DIY, Paint-Drips, and Code Refactoring

I’m moving soon! So, for various reasons, I am doing a whole load of painting-and-decorating to prepare to rent out my current flat. Today I was putting the final coat of enamel onto a radiator, and while doing this I was really noticing the remnants of old paint-drips that I had not quite sanded away in my preparation. Now, overall, I know the radiator will look a lot better tomorrow than it did a couple of days ago… but I still find those historic drips bothersome!

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Moving to Windows 7 x64 for Developers

I recently purchased and installed a new boot SSD, and rather than worry about copying my installation, I decided to get Windows 7; and further; to move to 64 bit. I had actually previously purchased a 64 bit version of Vista, but been baffled by an issue with lack of support for VPN 64-bit software by Cisco, so I ended up overwriting it with a 32 bit install.

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More Keys is More Secure. Right?

Happy Little KeyLast week, we had a heated discussion at work about encryption. We want to encrypt some data in our database, and I proposed that we go with a single private-key encryption mechanism (ignore which exact one for the moment), and my colleagues were pretty-much unanimously suggesting a ‘key per row’ approach. In this post I am going to attempt to explain the rough background, and why I felt their mechanism might not be best.

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Data Model Changes and Replication

Replicating Data Model ChangesJust a little reminder note today on the simplest way to make data-model changes in SQL Server 2005 when the database is replicated via transactional replication. This is from my own personal experience of replication and very-much muddling my way through learning how to use it effectively. Otherwise, this posts presumes you are familiar with Replication Monitor and so on.

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