Geek

Pocket C# is port of C# compiler from DotGNU project to Windows CE. DotGNU contains open-source runtime, compiler, tools and many other things to make free cross-platform .NET environment. I took only compiler and several required tools and ported them with some modifications to WinCE platform. This would allow you to develop and build applications using standard .NET CF and C# right on your pocket device. It’s quite easy, you almost don’t need to do anything manually - just write your code and project file and then build it with one tap. ...

Karan (see the Blogs I read section for his weblog) pointed me to this and I think it is pretty cool. IronPython is a new implementation of the Python language targeting the CLR. It compiles python programs into IL that can run on either .NET or Mono (now that is cool). This produces a standard assembly that other code can reference. It would be an interesting exercises to see the IL it produces and see if we can infer anything from that. ...

Recently google has been all over the news - online, print and television, atleast here in the US; and why not, with their IPO and everything, lot of people are hoping this would kickstart the recovery of the economy. I have been toying with a few other search engines for a few months now. These have also been highlighted in the media recently alongwith the google hype as a potential threat to google. The engines I have been toying with apart from google are: ...

This reminds me of a few weeks ago when during one of my IM sessions with my buddy Karan I was bashing up Linux (which from those who know is not really me). This lead to (atleast that is what I think) a frantic call from him - all the way across the pond - and we yapped like a pair of teenage girls for close to an hour +. The crux of that debate… err.. discussion we had was Windows vs. Linux. If memory servers correctly (which ain’t a lot *grin*), then this article pretty much sums it up. Here are some of the common OS myths that typically float around in cyberspace: ...

Bill Venners has an interesting article on Abstraction and Efficient. He says that Abstraction is a mechanism to understand things. A good analogy he lays out is in Mathematics. Where expressing a solution means we really did understand the problem and not write up some code to try a “special case“. Also states that it is important to generalise and see one particular problem as a example of the class of problems. You can read the article here , Part I (c++ style sweet spot) can be found here and Part II (modern c++ style) here . ...

If you did not hear, then google recently launched its Personalised Web Search feature which is still not Beta (its on their lab page). Here you can go and setup you interests (essentially your scope) and then you can narrow down your results to only within the context of that scope. Quite interesting when you are looking for something which is also very generic or a completely different topic. ...

A friend’s (Phil Kerkel) laptop recently got infected with HackerDefender which cost him about a day’s worth of work. Now this seems to be harmless, but something like this invading the system is scary, especially when you have all your data and not to mention in most cases a lot of our client’s data! Basically, these guys use the FTP services installed on Windows machines running on high speed networks (such as DSL/Cable, or University campuses) to they can use that fat pipe to distribute copyrighted material such as films, games and software etc. Sometimes these ftp servers are protected by a piece of software called HackerDefender, this software is used to hide files, processes and even ports from the user and investigating parties and is particularly difficult to infiltrate. ...

Karan found this and you can read about all of it in his blog. But I checked and he is right! Gmail does not show me the time of the “origin” of the email only when gmail got it. So taking Karan’s scenario: Retrieve from external pop3 mailbox 250 new messages Import 250 Messages look at inbox, and you have 250 messages received at the same time (1 min ago) Oh wow! this is just what I need. This begs the question, is this by design? If so, would it be to thwart the spammers? Personally I would like to see both when was the mail sent, and when did I get it. ...

I suddenly started getting an error during boot up on one of my machine and could not figure out what it was, after spending a fair amount of time on google, I found this listing of error codes that I feel was very helpful. You can bookmark this post and use it as your reference. Code Description 01x Undetermined problem errors 02x Power supply errors 1xx System Board Errors 101 System board error - Interrupt failure 102 System board error - Timer failure 103 System board error - Timer interrupt failure 104 System board error - Protected mode failure 105 System board error - Last 8042 command not accepted 106 System board error - Converting logic test 107 System board error - Hot NMI test 108 System board error - Timer bus test 109 Direct memory access test error 110 System board memory 111 Adapter memory 112 (any adapter in system unit) 113 (any adapter in system unit) 121 Unexpected hardware interrupts occurred 131 Cassette wrap test failed 151 System Board Error; Defective battery 152 System Board Error; Real time clock failure 161 System Options Error - (Run SETUP) Battery failure 162 System options not set correctly-(Run SETUP) 163 Time and date not set - (Run SETUP) 164 Memory size error - (Run SETUP) 165 System options not set - (Run SETUP) 166 (any adapter in system unit) 199 User-indicated configuration not correct ...

So, somehow I was one of the “dudes” to get a gmail account. Since I have been travelling a lot (on work), I don’t get the time to be online as much - if you have me on one of the IM’s, you know that - since I am online only about 50% of the day. But the point I am getting to, is that I have not had a chance to play with gmail all that much. Karan, got in and was fooling around with it and gave me his feedback. Today is the first day I think I did something meaningful with it. What better way to set it up that to forward all my spam mails from my “honeypot” account to gmail. So that is done! Now we will see how good the spam filter is. As of now about 50% if the spam is not getting caught! Also would be an interesting test on what advertisments am I shown based on all the spam I get? ...

OSnews and Aspire were running a competition for writing a Development Article where I had submitted an entry on Exception Management in .NET. To my surprise I won that (even though there were not too many entries). You can read the article here . I will be posting here also probably this weekend. ...

After my recent post on spyware, there is an interesting story being run by BBC where 90% of technology managers say that there is some kind of “spyware” running on their employees PC to track their browsing habits with 29% of those being installed surreptitiously. The interesting number to me was that about 6% of users believed that the machine they use had been infected by such software. So I guess you should stop reading this now and get back to work. :) ...

ICP DAS USA has a new PLC coming out that is running on Windows CE.NET 4.2 on a Intel Strong ARM CPU. It can run PC based control software developed with higher languages such as c#, vb.net and embeded c++. This offers the best of both the worlds - PC and PLC. If you like ladder logic you can use ISaGRAF and TraceMode. It also has a builtin VGA, Ethernet, CompactFlash, USB, Keyb and mouse ports (phew) and can use a regular monitor (or touchscreen) to view its HMI. You can check it out here . ...

Karan pointed this one out to me, but seems like google is into Mirrors now. Check out what “eerhab tima” returns. :)

First of all here are the sys. requirements: Macromedia Flash Player 6 r79 IE 6 compatible browser with Javascript enabled The IT manager - overworked and underappreciated. You know the story. Back in school, always the last to be picked for football, but the first one they ran to when they accidentally deleted a homework assignment. Not much has changed since then. But the fact is it takes a special skill set to manage an IT department. As IT manager you need to monitor industry trends and administer mission-critical resources for an entire company. At the same time, you have to manage increasingly tighter budgets - finding ways to do more with less - and possess the people skills to oversee staff and run interference with top decision makers. ...

Yes it is true and it is very cool! Mainsoft has a product called Visual MainWin for both J2EE and Unix and Linux platforms. You can have your ASP.NET applications (using ADO.NET) deployed on a single J2EE platform. Please note, this is not really “calling” any web services that are running on Java. How does it work? Well for one you can check out this flash movie (and it surely is amazing!). But basically they wrote an IL compiler that takes the IL generated by .NET app (i.e. ASP.NET in this case) and converts it to Java bytecode which then is run “natively” on a J2EE platform. ...

Incase you did not know, but this blog runs on .Text with minor tweaks to the code. When I run this in the W3C Validator , I get 61 (wow!) errors back. If you examine the results of the validator some interesting things emerge. Here is a listing of the issues I found: ...

Though, this has been possible by google for a bit, most people did not know all the power of google. Here are some of the things you can do: Area Code Maps Package Tracking ( FedEx , UPS, USPS) Flight Tracking Info Vehicle Info Patent Search FAA Plane Registration UPC Codes [FCC Equipment IDs]( http://www.google.com/search?q=fcc B4Z-34009-PIR) There is also a calculator which in addition to the simple things (such as addition, multiplications, etc) can also calculate the sqrt, trigonometric functions (sin, cos, etc.), ln (logarithm base e), log (logarithm base 10), factorial, etc. Want to see some binary multiplication ? ...

Ergodex has made what it dubs as the “ The World’s First Totally Personalizable Input System ”. They have a pad with a sticky surface that connects via usb to a computer. You can then stick the keys to the surface as you like. You can “record” macros and assign them to keys and can be executed at one touch. ...

This Is Broken , run by Mark Hurst , in my opinion has an excellent way to popularise the customer experience on the web. Not only is it “lmao“ funny, but it also tells you which products and companies to avoid! Kudos to Mark!

Many people have come to me asking what the heck does the Blog name mean? I have the same as my handle on MSN Messenger also and I get the same question there. For the non-techy folks, it is quite interesting that the first thing that comes to their mind is that there is a virus. Hmm, have we rooted this fear so deeply in them now? If so then probably we have failed, but thats another story. Anyways, if you read carefully my handle reads IUnkown [Deprecated]. ...

A bunch of my friends asked me, what is all the “gibberish” on the test posts that I had submitted to ensure that everything works. I was quite surprised to hear these - especially these are friends who are into custom development on various platforms and technologies. The thought that they have never seen this “gibberish” was quite astounding. So, the “gibberish”, is basically Lorem Ipsum which is sample or dummy text originally of the printing and typesetting industry, but now is used by the Information Architects in all product companies (that I know of). I did not know this, but Lorem Ipsum is from the 1500’s and is not just random text (or gibberish if you prefer that). On the contrary, it has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. ...

These guys show you how to fit a fully functional PC based on a VIA M10000 EPIA board . They went onto fit it into a Red Hat box and then using a sensor told the boot-loader which OS to run based on which box it is in. Now thats cool! Also check out the other neat projects they have done. ...