Seems the competition for reasonable .com domains is big, so I decided to take the chance and grab boonbot.com while it's still there.
I'll be moving over stuff there soon. The portal-thingy-thing is already there, so all images are now funneled through that one instead of portal.zunavi.dk that should be redirecting people to the new place.

I don't know if the name will be effective for whatever online doings I am going to put it through, but at least it should be somewhat easier for people to remember. Well, just a little compared to zunavi.dk plus subdomains. Hopefully I can soon start up some google Adsense on it so that I can be more slack on my online investments. Also, I'd like to have some fun with the portal thing soon.

For now, here's just a link to get started: boonbot.com. There's just pictures from my taiwan trip there now, but hopefully I can stuff in other stuff when I get some more work on it. For an example integrating this blog using my own coding could be nice.

What do you think of the name? Was it a waste of money? Should I have picked sandertams.com instead?

Today I got a pretty nasty surprise when I opened up my blog to check if there were any comments for me. Usually the spammers will just leave their vandalism on 3 or 4 blogposts and eventually make a spam trackback once in a while so that I have to use a few seconds for cleanup but today I just found out one spambot had gone to every commentable post on my blog leaving one comment at each thus forcing me to go through a lot. Luckily for me, I made comments close automatically when the post is more than 3 months old, but most of my posts are still very recent since I've just been in Taiwan for a little more than 2 months now.

That's unacceptable. Before it was just stupid random spamming, but this actually made me feel a little like someone making fun of me, (well, ofc. they're not but still... they can be bots but they definately have to die,) so I was willing to implement captchas even if they were going to annoy my visitors and myself most of all.

So I went and used my evening for plugging in an extention to BlogEngine that's called Askimet Extension. It's using Askimet which has an API that you can implement on your blog to prevent comment and trackback spam by checking it towards a database before letting content in. It's managed by the same people as are running wordpress and is free for any private person earning less than 500 US$ on his blogging business. By using this, I hope that I can keep spammers away. I won't know if it's working before some days have passed but I know there's no captcha's inside it, which surprises me actually.

Wish me luck. * Crossing Finger *

Btw: I uploaded more photos to the portal-thingy and am starting to put up tags on some of them. You should check it out.

This week has been pretty boring on my blog, amirite?
I know I haven't written very much here at all lately, and there's a pretty good explanation for that: I don't have much time for computer here because I'm busy being greedy with good memories, and the last week I've used my little time here more to work on a small project than the blog. I hope I can soon get back to blogging as much as I usually do. After all it's kind of to remember everything better myself too.

However, the project I've been working on is this: A small portal for all the pictures I take here in Taiwan.
You can go and take a look at it since it's working now. I'm keeping it as simple as possible, so don't expect there to be any special stuff to do except for looking through an insane amount of photos I took some weeks ago.

Eventually I'll get some more descriptions on some of the photos and also put up tags, categories and locations so that they're easier to get around in. Also perhaps there'll be a service for other to put up any taiwan or maybe just asia related pictures if I decide to work a little more on it. I guess it depends on the attention it will get in the future.
Actually, you can register a user there already, but you wont be able to use it for anything except logging in. This is because I need to authenticate to the site in order to edit the descriptions of the photos I take.

I hope you can enjoy a bit of it already. There's currently just photos from week 5 and week 6 there, but they should be enough for you to still use more time there than you could have used for reading my blog for the last week if I had posted a pile of really big articles. Maybe I can get the time tomorrow for writing about the barbeque with my classmates I had yesterday. It's not really a big story like my birthday, so shouldn't get too long.

Sleep well.

Det ser skam ud til, at jeg efterhånden har fået udryddet det meste, men der er en enkelt fejl tilbage, som ikke rigtig giver nogen mening (og derfor er den meget hårdføre).
Jeg kan se hvor den opstår, og jeg kan forstå, hvad der er galt.
Problemet er, at når jeg selv tester koden, opstår fejlen slet ikke, og i øvrigt er koden konstrueret, således at fejlen ikke kan opstå. Således har jeg igen skabt en fantomfejl (som dengang, jeg fik lavet et tal, der var både større og mindre end en konstant på samme tid). Koden skaber simpelthen en fejl, hvis den ligger i et dokument, og eksekverer uden problemer, når den ligger i et andet. o.0

Her taler jeg selvfølgelig om techgame, jeg nu har spildt endnu en uge på at få til at virke igen. Hvis jeg ikke snart ser resultater, giver jeg snart op.

Nå... LOLCAT IZ BEE TEHN!

So, I've decided to write this post in english, so that more people working with ASP.NET might have benefit from it. I'm sorry my english is not that perfect yet.

I ran into problems with my new webhotel, and I'm having them right now as i write. I am still unsure, what exactly causes the problem, but my speculations are that possibly asp.net executes under another user, when run from the Global.asax Application_Dispose or Application_End. (Is this correct?)

I am programming my own website in Visual Basic, which is hosted on a shared hosting solution. The ASP.NET version used is 2.0, and the aspnet user on the server has read/write to any folder inside my domain, at least most of the time. Thing is, I've used the same code for at least a half year now, and it has been working just fine, until I had to switch to another host, as the old one went bankrupt, duh.
So now my site has been deployed on a new server, which has a lot in common with the old one, but has one major flaw, that won't effect most web solutions, but unfortunately renders some of my (previously fine working) code obsolete.

My website is running independent of databases. It can be configured to use them for less important tasks such as custom event logging and tracking some of the websites users habits in order to fight dupe-accounts on the website.
Whenever an application instance is created, that is, when the first user enters the site, a subroutine is called from Global.asax.vb to load all data from files located in the App_Data folder of the website. This is working fine, now to the point:
Whenever the application is destroyed again, a subroutine is called from Application_Dispose, which has to save all the new generated data to files in the App_Data folder.
The data saving subroutines are very long and uses several threads, and so, they could invite a lot of unforseen bugs, but this is not the problem, as these subroutines have been tested on two other shared servers, aswell as my own computer. They even work on this server, if i call them from another place than the Global.asax, but as soon as I try to make the application automatically save everything through Application_Dispose (or Application_End), i get a System.UnauthorizedAccessException on every file i try to write to.

This problem has had me pondering for a while, and I've even made a more simple test, to make sure that this really isn't something with my subroutines or threading bugs.

First thing I did was to create test.aspx in my domain root, and put following code into its Page_Load:

Dim Fil As New System.IO.StreamWriter([App_Data path on the server] & "test.txt", False)
Fil.WriteLine("Hallow thar! :)")
Fil.Flush()
Fil.Close()

I even tried changing the path to outside of App_Data, and also tried both places with the extension ".stxt" instead of ".txt". Everytime, it executed the script without problem, and my file was there to read and see exactly "Hallow thar! :)", written in it.

Then I went to the Global.asax.vb and put this code into Application_Disposed, then later Application_End:

Try
    Dim Fil As New System.IO.StreamWriter([App_Data path] & "test2.txt", False)
    UserListLoad()
    Fil.WriteLine("HALLOW!! -.- ")
    Fil.Flush()
    Fil.Close()
Catch ex As Exception
    logerror(ex)
End Try

And so, the logerror subroutine started spitting out an exeption everytime i reset my application. I restarted it by replacing an empty .vb file in the App_Code folder some times, and later tried having it end by itself (takes patience, but that's life i guess).
Still. No way could I find a test2.txt file in my App_Data folder, and so, all I have is error messages in my SQL-database looking like this (part of the path is omitted to protect my website and host from hackers):

System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path '[root]\App_Data\Data\test2.txt' is denied.
  at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
  at System.IO.FileStream.Init(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, Int32 rights, Boolean useRights, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options, SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES secAttrs, String msgPath, Boolean bFromProxy)
  at System.IO.FileStream..ctor(String path, FileMode mode, FileAccess access, FileShare share, Int32 bufferSize, FileOptions options)
  at System.IO.StreamWriter.CreateFile(String path, Boolean append)
  at System.IO.StreamWriter..ctor(String path, Boolean append, Encoding encoding, Int32 bufferSize)
  at System.IO.StreamWriter..ctor(String path, Boolean append)
  at zunavi.Global.Application_End(Object sender, EventArgs e) in [root]\App_Code\Global.asax.vb:line 151

 So, maybe just an idiot for not reading the documentation thoroughly, and I might just be stupid for using Application_Dispose or Application_End for something else than cleaning up resources, or maybe this is a major problem, that appareantly only exist at some hosts.

Again: I suspect the application for somehow impersonating when executing code from Application_Dispose or Application_End.

Please send me an e-mail if you know anything about this or have  experienced the same. More is to follow, should (when) I find out more about this.

Sander Tams.