Blog from rptea.com

I always curious about which system was running behind a hacked website. This time is no exception. If you read last week tech news, you probably knew the recent big victim is San Francisco subway’s website. The news I read is like this: “Anonymous hack San Francisco subway web site; Mass user data leaked” (From Zdnet.com). The article says mybart.org is hacked and the main website bart.gov is OK though. This triggered my curiosity, thus I did a little research. Looks like BART was hiding their sever info from netcraft.com so I have to dig it a little bit further. Unfort... [More]

  I knew an IT “law” for a long time. The law says: Any time when a big business IT system crashing news come out, some “experts” will always try to see if Windows is running at that business IT infrastructure. If it is, no matter how that “crash” happened (human error, hardware issue or power failure without proper internal backup plans), “experts” will try as hard as possible to list million reasons that Windows can not run mission critical tasks and who runs it is a moron and deserves failure. if it is not, then “experts” keep quiet. This law started from MS going public 30 year... [More]

(Note: source code is available at the end of this post) Data driven PDF could mean: thousands PDF files created by a server scheduled job, which renders PDFs from a database query or a web site which generate a dynamic PDF file based on user inputs and clicks. There are two technologies offered by Microsoft to realize this dynamic data driven PDF generation: SSRS (SQL server Reporting Service) and  Report Viewer Control. I made two dynamic PDF creating web applications, one is using SSRS approach, the other is using Report Viewer Control approach. SSRS approach (live demo) is coded v... [More]

(Note: live demo is here and source code can be downloaded at the end of this post) Ajax control toolkit is a Microsoft open source project. The latest version is released at April 12th 2010, the source code and binary can be downloaded from Microsoft open source site: codeplex. There is a very useful control called “AsyncFileUpload” according to asp.net demo, AsyncFileUpload is an ASP.NET AJAX Control that allows you asynchronously upload files to server. The file uploading results can be checked both in the server and client sides. You can save the uploaded file by calling ... [More]

The upgrade from 1.6.0 to 2.0 works like a charm. When I noticed 2.0 is ready for the public, I was implementing my own 1.6.0 recaptcha feature. I love my new recaptcha so well for a while (At least 3 days I promise). This afternoon I got some spare time.  Uh, what the hell, so I downloaded the 2.0 source code from codeplex and decide to give it a try. Of course, it’s not 2 hour job just like a snap. I have to transfer my previous version c# code changes (mainly for file & image external links handling); copy/paste the app_data (don’t forget apply proper IIS user access rights... [More]

I just put online another web application called geeky logo creator, which makes your own logo very similar to google’s. People usually call it google font or google style logo. Whatever it is, it looks neat, smart and of course it’s geeky. That’s why I call it “geeky logo creator”. It’s easy to use, you just type the word and click the button. After about 10 seconds, a BMP file is created for you to download. Some restrictions though: It doesn’t handle far east characters No customized color pattern, all built-in No customized font size (Google don’t change their font size, do t... [More]