Atlanta ASP.Net MVC Developer/ Architect
Paul Lockwood
Paul Lockwood is a hands on .Net Team Lead/ Architect based in Atlanta, USA. He also performs short term performance tuning/ debugging engagements with a 'no solution, no charge' policy. His career spans over two decades including Accenture, EDS, 3M, London Stock Exchange, SwissRe, Philips.com and UBS Investment Bank. Education includes Bachelors/Masters in Software Engineering and a Masters in AI and Robotics. http://www.linkedin.com/in/paullockwood
Posts by Paul Lockwood
SecurAble – is your DEP working
Jan 22nd
Steve Gibson of GRC fame spits out another useful tool:
It simply displays if some newer hardware features are available on your PC. The screen-shot is verification that the 64bit PC I built almost three years does support DEP.
DEP: Prevents buffer overflows in hardware – this a very big deal. Of course the operation system must support DEP too. Which versions of Windows support it is unclear, but 64bit Vista and XP should support it. Hopefully Steve Gibson will extend his utility to test DEP with an actual buffer overflow
Hardware Vitalization: Hardware support for running Virtual Machines – they should run with no speed degradation
You can see all of Steve’s free utilities at his circa-1995 website:
http://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm
After a period of dumbing down his Security Now podcast is again one I highly recommend:
http://www.grc.com/SecurityNow.htm
Linux web servers are case senstive
Jan 10th
When re-hosting this blog I decided to go with an engine that published plain-jane html. The main reasons are:
. Simplicity of hosting
. Speed of pages to appear (i.e. no ASP.Net engine to ‘warm up’)
. Should be simple to migrate to another engine in the future
Unfortunately I decided that Linux is a simpler and faster choice than windows. I say unfortunately because it appears Apache on Linux is case sensitive, i.e. Index.html is different from index.html.
This means there are few dead-links on this site right now, and they will have to stay that way until I return from vacation. Probably I’ll swap back to IIS hosting. Anyone else who looking to move their blog don’t make the same mistake!
HDMI Compatibilty Woes
Jan 3rd
Over the last few days I have been on forums and chatting with friends about HDTV.
Anyone in the market should be aware that just getting HDMI is not enough. According to this article at cnet not all HDMI devices are compatible – nice. It was interesting to read Dvorak’s rant about HDCP in last month’s PC Magazine about what will happen when someone who bought a Sony TV two years ago, plugs in a new Sony blue-ray player only to find the player refuses to send HD content to the non-HDCP capable TV. Already I can picture non-technical yuppies flipping out at innocent Best Buy clerks – ‘listen sonny boy, I spent half your yearly salary on that [bleep]ing TV so you’d better make it work or..’.
Wikipedia details differences between versions of HDMI, which are principally higher bandwidth on video + new audio codec support (lossless TrueHD and DTS-HD). The question is would play a lossless codec straight to a TV’s built in speakers?
What is next? Probably a black market for boxes that accept any version of hdmi input, handshake with hdcp and output to DRM free DVI/ hdmi/ component video.