Obstacles

Listening to Dave Ramsey this morning, as I do most mornings, and he’s going off on another rant. This time it’s more of an encouraging rant instead of an angry financial rant, and it’s got some pretty good stuff.

 

He’s basically saying that once you get over the defeated mentality and stop making yourself a victim, you’re ready to overcome obstacles.  Everyone said that running a 4 minute mile was impossible until someone did it, not people are doing it all the time.  Everyone said that climbing Everest was impossible until someone did it, now people are climbing it all the time.  Everyone said that you can’t get ahead right now but there are people doing it, it’s the defeated mentality that holds people back. 

 

I love it! I believe that if you can attack things with confidence and the spirit needed to tackle a challenge you’ll be far more successful than if you went at something half-heartedly.  Sometimes you have to build up that confidence and enthusiasm to go after something, but it generally pays off in the end.

Google Maps KML

This is pretty awesome and I was excited when I saw this project come in today!

 

You can create KML files which is an XML file that can be imported into Google Maps, you can put your own custom locations and landmarks in the file and they will be displayed on the map.  It can use the address or the coordinates to pin the location on the map.  There is some much more complex things you can do with it, but in the example below I just added a pin at the coordinates below

 

<Placemark>

<name>Example</name>

<description></description>

<styleUrl>#purplepin</styleUrl>

<Point>

<coordinates>-81.426759,40.905645,1000</coordinates>

</Point>

</Placemark>

 

#purplepin is referencing some code above this segment where you can set up different styles for the pin on the map, below is the code for purplepin

 

<Style id=”purplepin”>

<IconStyle>

<color>ff8a005c</color>

<scale>.7</scale>

<Icon>

<href>http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/kml/paddle/wht-blank.png</href>

</Icon>

</IconStyle>

</Style>

 

You can see all of the different things you can do with it here:

 

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlreference.html

C# Tip of the week

Single quotes encode a single character (data type char), while double quotes encode a string of multiple characters.

 

Just learned this today!

.NET Authorization

Thought I would give a blog a shot and share some things I’m working on, as well as storing things so that I can remember them later J

 

So today’s (first) post is on managing permissions to a website in the web.config using ASP.NET

 

This is so easy, it’s an awesome feature that can be implemented in minutes.  You just add the authorization section under <configuration> and <system.web> then you can add the tags <allow> and/or <deny> to manage permissions.  The wildcard “*” can be used to allow or deny everyone, and a “?” represents anonymous logins.

 

  <authentication mode=“Windows“ />

         <authorization> 

                <!–Here we can manage access to the site–> 

                <!–Source:–> 

                <!–http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8d82143t(v=VS.100).aspx–> 

                <allow users=” msmucker0527″/> 

                <allow roles=“Admin“/>

                <deny users =“*“/>

         </authorization>

 

The best MSDN entry I found is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8d82143t(v=VS.100).aspx