Ran across a very nice collection of 1900x1200 wallpapers on Hamad Darwish's personal web site. Apparently he is the Flickr photographer commissioned to shoot Windows Vista wallpapers. Anyways check out the wallpaper. I got the link from another very-Vista web site, istartedsomething.com.

If you're into wallpapers, checkout a previous post of mine.

I occasionally get questions on how I do my thumbnail images for my photo gallery. This site runs on ASP.NET and the photo section automatically creates thumbnails of JPEG images on the fly. In the real world, a web site like flckr.com wouldn't work if thumbnails were always created on the fly, but for my small amount of pictures it works just fine. Below is the code that creates a scaled thumbnail from a JPEG path and writes it back to the browser. This code is used within an HTTP handler that just serves thumbnails.

A couple points of interest. The code encodes the thumbnail at 75% quality. If the original image is smaller than the requested width and height, it won't scale it but will send it to the browser.

   1:  Public Sub ScaledImage(ByVal Path As String, ByVal Width As Integer, ByVal Height As Integer)

   2:      Dim originalWidth As Integer

   3:      Dim originalHeight As Integer

   4:      Dim image As bitmap = bitmap.FromFile(Path)

   5:   

   6:      originalHeight = image.Height

   7:      originalWidth = image.Width

   8:   

   9:      Dim heightRatio As Double = CDbl(originalHeight / originalWidth)

  10:      Dim widthRatio As Double = CDbl(originalWidth / originalHeight)

  11:   

  12:      Dim desiredHeight As Integer = Height

  13:      Dim desiredWidth As Integer = Width

  14:   

  15:      Height = desiredHeight

  16:      Width = Convert.ToInt32(Height * widthRatio)

  17:      If Width > desiredWidth Then

  18:          Width = desiredWidth

  19:          Height = Convert.ToInt32(Width * heightRatio)

  20:      End If

  21:   

  22:      If Height > originalHeight Or Width > originalWidth Then

  23:          Height = originalHeight

  24:          Width = originalWidth

  25:   

  26:          image.Save(Response.OutputStream, ImageFormat.Jpeg)

  27:      Else

  28:          Dim thumb As Graphics

  29:          Dim bitmap As bitmap = New bitmap(Width, Height)

  30:          thumb = Graphics.FromImage(bitmap)

  31:          thumb.InterpolationMode = System.Drawing.Drawing2D.InterpolationMode.HighQualityBicubic

  32:          thumb.DrawImage(image, 0, 0, Width, Height)

  33:   

  34:          Dim codec As ImageCodecInfo = GetEncoderInfo("image/jpeg")

  35:   

  36:          Dim eps As EncoderParameters = New EncoderParameters(1)

  37:          eps = New EncoderParameters

  38:          eps.Param(0) = New EncoderParameter(Encoder.Quality, CLng(75))

  39:   

  40:          bitmap.Save(Response.OutputStream, codec, eps)

  41:   

  42:          thumb.Dispose()

  43:          bitmap.Dispose()

  44:          eps.Dispose()

  45:      End If

  46:      image.Dispose()

  47:   

  48:      Response.ContentType = "image/pjpeg"

  49:      Response.End()

  50:  End Sub

  51:   

  52:  Public Function GetEncoderInfo(ByVal MimeType As String) As ImageCodecInfo

  53:      Dim myEncoders() As ImageCodecInfo = ImageCodecInfo.GetImageEncoders()

  54:      Dim myEncoder As ImageCodecInfo

  55:      For Each myEncoder In myEncoders

  56:          If myEncoder.MimeType = MimeType Then

  57:              Return myEncoder

  58:          End If

  59:      Next

  60:      Return Nothing

  61:  End Function

Hashing is a reproducible process to calculate a hash value from some data. The hash values are unique and specific for the data it was derived from. Wikipedia has a good explanation of hashing. i will be showing some VB.Net code in this article that uses the SHA1 algorithm to do some hashing.

Hashing by itself does nothing to prevent tampering with the data. Message Authentication Codes (MAC) are a way to prevent this. MACs use symmetric encryption methods to protect the sent hash. Symmetric encryption uses one private session key and both the sender and receiver require to have a copy of this key.

Below is the VB.Net code to generate a MAC using HMACSHA1:

   1:  Imports System.Security.Cryptography

   2:   

   3:  Public Shared Function ComputeHash(ByVal Data As String, ByVal Key As String) As String

   4:      ' initialize the keyed hash

   5:      Dim sha1Algo As New HMACSHA1(System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Key))

   6:   

   7:      ' compute hash 

   8:      Dim hash As Byte() = sha1Algo.ComputeHash(System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Data))

   9:   

  10:      ' convert to string and return

  11:      Return System.BitConverter.ToString(hash)

  12:  End Function

  13:   

  14:  Public Shared Function VerifyHash(ByVal Received As String, ByVal Data As String, ByVal Key As String) As Boolean

  15:      ' hash our data

  16:      Dim hash as String = ComputeHash(Data, Key)

  17:      

  18:      ' compare strings

  19:      Return (Received = hash)

  20:  End Function

  21:   

This code was derived from a more in-depth article: Hashing, MACs, and Digital Signatures in .NET.

Yesterday Steve was telling me about something that happened to him at the local Ruby Tuesday. He was saying his wife ordered a grilled chicken salad and the waiter accidentally brought a fried chicken salad instead. To Steve and his wife, it was no big deal. It was a big deal to the restaurant's manager. He came over immediately, explained how quality and customer satisfaction is important to the restaurant. He assured them that the new meal was on it's way out and insisted that the meal be removed from the bill. Steve would kill me if I didn't explain that he wasn't looking for any kind of reimbursement or even an apology, but the manager made it happen anyways. Steve was impressed and passed the news on to at least three other people and will probably tell even more.

I read an article this morning from Joel on Software that talks about the same things and in fact explains a similar situation with his company and Lands' End. Check out the article, it's relevant to any software company (or any company that supports customers for that matter).

Our team is headed back to good old Lancaster County today. Things will be back to normal on Monday with momentum building for the first SalesWorks release. Until then there are a couple things you can do to help us get SalesWorks out the door.

1. You can download Beta 1 from the Mission Research web site and send us any feedback you have.

2. Read and contribute to the SalesWorks Beta blog.

3. Stay tuned to my Mission Research CTO blog. My team is responsible for building SalesWorks and now that we have a beta launched I will be covering it and the impending release in that blog.

4. Read up on more SalesWorks stuff on Steve Fafel's blog. He is the dev team's head honcho and will most likely show some cool stuff that can be done to extend SalesWorks.

I was forwarded a great writeup on SalesWorks. Jim Forbes writes about "Demo 2007's Tasty Treats" and about a quarter of the way through he talks about the software and the opportunity he sees for it in the small business marketplace.

"Salesworks is a great set of tools that fits tongue and groove with an emerging critical CRM tools for small business professionals"

The SalesWorks demo went well and is now online. Here are some links to the Demo bloggers...

Conferenzablog - Demo07: Opening Morning Session

InfoWorld - Demo update - the tech keeps getting better

InformationWeek - Demo '07 Conference Showcases

PCMag - SalesWorks Could Make Sales Less Work

Here is one quote I liked the best...

"SalesWorks looks like it could be the next-gen Salesforce.com application, bringing a new level of ease – and offline – use."

Right now these are blogs are just reporting on the demo itself. Soon we should have some feedback on the actual beta which can be downloaded now. This is an early beta and will change based on feedback we get. Please try it and let us know what you think.