Running an elevated application at startup time on Windows 8 is rather annoying. Normally, the easiest way to run anything at startup is to simply create a shortcut to it in %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. Unfortunately when UAC is on, Windows will simply refuse to launch any shortcut at startup time if…
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What's worse than experiencing a failure in a production system? I'll tell you: not knowing that it occurred.
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Doing some evening web surfing, I came across an intriguing Reddit post entitled "Don't be loyal to your company" that pointed to a blog post. The blog is currently offline, probably due to the Reddit traffic, but a Google cache of the post exists. After reading that post, I felt…
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It was a gray afternoon, the kind that makes people long for rain just to break up the dreary monotony of the sky. I was nursing a scotch, which was by this point in time far too diluted for my taste, as the ice had long melted. As I lit…
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You're working on a killer new app. Or a small niche website. Or really any kind of human-facing software. If you're like most developers, your primary focus is on functionality: before anything else, it has to work. How can anybody disagree with that? If it doesn't work, then what's the…
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I will freely admit that I have digital trust issues. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if you don't have these issues as well, then you are either not in the software engineering field, or you are being willfully ignorant. Allow me to explain my…
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In Authentication, part one I discussed the pros and cons of single sign-on, and if you've decided to use an SSO solution, that's great. However, if SSO doesn't fit your requirements, then you'll need to take care of storing your users' passwords. The first thing you should do when determining…
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Authentication is something that virtually every developer these days has dealt with at least once - and sometimes has purposely avoided increasing that particular counter. Security in general is hard to get right, and authentication is, arguably, at its heart. There is precious little out there today that has no…
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Sometimes I really miss the Linux shell on my Windows computers. I rely on too much Windows-specific stuff to actually switch to Linux for my everyday computing activities - not to mention Windows Phone development - but I do want more power from my commandline than cmd.exe provides by itself.…
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First, some background. I've got a new Samsung Series 7 NP700Z3A-S06US notebook (that name just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) and the first thing I always do when I get a new computer that I didn't build myself is wipe everything off the hard drive(s) and install the operating…
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