Photo of David Gardiner
A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Dec 29, 2008

    A furry visitor

    Furry visitor “I’m sure there was a tree around here last time”

  • Dec 17, 2008

    Fast hard disks

    So exactly how much faster are the latest hard disks? A number of people commented that using the old IDE disk on my Dad’s new Vista 64bit box wasn’t the best idea. I grabbed a copy of HD Tune to get some benchmarks of each of the 4 disks in the system to get an idea of how the drives compared.

    Here’s what I found:

    Measurement IDE Disk 1 IDE Disk 2 WD2000JD WD10EACS
    Transfer Rate Minimum (MB/sec) 1.1 7.6 32.1 37.2
    Transfer Rate Maximum (MB/sec) 43.5 45.1 55.1 90.5
    Transfer Rate Average (MB/sec) 28.8 33.8 48 68.3
    Access Time (ms) 14.5 14.3 20.5 15.5
    Burst Rate (MB/sec) 53.3 49.8 91.9 124.6

    Graph showing relative speeds of 4 hard drives

    So that 1Tb drive really is quite a bit faster than the other drives after all.

    I’ve since re-configured the new Vista box to use the fast drive for the operating system, and left the other drives in for video files (but with the knowledge that it will be a simple upgrade path to swap them out for additional SATA drives as required).

  • Dec 15, 2008

    CAT.NET and Xss

    Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET is a new tool to detect certain vulnerabilities in your code – including Cross Site Scripting, SQL Injection, Process Command Injection, File Canonicalization, Exception Information, LDAP Injection, XPATH Injection and Redirection to User Controlled Site.

    Also there’s a beta release of version 3 of the AntiXSS library which can help reduce the chance of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in your ASP.NET application.