My Must-Have JailBroken iPhone Apps
I’ve got a tonne of apps that are installed in my iPhone. But there are a few that I use regularly, and deserve special attention. I have downloaded all of these apps from the un-official Cydia store, where you can find a lot of free, and payed apps that will only work on JailBroken iPhones. For those who don’t know, out of the box, your iPhone is restricted by Apple so that your apps cannot do things like run in the back ground.
On with the list.
10 Ways To Suck At Programming
I found this article written by Donnie Garvich at http://www.finalint.com/2010/05/04/10-ways-to-suck-at-programming. But his server seems to be over loaded as it is throwing 505 Service Temporarily Unavailable message from time to time. So I have re-posted a copy of that article below:
I recently inherited a web app from a dirty, nasty, stinking contractor that claimed to be a competent enough programmer to be left alone to get things done. Unfortunately, we took him at his word. Functionally, most of the web app seemed to work at first glance. However, once the client took over the reigns and actually started using it things went downhill fast. The contractor disappeared after payment (die reputation DIE!) and I was left to try and get things working properly and performing up to snuff while the client limped along with what they had been given.
I decided to document a few of the things that I found wrong along the way. These are really just things that every good programmer should already know to avoid… but obviously some people need to be reminded (or taught).
Box Select & Edit in Visual Studio 2010
Don’t Press F1 in Windows XP

Apparently there is a newly discovered vulnerability in windows XP. If a website asks you to press F1 do not do this. Hackers have discovered a way to execute code on the user’s machine by feeding users malicious code disguised as a Windows help file. It affects both Internet Explorer 7 and 8.
If a malicious Web site displayed a specially crafted dialog box and a user pressed the F1 key, arbitrary code could be executed in the security context of the currently logged-on user.
jQuery 1.4.2 Released
| I’m a little late on the jQuery 1.4 bandwagon since it was released January 14th. However as of this post the latest version is 1.4.2 which was released on February 19th. Time to upgrade. |
From the developers:
“In this release we’ve added two new methods: .delegate() and .undelegate(). These methods serve as complements to the existing .live() and .die() methods in jQuery. They simplify the process of watching for specific events from a certain root within the document.”
The API Documentation has been re-written, and the library has some new features, while improving speed and stability. You can take a look at the full jQuery 1.4 Release Notes Here.

jQuery 1.4 Performance
Download Links:
- Download jQuery 1.4.2 Minified
- Download jQuery 1.4.2 Uncompressed
- Visual Studio Intellisense Documentation
Decoupling Application Code from IoC Implementation
Background:
While working on my pet project, using my favourite dependency injection framework, StructureMap, I came to a realization. If I ever decide to change my dependency injection framework for something else, such as Ninject, my code is tightly coupled to StructureMap. The change would force me to update a bunch of code throughout my numerous application layers.
VMware-authd.exe
I got home today and woke up my pc from hibernate. I always have Process Explorer running in my task bar, so as I was waiting for Firefox to start up, I noticed that my CPU was pinned at about 70% usage, it wasn’t Firefox. It was VMware-authd.exe. I do have VMWare installed but I have not touched it on this machine for years.
Being concerned I turned to the all-knowing Google. The answer came in the form of a blog post by Christopher Miller, who suffered the exact same issue.
Here is his post, hope this helps other VMWare users out there:
I was doing some work on one of my PC’s and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-authd.exe, was going from 0 to 10% of the CPU. I didn’t know what that process did, I went out on a limb and assumed that it was somehow related to VMWare. VMware is one of my favorite tools, but I wasn’t running any VMWare sessions. Time to go Googling. Apparently it’s a service that provides administrator priviledges to to a running VMWare session if the host use isn’t logged in with administrator access rights
If you are logged in with admin rights, you don’t need to have this service running. VMware-authd.exe is the name of the executable for the “VMware Authorization Service” service. You can go into Services and shut that service down and then set it’s startup type to “manual”. There are no other services that depend on that service to be running. You can also stop the service from the Windows command line with the following:
net stop VMAuthdService


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