I’ve got a week’s holiday, but I’m going to be working for at least part of it. I’ve been asked to help Iain’s company with some work for one of their most important clients. This came as a bit of a surprise, but our plans to go up to Scotland for the week hadn’t come to anything. Oh well, it looks like my Munro bagging total will need to remain at zero for another few months…
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” (Colossians 3:23-24)
Yippeee!!! I now have a Gmail account! Thanks for the invite Diego 
I will be using it as the forwarding address for e-mail to my jamesmckay.net domain name from now on. However I will be turning off the catch-all mailbox for jamesmckay.net in due course to stop spam coming to the likes of sales@jamesmckay.net. thecooldude and jammycakes will continue to work though.
Before you ask: sorry, I haven’t been given any invites to dish out …
We’re listening to Mum’s interview on UCB Talk just now. It was recorded about two months ago in the NRC and it’s finally gone live today. She did very well, as I’m sure anyone who heard the interview will agree. She spoke about how her faith remained strong in the midst of Dad’s final illness and death. This was a painful and confusing time for all of us, but God upheld us in the midst of it all. Especially seeing Dad’s strong faith right at the end as well. His last words were, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!” I don’t think you can have better last words than that…
On a more mundane matter, my blog has now moved to a more permanent home, courtesy of 1 and 1 Internet. They have a special offer on at the moment giving you six months’ free trial of a pretty good hosting package. Unfortunately it’s a Linux/PHP job–not exactly perfect for a Microsoft fanboy like me, but even so I’m pretty impressed. Besides, I’ve worked with both over the past few years, so why not?
Mum’s interview with Julia Fisher is being broadcast on UCB Talk on the “Faith Matters” programme on Wednesday, at 1:45am, 6:30am, 1:45pm and 6:30pm. Listen in on www.ucb.co.uk or on digital satellite channel 885.
Encountered a rather bizarre problem this afternoon with ASP.NET forms authentication. We tried logging onto the KF beta website on one particular machine, only to find that it kept dumping us back into the login screen again! No indication of a password being rejected or anything. Tried it in Firefox. Same result. I then tried it on my own laptop, and it worked fine, in both IE and Firefox. Tried it on one of the Apple Macs, and it worked perfectly in Safari but gave the same anomalous behaviour in Internet Explorer. Even more confusingly, on another Mac it worked fine on both browsers!!!!
A little bit of rootling around soon uncovered the problem. The other day I made a change to the code so that if you logged on to one site you would log on to all of them. It does this by creating an authentication cookie using FormsAuthentication.GetAuthCookie() and altering the Domain property to our root domain, kingdomfaith.com, rather than simply using FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage() which gives a cookie specific to the subdomain.
The result of this was that browsers that had visited the beta site before I made the change were now storing two authentication cookies. One for kingdomfaith.com and one for the beta site. Obviously, the old, subdomain-specific cookie was hiding, or somehow interfering with the new, general one.
However, this puzzles me a bit. The cookie that was set for the subdomain had exactly the same functionality as the cookie for the root domain. So… why wasn’t it recognising it? Perhaps I’ll do some experimenting one of these days to try and find out, but since it was easily solved on the affected computers by deleting the offending cookies, I think that can be considered a priority 4 task (neither urgent nor important)…
How do you start up a blog? I’ve been mulling over what to put on my first blog posting for quite a while now. My first draft rambled on and on about me, but I don’t think that would make that interesting reading. So, I will spare you the details, except to mention the fact that I am working for Kingdom Faith Church in Horsham, England, rebuilding the website. Of my education, including as it did such wonderful places as Selwyn College, Cambridge, where I studied Natural Sciences (physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, no less!) I will, following this policy of not wishing to bore you, say absolutely nothing.
This blog may or may not stay in the same place indefinitely. I’ve written my own blogging engine which I’ve got running on my laptop, but I haven’t yet taken the plunge and bought some web space to host it, so you’re just going to have to make do with Blogger for the time being. This is a less than satisfactory solution, because it doesn’t do everything I want it to the way I want it to do it. No categories, for instance, some of which I would like to password protect so that they are only accessible to family, friends, or colleagues. And some control over how I moderate comments and mitigate the menace of comment spam. But that will come sooner or later. So just how permanent the permalinks on this site will be remains to be seen. One thing will stay the same, however, and that is my domain name. Stick to using http://www.jamesmckay.net/ and you’ll be fine.
Okay, that’s my first blog entry over and done with. Hopefully the others will be more interesting than this…
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Posted at 21:38 in Miscellany 
