Broken Thoughts

If you live in the midwest, more specifically within driving distance of Omaha, Nebraska, there is a martial arts demonstration fundraiser going on this weekend put on by several martial arts masters, my sensei included.  This is open to anyone from any art who would like an opportunity to train with many great martial artists in arts from around the world.  The purpose of this event is to help raise money for a 14 year old boy with leukemia. Besides the martial arts demonstrations, there will be a garage sale and a bake sale.

Here is a message from Greg from the website.

“I have leukemia, a cancer of the blood. I underwent chemotherapy for 2 ½ years starting in May of 2000. I was in remission for fifteen months and then had a relapse. I underwent another 2 ½ years of chemo because a bone marrow donor was not found. I was in remission for 17 months after that chemo; unfortunately, the leukemia relapsed just after Thanksgiving this year 2007. This means that it is very resistant to chemo and is considered VERY HIGH RISK. The best chance for a cure for this disease is a stem-cell or bone marrow transplant. You can learn about Greg at www.greghatchey.com.

Well I’ve found a couple of cord blood units…but read on.

Translated: that means I’ll be in Seattle for awhile (possibly up to a year).

I’m told that the likelihood of finding a match for me is like winning the lottery, but in the last couple of years, they have made some significant advances with cord blood.”

-www.greghatchey.com

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I have been waiting for Windows Home Server since Microsoft announced the product.  I have been anxious to download it through my MSDN subscription and test it out.  As long time user, fan, and programmer of Microsoft technologies, I like to investigate their products so that I can recommend products to fill the needs of my clients, friends, and family. 

Someone I work with was showing me his copy of Home Server, which he purchased.  Very excited to test it for myself, I went out to MSDN, only to find that it is not available on MSDN.  After a little searching, I found this blog that talks about why WHS is not available on MSDN.
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One of the most annoying thing people can do around me, other than driving like an idiot, is to use the phrase “samurai sword”.  Here is why using that term is incorrect, disrespectful, and completely idiotic.

1. If you see a western-style sword, you don’t call it a “knight sword.”  If you do, please don’t.

2. The real name is katana.  Use it.  Other perfectly acceptable terms include shinken (live blade), or Japanese sword.

3. The katana changed over hundreds of years.  It started out as a straight edge (like most western style or chinese swords) until it earned it’s curved edge.

4. The katana is to be reguarded with the utmost respect.  It is part of Japanese culture.  By calling it a samurai sword you are not giving the kanata the respect it deserves, and are disrespectful to those who train in Japanese sword arts.

5. Samurai actually carried two swords - the wakizashi and the katana.

6. Other classes were allowed to carry a single sword, the katana, up until the classes were seperated and all swords were taken from anyone who was not a samurai.  Samurai were the only class allowed to carry 2 swords.

7. It’s all about respect.  Call the katana by a propper name and I won’t call you an idiot (or beat you senseless with a bokken).

While running one or more ASP.NET websites, it is valuable to have a system where errors encountered by your users are automatically reported so that you can fix them. It is bad practice to let the user’s see the error and it is horribly evil to force them to report the errors themselves. The answer: an automatic exception handler. I developed this handler for use in websites so that any error encountered would be e-mail to a list of developers as well as recorded to the log if desired.

I also give the option of filtering out 404 (Page not found) and 403 (access denied) errors in case you only care about hard exceptions. It the past, I did see one application where we used 404 handling because the structure of the site changed. We implemented an automatic redirection for users who had bookmarks, and we caught 404 errors to find gaps in our redirector.

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Validating data is a very important part of any application that takes user input. Without validation, users can enter whatever they feel like. This is especially bad when needing specific data, like an e-mail address.

To make things easy for myself, I have all my common validation methods in one library. Validating user input is done using regular expressions. While I do my validation on the backend, it is a common practice to use validators do do much of your validation on the client. This saves the user from having to do a postback to the server only to get an error back. I agree that this is a good practice, but for every javascript validation I do, I also validate it on the server. The reason behind this is that a user can download your html to their computer, strip out the validation, and post to your server. This was something I tested when working on websites for a certain polling and market research company. Because of this flaw, we developed a standard practice to only use required field validators for client side validation and test all other validation on the backend.
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