I have been playing with Zooomr’s new portal system. It allows you to link photos together in a nice interface. I’ve created a few to test it out and it shows great promise. Below is one of them from our trip a while back to Luxor in Egypt. Click through and hover over the image to get the full effect.
I am a little confused after having some very strange issues formatting dates and strings with the CultureInfo.InvariantCulture today with one of our applications.
One of our methods tries to parse a string as a date:
DateTime.Parse(myStringDate, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
If I passed in ‘28/05/2006′ this would throw a format exception. Why?
Another extremely weird thing would be if I had formatted a date using CultureInfo.InvariantCulture and then passed that as a parameter to a SQL query, the query would eventually time out. Removing the InvariantCulture parameter and everything worked perfectly.
Very weird. Any ideas?
In the past two days:
Primary domain controller crash: Two out of our 3 drives in the RAID 5 array died leaving us with no data left. Dell were very helpful but there is nothing they can do. Everything gone. We’re still rebuilding and Exchange will not install. Active directory is luckily still up on a BDC but building this the server is turning into a bitch. On another note, no one in the office has email because exchange is down. Yum
Phone system crash: No outgoing calls which means no connection to HSBC (they require modem connections) . This also means that none of our clients can be paid.
Launch of new Accounting Engine: Going smoothly but added on top of the above we’re starting to show cracks in the good nature that is inherent in IT people. 
One month until I get married: Lots to do, no time to do it - see above.
Currently in the business world, paper reigns supreme. The stats that companies come out with how many emails are sent per day can safely be ignored by the one caveat of email. Most businesses and government agencies will only accept originals of documents or copies that have been authorised.
With the advent of digital signatures (and yes, this is from years ago) you could now establish proper trust around email and the contents. It is possible using a “Web of Trust” model to properly show and audit the validity of any given email. The ability to do this applies to most digital media. I.e. we can sign or encrypt anything digital but mostly in this article email is the primary subject.
The problem that I see with digital signatures and encryption keys is the fact that they are not easy to setup. Getting a key for your email address is not a simple task to the ordinary user and continues to be so years after PKI came about. Outlook, Thunderbird and Opera (as examples) do not make the procedure any easier for “my mom”. For the ordinary user, the process for importing a digital signature is simply too big a wall to climb and results in a very low rate of signup for keys and even fewer realising the value in them.
My thinking on this is two fold. The first part is to make it “compulsory” for domain owners to provide digital signatures and keys to every mail client. This can be started at the webmail providers. Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo should all provide a digital signature on startup and allow the users to sign email and easily import their contacts’ keys on receiving an email from them. This will at the very least raise the level of awareness in PKI.
Secondly, email clients need to make the ability to create and import a key be seamless. There is nothing stopping Microsoft or Mozilla from partering with a PKI supplier such as OpenCert, Thawte or Verisign to allow keys to be created within the mail client and have them seamlessy integrated with the mail client. And have the keys created without leaving the mail client.
If these two objectives can be met, the amount of email being sent that is either being signed or encrypted will hopefully increase at an exponential rate. If more people rely on the PKI to ensure that the email they are receiving is either unaltered or has not been read by anyone else, the more pressue can be put onto businesses to accept emails as official documentation.
This article seems a little sugar coated to me but does put my point across.
Following on from a post by Ben Metcalfe about the new version of Gtalk, all of the features that are added in Gtalk will (if ratified) form part of the open jabber protocol.
All features are first passed to Jabber as part of a Jabber Enhancement Proposal (JEP) which is an official document proposing a new enhancement to the protocol itself. If this is ratified it becomes part of the official Jabber protocol.
Now obviously Google want their IM client having these features now and have implemented the JEPs without having it ratified first. Which isn’t by any means a bad thing, but means gtalk doesn’t follow the jabber protocol to the letter.
Just a clear up for some issues that seem to have crept up.
The lack of updates on this blog have been annoying but something I’ve needed to cut back on to start and finish some important work.
I have almost one month until I’m a married man (can’t wait). The preparations that still need to be done are small but they are there. Suits on Saturday! 
I have two pretty interesting projects coming out of the Absolute Value labs. Nothing I can speak about as of yet, but both are BSD licensed and will be put either on Sourceforge or Google’s Code repository. They are pretty exciting (if small) projects and I hope they’ll be used.
On top of that we’re putting out a new release of the accounting engine in our office. I’ve been pushing to convert to .NET 2.0 before to help in some of the areas we are lacking but the timescales won’t allow this. So I’m stuck developing in 1.1 for the moment which on top of constructing reports makes for pretty boring work.
So once these are out of the way, full steam ahead with my website. I need to spend some time with it to polish it a little. I’ve been developing with the Subtext team and am looking to move the blog onto that platform so I’ll probably be doing that after September.
Wrote this post on Windows Live Writer. Pretty impressive. Especially how it picks up your blog style automatically. And its only beta! 