Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

I just updated my online accounts thanks to Gawker’s recent news regarding their user database being compromised.  I did have a gawker account, I’m a reader and subscriber to lifehacker.com.

You can check to see if you need to change passwords by looking if your account was compromised here (http://www.slate.com/id/2277768) the widget looks up your email or username.

At the time I created my lifehacker account (that is compromised) I was using my primary email address and a common password that I used everywhere.  I have since created a better method for using online sites and also passwords.  My method is based off the common password variation method.   I use a similar password phrase to create the password.

Example:   J1MB3cH3r – this uses numbers and capitols to re-create my common used phrase (no I don’t actually use that as my common password) .  Then depending on the site I append some type of element to merry the username and password together.

facebook.com – J1MB3cH3r@fb (notice I added the ‘@’ sign)  I use this to separate my common password with the site specific attribute ’fb’.

So make sure that you change your password info and keep strong passwords.

I love broadband internet.  I signed up for excite @home back in 1999.  @home eventually became Comcast and my love hate relationship with them continues.   In-fact, I still use the original Motorola surfboard that I got in 1999 (it has a date on it from 1998) as my cable modem.

I have been relatively happy with Comcast for all these years in terms of internet access.  I can’t say that for my TV subscription with Comcast.   But, they have provided me consistent internet access that I have used for Work, play, phone and entertainment.  I have multiple devices in our home: iPad, iPhone, laptops, computers, macs, tivo’s, wii, etc….  The list could keep going on, that use the internet.   More that I like to admit we are always connected online.  That is why it is important that our broadband be reliable and available.

Most recently, my broadband has been reliable (in that it has been up and running) but the performance Bandwidth has been poor.   I think this will become more of an issue in the future as people rely on high speed internet.

The issue I had last night  is pretty trivial in the whole scheme of things (though it really made me angry).   The family was camped out in front of the TV in excitement of watching an ABC special called “Prep and Landing”.  The special was on ABC.com and I typically just hook one of the laptops up to the Plasma via HDMI and we  have a wonderful picture.

However, last night my kids were not loving the show because they saw more of “buffering” than they did of the content.  How, could that be?  My cable modem connection was up and running, wifi working great, and I was also online reading email.   What it ended up being was that I had the connection speed of a 56k modem.  Even as I am typing this here is my speed.

My issue from last night is not that big of a deal in reality.  I basically turned on MyFi on my cell phone, and had the laptop use 3G to get the show (My kids cheered for me).

What this does show is how reliant we have become on bandwidth, not necessarily broadband.  At the time we could not watch a show on ABC.com, we also could not make a phone call (VOIP) or get to weather.com.

I’m not sure what my SLA with Comcast is but I am guessing there is not much in there about minimum bandwidth they will provide.   I do know that my advertised speed is 5MB down and 1 something up.

In the future, I am willing to pay for an SLA and also the amount of bandwidth I use.  I realize that I am a high bandwidth user.

I’ve been doing some research on QR codes (the funny looking squares you see in magazines and Sunday advertisements). QR codes are “Quick Reference” barcodes that can contain a lot of information. They started to become popular in Japan and have recently been showing up more and more in media and at stores.

There are a few great QR code generators out there but I set out to make one for myself that I would be able to share. I used an opensource qrcode library from twit88.com.

Head over to www.tilde32.com/qr.aspx to use the generator. Create a QRcode for your site, or for a business card, even your wifi info. You can use the permalink to add the QR code to your site or just download and save the image. I have also been working on a GDI app that you can add your logo on top of the QR code (coming soon) Similar to what the BBC did with their logo. I am also adding a Microsoft TAG generator.

QR code for : jimiz.net

Why are QR codes so popular? There are over 50 Million smartphone users in the US. Any smartphone with a camera should have the ability to read a QR code. It is a simple way to transmit data to a end user. QR codes are easy and free to create and can store a lot of data. They are easy to embed into media and marketing materials.

I recently launched a new application that generates an image. In the app I created a custom image handler that returns a 2D barcode. The Handler used the System.Drawing class to generate the image. This all worked great locally on both Visual Studios Cassini and my local IIS box. However when I published the application to my server (win 2008) I was getting this obscure error “A generic error occurred in GDI+.”

What a great informative error. I did a quick google search only to find that this is a common issue. Many of the posts suggest this is a security issue, and that may be true is you were saving the image to a file structure. In my app, I am streaming the results out of memory back to the context in the handler, so it can display the image.

The offending line of code was:
context.Response.ContentType = "image/Jpeg";
System.Drawing.Image.Save(context.Response.OutputStream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Jpeg)

I started looking at permissions, I assumed that since 90% of the fixes I read were done with permissions that this would be the simple answer. I was wrong, in my case permissions did not help. In a last ditch attempt I changed the image type. I was using System.Drawing.Image.ImageFormat.Jpeg I changed this to ImageFormat.Png.

This simple format change allowed the page to render on the server. I am not sure why the rendering of a jpg would be more of an issue than a PNG but I am ok with the result.

Fixed code
The offending line of code was:
context.Response.ContentType = "image/Png";
System.Drawing.Image.Save(context.Response.OutputStream, System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png)

If you are unfortunate enough to have this error I hope this post helps you. Good luck with the dreaded A generic error occurred in GDI+ error.