Friday, February 13, 2004 - Posts
Counts tonight: .NET:18; Beer:1; Blogging:10; Dev:18; Food:2; Rants:5; RS:3; SciFI:1; Security:4; SQL:3; Tools:6; WILY:9; WFT:5; Writting:2; XML:10
Line of the night: "Search: 'natalie portman views on muslims' Natalie Portman: Expert authority on Islam."
Posting this here as .Text on SSWUG.ORG is having issues. Donny must be at least a demigod. :)
Parag posted on the SSWUG mailing list that he was having problems getting images to show up in reports. He has a column in is DataSet that has the relative path of the image to be used. The two things he found out he needed to do were:
- Make sure to set the source to external on bound control
- Add the image to the RS project.
#2 was quite a Zenslap for me.
I have a great relationship with Rod, my Boss. Today I asked “how do you not borrow problems from tomorrow (that is, design systems to function on future platforms like Yukon) while trying to prevent problems tomorrow?” We often have very divergent points of view on this issue. I'm generally on the side that says “take the time today to design systems that work today and tomorrow,” whereas he tends to be “take the time to design the system to work today.” My problem with that is it implies you'll be reworking the system to work again tomorrow too.
He's got three suggestions for me about coping with that problem:
- What's the probability if the problem you're worried will actually occur? If its low, you likely don't have to worry about it, so the extra work is wasted. If its high, its probably worth addressing. Anything else in the middle is a judgment call.
- How easy is to fix? Supposing the problem you're trying to design around does occur, if its impact is low and its fairly easy to fix, fixing it today problem isn't efficient in light of the next suggestion.
- How busy are we today? If you have the luxury of plenty of time to get a project done, then solving some problems in advance is probably not a problem. If you have the luxury of having more work than you can possibly do, you can't afford this expense.
Sobering, isn't it? More thinking about the economic implications of it here.
Ken vanWyk had a really interesting post about Security and Blogging on the SC-L that I though was worth sharing.
Over the last couple weeks, I've been reading up on RSS* in my spare time, having only recently been introduced to this neat mechanism--thanks, Dana!.
(FYI, we even put up an RSS feed of updates/announcements on securecoding.org in order to dive directly into it.) One of my concerns, naturally, has been security, especially since stand-alone RSS aggregators are _relatively_ new, and I couldn't recall having seen many vulnerability advisories on them.
After just a bit of googling, I found several real good sources of information, which I'm including here for anyone that's interested. Most of these have been available for a while, but I thought that they were pretty interesting reads anyway. YMMV...
* RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary" or "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication," depending on whom you ask. If you're not familiar with it, check it out. If you spend time reading through various web sites for news, technical info, and other info, then you REALLY should check it out. RSS can be a tremendous time saver.
I've been trying to read as many blogs from folks as I can from who use or are interested in XQuery. Obvious, SQLJunkies is bless to have Dr. Rys amongst us. Anyone else?
I'd offer an OPML, but the only other feed I've got so far is http://fb2.hu/x10/rss.xml from Balazs Fejes.