This is meant as a follow up to my previous post where I talked about the dangers of just leaving your keys laying around when you want to decrypt an XML file. Well, I devised just one solution that can help make your code a little harder to crack. This article will be a little easier to follow (I hope) if you read the last post, because this post is really a supplement to it.

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One of my professors at Purdue always raved about XML and how it was a powerful language. I thought it was a cool language, sure, because you could make up your own tags, but the ways I could use it escaped me at the time. However, I’ve begun using XML as a database, and it coupled with XPATH have opened to my eyes to a dynamic data storage world. It makes it easy to create and read data, but it also makes it easy to share between applications. Up until this “aha!” moment, I found XML only to be useful for RSS feeds and weather data.

But, the easy readability of XML comes at a price: if you’re storing sensitive data, any person who can read has a pretty good shot at understanding it. So, I went on a quest to find out ways to password-protect or encrypt XML files, and found out that recently the .NET framework began supporting a few easy to use methods to make encryption/decryption a fairly simple task. I’ll cover both of these, with some caveats, in Visual Basic .NET, since that’s the language I’ve been writing in.

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I’ve been insanely busy this last week! I haven’t had time to work on iPhone app development at all, because I started working with a client on a new site, among my other work. In my last post, I talked about my work in VB.NET and I was planning on doing some HTML5 + AJAX stuff. The VB work is still underway, and I haven’t touched any HTML5 yet (this whole working thing is getting in the way of me playing around with stuff), but I did do some templating work for my new client, that involved some work in Illustrator. The project called for creating some wave aspects, and Illustrator was my weapon of choice. I thought I’d share with you all my little technique for making (x-repeating) waves, Illustrator style! Read the rest of this entry »

Just making a quick post here to say that I’m stuck in a little holding pattern with iOS development. Apparently, I needed to have my OSX updated to 10.6 in order to install the iPhone SDK with XCode. Whoops! So, I ordered the upgrade since it wasn’t too much, and it should arrive sometime this week, I hope.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on client projects. We’re doing some cool stuff with a point of sale system, and then integrating a load cell with a code project. I’ll try to share what I learn here, if of course it won’t give away too many secrets!

I also have plans to make a little rock-paper-scissors game using HTML5 and JavaScript, so that way I’ll be able to say I’ve actually used HTML5, and it will be fun to develop. More coming soon!

One of my clients is a baker, and the weather data is very important to him. Things like weather conditions and temperature affect buying patterns, and things like humidity affect water saturation in recipes. So, obviously, collecting the weather data for him to store so he can predict and refine his production was a goal of ours. I’d read a post on CSS Tricks in the past that showed how to collect weather information from Yahoo! Weather’s RSS API. I used his code as a base for creating a class so that I could collect the data we needed as an object. Read on for the code. Read the rest of this entry »

Not so much a post as a simple update: today I picked up an iPod touch. I wrote a dinky little app for my Palm Pre and had fun doing it, and decided I’d make an investment and learn how to make some iOS apps. It may be a daunting task sure, but I always love learning new things and expanding my skillset.

I’ve been busy with work, but intend to spend a little time learning about developing for this thing this weekend, and will be sure to post my findings as they come!

This is just an introductory post for anyone who has stumbled upon this blog before I have written anything in it. I design and develop websites for a living, having gone to school for it at Purdue University. As such I plan to dedicate this blog to things I’m doing or things I want to do with code and maybe sometimes with design. I’m sure the purpose of it will evolve over time, but the posts on this blog will be more of a technical nature than a personal one. I have another blog dedicated to “personal” things for interested readers. I imagine the content will range from little tips with HTML and CSS to full-on tutorials in Object-Oriented ActionScript and PHP. Many of the things I’ve done are things I’ve learned from other blogs on the internet, but I find that one of the ways to help me really learn something is to take it and explain it to someone else in my own terms. While a lot of it will be for my own reinforcement, I hope that anyone who reads this will have something to take away as well. Please feel free to comment or contact me, especially if I’m wrong about something!