There are 3 basic rules to software programming. Most people don’t know them. Or if they do, they probably don’t know how to properly articulate them. So I’m going to spell out the 3 rules for you. This was talked about a lot at my last job early on when dealing with problems and support issues. Just about everything came back to one of these 3 rules, and unfortunately, rule 3 was more popular than even we believed.
So, its been a few days, did you figure out the solution to our first cryptogram?
This one I thought was pretty easy if you are a geek. And seeing as my blog is pretty tech related, I figured that a lot of people would get this one. Maybe its just me, but when I see certain encoded lines, I can pretty much guess that they are encoded with base64. Maybe I’ve been around email too long.
So I’m experimenting with a little contest to see how smart my 3 readers actually are. Every couple of weeks I’m going to post a puzzle. They’ll be pretty easy to start off with and get increasingly more difficult as time goes by and I have time.
Without further ado, here is the first cryptogram.
V2l0aCBmYWl0aCBhbmQgaG9wZSwgdGhlIGRyZWFtIGJlZ2lucyBhbmV3
Good luck!
For each cryptogram, the solution will be posted the following Monday.
Update: Answers are posted on Wednesday, not Mondays.
As you’ve read before, I’ve had a variety of battles with the Hosted Messaging and Collaboration framework from Microsoft.
Today was another day for battle. And an interesting battle it was.
So here is the situation that I was running into. Within my code in the customer portal, I have a notification that is sent out that has a full back trace of what happened on the system, what was inputted and what was the error message that was returned.
Ladies and Gentlemen, today you are going to learn a lesson on why you do NOT edit the active directory directly for exchange attributes.
Background
A long time ago, we had a very crappy provisioning system for our hosted Exchange 2003 platform. It worked ok, but missed a lot of things that we wanted to have set. They also were kind of pricks when it came to licensing so making a ton of money on the platform was hard to do.