" In January, visits from the United States to some of these fashion-conscious sites increased exponentially compared with the previous year, according to Experian Hitwise, the Internet tracking firm. About 60 percent of the visits were from women. Pinterest, the scrapbooking site where members post to virtual boards their favorite images from around the Web, has much of this traffic. It is now among the 10 most-visited social networks, along with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, even though it’s not yet officially out of beta either. One would think that these sites, with their legions of followers, would be among the most monetizable areas of the Web, because browsing them can lead directly to online retail portals. And certainly some small businesses and artists have benefited from the links posted on sites like Pinterest and Polyvore. But industry observers say there is still a gulf between browsing and buying; consumers may be flinging open their closets online, but their wallets have yet to follow. Internet start-ups are experimenting with business models: advertising, selling access to analytics, creating contest platforms"*

One way is the online wardrobes like http://www.pureple.com The Pureple team has made it easy for the user to keep their online wardrobe with them at all times; both the website and iPhone app are available for members at no charge. For those that prefer the android device, the design team is working diligently to perfect the wardrobe app.

* Ny Times Fashion

It is always a good time to write a blog if your source code access permission expires and you wait for someone to approve your request. Since I couldn’t find a good example how to do this and spend some time this thing deserves its blog post. What I want is a very basic operation: I want to set anonymous access for a vroot and I must do this in a scriptable way so that other devs in our team can deploy the WCF service that I am developing.  Before appcmd.exe to manipulate IIS configs we had adsutil.vbs scripts which is kind a straight forward. I found appcmd a little bit challenging but more powerful.

So here is the way to make a vroot anonymous

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\APPCMD set  config "Default Web Site/myVroot" /section:system.webServer/security/authentication/anonymousAuthentication   /enabled:"True"  /userName:"" /commit:apphost

Don’t forget to do an iisreset to see the effects. As you can see the username is empty so an anonymous request will work under the identity of the appPool of this vroot but you can make it work under any other identity. And you must add /commit:apphost to make this change applied to the configuration.

If you want to change any other property take a look at the section of the property in application.config file and put it as section parameter. Never hand edit the application.config file.

The correct solution is to use a public-key-like scheme, where somehow first king get a lock from second king and seal the box with this lock and of course only second king has the key to open it.

So this is a way to narrate public key cryptography, as I was thinking about this I asked myself if there are any other situations in real our daily lives that we use a scheme like this and I found 2. Our email addresses are actually a form of our public keys, We distribute them freely (without fearing from spam:) and when a website wants to send a secret or verify our identity (if we really own the email address and Facebook really uses this to understand if you belong to a certain company and/or university) they use our public key but only we using our passwords (our private keys) can read(decrypt) the message (assuming no body reads our emails along the way... yeah definitely not :). One more scenario is our home addresses which are another form of public keys and in this case our private keys are in fact our metal keys to mailbox.

So can you think of any other scenarios that we use public key cryptography in our daily lives?

www.limoon.net

B- good for you.

A- the only problem is I don’t have enough experience to start with

B- maybe you should ask your lead for a project you can act as lead.

A- I already asked but he said we don’t have anything right now so I will wait.

Just asking is for an opportunity is proactive I am OK but should we stop there, is work the only place we can get experience? The answer is NO. There are a lot of opportunities outside the work that can give same (or bigger) challenges we can have at work. For example nonprofit project: I am sure your church, mosque, temple, community … is looking for someone to manage a small project from start to finish. And you know what? Working on non-profit projects are more challenging than work, since there is no money to motivate people, you really must be smart while defending your ideas. You want someone to do something? You need to be 10 times convincing than you are at work.

And as an added bonus to getting experience you will be introduced to many people that you can add to your professional network. So are you up for a management challenge?

public void RemoveKeyContainerAccess(string userName, string CSPName, string keyContainerName)

        {

            NTAccount account = GetAccount(userName);

            CspParameters cspParams = new CspParameters(1, CSPName, keyContainerName);

            cspParams.Flags = CspProviderFlags.UseMachineKeyStore;

            CspKeyContainerInfo container = new CspKeyContainerInfo(cspParams);

            //get the original acls first

            cspParams.CryptoKeySecurity = container.CryptoKeySecurity;

            //Search for the account given to us and remove it from accessrules

            foreach (CryptoKeyAccessRule rule in cspParams.CryptoKeySecurity.GetAccessRules(true, false, typeof(NTAccount)))

            {

                if (rule.IdentityReference.Equals(account))

                    cspParams.CryptoKeySecurity.RemoveAccessRule(rule);

            }

            //persist accessrules on key container.

            RSACryptoServiceProvider cryptoServiceProvider = new RSACryptoServiceProvider(cspParams);

        }

Since I have time during my vacation, I wanted to spend some fun time with my laptop solving Mathematical/computer programming problems. I found Project Euler website while checking del.icio.us popular bookmarks about algorithms. The first problem I solved was Problem #208 Robot Walks. I chose to solve it because I liked the title (it reminded me the problems that I worked on while I was getting ready for IOI during high school) and it was one of the difficult ones on the site (tough it turned out to be Relatively easy). I will not tell you how I solved the problem in case you want to try yourself . It took some time to figure out to model the problem. After finding the solution I tried  a brute force approach. Even for a limited set it took more than 10 sec to solve. I tried the full set but I had to stop after couple of minutes without any answer. Then I figured out there were many small sub problems that my algorithm re calculate again and again. To save time I needed to calculate once and save it and use recalculated values instead of trying to re calculate. I calculated the space to store all possible combinations and I needed an array with a size less than 1 GB which I could allocate on my laptop ... anyway at the end , my small program found the solution under 500 milliseconds. This is the beauty of dynamic programming. You can find a nice explanation of dynamic programming here .

12 Years ago

I remember during high school I worked on PCs that had 2-4 MB of ram. When I was working on this kind of problems back then, I almost never considered allocating memory to save sub problem results since memory was a limited resource. I usually spent more time on finding a more fine-tuned algorithm with many heuristics to save on CPU time.  It is not the case anymore, this is a mind shift for me.

Aziz Cagatay Kurt

ServerManager srvMgr = new ServerManager();
Site DefaultSite = srvMgr.Sites["Default Web Site"];//you can also use site id

                foreach (Binding binding in DefaultSite.Bindings)
                {
                    if (binding.Protocol.Equals(URI.UriSchemeHttps, StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase))
                    {
                            bindingFound = true; 
                            binding.UseDsMapper = true 
                            break;                               
                    }                       
                }//Commit only if we need to
if(bindingFound)
     srvMgr.CommitChanges();

A few days ago I was working on a bug, I prepared the fix tested it then I found a nicer way of doing something and changed the fix again then tested it but I realized I forgot a “not” (! In c#) which spoil the code terribly. One character. So as an engineer I started thinking about this, why it happened and is there a way to prevent this or if not, is there a way to automatically fix this.  Automatically fix this , Automatically fix this , Automatically fix this , who can fix it automatically? Can a software fix another software?  It might not be feasible right now for a software to code something but at least can it randomly attack a piece of code change stuff, dump if’s , loops  , manipulate variables etc .Or if we want to start scratch we will give function signature,  set of correct inputs and out puts and do not care what is inside the function . Can a software randomly  dump lines into this function ,build it , run it and satisfy the input/output requirements ?  If you say a it is impossible how about we have a dictionary of ready lines and software can mix and match lines from the dictionary. I am sure this will be a dream machine for lazy developers : ) .  But don’t underestimate lazy people,  they are the reasons for many inventions ; ). Anyway this much of daydreaming is enough for today, I need to go back to my longhorn RC bugs  which will not be fixed automatically for sure.