programmingtasks

stuff I tend to have to look up while I'm programming at work or at home....or, whatever I want to put up here I guess...

[nasprogramming]

Evernote Note Panel View

I was trying to figure out how to change my evernote (on Windows) to view like Outlook. I wanted the list of notes in the middle, with the note text to the right. After looking all over the place inside Evernote itself, I googled it and found the answer. If you hit Ctrl+Shift+F5, it toggles that mode. I think they need to put this in the regular View options. With all the widescreens out there, it is much easier to view this way. Of course, I usually have my monitor in Portrait mode, so it wouldn't bother most of the time, but I'm going Widescreen for a little bit. 

[nasprogramming]

More on gpg / pgp encryption

so, I'm back doing some gpg encryption setup stuff. Here's what I've found: 

You decrypt with your key

which means, you create a key with --gen-key. Then, export that key to a file

for example: gpg -o c:\temp\NewKey.asc --export KeyName 

now, send that key, NewKey.asc, to the person you want to encrypt files. In this case, I put it on another computer. 

we then import the key on that computer (computer#2) (gpg --import c:\temp\NewKey.asc

Now, let's encrypt a file on computer #2: gpg -r KeyName --trust-model always -o c:\temp\encrypted.pgp -e c:\temp\file2encrypt.txt

Now, move encrypted.pgp back over to the original computer. 

and, we can now decrypt it: 

gpg -r KeyName --batch --passphrase-fd 0 -o c:\temp\decryptedFile.txt -d c:\temp\encrypted.pgp

(You then enter the passphrase after hitting enter) 

now, decryptedFile.txt on computer#1 should match file2encrypt on computer #2

kinda simple, but it gets confusing really quickly. 

[nasprogramming]

language decision

I decided to stick with C# and Entity Framework. Really the only reason is that I'm using C#/Entity Framework everywhere else, so I can get things done faster that way. Eventually, I think I will make the move back to php for my side projects, but now is not the time to do that. The only thing that bothers me is the cost of using Visual Studio compared to the completely free php. 

[nasprogramming]

new language?

I'm trying to decide if I want to stick with ASP.Net and C# for my next projects, or do I want to escape from expensive-ass Visual Studio. I've used a lot of php in my past, so I'm wondering about going back to that. The only thing is that I've been using Enitity Framework a lot lately, and I love how quick that makes development. So, now I'm going to research any php equivalents. So far, I've found two that might be worth looking at: Propel and doctrine. I'll be back with findings!

[nasprogramming]

stupid excel thing

I had to do a stupid excel comparison, and I couldn't figure it out for a second. I took to the internets, but didn't really find what I was looking for until a bunch of clicks down the search engine.

What I was doing was comparing names in two different columns. Sounds like a simple if, but the problem was one was in camel case, the other in upper case. So I needed to change one of the columns to upper case for the comparison to actually work. There was also a problem with spaces in one of the columns (because it was a copy/paste thing). Once I solved the problem, it was so freaking easy, but I guess that's how it always is, right!

here is the IF i used to make everything all caps (uppercase) in the comparison

=IF(TRIM(UPPER(A303))=TRIM(H303), 0, 1)

simple, but it solved my problem.

[nasprogramming]

gpg exe in c sharp .net program

So, I have to get some files encrypted here at work. We are using a version of pgp in our legacy programs, but its so old, I didn't want to use that for the new stuff. Plus I was having a hard time getting it to work period. Apparently there were some licensing issues and stuff and it was so old, we couldn't fix them without upgrading pgp, which costs money. I ended up giving gpg a try, and after some fanagling back and forth with the client, we got it working in theory (In theory meaning I was able to do command line stuff to encrypt and decrypt the files manually).

Next step is actually adding that functionality into the program that builds the file. I can then move the encrypted files into the proper folder and then the client can pick them up. Kind of old school; it would be better if we could use web services or something, but oh well. Anyway, I couldn't fund too much help with how to encrypt the files using gpg2 in c sharp .net. So I've added this entry to try to be helpful, even if its just my future self when I need to remember what I did.

//gpg2exe is the location of the gpg2.exe

//gpgUser is the key to encrypt with static void encryptFile(string filename) {    try {     System.Diagnostics.Process proc = new System.Diagnostics.Process();     String FullGpgCmd = "\"" + gpg2exe + "\" -r " + gpgUser + " -o \"" + filename + ".pgp\" -e \"" + filename + "\"";   proc.EnableRaisingEvents = false;   proc.StartInfo.FileName = "cmd.exe";   proc.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;   proc.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;   proc.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;   proc.Start();   proc.StandardInput.WriteLine(FullGpgCmd);   proc.StandardInput.Flush();   proc.StandardInput.Close();   string cmdOutput = "";   while (!proc.HasExited) {     cmdOutput += proc.StandardOutput.ReadToEnd();   }   LogWriter(cmdOutput);   } catch (Exception ex) {     LogWriter(ex.ToString());   } }

This code basically passes the gpg2 command line to cmd.exe in the StandardInput function, and then reads the output. Pretty simple little function, but it could easily be converted to a function to decrypt a file as well.