Phil Scott's WebLog

A little bit of an internation feel of things with Ralf Westphal's posts.  He's got a pretty cool word in his title "Sudelbücher."  It's like a journal I guess, but a little more informal.  Found this definition from google: "sort of an informal notebook where you keep your trip expenses, that sort of thing, collections of thoughts, random, flashes, worked sentences."

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-007
Unchecked Buffer In Windows Component Could Cause Web Server Compromise (815021)

I was playing around with some code that we use in one of my Microsoft courses.  Not a complex example, and it assumes you've granted privledges to the ASPNET account datareader for Northwind.  No biggie I guess (this is actually quite common in courses that don't focus on ASP.NET.  Getting into identity might be considered overkill for many of these classes).  Well, this is all fine and dandy unless you are running 2003.  I get a big ol' Login failed for user 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' error message thrown at me.  Bastards! 

Pretty old stuff, but my partners in crime is teach SQL Server Admin this week, and it reminded me that I wanted to post a link to the Sql Server System Table Map. It's in chm format, so it's pretty easy to navigate with pretty pictures of all the tables and how they are related.  Granted, you should always use the system procedures or information_schema_views, but sometimes you just need to go gonzo and dig into those system tables.

A lot of talk about InfoPath.  Just got my beast of an Office 2003 beta kit in the mail, so I've been playing around with it.  I wouldn't say I've drank the kool-aid, but I definitely have sipped it.  Not my favorite flavor, but I definitely see where others might enjoy it. 

Ok, I went ahead and created a group on ESPN's tournament challenge.  If you don't have a username/password, well, you'll need to signup.  I've never recieve mail from them in the three years I've done this (besides they "hey dummy, fill this out" type stuff I suppose).  After that, click on the second link below and join the group.  It's that simple!  Pass this along to whoever you want, as long as they don't think of those singing Jamacan's when you say CLR.  I'll post reminders until Thursday.  In an act of brilliance, I asked for vacation days in November for Thursday and Friday.  MWwwwwwwwahahahaha.

I'm going to put together a ESPN.com Tournament Coverage thingy later tonight.  Any .NETer is invited of course, not just people with blogs here.  I know we got a couple guys from Cinci, Scott's a cameron crazy, Jason Bock went to Marquette, and it should be a little fun with some competition.

Stumbled upon Jason Bock's weblog today via my traceback / postback chumpy.  Jason wrote the excellent CIL Programming "Under the Hood of .NET".  This book is from APress, which while I feel they might need to get on the ball updating some of my favorite beta 2 books, still have perhaps one of the most talented group of authors working for them.  One Apress title I'm looking forward to is .NET Game Programming with DirectX.  Game programming isn't something I ever got to big into, and maybe this will help me push myself towards that.