organized and productive person than I am now. Which leads to the Geek's Dilema: Which technology will be useful later on. Like I've said a zillion times in the past, there's never been a technology that I've played with and learned that at sometime in the future hasn't paid off at work or on a job. So its important that I do play and keep exploring technology and working on pet projects, but there isn't enough time in the day. I know exactly how this feels. Yesterday I was reading about C# in a computer magazine and it really made me think I should find some time to learn C#. I remember thinking the same thing, way back, when C# was still just a clever name and few people had yet got their hands on it. Until now I've always tried to resist the temptation to dabble. Part of me wants to get into it. Another part says no, you're a technical author with a family, you don't need to know about C#. I'm prone to being a Jack of all trades, master of none, so I try to limit myself to spending time on authoring stuff, web stuff and Perl – in an attempt to master those. But then Jack whispers in my ear: wouldn't it be great to write little Windows applications – it would be really useful – I could write Windows versions of the Perl programs I use, then people with no knowledge of Perl, and without Perl on their machine, could run them from their own machines, click-only fashion. Resist! resist!

I couldn't work out how to add newsgroups in Thunderbird. This explains how: http://www.nidelven-it.no/articles/introduction_to_thunderbird_8 complete with screenshots. Dead easy, once you know how!