For the remaining freelance gig in my spare time pipeline (which hopefully is winding down), an ecommerce site, I had to create simple user management system. Obviously, I'm not going to store users' passwords as plain text in the database, but rather as a hash - an MD5 hash to be exact. Unlike the old days where you had to implement the MD5 algorithm yourself, modern programming environments have this conveniently part of some specific standard library. From PHP, hashing a password (or any other string data) is easily accomplished like this:

 
$plain_text = "ChrisBellini.com";
$md5_text = md5($plain_text);
// hash is '56d1df360dce2f5025c71fa7697af642'
 

That hashed value is then stored in the database and I can use it to compare during logins. Easy peasy.

Sometimes, though, I'd like to verify what a hashed string really is. What does "12345" look like after passing through MD5? If you can do that in your head, then you can probably move objects with your mind. For those of us lowly creatures who can't, though, a simple way to determine this would be nice. I'm a .NET guy in my day job, so a quick console app should suffice. Using .NET's MD5 library with C# is trivial.

 
using System.Security.Cryptography;
 
// ...
 
string plain_text = "ChrisBellini.com";
UTF8Encoding objEnc = new UTF8Encoding();
MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5Hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
byte [] arrHashBytes = md5Hasher.ComputeHash(objEnc.GetBytes(plain_text));
// hash is '56-D1-DF-36-0D-CE-2F-50-25-C7-1F-A7-69-7A-F6-42'
 

That would do the trick, but what if I'm on my Linux computer? I could use Mono, but still... It sure would be nice to be able to do this quickly on any operating system. Enter Python.

 
import hashlib
 
plain_text = "ChrisBellini.com"
md5_text = hashlib.md5(plain_text).hexdigest()
# hash is '56d1df360dce2f5025c71fa7697af642'
 

Pop this into Python's interactive interpreter, Idle, and you've got yourself some lovely hash.

Die-hard readers of my blog may be thinking that based on the Diebold logo in the picture, that I'm reminded of one of my rants against slow Diebold ABMs. It's not. That "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" ASP.NET error is the one that makes me shudder - more so, since this is a banking application.

Sometimes this is caused by trying to access variables and object beyond the current scope, but Visual Studio can notice these more often than not during a build. Where I really get nabbed is when trying to access a null object. Sure, sometimes it's just a slight oversight on my part and I try to access an objects methods and properties without actually instantiating it first. Hey, it happens. Yet, often I find that an object doesn't instantiate and I don't find until much later....like runtime later. So I'm now conditioned to try to catch everything:

 
   MyCoolClass myobject = null;
 
   try
   {
      myobject = new MyCoolClass();
      myobject.someVoidMethod(SOME_CONSTANT);
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {
      Response.Write(ex.Message.ToString());
   }
   finally
   {
      myobject = null;
   }
 

That's my two cents, anyway

If you've created a page that is correct from a business logic point-of-view, but may not make Visual Studio's visual designer happy, don't open the file in the visual designer. The visual designer wants to correct your "shoddy" HTML. The visual designer thinks that it knows you. It doesn't. It wants to kill you, and charm your spouse and children so that they forget that you ever existed. Well, maybe not entirely. Regardless, whatever you do, don't lose your head and think that you can use your VB or C# code-behind to load up some placeholder controls with your own HTML. That's kids' talk - crazy talk. Keep it together, man. Pure and simple - don't view the page in the visual designer. Code view? Yes. Visual designer? No.

That is all

It took that guy over ten minutes to "write" simple Perl code to read the contents of a file and print them to standard output! Now I know that it's not completely fair to compare VoiceCode (aimed at software development tasks) to Vista's speech recognition capabilities (aimed at general computer use and word processing and the like). But that script was not an example of advanced programming techniques and methodologies - there were no classes, functions, ADT definitions or elaborate syntax.

I guess sometimes, you don't get what you pay for.

I've written a few Python scripts to automate various tasks, so I needed to get a Python interpreter installed on my fresh installation of Windows. After reinstalling a lot of software in a short amount of time, my brain switched to autopilot and I entered python.com in Firefox's address bar. I hit ENTER and averted my gaze to the TV. When I turned back to look at the monitor, I noticed that there was some "hot oral and anal action" on my screen; two things that aren't typically associated with Python programming, unless you're shouting at your computer because the buggy Python script that you're writing is a pain in the ass. I then noticed the ".com" that I mistakenly entered in the URL and promptly changed it to the proper python.org. I bet python.com gets many visitors who were originally looking for python.org. Yet I wonder if any people looking for python.com accidentally visit python.org and become convinced that writing code would put their to hands to...ahem...better use. I'm glad that porn sites were too late to register clever domain names for other scripting languages' web sites like Perl; they could've had fun with that one