Category: Uncategorized

Ok, so you don’t remember the password


ssh-keygen -t rsa


ssh [email protected] mkdir -p .ssh
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'


In my previous post I spoke about Getting personal with Posterous. Well, after signing up I gave Tumblr a go, and I have to say I was impressed!

As such, I would like to introduce http://benhall.tumblr.com/. Two great services! However, I think Tumblr has the edge for allowing you to easily write different style of blog posts – such as text, images or videos. Overall, it also has a nicer feel and experience.

While Twitter is great for sharing ideas, I’m getting a little frustrated at the 140 character limit. Sometimes it is great, other times you need a few more characters. I also want to keep this blog more ‘professional’ and technical related. As such, I’m going to use a service called Posterous to post some random thoughts and comments of a more personal nature about my life. Some of you might be interested, however I’m guessing most of you won’t be 🙂

One of the great things about Posterous is how easy it is to get started as you simply send an email to [email protected] This then creates a blog for you:

However, in order to get a real URL you need to claim your post by clicking the link.

Done! The blog has been created. The domain name is http://benhall.posterous.com/ – Feel free to follow what I’m saying.

If you want to start blogging, sharing ideas – either personal, or technical then posterous is a very quick way to get started.

Via Mac OSX Safari
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/530.19.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.2 Safari/530.19

Via iPhone Safari
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone Simulator; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16

Via home screen:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone Simulator; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341

I’m currently on a cut-costing exercise and one of the items which needed to go was a premium Ning service. Priorities changed, aims changed and as such it was no longer required.

Finding how to cancel the service was pretty simple task. However, once I was there I felt something was missing. Notice anything from the screen below?

In my mind, Cancel is a way of backing out of a decision. In this case, it was a way to confirm.

Logically, it made sense – you are explicitly clicking cancel. However, based on how every other application works I was expecting an OK or Yes button to appear next to it.

It is important to think about what users are expecting to see together with how certain terms might have more than one possible meaning.

I’m all for applications providing users with a streamlined experience, reducing clicks and the amount of dialogs they have to confirm to get the job done. However, sometimes it can go a step too far.

Today, I had to buy a printer. Came home, plugged it in and Windows 7 happily installed the correct drivers – job done. Not quite. Sadly I had left Word open in the background. After continuing to do work on the document, AutoRecovery kicked in and saved the file. At this point I was shown the following dialog.

Instantly I had to stop, take a step back and wonder what I had done to cause this to happen. I was confused, and confusion is very bad for a user. I had no indication of what was happening, how long it would take or why it had happened in the first place. I can only assume it was related to the installation of the printer which caused Word to reconfigure itself.

To make matters worse, after it had completed I was then shown this dialog. There is no reason why Word should need me to reboot my machine.

Clicking no was my natural reaction given the choice as I was in the middle of working. Word had other ideas.

At this point it had back round the cycle at which point I caved and accepted the reboot. After receiving random errors, Word informed me it could not save my work resulting in a loss of work.

Lessons to take away from this.

1) If the action the application is taking is uncommon or could cause the user confusion – tell them. It would actually have been nice to have a dialog saying – “Sorry, we need to do some configuration as your printer settings have changed.”

2) At which point, I should have been given the option of ‘Now’, or ‘When I close Word’. Actions such as configuration are best performed when the user closes the application as they have finished their work and as such won’t mind the delay.

3) If they don’t want the action to happen – make sure you can cope. In this situation Word obviously couldn’t.

4) Finally, always think about how the user will feel when the dialog pops up or an action is taken without their consent.

Worse user experience ever! today so far today.

When using the command line, your $PATH variable holds different paths to search when you enter a command. Today, I was using the Visual Studio 2008 command prompt, which has setup my $PATH variable to point at known locations relating to .Net and Visual Studio.

I could happily type in ‘sn’ in order to execute the program, however I had no idea where that exe lived and I needed the full path. I thought I would have to search using Windows, however I found that there is a ‘where’ command which will return you the full path for a command.

C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 9.0VC>where sn
C:Program FilesMicrosoft SDKsWindowsv6.0ABinsn.exe

Surprisingly useful!!

This morning I was checking my deployment instructions for an ASP.net MVC application, ideally this would be automated but that is my next task.

I was following Option 1 Steve Sanderson wrote on his blog, where you use Wildcard mapping for aspnet_isapi.dll. After setting up this while card mapping, you should be able to use the same pretty URLs without any modifications or additional mappings.

Unfortunately I didn’t read the post correctly and forgot to untick ‘Verify that file exists’,

As a result, I kept receiving 404 error messages – yet I knew that the path was correct.

It took me a while to figure out that I had forgot to untick the verify that file exists box.  Once the box had been set correctly, my content was serving again.

This raised an interesting question – why does ‘Verify that file exists’ need to be unticked? The executable is a ‘Win32 DLL (ISAPI extension)’, but not sure why this needs to be unticked – answers on a postcard (or a comment)!

NxtGenUG are taking over the world, well at least the UK for the moment. They have announced that they have a new region – Southampton.

General information from NxtGenUG guys

“Then there were 5! Two months, two new regions, first Cambridge now Southampton. Yes, the Next Generation User Group (NxtGenUG) is expanding (again) and this time we’re heading South.  The latest and warmest region of NxtGenUG is Southampton.  The region is being organised and run by John McLoughlin and Rick Allen two local guys who have sourced a venue, projector, screen, pizza, swag and speakers all on their ownsome – all that a User Group needs or could ask for!

As ever when a new NxtGenUG region opens we insist on having a ‘Launch’ extravaganza, and this one is no different!  The event will be held on 18th October 2007 at St Andrew’s Hall, Southampton.  The main speaker for the evening is top UK Community speaker Guy Smith-Ferrier speaking on Astoria and there will be a SQL Nugget from Dave ‘Readyboost’ McMahon.  Pizza and Swag will be present also in abundance. All the details of the meeting are at http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=85, and you can register for the event as always through the NxtGenUG website. Don’t miss out on this event which kicks off at 6.30pm and finishes at 9.00pm, as there is only ONE launch meeting after all.

NxtGenUG are a User Group focused on current and future technologies and provide monthly meetings in Birmingham, Cambridge, Coventry, Oxford and Southampton.  We love technology, chatting, pizza, swag, Halo 3 (well Richie Costall does) and having a laugh. If you’re in one of our areas, get along to one of our meetings and get involved in the UK Community, its well worth it socially and professionally!”

I wonder how long it will be until NxtGenUG Paris?

Don’t forget, there are a number of other great communities in the UK covering all aspects of Microsoft technology.  Visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/aa905717.aspx for more information on your local group.

Scott Guthrie has blogged about the Silverlight 1.0 Released and Silverlight for Linux Announced.

The interesting thing to note is that Microsoft now have a formal partnership with Novell over Moonlight (Novell’s / Mono’s implementation of Silverlight which runs on linux). 

Miguel de Icaza who started the mono project has wrote some more details of the partnership on his blog.  He says Microsoft are allowing the team access to the Silverlight test suite, which will ensure 100% compatibility and access to the Silverlight specification for 1.0 RTM and 1.1 as and when it is updated.

On a side note, Phil Haack has wrote why Should Microsoft Really Bundle Open Source Software? and made some really good points.  While the pre-agreement with Novell would definitely have helped the situation, its great that Microsoft took the work on Moonlight into account and support them instead of creating their own implementation.

Official partnership with .Net and the Mono framework next?