Huthaifa Afanah

Huthaifa.com!!

I bought huthaifa.com domain one year ago – nearly. And I keep on telling myself that I will setup a unique, user friendly, personal … etc website. And as usual I didn’t have the time ooops .. I didn’t set a time for this task so as its being postponed day after day for a long time. Today morning I have some issue which forced me to have my own personal area on the Internet space. So I ran to my godaddy account and setup a free express hosting plan. It’s good enough although its contains godaddy ads in the top bar. In the mean time this was more than enough for me.

Then I make a quick google search for Ajax based RSS reader and I ran into Steve’s rss reader – thanks Steve :) - at codeproject. So I copied the project as is in a hurry and modified the code, markup, added my tow RSS feeds to the reader and uploaded the mixture to my site.

After a quick first look I noticed that the CSS layout is broken and its a pretty ugly look. I will invest more time in UI and add those features I was dreaming for a long time. Until that time you need to excuse me for this crappy site.

No more spam for PalDev

One of the most annoying things about using Community Server that its not come with anit-spam forms. Blogs,media, registration forms and other public forms are exposed to spam bots.

Community server have a spam scoring utility to mark spam posts regarding several factors such as the number of links in the post, the number of posts from certain IP address… and many others. In my opinion and from my experince with PalDev site –whihc uses community server 2008.5 express- this sucks and does not work well.

The most simple, common, and trusted way to prevent webform spam is using Captcha. Captcha is a pattern and the majority of the Internet sites nowadays is using captcha challenges to prevent spam bots fro flooding sites with endless submits.

CAPTCHA, stands for (C)ompletely (A)utomated (P)ublic (T)uring test to tell (C)omputers and (H)umans (A)part.

Anyway from day one when I setup PalDev site I said that I really need to implement Captcha and as usual – for lazy busy people- this task is delayed day after day. PalDev site have a many spam users registered, many spam comments on the blogs and too many spam comments in the media gallery. Then my email account receive tons of comment auditing alerts notifying that new comments arrived to my poor blog so I decided to stop complaining about and get the work done.

Don’t underestimate captcha its a great invention. Google acquires reCaptcha for 500$-700$ million deal last week.

I picked my favorite captcha control implemented by Jeff Atwood –you can find it here at codeproject- and makes some tiny tweaks. Then I started modifying the community server forms: the registration from, the media gallery post from, and I ended up modifying all the 16 blogs posting forms … ooof the community server ships with 16 blog theme.

Finally I can say PalDev is spam free – almost i still need to delete all those spam comments,users.

I will publish all the captcha enabled forms, the captcha modified source hope it helps somebody.

In Hebron “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session

As part of PalDev activities I was in Hebron this Saturday to deliver a “Introduction to VS2008 & ASP.NET” session for the PPU –Palestine Polytechnic University – CS and IT students. The workshop was held in Friends of Fawzi Kawash IT Center of Excellence (FFKITCE). We stopped the event registration process after 65 person was registered regarding the room limitation and we also emailed the latest 25 person that the priority will be given for those who registered earlier and we will re-hold a similar event for those who could not attend.

Anyway I went to Hebron using public transportation and it was like using “Crazy Taxi”!! it was really a mad drive I reached with no harm and headed to the FFKITCE center. The presentation started after 12:00 pm and continued to 4:00 pm nearly. It was really a very quick 3 hours full with Microsoft Buzz.

The audience was excited –I think- and I was very pleased to see those motivated students which really encouraged me myself to pursue latest tech’s further and further. The audience was interested with the powerful features the .NET and VS2008 provides which ease the application development process and save time and efforts. On the side of the presentation I introduced the express editions Microsoft offers, Microsoft Dream Spark and MSP programs.

In general the presentation run smoothly except that I could not figure out what happened in the second demo when my VS 2008 refused to connect to adventure works sample database. Although I checked the sample scenario early that morning and it was running fine but this is the demo’s hell I really tested –many times probably- !! Anyway we was already exceeded the given time so I skipped the rest of demo and finished the presentation. I am looking forward seeing more interaction from the students with PalDev and I really think that the time when such events are being held by the students themselves is very near.

A several suggestions came along with the presentation: some folks asked for advanced topics and this is very eligible and PalDev already has plans to do a bunch of advanced sessions for advanced users. Another asked for HOL’s but this is very limited due the limitation of available well equipped  labs.

Hope that helps anyone
Huthaifa