I’ve just been writing some code to run a TCP socket on a specific port. I was having trouble reading the response from the socket, which promted me to luckily find this damn good port scanning utility that I want to tell you about.

Its called JFirewallTest and it’s a nifty little Java program that can be run from the web page and will perform  a full port scan. All 65,536 ports are scanned very rapidly to find possible security holes in your firewall.

My sincere thanks to Michael Gardiner for developing and making this utility available free. You did a great job!

I had to download the Java runtime on all my servers and then checked them all. I’d wanted to do this for some time just to check. I new they were pretty secure and my firewall is locked down tight. Now I’m sure of this thanks to JFirewallTest.

It downloads and installs quickly and the port scan is performed in two phases and only takes a couple of minutes! Bloody marvellous! Thank you!

I’ve just upgraded a clients payment system to use the Paypal API. One new feature that I like is the API signature option for verification.

Previously you had to download and install a server side certificate to verify payments through the API. This was quite easy to do but you have quite a number of things to do to get the certificate installed etc. There are certainly some management issues when you are dealing with a number of sites.

With the API signature, you call the web service with an signature string that PayPal generates for you and you can do all your verification on the client side. It’s easy to setup multiple sites using this method.

If you’re thinking of upgrading, download the 4.2 api sdk files and use the paypal_base.dll and log4net.dll files. Then simply modify your Profile code to call createAPISignature.

Then set your username, password, environment and signature and away you go!

The only thing I’ve found time consuming with configuring and using the PayPal api is setting up the sanbox accounts and some of the documentation could be better.

On the whole its pretty darn good though and the Payments Pro solution only costs $20 per month plus transaction fees.

Good stuff!

I’ve written somewhere on my website how I try to provide solutions that give a good return on my clients investment.

Unfortunately with Information Technology you don’t generally get any kind of feedback on the good stuff. You only hear when things are going wrong. That has a tendency to happen because the results are often difficult to quantify. Also, in a lot of cases, the client has no mechanisms in place for measuring any return or tracking results. So a lot of the time, we’re fighting an uphill battle.

However, I’ve recently been informed that software development projects that I’ve designed and built with one of my customers is producing MASSIVE growth within the company. This has been proved by the fact that they have rolled the system out for 5 new clients in the last few months. They have also committed to a large spend on new hardware and software upgrades and they are moving to new, bigger office complex where they will be leasing an entire floor. So their investment in IT solutions is paying off handsomely for them.

I’m so happy that they are seeing these benefits. Not just because it’s good for my reputation, but because it will hopefully inspire them to try more things with technology that will give them an even greater advantage over their competitors, provide more jobs at the company and allow them to help more people who user their business services too.

They are a student loan consolidation company based in Pinellas Park. We’ve rolled out some fairly leading edge technology using .NET, ASP.NET, web services, SQL server, SQL server reporting services and encryption.

The new client roll outs take less than 4 hours and they can effectively offer their services in this way, providing great leverage in their business with additional revenue streams built on what was initially a one off internal development project. However, as always, I tried to provide a reusable solution that could be pretty easily adapted and developed and that paid off too. That’s really a great benefit of developing for the Windows platform and using the .NET framework and related technologies.

So everyone’s happy! Neat!

You’ve got to admire the way Microsoft has given us the ability to easily and quickly create system that span the internal network, internet and allow us to join together processes with other vendors and suppliers. What’s this all about? Web Services.

I’m working on a proposal for an existing client (yes, they keep coming back for more ) that will utilize the .NET framework and Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server Reporting Services, SSL and 3DES encryption technologies to provide a solution that will join customers with service providers and integrate seemlesly into the existing network and database.

Should be quite a challenge!