Geospecialling

Time 2020-09-10 13:04:38

Web Name: Geospecialling

WebSite: http://www.geospecialling.com

ID:42043

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We recently implemented two factor authentication for VPN access to our LAN. We use Yubikeys from Yubico to provide one time passwords (OTPs) which, when combined with the domain login and password, protect us from an array of attacks that password-only solutions can never solve.You hang yubikeys on your keychain so you always have them with you and there are zero interoperability concerns (unlike smartphone solutions such as google’s authenticator). A yubikey requires no battery but draws its power from the USB port you plug it into. To your computer, it looks just like a keyboard, and pushing its green button will make it type 44 letters followed by enter , as if you typed it.We wanted to use the standard windows VPN client built into windows 7, so we can connect from any computer running windows 7 without having to install custom software. In the most straightforward deployment, you append your Yubikey OTP to your normal domain password. But it turns out that the windows 7 VPN client supports a maximum of 48 characters for the password, after which it starts truncating from the start of the password. Since the yubikey OTPs have 44 characters, that supports only passwords up to 4 characters, which of course is far below the acceptable range of domain password strength. (more ) Enums are simple collections of constant values, using an underlying integer to store the value.  Enums implement IComparable, IFormattable and IConvertible while still being value types and give us everything we need to store and use things like status values, action codes, colours etc You can use enum values in both server and client code, but when the user interface displays an enum, or when the user must be able to choose enums from a combobox, we can run into complications with enums. Making enum display values more human readable and showing values in a particular order are not that easy to implement. In this article, I will show you a solution used in a WPF client consuming WCF web services. (more ) MATLAB is a numerical computing environment for engineering applications. It supports communicating with and controlling hardware and processing and visualizing data from that hardware, which makes it a very popular platform for writing the software that goes with custom hardware solutions.  It also supports creating user interfaces too, but they tend to look outdated and clunky. For example, the control and display software for your custom pump controller system can easily be written in MATLAB. It would run on a PC that is connected to your hardware, lets the user turn the system on and off, set parameters such as pump cycle delays and display graphs showing overall efficiency or total energy input. You can compile all the MATLAB code and sell it, along with your hardware and the MATLAB compiler runtime, as a product.But what are your options when you want a sleeker, more modern UI with a ribbon bar, interactive graphs and UI themes or skins?  The most economic solution with a relatively short time-to-market, is to create a .NET based UI which connects to your MATLAB functions. In this article, I’ll elaborate on how exactly this works. (more ) Ah, managers… We all love to hate management, until of course we join its ranks. Then we like to think we are different from those other pointy haired types, but we fail to see the evidence to the contrary.If you recognise some of your own behaviour in the anti-patterns in this article, it is time to re-evaluate! Admitting you are a pointy haired boss is the first step toward better management. (more ) To all my American friends, colleagues and readers – please have a safe and happy holiday weekend surrounded with family and friends! Agile software development has been picking up steam in the last couple of years and especially SCRUM has become a very popular development methodology. SCRUM can produce better results for complex projects and the internet is full of helpful tips on how to tailor it to specific project types, team structures or industries. I have been using SCRUM for several years now, in both large and small environments and found that there are non-technical benefits from the SCRUM process that can have a positive impact on your business. Benefits such as effective customer engagement, timely customer payments and better estimates should be of interest to everyone in the software development business. Small companies may benefit the most because the link between a developer’s pay cheque and customer happiness is obvious and there can be direct contact between end user and developers. (more ) Hey everyone!Another day another baby! On November 2nd at 1am exactly our son, Ozzy Ash Pawliuk-Maidlow was born. Yup, Ozzy as in Ozzy =] Weighing in at a hefty 6 lbs 5 oz (as opposed to our daughter who was 4 lbs 7 oz). Mom and baby are doing great. As I hoped this time around was a LOT easier. Much better when you have some idea what you’re getting into. The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was the lack of sleep. Staring blankly at a screaming baby on maybe 2 hours of sleep trying to remember how to change the diaper on a newborn. The last time I did an all nighter was when our daughter was born. Before that it had been many years =)Fortunately the little guy looks great in pink : ) For several weeks now I’ve been suffering a slow painful agony at work, Visual Studio 2010 has been unusably slow. The editor takes forever to display WPF views and don’t even get me started on builds. I’ve got what I would consider to be a pretty decent pooter – Alienware M17xR3 with an Intel i7-2720QM 2.2Ghz, 16GB ram with SSD drives. The machine is still generally pretty quick. It boots in a matter of seconds. A quick test of the disks using CrystalDiskMark shows that disks are running within the expected ranges.Visual Studio seems to be the only thing really running slowlyI tried the usual suspects. Disabling all plugins and addins. ReSharper is a very powerful tool – but it can also come with a cost creating all of its metadata. It was conceivable that as our solution grew (it’s at 40+ projects) some bug may have been exposed in R#. I also disabled Intellitrace and various other things that were rumored to help deal with slowness.There’s no bad ideas when you’re brainstormingThat header there was for those of you with toddlers and TV’s glued to the Disney channel. Yes, its true… I have kids TV show songs like Imagination Movers stuck in my head most o f the time now. Oh the joys of being a parent =) In all seriousness though after sitting back and thinking about the systems involved it dawned on me. Real time anti-virus scanning. Visual Studio is constantly writing temporary files during use. Builds are especially disk intensive. Builds are also usually building and copying around exes and dlls that real time anti-virus engines love to scan. This may not be immediately apparent on smaller solutions which would explain why this seems to have been a progressing problem. As more and more code and projects were added to the solution – Visual Studio got slower and slower. To test this theory I just disabled AVG and ran a build. Hurray it was fast again!Add some scanning exceptionsThankfully due to our strict rules on source control all of our solutions exist within one of two folders – one for SourceGear Vault and one for TFS. This allowed me to create a handful of exceptions under the AVG real-time scanner settings that excluded my source control repositories. Suddenly now my designers as well as my builds are quick once more!Set it and forget it is great – except when you set something up years ago and forget about it when its causing you problems. =) We recently re-wrote an AutoCAD 2010 application to be entirely based on .NET.  Our application was using Windows Presentation Foundation for the presentation layer, which lets you nicely separate presentation from business logic using the MVVM pattern.  Since this application also had to run in AutoCAD 2009, it had to use the .NET 3.5 version.It turns out there is a bug in .NET 3.5 (fixed in 4.0) that causes a stack overflow exception when you define two or more default style resources for the same type at the same level.  If you use global resource files and window-specific default styles, you may run into this and its not at all obvious what the problem (or the solution) is. (more )

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