Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for October 7th, 2004
ASP.NET Security Threat
I’ve been busy fixing the many applications at University today with this new security threat to ASP.NET applications.
Put simply, its a matter of canonicalization that could allow users to enter password protected areas of your sites by simply altering a URL.
A good how-to guide is available on the Microsoft support site, yet no formal fix has yet been released. You can protect your application however, by dropping 5 lines of code into your global.asax (available on the page)
Also for .NET developers, grab the patch for the GDI+ JPEG buffer overrun bug that has also recently been fixed.
Update: You can now download a patch to update your servers. Thanks to tchansen for the heads up.
Towards fully automated marketing
I did something today I should have done a long time ago: Put the marketing of my book on 100% autopilot.
Previously, every Tuesday I’d write a fresh new newsletter to prospects.
No more. I have enough content by far to put all of my newsletters on autoresponder. Every prospect gets a series of newsletters for about six months. Each issue provides more content than most newsletters, plus a small pitch for my book and/or consulting services.
After six months, they get a notice that their subscription has ended, and a final request for them to check out the book. I’ll still send my list of contacts messages as new news comes up, but six months of free information is about right for a prospect to make up his or her mind to hire me or not. (And I’m testing that hypothesis, so that I can add more content if needed).
I have too much going on with other start ups and clients not to have my marketing on autopilot. Thanks to Google, a web site that gets prospects involved, and an automated newsletter, I can focus on other things.
By the way, I sincerely hope you have subscribed to my newsletter at
Practical PHP Programming
Paul Hudson, who writes for Linux Format has published his book Practical PHP Programming online.
Generally looks pretty good from what I’ve read and nice that goes from the absolute basics all the way to writing extensions. Would be great if Paul provided some kind of feedback mechanism, given he’s gone online with it; there’s various pieces of insight that could be added such as the page on included. Definately a good place to point people who are starting PHP from scratch.
