Tuesday, February 22, 2005

I didn't realize I had to do a 1099-Misc for someone I subbed last year, but it isn't as hard as I thought.

You have to have real paper forms from the IRS (or your accountant, or the business supply store) because they are red. These are the ones you send to the IRS. The black copies go to the Vendor.

Quickbooks can print them out if you have it set up properly. I had to mark this vendor as a 1099 vendor and then in Preferences/Tax I had to associate the "Nonemployee compensation" box with the account I used to pay the vendor from - in my case "Subcontract: Programming".

You also need the vendors tax-id. That could be a SS# or an EIN. If you want to be official, you can have them fill out a W-9 that you can download from the www.irs.gov website and give that to you.

Don't forget that you need a red 1096 as well. It is basically the "cover sheet" for the 1099's that you submit to the IRS.

Remember - I am not an accountant, just another business owner. This is only basic heads up info, but check with your accountant first!!



http://www.AcehAid.org
Tuesday, February 22, 2005 1:51:27 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Monday, February 21, 2005

If you have been following the saga of Rob Howard trying to get to Vermont for our 6pm meeting where he was our INETA speaker... Rob was stuck in Chicago waiting for a flight that kept being delayed and delayed. We finally decided he should turn around and go back to Dallas. I think we made the right call!



http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 8:35:09 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

I realize that I have started referring to the high level policy files you create by clicking on the check boxes in WSE2 Config Settings Tool as “click click policies”. I think I'm going to coin that phrase for myself!

WSE
Monday, February 21, 2005 8:17:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Jerry Dennany sums up his experience with working with WSE2 for a while.

I have to agree with much of what he is saying which is why I have been working hard to try to digest as much as I can and spit it out for other developers to save them some of the pain of learning how to leverage WSE2 beyond just clicking a few checkmarks in the config tool.



http://www.AcehAid.org
WSE
Monday, February 21, 2005 4:50:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Boo hoo

Rob Howard's flight from Chicago was delayed again so as there was no point in him arriving very late and then flying out tomorrow morning, I sent him home to Texas and 85 degree weather.

After a quick concensus of those who rsvp'd, many people said they weren't going to come now (no star, icchy weather, and half of Vermont has some bug anyway - but they *were* going to come if Rob had made it...) so we have cancelled the Vermont.NET meeting.

Rob and I are both very sorry.



http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 3:44:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Based on the current United schedule, we will start the meeting at 6pm and Rob should arrive at about 7pm with Roman Rehak.

The first hour of the meeting will have the usual "what's going on" and then I will facilitate a free for all .NET Q&A until Rob arrives.



http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 1:28:52 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

(responding to some emails and phone calls) really - here's why

flight 7960 is en route. It left Burlington one hour late and will arrive in Chicago only 25 minutes late.

It is the same plane, it arrives at gate E2 and Rob's flight departs from E2.

I think they said 3:30 because they did not know when the Burlington flight was leaving (there were computer problems).

Hang in there. Let's give it some more time to shake out.



http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 12:39:01 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
so far so good. The plane from BTV to Chicago left only a few minutes late. That's the plane that comes back here later with our speaker on it! And currently Rob's flight is scheduled to arrive only 20 minutes late.

http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 11:43:28 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

My dear friend and college roommate was highly impacted by Hunter S. Thompson's work when we were in college -- I believe even writing one of her two senior theses (she was a double major - my brilliant friend :-) ) on something that involved reading a lot of his work. She went on to do her post graduate work at Medill School of Journalism and is, of course, a journalist who I know will someday get a Pulitzer!

Of course I thought of her immediately this morning when I read that Thompson had killed himself. I thought that my friend's reply was a nice tribute in her journalistic shorthand...

i can't blv he did it. i always admired him and thought of him as an icon but only in last couple years  did i come to totally appreciate and read a lot of his stuff. i wanted to have a beer with him at woody creek tavern but i guess that won't be happening...

proud highway is an awesome book i read last year...
now this is a guy who should have left a note.


http://www.AcehAid.org
Monday, February 21, 2005 11:11:18 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

Watch here for updates on meeting status! I will feed them to the VTdotNET site as well.

Rob Howard is scheduled to speak at Vermont.NET tonight. Everyone is very excited and I have a lot of RSVPs. But now we have a snowy blustery morning and a forecast for it to be like this all day. Rob's flight is due in at 5pm and the meeting is at 6pm.

I did just speak to Rob on his way to the airport in DFW and he's going to go for it, at least as far as Chicago then we'll figure it out from there.

We can watch his Chicago -> Burlington flight status here. And the weather forecast here.

 

http://www.AcehAid.org

Monday, February 21, 2005 9:14:07 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Saturday, February 19, 2005

Alex Lowe has just joined Telligent Systems. I'm sure he will be missed as a D.E. in the Michigan and Ohio area, but what a perfect fit!!

Alex has a new blog here



http://www.AcehAid.org
Saturday, February 19, 2005 11:10:51 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Friday, February 18, 2005

This is such a nice post from Sam Gentile, that I had to point it out...



http://www.AcehAid.org
Friday, February 18, 2005 4:17:11 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

New Location! VSLive Boston
June 28-July 1 (Web site to be posted soon, check www.vslive.com for updates)



http://www.AcehAid.org
Friday, February 18, 2005 11:27:45 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

update: However, for the purpose of testing out some basic ink functionality when developing ink-enabled apps, without having to go out and purchase a tablet pc, this might do the trick. I don't think (from my one minute of testing - let's be clear about that) that this will be good if you are testing intensive functions that depend on granularity such as breaking a stroke down or working with stylus input.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Friday, February 18, 2005 10:43:21 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
Friday, February 18, 2005 9:27:32 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

My favorite method of inspecting SOAP messages when I am working with WSE2.0 is Mike Taulty's WSE 2.0 Tracing Utility. Mike had to update the tool to work with SP2. If you use this tool, and have updated to SP2, be sure to grab the new version here. You will need to modify your config files as well.

If you are using WSE2 and not using Mike's utility, I highly recommend that you try it. The messages are so much more disoverable and readable than opening up the log files in notepad..

Posted from BLInk!

WSE
Friday, February 18, 2005 8:50:29 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

explanation?

from the thoughtful Sam Ruby http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/02/16/SHA-1-Broken

action item?

from security expert, Keith Brown: http://pluralsight.com/blogs/keith/archive/2005/02/16/5907.aspx



http://www.AcehAid.org
Friday, February 18, 2005 8:39:49 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

At Web Services Edge, someone asked me in the hallway about doing WSE2 Security without X509 certificates. Although there is, out of the box, support for Kerberos (which I still know nearly zip about) and you can write custom tokens as well, I think the question was really about how to do security well with login/pw ---> UsernameTokens.

The answer is that you can, but with the caveat that logins/passwords are often (thanks to social engineering and use of passwords like "cat") not the best way to go.

However, if you are hoping to do this with UsernameTokens, there are two important resources you should be aware of.

1) Keith Brown's recent article on the Web Services dev center on Securing UsernameTokens with WSE 2.0

2) To solve another problem - doing SecureConversation with UsernameTokens - which still basically requires a web server x509 certificate - see William Stacy's blog post which accomplished what a number of us have been trying to do for some time!



Posted from BLInk!
WSE
Friday, February 18, 2005 8:26:57 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 
 Thursday, February 17, 2005
Not only is it their 20th anniversary issue, but it also represents a milestone for me!

http://www.AcehAid.org
Thursday, February 17, 2005 5:50:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  | 

I had a great time at the Edge East conference in Boston over the last few days. I was able to meet some people I know via emails, blogs etc. This includes Philly area D.E. Stan Spotts - who i hope is feeling better, Atlanta D.E. Doug Turnure and Raj Das from Magenic. I also unexpectedly got to catch up with Andrew Duthie. Best of all was seeing all my New England pals  - some of the user group leaders that I konw and others, like Robert Hurlbut. I also enjoyed seeing Michael Stiefel's talk on SOA and WSE2.0. He and I consulted in advance so that our talks didn't overlap. I got to focus soley on the security fundamentals - all concept no code! That talk is becoming my raison d'etre these days!

There were some fantastic session, including the workshops and Ari Bixhorn did a super job of the keynote. Though the keynote was the same focus as the keynote that he did with Eric Rudder at VSLive, he really made it his own at this show. It's always entertaining to get a chance to catch up with Ari!

Thom Robbins got me to actually sit down to do a Hands on Lab with Whitehorse, but I didn't get too far as I was having too much fun chatting with Jim Murphy and Tim Ewald from Mindreef which was right by the HOL area. I got to hear about some interesting features that are upcoming in their already awesome product. I think those guys are going to do a group road trip to speak at VTdotNET after this summer. That will be a blast. What great luck for the user group!

The Cabanas (sponsored by INETA, no less <g>) last night were great. I ended up in the VB room with Carl Franklin and Markus Egger. People asked awesome questions. It seems that STILL the #1 most difficult new concept for VB6 devs coming into .NET is delegates. (it was mine as well...)

I went over this morning for a bit and sat in an amazing (and entertaining) workshop called "Security, the new reality" doen by Patrick Hynds and Duane LaFlotte of Critical Sites. It is a REALLY good thing that these guys are not on the wrong side of the law when it comes to hacking website. I pity any hacker that tries to get into their sites.

All in all it was a great show. Thanks especially to Derek Ferguson and Grisha Davida!!

And I can't complain about the very clear weather for driving to Boston and back either!



http://www.AcehAid.org
Thursday, February 17, 2005 5:30:24 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #     |  Comments [0]  |