Radical Development | 2009 | July

July 8, 2009
by Steven Swafford
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Internet Explorer 8.0 and The Marketing Behind It

In my opinion Internet Explorer 8.0 is a long awaited welcome edition the the family of web browsers. In my day job I have been using Internet Explorer 6.0 for so long that it seems as though I have become oblivious to other browsers on the market. Well that is until I run across an problem with the lack of standards in earlier versions of Internet Explorer. I totally understand the reasons behind why corporations do not upgraded to the “latest and greatest” but to be stuck with IE6 for years almost numbs ones soul. Luckily on my home PC …

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July 7, 2009
by Steven Swafford
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Internet Explorer ActiveX Security Hole

If you have not heard by now there is a sever security flaw with Internet Explorer running on Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server when it comes to ActiveX. It essentially comes down to the possibility of remote code execution. Purpose of Advisory: To provide customers with initial notification of the vulnerability and to provide information to help protect customers. Advisory Status: Issue Confirmed, Security Update Planned Recommendation: Review the suggested actions and configure as appropriate. References Identification CVE Reference CVE-2008-0015 Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 972890 There is both a fix here and a workaround in the event you can not …

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July 6, 2009
by Steven Swafford
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Windows 7 Tips: Round Two

Sharing Your Screen This is a welcomed feature in my humble opinion. I can not recall how many times I have fought the overhead projector to properly conduct a presentation in a team environment. Windows 7 brings to the table a utility named displayswitch.exe. If you are more of a command line guru Microsoft has you covered here as well. The command line switches are: /internal, /clone, /extend, /external Otherwise you can use the hotkey WIN+P to access these settings: Help Desk Support Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to report an issue with your …

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July 5, 2009
by Steven Swafford
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CodeSnip: Easy Data Encryption Using the DBMS Obfuscation Toolkit from Oracle

If you use Oracle as your datastore and need to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data, then Steven has a stored procedure code snippet that you can use in no time. Introduction Encryption and decryption is fairly common in many web applications today. If you are using an Oracle Database as your data store, then you can easily implement encryption and decryption at the database level using the DBMS Obfuscation Toolkit provided by Oracle. Establish Table and Package Create the table. Simply cut and paste the PL/SQL as shown in Listing 1. Listing 1: Create Encryption Table Next you will need …

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July 4, 2009
by Steven Swafford
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Mono Development With The MonoDevelop 2.0 IDE

I have heard of this cross platform and open source .NET development framework for some time now and If I recall correctly I first heard of it on .Net Rocks years ago. Show #75 | 8/8/2004 (120 minutes) Miguel de Icaza talks Mono! Show #313 | 2/5/2008 (63 minutes) Miguel de Icaza and Geoff Norton on Mono Over the years, I hear so many people stating open source is the way to go and in many cases this may be true. It all comes down to the needs of the business, products, and individuals so I am not even going …

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