It’s now on the www.microsoft.com/presspass website.

Here’s a direct link for when it is no longer at the tippy top of that page.

We’re all (or mostly) developers here. I can certainly sympathize with the situation and the need for a reality check.

I give up – I want to call private keys “locks” because there’s only one and then public keys can be keys because it’s a different entity than a private key and can be duplicated. Isn’t that easier to understand?

So when you are signing, you put your lock on the message and anyone who has the key can unlock it. And they know that it’s ONLY from you because those keys only work on that one lock. [BTW – you are not literally locking the message. It’s more complex than that. The message is not actually safeguarded, but with digital signatures, you have a mechanism of letting the recipient compare the message they received with the message that they were supposed to receive, which is a little digest you created and locked up and sent along with the message. They are not unlocking the message, but this digest. Then they do the same thing to the message that they received that you did in creating the digest. The digests should match. All that we achieve here is determining if someone tampered with the message on the way. If so, you dont want to accept it.*]

When you are encrypting you only want one person to read the message. So you attach a key, that anyone could have, but it only unlocks ONE lock. That is the lock of the designated recipient. So only that person has the lock that they key fits into.

Well, although you can’t stretch the analogy too far, it still works for me.

*see??? I can explain it in my own words now!! BIG GRIN!

Way cool. Chris Kinsman pointed out this misbehaving.net post to me before it even hit my aggregator!

When I was at TechEd, I did the TabletPC hands on lab. It was in C#. It was the first time I realized that those poor people have to declare every event when they are coding (we get them for free in VB). But it also got me practicing constructors in C# and the curly braces and all.

When I wrote my doodle app, I started with some C# code from a demo and wrote the whole thing in C#. It’s a pretty straightforward app. But again, just more time in the saddle getting used to some little differences like constructing if statements, try/catch blocks etc and the totally anal capatilization.

Now I’m back into the WSE2 Hands on Lab again. It’s all C#. The first part of it is gobs and gobs of coding.

I like the flexibility of being able to go back and forth.

And I was really happy that I didn’t have to learn a new way to create a new line since I’ve been using System.Environment.NewLine in VB since.net came out. reading this post of Sam Gentile’s on BCL Types. I wrote THIS one in response, which same saw and wrote “my work here is done.”

I was having some, umm, difficulty (heh) setting NTFS permissions on my new tablet for folders. I couldn’t for the life of me find the security tab. It has been a loooooong time since I had to do this on a new computer and I had forgotten why I was having this problem. I decided it had to be something new in XP SP2 and googled forever. Finally I found security whiz Anil John online on i.m. and asked him. It took him a moment because I distracted him by saying “I think it’s something new in SP2”. But then, he kindly pointed me to Explorer/Tools/Folder Options/View/Advanced Settings. That STUPID “simple file sharing” setting is on by default when you first install XP. (okay, it’s not stupid…) Now this is really embarrassing, but it’s one of those things that is easy to totally forget if you haven’t touched it in years. I was not googling the right words. So it is now just here as a reminder.

as in Gates, Ballmer and McNealy

not me, but Jackie Goldstein

Interesting article from CNN . I had no idea this was being done in grade schools. I went to a women’s college, Wells, and I can definitely attest to the fact that I found myself definitely able to focus on my studies and start definining myself as a human being rather than worry about how I looked in class or would I sound too smart or too stupid…

However, there were a few geeks in my high school that definitely turned out to do some cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I were at a single sex high school. One perfect example is Dan Schwinn, who started a company called Shiva Corporation in the early 80’s that was eventually purchased by Intel. Now he’s into aerospace technologies, heading up Avidyne, a company he started with the dream of bringing high-tech instrumentation to moderate airplanes.

 Dan was definitely our “bar” in high school as there was a group of us who were interested in math & science (oh my god, I just realized, I’ve been a geek all my life – eeeek!) and he was clearly the smartest among us and I also think the most self-confident, in those troubling days of high school social politics, as well. But it wasn’t all geek all the time. I think our poor mother’s drove us to ski about 6 or 7 days a week during the winter!

I went off to a small liberal arts women’s college and Dan went to MIT (oh, shock!) and I remember hearing that he was coming home during college breaks driving a Porsche because he was already doing some amazing stuff for some high-tech companies during the summers. In the late mid-80’s, I was working in the marketing dept for a magazine (already doing lots of programming related stuff). We were heavily invested in Macs as one of the first companies to do a lot of in-house computerized graphic work, and I remember that Dan’s company had the back cover ad of MacWeek (or something like that) every single issue! I’m talking about the 80’s. It was not the norm for 20 somethings to be doing big stuff like this, so it was pretty notable.

Sorry for my light interepretation, but this is really interesting.

(Why do the words “how did you miss the point?” keep ringing in my ear?)

I just noticed this when doing some testing in a VB6 app:

(green is expected results, red is unexpected)

?int(88.941*1000)
 88941
?int(88.932*1000)
 88932
?int(88.929*1000)
 88929
?int(88.931*1000)
 88930

huh?

?88.931*1000
 88931
?int(88931)
 88931

So what is up with that value 88.931? I’m sure there is some background processing that explains it. But for now I’m going to have to do a kludge with something like this to ensure my return values are correct

x=88.931*1000
?int(x)
 88931