Geek

Well, I have been thinking for a long time (for those who know me, know that is quite unusual, mostly my poor brain just gives up and packs up due to overload - but that’s a story for another day) of getting a Media Centre at home of some sorts. Being a Microsoft geek it was obvious of the choice of going with the Media Centre 2005, but being a geek, and not to mention the consistent and persistent push of my dear friend Karan , who is a huge proponent of OpenSource (and no he is not the sort of a guy who bashes MS just because of them being MS), I realised, I could not just take it at face value and decided to read up a little more - after all at the end of the day this would be sitting next to the TV and is something that needs to look half-decent and not something that would live in the study so who cares what it looks like. It also needs to be usable (whats the point otherwise), and of course can integrate with the TV, etc. ...

I think, this is the ultimate geek story about two guys who got fired from their jobs at Apple but still kept working (to finish the Graphic Calculator ) - oh how I wish I was there!! BTW, you can download the free versions even today (and no they are not from 1993). ...

.netcpu Corp , a small startup in Microsoft’s backyard is beginning to ship a tiny, 32-pin chip-like computer module that runs “.NET Embedded”, the same platform developed for use in the SPOT watches. The embedded software stack, called .NET Embedded, (shaded in blue in the architecture diagram below) contains the bootstrap code (to initialise the system on powerup), a Tiny HAL plus device drivers ( to control the underlying system hardware) and a Tiny CLR through which the device is programmed. ...

Thanks to Rohit for pointing this out, but if you are a Punjabi (and unlike me you are the literate lot and can read it), then you can google in Punjabi. To check it out browse over to http://www.google.com/intl/pa/ and have fun!

Robert Hensing writes a very interesting and controversial article where he recommends not to use any kind of passwords on a Windows network? Why you ask? Well because passwords are very easily cracked and worms such as Agobot / Phatbot / Polybot / SDBot / RBot / etc. ship with boat-loads of dictionaries of passwords. Not to mention that either automated or human attackers don’t even need to guess the password as there are many hacking tools that will let a miscreant sniff your network traffic to get the authentication material for the LM, NTLM and Kerberos protocols and then brute-force that material back into a working password. You can try and protect the network with segmentation, encryption (IPSec etc.) and even 802.1x , etc. but really they just workaround with the inherent vulnerability in your network which is - the password. ...

Well this is probably old news, but now GMail allows pop access , not sure if many people will use it or not including me since I like to be able to access my emails anywhere (especially at work) and the searching emails as usual is damn good. If you however do download it to Outlook then I would suggest installing Lookout , atleast your searches in Oulook would be as good as Google (I had an earlier post on it here and here ). ...

I am sure you might have seen these in some magazines or the other, this is the second one I have seen and I think they are a pretty neat idea to find the right talent. Remember these are “aptitude tests” so look at how you think and how creative you can be and not necessarily how fast you can write some piece of code (or how efficiently). Here is what is it - could you solve any of these? What answers would you have? Here they are: ...

After my previous post on Google Desktop search , I thought what the heck and took out some time to play with it and below are my findings. To get around the installation issue, I had to uninstall the MS Firewall Client. Here are the screen shots of the installation, but before that, it runs locally (127.0.0.1) on port 4664. So if you were to browse to http://127.0.0.1:4664 then you would get an “Invalid Request“ error which makes it seem like its running a small web server. ...

I guess you have heard all the flutter on Google’s new Desktop Search that lets you find stuff on your own hard disk and all the articles pointing to its a direct challenge to Microsoft, etc. But the real question is, has it been able to work for you? When I try to install it on one of my computers (this instance is running Windows 2000 Professional SP4, I get the following error: ...

Celestia is probably one of the coolest apps (ever) that I have come across and it really gets the geek-meter high up there, not to mention it is so educational as well, so if you are a geek, or hungry for some knowledge and exploring or got kids in school who might benefit then read on. You can see the giant hurricane on Jupiter, take a quick spin to the moon Io, set off for icy Europa and zoom back to Earth. All these computer simulations are possible using Celestia which is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. ...

BBC is running a story that has the Top 20 computer threats unveiled which covers both Windows and Unix/Linux. Here are the top 10 Windows threats: Web servers & services Workstation service Windows remote access services Microsoft SQL server Windows authentication Web browsers File-sharing applications LSAS E-mail programs Instant messaging And the top 10 Linux/Unix threats: Bind domain name system Web server Authentication Version control systems Mail transport services Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Open secure sockets layer (SSL) Misconfiguration of enterprise services Databases Kernel ...

If you recall the previous post on instantiating static fields , there seems to have been a flurry of activity at Microsoft. As Peter Hallam writes , it made sense to improve the perf. for the static field initialisers and this you should see in Beta2 of Whidbey. The main issue here as Peter explains is if you have a field initialiser for a static field, which initialises the static field to its default value, you still get a static constructor, or .cctor in CLR speak) which is a significant performance penalty. So this begs the question, why did we not add this optimisation for static fields? ...

Google released a new service enabling you to use SMS to run searches. This service as of now is available only in the US. As their FAQ states e.g. Right now, Google SMS only works in the U.S. We’re working hard to make it available when and wherever you’re on the go. In the meantime, how about a little slice of heaven in Little Italy? (try ‘pizza 10013’) (that is a New York zip code for those outside of US). This service includes information like: ...

Microsoft is currently investigating a reported vulnerability in ASP.NET (does not affect ASP) where an attacker can send specially crafted requests to the server and view secured content without providing the proper credentials. This issue affects anyone running any version of ASP.NET on Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, 2000 Server, XP Professional, and 2003 Server. The issue at hand really is that asp.net does not perform a proper canonicalization (will get to what it is in a minute) of some URLs. ...

If you have not checked out TouchGraph , then I would recommend to do so. You need Java JRE 1.3+ to view it but it will map out the url and graphically show you how others link to it. You can zoom in/out, limit the lines between the sites, etc. If you want to use it to the max, then make sure to read the instructions. ...

There are many utilities I have come across over the years - most I used for a bit and moved on because they just did not do the job or were cut out for it or something better came along. A few are very useful from a Developer or Administrator such as Sysinternals . But NirSoft does have a unique collection of freeware utilities that will please to most computer users across the board (a whole bunch with the source code), and range from Password recover utilities to Network Monitoring Utilities, to Internet related utilities such as TurnFlash - a small utility that allows you to easily disable and enable the Macromedia Flash player component in Internet Explorer - which is a great help now as more and more web sites have close to full-screen advertisements. There is also a collection of links, that have other unique free software such as VNC, Etheral, etc. Check it out and let me know your favourite sites and tools are. ...

Brad Adams has an interesting post on this blog, but before you go and read it, take a crack at it here and let me know what your answer is. There is an interesting thread going on there and I honestly cannot figure out the “bug” and being the impatient fool I am, I need to know the answer! :) A dev on the team recently found a bug in Whidbey a long these lines… Say you want to initialize the value of a static int to zero… which code should you use (C1 or C2) and, of course the most important point, why? ...

The folks at Redmond, just released a 2nd preview to their new search engine . Based on my little bit of playing around, if this is their answer to Google, then unfortunately there is still a fair amount of work left. I was quite disappointed and instead of “wasting” more time in it went back to Google. E.g. if you search on my name “Amit Bahree” both on Microsoft’s new search or Google you get very different results. What have your findings been? ...

Thanks to Wai for pointing me to this one. Before we go on, I would like to point out that there is nothing wrong in being a geek. Signs you are becoming a geek: Monitor tan. Before heading to the bathroom you inform your friends you’re off to download and log out. You become physically ill at the mention of the RIAA, and visibly excited at the mention of object-oriented programming. You have a poster on your wall of the Linux penguin. You’re mad because all your friends got goodnight kisses after prom, but your sister just slugged you in the arm and said “Thanks, bro”. You think having twice as many computers as there are people in the house is a bare minimum. You feel that living life like the movie “tron” wouldn’t be so bad. In your little black book, you list (both) the girls you know in order by IP address. You can type faster than you can speak When your shrink says “Mother . . . ” you say “ . . . Board.” If, by some happy accident, you someday have kids, you want to name them after your favourite fonts. ...

NY Post reports that Google is working on a new browser (as reported on /. if you check www.gbrowser.com among other domains, they are taken by google). Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft. Google hired Joshua Bloch, one of the main developers for Java, from Sun. They also hired four people who worked on Internet Explorer. One of them, Adam Bosworth, is credited with being a driving force not only behind IE, Access too. Most recently, Google grabbed Joe Beda, the lead developer on Avalon . ...

Well after an interesting post on Forbes view on Linux and Microsoft and Karan’s lash back on the same I am back with more. Do I think is there an alternative to Windows? Absolutely! Is it for everyone? Well, if you believe the article in MIT’s Technology Review then probably yes. ...

Microsoft employee Raymond Chen (who seems to have loads of time on his hand) has compiled unique evidence of the explosion of spam: he’s saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he’s received at work since 1997. Not willing to stop there, Chen graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man’s malicious traffic. Cazh1 on the other hand has another take on the whole History of Spam thing - the impact of spammers changing message formats to get past the spam filters. ...

As Forbes writes (which I verbatim here), Is Linus Torvalds secretly working for Microsoft? That sounds crazy until you consider that lately, the free operating system he created, Linux, has been helping Microsoft close deals. Consider the deal that Microsoft snagged with the London borough of Newham, announced in early August. Looking to overhaul their computer systems, the Brits originally planned to dump Microsoft’s Windows and switch to open-source programs, including Linux. But when they commissioned a study to evaluate costs, they found it would be cheaper to stick with Windows. So they signed on for a 10-year deal. “We think the savings following the Linux route would have been about half what they were when following the Microsoft route,” says Richard Steel, Newham’s director of information and communications technology. ...

Techdirt writes on how University of Texas is having WiFi Blues. Can’t they run this on a different frequency and allow their students to run it on a different one? Why does Bush country want to do everything the difficult way and different? ;) Slashdot is running a story about The University of Texas at Dallas banning independent WiFi networks to avoid interference with the university-run WiFi network. There’s just one (big) problem. The FCC has made it clear that only they have the right to regulate unlicensed spectrum . That was the point of the ruling they made just a few months ago telling airports they can’t stop anyone from setting up WiFi networks within the airport. At the same time, though, this does demonstrate some of the issues with unlicensed spectrum. As great as it’s been for generating massive growth for things like WiFi, interference is still a problem - and one that not enough people have paid attention to. ...

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility! ...