Fake Lottery – Game Corner International

I received another fake lottery thing today, this time from Deborah Shiemke – dispatch@mailonetoday.co.cc

Here’s the body of the email

We congratulate you this day as you have emerged a winner in the Game Corner International Lottery Organization. See attachment for claims procedure. Thank you

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Deborah Shiemke

Announcer-Game Corner International,

United Kingdom.

This message and its attachments are for designated recipient(s) only and may contain privileged, proprietary and private information. If you have received it in error, kindly delete it and notify the sender immediately.

This was attached in a word document:

The Game Corner International 
17, Bugsby Way 
Canary Wharf, London, E15 4OM

United Kingdom 
Registered No: GCIL/UK/04281185 
Serial No: GCIL/MYP/UK/09-1250/09 
Draw No: 09945/SALD

Dear Winner,

CLAIMS NOTIFICATION

Over the years, the prestigious Game Corner International Lottery Organization has set out and successfully organized Sweepstakes on a regular basis. (Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Annually)

We have equally maintained a high standard and unrivaled in the industry as it concerns the pay out of winnings to successful participants with the help of our London Pay Banks/courier services.

In line with the commemorating event marking our 25^th year anniversary, we rolled out over £25,000,000.00 (Twenty Five Million United Kingdom Pounds) for this anniversary/mid-year draw. Participants for the draws were randomly selected and drawn from a wide range of web hosts which enjoy our patronage .The selection was made through a computer drawn system attaching personalized email addresses to ticket numbers.

As luck and destiny would have it, your email address as indicated was drawn and attached to ticket number 4019241059 with Serial No: GCIL/MYP/UK/09-1250/09 and drew these lucky numbers 04-09-12-21-23-45 (25) which subsequently won you £350,000.00 GBP (Three Hundred and Fifty Thousand United Kingdom Pounds) as one of the 25 jackpot winners in this draw. You are therefore entitled to a total payout of £350,000.00 GBP (Three Hundred and fifty Thousand United Kingdom Pounds) in Category A. The draws were conducted in East London, United Kingdom on July 26, 2009.

These lottery Draws are commemorative and as such special. Please be informed by this winning notification to make contact with our claims department with the details below who shall by duty guide you through the process to facilitate the release of your winnings accordingly.

To file for your claims; contact;

Mr. Feraren Dawson

(The Game Corner International –Claims Department)

Tel: +44-701-078-6477

Fax: +44- 8445855766

Email: ferarendawson-gcli@live.com

PROVIDE THE UNDERMENTIONED CLAIMS REQUIREMENTS/DETAILS ON a Microsoft Word Pad or On Your Direct e-mail Page AND FORWARD DIRECTLY TO THE ABOVE MENTIONED DEPARTMENT/OFFICER

(1) FULL NAME                                                                    (8) WINNING EMAIL ID                                                                            

(2) FULL ADDRESS                                                             (9) DATE OF WINNING AWARD

(3) NATIONALITY                                                               (10) TOTAL AMOUNT WON

(4) SEX                                                                                   (11) MARITAL STATUS

(5) AGE                                                                                  (12) REGISTERED NUMBERS

(6) OCCUPATION                                                                (13) SERIAL NUMBERS

(7) MOBILE/TELEPHONE NUMBER                                 (14) DRAW NUMBERS                      

I wish to on behalf of all members and staffs of The Game Corner International Lottery Organization to congratulate you on your win and wish you the best as you spend your good fortune.

Sincerely,

Dr. Deborah a Shiemke

The Game Corner International Lottery Organization

United Kingdom

This message and its attachments are for designated recipient(s) only and may contain privileged, proprietary and private information. If you have received it in error, kindly delete it and notify the sender immediately.

Tags: Scams

Could not load file or assembly ‘ChilkatDotNet2′ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

Whilst setting up an application to run on my local machine (running Vista 64bit) I encountered this error:

Could not load file or assembly ‘ChilkatDotNet2′ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

 

Obviously, the application uses ChilKat components, but it would seem that the version we are using, is only the 32bit version.

To resolve this error, I set my app pool in IIS to allow 32bit applications.
Open up IIS Manager, right click on the app pool, and select Advanced Settings (See below)

 

Then set “Enable 32-bit Applications” to True.

All done!

Tags: .net, Error, IIS

Specify XML-RPC Endpoints at Run Time With CookComputing XMLRPC.net

A common question when using Cook Computing XML RPC.net to talk to blogs etc… is how to specify a blog / endpoint at runtime? Most of the examples seem to specify the details in an attribute… not much use if you’re trying to develop a wrapper.

To enable me to create JoeBlogs, I made use of the IXmlRpcProxy Proxy classes…

I created my interface, implementing IXmlRpcProxy:

We define the method as an XML RPC method using XmlRpcMethod.
The name of the method is also specified.
In this case, we are using getPost from the metaWeblog XML RPC API – WordPress supports this, as well as the Blogger API and the Movable Type API.
They also have their own (which is an extension to the Moveable Type API) –

http://codex.wordpress.org/XML-RPC_wp

Anyway…..

As per the metaWeblog.getPost specification, we need to pass in the postid, username, and password. So we create our interface as follows:

	public interface IMyProxy: IXmlRpcProxy
	{
		[XmlRpcMethod("metaWeblog.getPost")]
		Post GetPost(string postid, string username, string password);
  	}

As we can see, this returns a “Post”

This is a struct, that basically defines the structure of the response.

	[XmlRpcMissingMapping(MappingAction.Ignore)]
	public struct Post
	{
		public DateTime dateCreated;
		public string description;
		public string title;
		public string postid;
		public string[] categories;

		public override string ToString()
		{
			return this.description;
		}
	}

To use this,  you need to create an instance of the proxy object.

XML RPC.net provides a method called XmlRpcProxyGen to do this for us.

We then set the Url, which is declared as part of IXmlRpcProxy (remember IMyProxy implemented this interface…)

Since our proxy declared the method GetPost, we can now use this, pass in the required post id, username and password.

    public void myTest()
    {
      string postId = "1234";
      string username = "myUsername";
      string password = "password";

      var proxy = (IMyProxy)XmlRpcProxyGen.Create(typeof(IMyProxy));
      proxy.Url = "www.alexjamesbrown.com";

      var post = proxy.GetPost(postId, username, password);
    }

And there we have it.

Of course this is a very bare bones example.

JoeBlogs contains much more separation of these concerns.

Tags: c#, JoeBlogs, wordpress, xml rpc

String.EndsWithAny and StartsWithAny Extension Method

It frustrated me that while String provides the StartsWith and EndWith method, it doesn’t provide an EndWithAny. So, if I wanted to see if a particular string started or ended with any specified string, I would have to create my own method to return a true or false.
Whilst this is fine, it’s a little clunky if I want to use it in various places in my application.

For this reason, I decided to create an extension method:

EndsWithAny

public static bool EndsWithAny(this string input, params char[] endings)
{
	foreach (var x in endings)
		if (input.EndsWith(x.ToString()))
			return true;

	return false;
}

The method is very similar for StartsWithAny:

public static bool StartsWithAny(this string input, params char[] beginnings)
{
	foreach (var x in beginnings)
		if (input.StartsWith(x.ToString()))
			return true;

	return false;
}

I’ll write up a post on Extension Methods as soon as I get a chance.

For now, the MSDN one may help….

Tags: .net, c#, extension methods

Fix for Mail Enable – %1 is not a valid Win32 application.

As mentioned in a previous post, I am in the middle of changing my hosting, from a reseller account, to my own VPS.

After working closely with eHosting support, I’ve managed to beat into submission the large majority of the features required.
One thing however, was the installation of MailEnable Standard (the free one)
It didn’t come with any form of web mail client.

Some emailing, and googling later, I discovered the latest version of MailEnable standard (v 3.6)  includes webmail

After installing this on my VPS, and trying it out on a test domain, it threw an error in the web browser:

%1 is not a valid Win32 application.

This caused me quite a lot of trouble to figure out, but the solution – ASP.Net needed re-registering with IIS.
(I had recently installed .net 3.5 – not sure if this had anyrthing to do with it)
To do this, click Start, Run, then type "CMD"

At the command prompt, type (or cut paste, like most people)

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i -enable

Hit enter.

That fixed it for me, hopefully it will for anyone else.

Moving Server…

Well, kind of.
I’m an avid fan of www.ehosting.com however I’m upgrading to one of their VPS plans…
I’ll re-post when this is complete!

Tags: VPS

Email Scam – Winning coupon number 76.47.49.12

I thought this kind of email had fizzled out, but, apparently i’ve won 750m euros.

Anyway, for the sake of google, the originating email address was eustakevan@virgilio.it

---

Winning coupon number 76.47.49.12

Dear Sir/madam,

We are pleased to inform you that, you have won the sum of €750,000.00 Euros
from EU Lottery board held on the 9th of March, 2009. For more information,
contact the verification department below with your name, address, telephone
number and winning email address.

 

Contact: Mr. Peters Williams

Tel: +31- 641 449 705

Email: dayzclaimoffice@aol.com

Best regards,

Mrs., S. K Lugt

Dinner!

 

My favourite time at these kind of hotels (just like it was in Egypt) is always the selection of food on offer.

There are several restaurants available at this resort.
2 a la carte restaurants inside the main complex require men to wear long trousers.
Luckily, i brought suitable attire, however I’m on holiday… i should be able to wear what i want!

Back to our selected choice this evening (and I’m sure it’ll be the most common choice) – the buffet restaurant.

There are 2 – one in the Punta Cana side of the resort, one in the Dominicana side. Both are identical.

The dining hall is huge. The food on offer ranges from things like:

• Salad
• Cooked meat
• Cooked fish
• Pasta
• Pizza
• Bread
• Fruit
• Cakes
• Eggs

And much much more!

All of it was so good, it’s hard to write about it!

Session_Start event not firing

I’ve been scratching my head about this one for sometime…
As I’m sure your aware (or you wouldn’t be reading this) in the Global.asax file, we have the following method:

protected void Session_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

Placing a breakpoint on this method, I attached the debugger, ran up my application, and the breakpoint was not hit…

What I would of expected to happen would be the debugger break just as the page is loaded. It didn’t.

When my application builds, I have post-build events that copy required files (.aspx, bin dir etc…) to a separate directory, and i use a custom web server for the project (rather than the standard, local IIS Web server)

What this means is that the Global.asax file needs to be in my output directory.

Nothing in the “Global” class will run without the presence of the Global.asax file.

My post-build events did not copy *.asax files.

Upon adding this line, the issue was fixed, and my breakpoint is now hit.

Tags: .net, asp.net, c#, global.asax

Var keyword in C# – Implicitly typed variable

I’ll write my own post on this, but for now -

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb383973.aspx

Tags: c#