Brandon: Boise Code Camp!

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I'm at the Boise Code Camp right now.

Its been fairly interesting already. Not too bad.

I'm such a geek ;)

Battery: on my laptop needs charged.


Tags (beta): code, camp, boise, geek

Comments (1)

Brandon: Politics and such.

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Honestly, I haven't been paying attention much. I'm pretty sure Hillary is done for. Kudos for doing so well, but better luck next time. Obama has some sort of charisma aura or something.

Also, anyone ever notice he kinda looks like the guy who played Apophis in Stargate SG-1?

Also, McCain looks to be the only real republican candidate. Also, he is old. Like, really old. But, he's a war hero and all that. Good for him.

Will anybody actually be able to *do* anything though? I don't care what they say, their first term will be cleaning up our current mess.

Anyway, I don't have any deep thoughts on the subject. I'm going to vote Democrat anyway.

Sort of: Insightful
But: not really


Tags (beta): politics, hilary, obama, stargate, dog and pony show

Comments (0)

Brandon: Windows Vista Update KB935509 (For Ultimiate and Enterprise)

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WTF Microsoft.

Ok, so this update prepares Windows Vista for SP1. Thats all fine and dandy, but it apparently tries to update the BitLocker encryption feature that is available on the Ultimate and Enterprise editions.

I of course do not want full disc encryption, and I can't use it anyway because it requires a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) on the motherboard, and I don't have one.

Apparently, to get the update to install, you have to run the BitLocker drive prep tool, even if you are not going to encrypt your drives.

Why is this a problem?

Well, mostly because it shrinks your boot drive (In my case, C) by 1.5gb to create another partition, which is now named S, for me anyway, to store the non-encrypted boot files.

I don't want another stupid partition that I'm not going to use.

Grrr, this is lame.


Wondering: what Microsoft was thinking.
Do they: even test these updates.
I still: like Vista though.


Tags (beta): microsoft, windows, vista, updates, fubar

Comments (1)

Brandon: Merry <Insert Holiday Name Here>

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Merry <Insert Holiday Name Here> from all of us here at Vent.

Well, just me.

And Vikki.

And Jupiter (the dog)

And Mojo, Star, and Sugarbear (The cats)

Hope everyone has great holidays and whatnot!

Santa: Claus was arrested for breaking and entering


Tags (beta): christmas, chanukkah, kwanza, festivus, x-mas, holiday, political correctness

Comments (5)

Brandon: Obfuscation

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I hate obfusaction.

What I am speaking of, of course, is having to obfuscate compiled .NET code so that someone cannot simply reverse engineer it using reflection or some such nonsense.

At work we use a package called Xenocode Postbuild 2007. It is quite improved from the 2006 version, but it still has some annoying issues.

For example:
.NET 2.0 has a XMLSerializer class built in. What this does is take data out of an object and represents it as XML. It makes saving the contents and state of an object quite easy. However, to do this, it (the .NET runtime) creates a new assembly (basically a .NET dll) on the fly. Now, when you obfuscate a program, it takes the variable names and makes them full of random characters, so something like "Name" would end up being "x9038242ndo3412f". Thats all fine and good, but it ends up confusing the generated XMLSerializer assembly sometimes.

And don't get me started on the mess it makes of trying to use reflection. You might as well not even try to protect your code if you are going to use reflection on it.
(Reflection is a way of dynamically loading .NET assemblies at runtime. Think of plugins, thats sort of the idea, but its much more complex than that).

Anyway, code that works fine in a development environment may not work at all if it is obfuscated.

But, how else can you protect your code.



Code: monkey need caffene
Post: is far too nerdy for most.


Tags (beta): code, .net, obfuscation, rant, xml

Comments (1)