What to do when attach to process doesn’t work

When using Visual Studio, you can attach to a running process that’s chocked full of debug info (or not, but there’s not much point if it’s not) by selecting Build | Start Debug | Attach To Process…

This can handle cases where a problem doesn’t happen under the IDE, but does when running a debug executable. As happened to me recently. So, with the app running and the problem reproduced, I wanted to debug. But, when the dialog pops up it might be distressingly empty – as it was for me. What to do?

From task manager, right (context) click on the process and select Debug. That will launch your debugger and away you go.

How do you name your computers?

These days just about every computer is networked, and that means they have to have a hostname. So how do you name yours? Assuming there’s no particular corporate standard you have to follow, do you make up a theme, or just give them random names?

At home we have lano and woodley.

At my girlfriend’s place, they’ve called them crunchie and munchie.

The company I use for web hosting names their servers after towns and cities around Australia.

At one job I had, we went Red Dwarf, and ended up with holly (main server), kryten (test server) and hudzen (temporary server).

At another job, we started on The Simpsons, with maggie, marge, homer… then moved onto Asterix, with getafix (very appropriate for a machine that needed patching) and obelix.

Rolling your own certificates in Windows

Forget what I said a few weeks ago about creating your own certificates, at least for testing secure web services. You can do this from within Windows server; this KB article gives all the details.

There’s heaps more detail hidden away in this Word document… which probably would have come up in my Googling if MS would just put this information on a web page somewhere instead of as a Download.

Don’t have a Windows Server? Grab a trial download of one, and chuck it on one of those free Virtual Servers!

Girls, music, and virtual PCs

Hmm, a calendar of Australian IT women, in the name of encouraging more women into the industry. Available online at itgoddess.info.

If you’re more at home with mucking about on Virtual Machines, then you might be interested to know that Virtual PC is now free.

Billy Bragg has applauded MySpace for backing down on their T+Cs imposed on artists who used the site to distribute music. “I am very pleased to see that MySpace have changed their terms of agreement from a declaration of their rights into a declaration of our rights as artists, making it clear that, as creators, we retain ownership of our material.”

Review: Nokia 6230i

Nokia 6230i (from Nokia AU web site)Like many people, I don’t just use my phone for making phone calls. It’s a calendar, address book, alarm clock…

In recently upgrading from my old reliable Nokia 6100 to a Nokia 6230i, I’ve added camera, radio and MP3 player to that.

(The 6100 still works fine. It’ll go into storage for when my kids start needing/wanting a mobile.)

Why the 6230i? In my position as tech luddite, I judged it to be a good balance of price (free, that is totally subisidied, on a $30 Telstra business plan, which has very decent call rates, in fact well below what I was previously paying) and features. I wasn’t willing to pay the premium for something super-fancy like the Nokia N-Series, which would have given me 3G. Video phone calls might be fun, but are pretty useless to me. Not worth the extra dosh.

It’s also (unlike some of the camera phones) not much bigger than the 6100, which is pretty titchy. If I’m going to carry a phone with me practically everywhere, it’d better be small. Err, but with a keyboard big enough for my manly adult fingers, and a screen big enough to be productive. Ah, conflicting requirements, but not insurmountable.

I should emphasise that I wasn’t looking for a phone to read emails on, or browse the web with. The 6230i will do both of these, but not well. How much can you fit onto a tiny screen? Not much. If you want to do that, I’d be looking at a proper PDA.

And yes, I wanted another Nokia phone. I know how they work. They’re easy to use, and I’d prefer not to wrestle with an unfamiliar OS. And those I’ve had have been fairly reliable.

It’s worth noting however that the first 6230i I got was faulty. Not in a major way, but the “1” key needed to be pressed quite hard to work. I took it back to the shop for another one.
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Common Passwords

A UK mob has collected Top 10 Most Common Passwords; soccer teams rate highly. German passwords are just as lame, with the f-word, hello and digits strings starting with 1234 rating very highly, as does treasure and, for some odd reason, Daniel (care to explain, mister?).

Dictionary based searching works – if you aren’t going through something that monitors that sort of thing. Ophcrack will break into a Windows system, by running through very large dictionaries, some of which are available only by purchase.

Perhaps to read the advice on Choosing a Pretty Good Password. Myself, most of my passwords are highly insecure. But that’s only because they’re on systems I don’t give a tinker’s cuss about. The ones I do are pretty tight.

Does anyone out there use multiple, changing, strong passwords? If so, how do you keep them straight? If not, why are you toying with your security like that?

Name and address, please.

Those of us in AU who used to frequent Tandy Electronics might recall that they always asked for a name and address — ostensibly for customer service, but in practice to send you catalogues. I had a CompSci teacher in year 12 who refused to provide it; he found it ridiculous to do be asked, especially when buying something like a single resistor.

Raymond Chen writes about this happening at the affiliated Radio Shack stores in the USA, and tells a funny story refusing to give his name.

Retiring Baby Boomers lead to IT Workforce Crisis

ComputerWorld reports that the retirement of the Baby Boomers will lead to IT Workforce crisis. The tech crash shook a bunch of people out of the industry (mostly “HTML programmers” – the rodeo clowns of our profession), and it also caused a collapse in the number of undergraduates enrolling in IT courses (I’ve been doing my best to discourage anyone from entering the field).

Basic economics says that a reduced supply of workers and an increasing (or even static) demand for them leads to a rise in prices. And it’s not like prices are low at the moment anyways.

More champagne, anyone? I’ll just drive the shops in my diamond-encrusted Rolls Royce to fetch it.