New Travel Diary - Retrospective of 2013

Hi all - As some of you may know I work as a Security Consultant for IBM. Apart of getting to do that I get to travel to some of the most exotic and interesting places in the world. From now on I will be posting my pictures of my travels as well as a short blurb on what my trip entailed. Looking forward to your comments!

Ciao

Microsoft's answer to Gmail

It appears that Microsoft has tried to create a competitor email service to Gmail. At least that what it looks like over at https://outlook.com where you can sign up for a free email account with Microsoft. I wish they would have done this years ago and ditched Hotmail and it's sad interface. Gmail from Google has made so many options and features incredibly easy for users. In fact, that is one of Google's main benefits over other technologies and that is their stuff "just works". I'm sure it would be interesting to see the difference in QA defects coming out of Google's products vs. Microsoft's products. Whichever, at least Google has kept the customer confidence very high in comparison to Microsoft. Enough bashing for a moment...

I signed up for a test account today and test drove the new interface and I'm excited for Microsofties. The interface is completely metro-styled based on Microsoft's new Windows 8 & Server 2012 product line. Good job to the folks up in Redmond. I think you have won back a new email account.

You can follow me and if interested email me at my new account : joshua.clark@outlook.com

Transitioning into a new role

I wanted to let everyone know that follows this blog that I am going to be making a transition into a new role. I have been working in development for over 5 years now and it has been a very rewarding and challenging career. For my new role I will be changing direction a little bit and working in the software security field. I feel that this will help challenge me in other areas that I have yet to be challenged with. I feel that in order to stay competitive in an ever-changing industry we must change our paths/roles in order to stay competitive, dynamic, and on-top of our game. I have heard too many-a-story of the classic worker that works in a particular role/position for too long and gets burnt out or bored with their work. If you are one of these types of people I challenge you to change your path/role and seek out something more challenging as it will lead you to new heights and expand your skill set.

I will still be blogging at http://joshua-clark.blogspot.com/ but I will be creating a new blog site designed specically for security-related topics as the core focus of my work will be in software security I will be writing about trends, tips & tricks, how-to's, and the do's & don'ts that are specific to software security. You can follow the link in the top right or just click the new link below:

http://security-dude.blogspot.com/

MIX 2011 - Keynotes Live

Great keynotes by ScottGu, ScottHanselman, and IE team, MIX is amazing conference and always amazes me.

Great job guys!

http://live.visitmix.com/

Staying Thin Being IT Software Consultant

Here are some tips and tricks for staying thin sitting on your butt everyday being a IT Software Consultant. I have consulting for over 5 years and my job mostly consists of sitting on my bum all day typing emails, code, word docs, excel docs, etc. and this makes me seriously non-active. All I do is slam on the keyboard and don't use any of my other body parts which makes my occupation' activity directly related to my gut. So I have been working on this new dieting plan that in conjunction with a moderate workout plan has been helping me lose weight. At the end of last year, I was about 212 lbs. I am not 190, and it has only been 3 months which I'm pretty happy about. Take a look at my plan and see if can work for you:

Morning: 1 Cup Black Coffee w/2 Tsp of Sugar - 30 calories w/caffeine to keep my metabolism up = 30
Mid-Morning: 1 Cup/Danon's Greek Yogurt w/Organic Raspberry Preserves (1 Tbsp)  - 120 cal
Lunch: 1 Can Tuna and as much spicy brown mustard or reg mustard as you want/1 string cheese/1 pkg of whole almonds - 120 + 60 + 100 = 280
Mid-Afternoon: Orange, 1 String Cheese, 1 Pkg Whole Almonds, 1 Cup Black Coffee w/2 Tsp of Sugar : 60 + 60 + 70 + 100 + 30 = 320
Dinner/After work:Chicken Breast/Pork Tenderloin Serving w/Veggies - 500 calories
Post Workout: 1 Scoop of Gold Standard Natural Whey Protein w/2 Tsp of Benefiber (Orange) and 1 Cup of Organic Fat-free Milk: 120 + 30 + 90 = 240


Total Calories: 30 + 120 + 280 + 320 + 500 + 240 = 1480
Estimated Normal Calorie Burn: 2000 - (25 yrs, 5'9, 175 lbs) - this is where I want to be, weight wise
Net Loss: 520
Workout: 650 calorie burn (use Treadmill calories burn counter based on weight)


Total Net Loss Per Day: 650 + 520 = 1170


For every 3500 calories that you burn, you estimated 1 lbs. of fat loss. Try it out ,  it has worked for me, I have lost 22 lbs over 3 months time. 


I hope this helps and good luck!

Oracle Variable Syntax for TOAD tool - tip

I have been working extensively with TOAD for Oracle on a current project and have just found something that I have been looking for, variable syntax for TOAD. If you are lucky and get to develop on SQL Server, you have it easy, like I once did. Now, Oracle is a pain-in-the-butt, hardcore. If you need to ever run Oracle SQL in TOAD, here is an easy tip for the variable syntax. Use your standard SQL code like following:

If you are in TOAD, then when you execute this you should get a popup like the following:

Pretty cool, huh?

Hope this helps!

ASP.NET Best Practices

I have been looking for a good bulleted list of ASP.NET best practices and I found some pretty site ASP.NET Best Practices . I have been meaning to create my own from my own experience and projects but I felt that some people that do read my blog may benefit now until at least I come up with my own. Here you go.

http://jsprunger.com/asp-net-webforms-best-practices/

ASP.NET Compilation Model Overview

I have been looking to write a good blog on this for a while and found an awesome deep-dive into the ASP.NET compilation model overview. I recommend this for all ASP.NET developers. It will give you all a great overview of the technology.

Rick Strahl's ASP.NET Compilation Overview

Verizon finally gets IPhone!

Verizon finally gets the iPhone, thank goodness!

How to setup/integrate Facebook Platform with your own

Facebook is a host platform today for developers, marketers, businesses, actually anyone really! Facebook is the world's largest social network topping over almost 500 million users. The amount of active traffic you can get from Facebook is astonishing. I am not going to bloat about Facebook and how awesome it is but what this blog post is about is how you can get started with Facebook in your own site in less than 15 minutes. There are many tutorials out there now that try to explain this but fail miserably. Either the documenation that the tutorial provides is out of date or the version is out of date. It is very hard to follow. This blog post will make it incredibly easy for anyone to get started who knows how to copy/paste :) Let's get started: Step 1: Register your application with your facebook account Once you are logged into your facebook account go to the follow address: Register your application If you have not already added the facebook "developer" application to your profile, you will need to do so in order to continue. If you are reading this blog, I am hoping that you have already added the facebook developer application to your profile. If not, its easy to add, just like any other app you add to your profile. Fill out the captcha... Step 2: Setup your application's info To make your application more easy to understand for your users, provide a brief description about your app. Also, you can include other helpful information to your user such as contact email, the developer's name, etc. Step 3: Setup your web application details I had the most trouble getting this work since all the google'd information I found on doing this was out-of-date. Under 'web Site' tab on the left, enter your site's URL and site's domain. (e.g. site URL: www.example.com/, site domain: example.com) Step 4: Create a dummy page in your web site's root called 'xd_receiver.htm' with the following code Step 5: Create a base page on your site to connect to facebook using Javascript This part requires a little more knowledge on the coding part. If you have made it this far, your are doing well. Almost there! We need to create a page to collect our facebook data and show it on our web page. Create a page on your site using whatever technology you prefer and then in the paste in the following code: You will need to deploy this web page to your site on the web in order to get this to work. This will basically allow you to connect to facebook using an account of your choice. (e.g. Your fb account , your dev account, etc.) That is pretty much it as far as the hard stuff goes. The only thing left to do is to work on what your application needs from facebook. You will need to look throught the JavaScript API and SDK to understand how to format requests and the other. One thing I did leave out is how to obtain the oAuth token that you will need in order to query the Graph API. I will blog on this later. This should get your development started ASAP! Check out the following links below to help: Facebook Graph API Getting Started - Facebook Documentation (Helpful, but very lite) Facebook - JavaScript API [Posted By] - Vorality Admin on [Key Words]