The Tomes Of Experience

I have just uncovered a way to perform root priviledge escalation under Windows (tested using Server 2003 SP2)…so easy, with no addons or anything - all you need is a console.

Open up a command prompt (cmd.exe)
Type whoami. This should return your username - lowly peon user.
In the command prompt, enter the following: at <current time [...]

I was recently reading a post about writing non-threadsafe code which talks about the main peril of multi-threading, and one way you can work around it.
I’ve long been a believer that doing anything multi-threaded is fraught with danger and you have to tread incredibly carefully when doing so. I say this with experience. What I [...]

I’ve just read a blog post about why you should pass interfaces instead of concrete classes as arguments to your methods.
I normally try to think about the most appropriate usages of interfaces for my own classes, but what this post alerted me to was the necessity to use interfaces when working with framework classes.
IE: IDictionary [...]

You can use the reserved keyword $exception in the object inspector to get details of any caught exception.
I’d forgotten about this one. Found it when reading about other tricks for tracking down exceptions

Reading an article about unit testing got me thinking about some of the tools i’d love to sink my teeth into.
I’m documenting them here in case i forget.
Backend
NHibernate (ORM)
SQLLite (DB)
Framework
Castle Windsor/Ninject (DI)
Lof4Net (Logging)
LINQ (Language Querying)
Tree Surgeon (Environment setup)
Testing
NUNit (Unit testing)
Rhino.Mocks/Moq (Mocking)
WatIn (UI testing)
Build Integration
Nant (Build tool)
CC.NET (CI server)
UI
WPF (GUI)
ASP.NET MVC /Monorail (Web engine)
PRISM (WPF App [...]

A friend told me this one - I missed the feature of “recently closed tabs” in FireFox - it displays a small menu which lists all tabs closed in chronological order.
Well Chrome doesnt have exactly that, but CTRL-SHIFT-T will re-open the last closed tab. If you repeat the keystroke in sucession, it will re-open the [...]

If you are reading this through an RSS reader, take note - I have changed the URLs for my feeds, and they are not accessible via this website, but through the following URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTomesOfExperience
So just to re-iterate, please update the feed URLs to the new address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTomesOfExperience

Sometimes though when you’re changing interfaces across several projects, you can end up in a stink because a method reference is removed or a signature is changed, and you end up with the following error:
When i build in Visual Studio, in order to save time, I don’t always do a - (Rebuild Solution). instead, i [...]

The Hollywood principle is a software design methodology that takes its name from the cliché response given to amateurs auditioning in Hollywood: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. It is a useful paradigm that assists in the development of code with high cohesion and low coupling that is easier to debug, maintain and test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Principle

I needed to quickly browse through some web-server logs and pull out the hostnames which were accessing the web-server (to see where people were originating from).
The following single linux command will pull the IP address out of the apache log (for a particular date) and do the reverse DNS lookup for me:
cat access.log | grep [...]

In a stunning display of dick-measuring, FireFox has countered Google’s Chrome browser by claiming New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome’s V8
Give me a break. If this new JS engine in FF was so good, why has noone heard of it until AFTER Chrome was launched? Coincidence? I think not.
And more importantly, even if [...]

This morning at work we had a conundrum - one of our client’s websites was displaying the infamous “This page contains unsecured content” message when you navigate to the secured (HTTPS) version of their website.
In order to work out which parts of the page were making references to unsecured (HTTP) content, I could either start [...]

Well first thing i have to state is that unlike FireFox, the initial download is actually a 500KB downloader which actually gets the full Chrome package off the net. Just how big is the full package? Well Chrome drops itself into the %Program Files\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\ directory, and the installer there is about 22MB, so [...]

http://www.google.com/chrome
Downloading and installing it now…
In a way, i’m kind of excited. I hope this represents the start of a short, fast journey to push up the web…The one thing that I *hate* most about web-development is cross-browser incompatibility problems.
Reviews are here