One of our hosted web sites was disabled due to their bandwidth quota. The site had exceeded the 50gb per month limit. This was notable because the site usually uses around 500mb of bandwidth each month. The site was disabled on February 17th. We tried to access the site and it came up blank. We…
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A Close Call with Cryptolocker
Cryptolocker We recently had an interesting run-in with Cryptolocker We have a number of customers that run the pre-release version of our ProfitSystem software. We also use it in-house, it’s called “dogfooding“, where a company “eats it’s own dog food.” In return for testing the software, we help with their IT services. This customers desktops are actually…
External DNS and redundant internet connections
Having redundant internet connections and a DNS fail-over service is essential for hosting our in-house web servers and other web services. If our internet connection goes down for any length of time we start to feel like Tom Hanks on his island in Castaway. Why redundant internet connections? The benefit of redundant internet connections is…
Why Can’t Legacy Thin Clients Connect to RDS on Server 2012?
At BBL Systems, we use Remote Desktop Services extensively. Our sister company runs our point-of-sale system from a 2003 Server via Remote Desktop. They have around 50 users who access it via thin clients, Windows 7, and Windows 8. It’s a great solution as it centralizes the management of the IT infrastructure to one server….
Using ASP.NET SignalR To Play an RPG
My son plays an RPG with his friends (think Dungeons and Dragons, but with a Star Wars feel.) I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid as well. My brothers and our friends would gather around the kitchen table with our manuals, graph paper, dice, and character sheets. The difference is, when my son and…
Oplocks project on GitHub
Our Visual FoxPro applications had been in wide use since the early 2000’s, and before that our Clipper based applications had been in use since the late 80’s. Visual FoxPro and Clipper are both are xBase-based prodcuts, and use an ISAM-based database system. Other products that use an ISAM type database include Btrieve and MySQL. A…
PrintRaw project on GitHub
Interfacing to UPS (and FedEx) to ship packages is fairly straightforward. The carriers each have a web api to create the shipment and generate a shipping label. For UPS, the application can generate an XML document with the shipment details and post it an api endpoint. The api returns an XML document with the shipment…
Windows 8 Look For a FoxPro Application
We wanted to give our Visual Foxpro application a quick face lift when it’s running under modern operating systems. An easy way to do this is to change the font to Segoe UI which is the Windows 8 default font. This gives the forms a cleaner, more modern look. However, this font isn’t available before…
Retrieving an OAuth access token for an installed application
We needed to create an integration from our installed application to a 3rd party web service. The integration requires an access token, which is retrieved from the web service during registration. Now, the web service uses OAuth 2 for authentication during the registration process. This presented a challenge, as their OAuth implementation ultimately calls a…