Month: December 2016

Evernote privacy

There was a bit of a brouhaha earlier this week, when Evernote made some changes to their privacy policy. I’ve always known that my Evernote data isn’t encrypted, and can be seen by Evernote employees and processed by Evernote’s servers, so this doesn’t seem like that big a change (or that big a deal) to me. I generally store more sensitive stuff in 1Password, which is encrypted locally, and would be inaccessible to the folks at AgileBits.

The new wrinkle here is that Evernote is going to be doing some fancy machine learning stuff, so they needed to clarify how that would work. They posted a blog entry on this stuff today, and I’m reasonably satisfied with it, so I’m not going to be jumping ship over this.

Still, I should probably do a quick pass through my Evernote notebooks, and make sure I don’t have anything sensitive in there. If I do, I can move it to 1Password or just encrypt it in-place in Evernote. The encryption feature in Evernote is not great: you need to encrypt single notes, one at a time, and you can only do it on Windows and Mac, not on iOS. I think it would be great if you could designate an entire notebook as encrypted, and just put all your sensitive stuff in that one notebook.

Copying SharePoint users from one group to another

I recently hit an issue with SharePoint, where I had added a bunch of users to a “visitors” group, but then needed to move them to a “members” group. I figured I could probably do this with PowerShell, so I did some searching, found a couple of scripts that were almost what I needed, and managed to cobble something useful together. So, for future reference, here it is. This script will get a list of users from the source group, then add them to the destination group. (I later deleted the users from the source group manually, but that could probably be done with PowerShell as well.) I’m also filtering the user list, so it only includes individual users with e-mail addresses, not domain groups.

Add-PSSnapin "Microsoft.Sharepoint.Powershell"
$siteURL = "http://SITENAME/sites/SUBSITE/"
$srcGroup = "My Database Visitors"
$destGroup = "My Database Members"
$srcUsers = Get-SPWeb $siteURL |
    Select -ExpandProperty SiteGroups |
    Where { $_.Name -eq $srcGroup } |
    Select -ExpandProperty Users |
    Where {$_.IsDomainGroup -eq $false -and $_.Email -ne ""}
foreach ($user in $srcUsers)
{
    New-SPUser -UserAlias $user.Email -Web $siteURL -Group $destGroup
}

I’m still not great with either SharePoint or PowerShell, but I get by. Here’s a couple of sources that I used in creating this script:

Interactive C# REPLs

I was working on a C# program today, and wanted to test a small code snippet out. I used to use Snippet Compiler for that sort of thing, but it hasn’t been updated in a very long time.

Visual Studio 2015 now has a built-in REPL, but I’m using VS 2013.

I decided to try installing ScriptCS, which I’d read about before, but never actually tried. It was near the end of the work day when I started trying to install it, and I hit a couple of minor snags. So I don’t have it working yet, but I plan on getting it straightened out tomorrow.

In the past, I’ve also looked at CShell, which appears to be similar to ScriptCS, but with an actual lightweight IDE included.

I’ve also looked at CS-Script, which is interesting because it can be used with Notepad++ via a plugin.

And if you just want to try something out in a web browser, there’s .NET Fiddle.

Scott Hanselman has a good blog post on C# REPLs here. He mentions ScriptCS and the VS 2015 C# and F# REPLs.

I don’t have anything terribly useful to say about any of these products, since I haven’t gotten around to using them yet, but I wanted to write this up, just so I’d have a consolidated list of links to all of them.

This whole thing has side-tracked me enough from the actual task I was trying to accomplish, that I almost forgot what it was. I’m pretty sure I was trying to check how WebUtility.HtmlDecode would treat a certain input string, but I could be wrong. Well, tomorrow’s another day!

 

scary router vulnerabilities

It seems like consumer-level routers get hacked at an alarming rate. There was a lot of buzz today about a new Netgear vulnerability. I have a Netgear router, but not one of the models that’s affected by this particular problem. I bought mine back in 2010, and it’s been working fine. The firmware for it hasn’t been updated in a few years though. As far as I know, there are no unpatched vulnerabilities for it, but I’m not really confident about that.

I should probably install DD-WRT on it. I had DD-WRT on my last router, and it worked well. I’ve thought about installing it on the Netgear, but haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe that’s a project for this weekend, since it looks like it’ll be cold and snowy out.

Reinventing Local News

Here’s an interesting effort to help “reinvent” local news. The gist of it seems to be that we should put aside a certain amount of money from FCC auctions of local TV licenses to help set up new “cutting edge” local news sources. I’m not too optimistic that this will happen, or that it would result in quality, long-term, local news for New Jersey if it does. But, hey, it’s worth a shot. The local news situation in NJ is pretty weak.

We’re focusing first on New Jersey. Sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia media markets, New Jersey receives little to no coverage of its state and local governments. New Jersey owns four public TV licenses, which the FCC estimates could fetch as much as $2.3 billion at auction.

Source: Our Last, Best Chance to Reinvent Local News

Paying for Pluralsight, and other subscriptions

Pluralsight extended their Black Friday sale by a few days, so I gave in and paid for a year last night. Part of my reason for that is that I noticed that there’s a series on SharePoint 2013 programming with JavaScript by David Mann that looks like it might be useful. (Now I just have to convince myself to watch it.)

I was happy to see that they added the paid subscription to the end of my free period, rather than just start it immediately, so it will last until January 2018. I paid for the subscription with a virtual card number, so it won’t auto-renew, so that will give me a chance to think about whether or not I want to continue with it in 2018.

I’m in the middle of listening to a Mac Power Users episode on managing subscriptions, and there’s a few good ideas in there. For stuff that renews annually, my approach is generally to pay for them with a virtual card number or (where possible) a personal check, so they don’t auto-renew. Then, I have to make a conscious decision to evaluate and renew (or not) each year. I also try to keep track of them in Evernote, and set reminders so I know when they’re coming up for renewal.

I tend to review subscriptions at the end of each year, so I might as well do that now. Looking at a few of the big ones, I see that my Office 365 subscription is good until December 2018, so I don’t have to worry about that one for a long time. But my Evernote subscription is set to renew next month, at the $70 “premium” level. I’m still not happy about their increase from $50 to $70, but I do get quite a lot of use out of Evernote, so I’m pretty sure that I’m going to let that one renew. (Though maybe I should read up some more on their iOS app redesign, before I commit to that.)

And I just checked my NY Times subscription. I originally subscribed at a promotional rate of $10.50 every four weeks, for a year. That was in January, so that promotional rate will be over soon. I don’t mind paying that, but I expect that the renewal will be done at whatever the current “regular” rate is. The Times is kind of sketchy about pricing. My account page doesn’t say at what rate the subscription will renew, so I’m not sure if it’ll still be $10.50, or something else. Looking at their current rates (by going to their site in a private browsing window), I think it would be $15 every 4 weeks. And looking at the cost of subscribing through their iOS app, I think I could get a subscription for $130 per year, which comes out to $10 every 4 weeks. So, to get a good rate, I may need to cancel my existing subscription and resubscribe through iOS.

I could choose to look at supporting the Times as being a little like a charitable donation though. I think we’re going to need a robust, independent, (relatively) unbiased press over the next four years. And the Times seems to have gotten under the president-elect’s skin more than any other media outlet. So they’re worth supporting, for that reason, at very least.

Giving Tuesday (a bit late)

Since I posted about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I figure I should write a Giving Tuesday post too. I’ve been really indecisive about giving to charity, since the election results came in. I think there are a lot of charities that will need help over the next few years, and it’s hard to choose which ones to support.

A friend forwarded me an article from NPR about choosing charities to support this year. It’s somewhat helpful. And there’s Nick Kristof’s annual column about holiday season charitable giving at the NY Times site.

Fun and games with the SharePoint social comment control

I’ve been working on a big SharePoint 2013 project at work, and I’m learning a lot about the ins and outs of developing custom applications with SharePoint. (TL;DR: It’s messy.) There have been a bunch of times when I’ve come across something weird and/or interesting and thought “I should write this up in a blog post,” but I just haven’t gotten around to it. Well, this time, I’m going to at least start writing something up. (We’ll see if I get far enough to have something coherent to post or not.)

My application is a farm-level solution using a couple of application pages. There’s a search page and a detail page, basically. The detail page loads data from a few different sources, based on parameters passed on the query string. So, in some ways, standard ASP.NET stuff.

After having gotten most of the stuff on the detail page done, I wanted to add the ability for users to add comments to the page. I looked at a number of possibilities for this. One option that jumped out is the social comment control. This control can be added to a page as a web part, via “Social Collaboration”, “Note Board”. To add it to an application page in Visual Studio, you need to do the following:

  1. Add a reference to “Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal” to your project.
  2. On your page, register the SharePoint portal controls:
    <%@ Register TagPrefix="SharePointPortalControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
  3. Drop the social comment control on the page somewhere:
    <SharePointPortalControls:SocialCommentControl ID="CommentControl" runat="server"/>

I picked up the basics on this from this article, which also covers user ratings.

This initially seemed to work well. I was curious about where, exactly, SharePoint was storing these comments though. From this article, I learned that you need to go through central admin to get to them:

  1. Open the Central Admin home page.
  2. Click “Manage service applications” under “Application Management.”
  3. Click “User Profile Service Application”.
  4. Click “Manage Social Tags and Notes” under “My Site Settings”.

This gets you to a page where you can search for notes, by user and/or URL. You cannot do a wildcard search, or simply pull up all notes, so that’s pretty inconvenient. But it was reassuring to see that the notes are indeed stored by URL, with the full URL, including query string. So, for me, each detail page would have its own set of comments, no problem there.

When I did some testing, posting comments to the same page from two different user accounts, I hit a pretty major snag though. The two users could not see each other’s comments. That led me down a rabbit hole that brought me to this StackExchange page. I followed the advice to set “Security Trimming Options” to “Show all links regardless of permission”, and that (eventually) fixed the problem. I also ran the “Social Data Maintenance Job”, as described in this StackExchange page.

I’m not sure if changing that security trimming setting will have any negative effects, if I change it in production. It’s a Central Admin level setting, so it’s something I’ll need to review seriously.

Assuming I stick with this plan, I’m also going to need to be able to create comments in code, as I’m going to be importing a bunch of them from the old site that I’m replacing. It does seem to be possible to do that, based on info from these pages:

I haven’t actually tried writing any code for this yet, so I may stumble across some “gotchas,” as I have with a number of other seemingly-straighforward SharePoint tasks.

And, after going through all this, I see that, for SharePoint Online, the Tags & Notes feature has been retired. We’re not using SharePoint Online, but if we ever migrate to it, I’d have to redo this functionality. So that’s a serious knock against it.

A lot of the stuff I’ve been doing in SharePoint has been working out this way:

  1. Find a SharePoint feature that looks like it solves my problem nicely.
  2. Spend some time setting it up and doing some initial testing. Things look promising.
  3. Stumble across a problem. Spend a bunch of time researching it.
  4. Either:
    • Find that the problem isn’t really solvable and give up.
    • Or find a workaround that’s acceptable, maybe, but not great. (It relies on something undocumented, or a feature that’s deprecated, or it requires changing farm-level settings that I’m not sure I can change.)
  5. Realize that I’ve wasted half the day on this.
  6. Give up and go to lunch.

So my solution for commenting is probably going to be a standard SharePoint list that I’ll read and write in code-behind and show in a standard ASP.NET repeater, or something like that.

Well, I guess I’ve succeeded in writing a semi-coherent post about SharePoint programming. I’m not sure if it will help anyone, but it might be mildly amusing, if nothing else.