There is several issues that are a hidrance for the economic development of Mexico, but one of the few that worries me the most are the monopolies.We have public and private monopolies, but we have monopolies in basically all our industries (telecommunications with telmex, oil with pemex, banks with banamex and bancomer, media with Televisa and TV Azteca). We all know the damage monopolies do, but there are some effects even more sutile. I found a story on slashdot about a new vector of attack called drive-by pharming. It basically configuring your router to change the IP address associated with a DNS name, you can read the detail in the article (btw I am quite sure I received that email). The first time this attack has been found on the wild was in Mexico. That doesn't surprise me the least; the big problem is that Telmex (and prodigy which is their ISP) being a monopoly have basically create a humongous homogeneous network of misconfigured routers. I am also guessing that the bank that is attacked is Banamex, which is another big monopoly.  

I have a love-hate relationship with Telmex. They are a monopoly which I hate, and their services is expensive. But their service  have some redeeming qualities: they give you a real ip adress, they don't filter the content, and they don't block any port; at least they didn't. That have recently changed when they decided to outgoing calls to port 25 just after christmas. They decided to do that because they had been transform in one of the biggest spamming source in the world (to reactive your port 25 access click on this link). I think they decided to do this silently so that only people who are technically saavy would discovered it. However, it did took me a couple of hours figuring why I couldn't send emails and finding the link to correct the issue. Anyway, after this was done, my college which prides itself  of their technology decided that the best thing to do to overcome this issue is giving everyone the link to open their port 25. They should have opened a new port, which is the standard way most smtp servers are working right now instead of giving you the pliers to break your own lock.

Usually at work I built new Web applications everytime I have add a new server. Unfortunately, with GoDaddy Hosting(or any as a matter of fact) you have to work with virtual directories. Right now I have been using blogengine.net as my blog application, why? because I hate how GoDaddy works with the database and I cannot be bothered to work with it anymore, so I got lucky and found that BlogEngine.net that works purely with files. Then I decided to add a wiki to my hosting so that I could work with my master's Liderazgo para el Desarrollo Sostenible team. I wanted to build a wiki so that we can easily work together, and share information about energy savings. Then I found screwTurn wiki, and I was really happy to find out that it can also work exclusively with files. So I tested it in my local machine, made it work and uploaded it to the server. Then I tried to start the server at energy.janosoft.com and the installation failed miserably. I receive an error message that seemed to be related to the app trying to upload the settings from the base application (in this case it was bloglines.net application). I initially tought that it was a bug at Godaddy setting the root but when I removed I found an error that was definately relating to the missing root. So I googled around and found the sneaky poorly documented answer to my prayers. Asp.net applications settings are automatically inherited to children virtual directories. Can we stop this? yes we can you just need to enclose the system.web tag with a location tag and set the inheritInChildApplications attribute to false. This attribute doesn't even appear in the Visual Studio 2005 intellisense. So you get something like:

<location inheritInChildApplications="false">

    <system.web>

    .

    .

    </system.web> 

</location> 

 

I have to thanks Rick Strahl's Weblog  for the solution.  

Well, I am not a big fan of keeping a diary, soooo I will call this a blog. This blog will be primarily technical, since I wish to track my master's thesis with it. Plus a few ramblings from other topics.

 I hope to find useful stuff about C# and Python, that I have been found useful in the past and I had some trouble trying to find the mistakes in case someone finds them useful. Plus, I will elaborate in any project I am part of. This is my way to give something back to poor soul's of the blogsphere that have gave me a lot of knowledge and a couple of new skills.