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Recently I have been diving in to the world of REST and all the great things that come along with that. If you are not familiar with REST and what it means to have a REST Web Service for your site, you can go through the Digg API, which should give you a pretty good idea. My company has been contracted to build the framework for a new Web 2.0 initiative of one of our clients. You cannot do Web 2.0 if you are not using some kind of AJAX/REST combination. ...

Google has extended its support for Google Bot restriction by giving us web developers a new tool to stick in our belt. It was announced today on the Google Blog that you can now control access to your non-HTML files on your website with a simple header. The header X-Robots-Tag will allow you to do everything the normal Robots Meta tag will, but now you can do it for the PDF, Word, Image, and any other document you can think of that is served via HTTP. They also announced on the same post a new type of exclusion cause that lets you set when the document will be unavailable, see below for more information on this new feature as well as currently supported ones for use with X-Robots-Tag: ...

Well it is official Firefox just released version 2.0.0.6 which makes the old version 2.0.0.5 just 13 days old and not needed anymore. The following issues were fixed: MFSA 2007-27 Unescaped URIs passed to external programs MFSA 2007-26 Privilege escalation through chrome-loaded about:blank windows This brings up the real question which is more annoying Windows Update (the passive update process) or Firefox update (the active update process). Honestly I prefer to stay ignorant about browser updates, because honestly I don’t really care about unescaped uris. Not because I don’t think they are a threat, but because I know the signs of a potential site that could cause harm and just avoid them.

Please note: These fixes break all current methods of bypassing driver singing requirements except the good old F8 during boot (that you have to do every single time you start vista) If you are using Rivatuner, atitool and or Peerguardian on 64bit vista, you will have to use F8 every single time to disable driver signing requirements to use those two programs. x86 version is unaffected. These updates should go official on the next patch Tuesday (in one weeks time). Please read more for the download links and information on these updates. ...

I would like to let everybody know that today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, so go out and get him a beer or her a bundle of flowers for putting up with the crap of us Developers of the past year. http://www.sysadminday.com/

I found this great article about Con Kolivas on Slashdot today: Linux is burdened with ’enterprise crap’ that makes it run poorly on desktop PCs, says kernel developer Con Kolivas. Kolivas recently walked away from years of work on the kernel in despair. APCmag.com has a lengthy interview with Kolivas, who explains what he sees is wrong with Linux from a performance perspective and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers. ...

One of the new features of Windows Vista was the Driver integrity Checks. In the x64 version of the product it is turned on by default, and is a great idea to prevent kernel level access to only drivers that have passed the Microsoft Testing for security and performance. However this feature can be rather annoying since Microsoft hasn’t even released signed drivers for all their products. (i.e. Streets & Trips GPS Device) So I have included the following steps in order to disable the driver signing integrity checks, so that you can install unsigned drivers. ...

Just saw this article over at The Register about the virus turning 25. Elk Cloner, which spread between Apple II computers via infected floppy disks, has the dubious distinction of the first computer virus1 to spread in the wild. The malware is thought to be the work of Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school student from Pittsburgh, who released it in July 1982. So when ever a fan boy starts talking about how secure OS X is, you can remind the that it was Apple that had the first unsecured computer in the world.

It’s official MainSoft developers have too much time on their hands. I personally think so, but if you are one of those coders who always wished they could debug .NET code on Linux using your Wii remote you might disagree with me. Video: Debugging .NET On Linux Using a Wii Remote

One of the things I love to learn about is the history of how things come to be. Specifically my interests have always been in the evolutions of religion and the tech world (yeah I know pretty much polar opposites, but that is what I like to learn about). I came across an interesting article in my MSDN subscription that talked about how language features of C# 3.0 came to be. The features I am talking about are: ...