Geek

I first heard of KeyHole during one of Microsoft’s presentation of Avalon (which is Longhorn’s presentation subsystem). Keyhole is the 3D digital earth pioneer—the only company to deliver a 3D digital model of the entire earth via the Internet. Keyhole’s groundbreaking EarthStream™ technology combines advanced 3D graphics and network streaming innovations to produce a high performance system that runs on standard PC’s and commodity servers. Both high performance and intuitive to use, Keyhole’s solutions enable anyone to manipulate a rich map of the earth composed of imagery and feature information. Check them out at http://www.keyhole.com/ . ...

My dear friend Mario pointed me to this and it is hilarious! Make sure your speakers are on and enjoy!

If you live (or ever lived) in the San Francisco Bay Area (also know as the Silicon Valley), you would know that boosterism has a long part of the valley’s culture as much as Technology and Money is. This Sunday in the paper there was an excellent perspective on with the upcoming Google’s IPO, Silicon Valley’s hype machine is in overdrive, raising sales for potential investors. Below is the article written by Jonathan Weber for Mercury News, hopefully you would also enjoy the read and let me know what you think on the issue. ...

MSDN Mag has an interesting article on tools that convert code from c# to vb.net and vice-versa. I have come across a number of clients and developers both in the company I work for and also at clients who are interested in this. I find this whole topic quite intriguing, especially since in .NET there are minimal differences between c# and vb.net, at least if you stick to only managed code. Also it is quite easy to reuse functionality between the various objects (especially in these days of SOA - more on that some other day). This of course is easier if your are not trying to reuse WinForm apps. Irrespective, there is a lot of demand and some of the options listed here allows you to download the code and play with that too. ...

Thanks to Chris who accidentally pointed me to this. This is an update to my earlier post on Lookout. Seems like Lookout is now part of the MSN Sandbox and you can download it from there which is pretty cool of Microsoft to offer it soon after acquiring that company. If you use Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express) then this is a highly recommended add-on. ...

I guess it had to happen one day, but as of this morning Google’s search engine is not working - atleast not here in Bay Area, USA which is also where Google is Headquatered. CNN has also picked up on this story and mention that in addition to the US, France and UK are also having issues. When I try and search on something I get the error an Error -27 as shown below. You can click on the image to see the full size. ...

Wired is running a story that interview’s a former senior manager who shares his firsthand knowledge of the device’s development, the glitches that almost killed it, and the extraordinary steps Apple took to keep the iPod a secret. You can check it out here .

Found this interesting link which has all kinds of DVD Hacks for most DVD Players (including my cheap-no-brand-one). You can also enter codes to make your DVD Players region free - neat! Update: This link was broken its been fixed now. Thanks to my lovely wife - Meenakshi for finding that. She does need to read my blog every now and then especially when I am quizzing her. *grin* ...

As Jim Fawcette who had had this interesting entry writes, we’re starting to see Microsoft’s strategy for serving different market sectors with the preview of Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), the enterprise version of VS 2005 and the various Visual Studio Express (VSE) Editions. What hasn’t been discussed widely yet is that Microsoft’s approach is fundamentally different from what we’ve seen for development tools. Historically, design focuses on the high-end tool, then all other versions are essentially crippled versions of the “real” release, with levels of features simply turned off with little or no attention being paid to the unique needs of each market sector. From what Microsoft has shown us so far, the Whidbey release will be a welcome change with each version specifically designed to meet the needs of its target user. ...

Now, not sure if this error is supposed to be smart or cheesy, or did a programmer at Google just have too much sugar, but I got this error a few times tonight and the first time I have seen it.

As Techdirt points out It’s funny how all the lawsuits against Google just so happen to appear right before their IPO. The website Googles.com just shot up their traffic numbers by a ridiculous amount for their stories and games for young children about an alien named Googles, by suing Google for trademark infringement . It turns out that Googles (the alien/children folks) got a trademark for the name related to children’s books and toys in 1997, pre-dating Google by about a year. This wasn’t a real problem until Google decided to go public… er… start offering shopping searches on their Froogle website that offered links to children’s toys, games and books. The folks behind Googles’ say they would be happy as long as Google.com pointed to their site any time anyone searched for children’s products (no, seriously). However, they’re upset that Google’s management hasn’t found the time to sit down and discuss the claim seriously. Well, at least they appear to have a stronger claim than the family of man who came up with the word “googol” . ...

IMHO, it was bound to happen and about time it did. The BBC is reporting that Google bans Gmail sales. Google updated the program policy for Gmail on Monday adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of Gmail accounts for commercial purposes. Despite the policy change Google still seems happy for invitations for accounts to be swapped and traded. ...

Subramanian pointed me to this article. Researchers at Microsoft have devised a technique to assimilate the human body as a conduit for consumer electronics. Electrodes attached to body use the skin as a system bus to transmit data and as a conductive medium to distribute power between devices. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes. One or more devise to be powered, e.g., peripheral devices, are also coupled to the human body via additional sets of electrodes. The devices may be, e.g., a speaker, display, watch, keyboard, etc. A pulsed DC signal or AC signal may be used as the power source. By using multiple power supply signals of differing frequencies, different devices can be selectively powered. Digital data and/or other information signals, e.g., audio signals, can be modulated on the power signal using frequency and/or amplitude modulation techniques. ...

Found this off /. so if you have seen it there, you can stop reading. Interesting project where one can submit a md5 hash and in a few days (I presume) you get the plain text value of them. Currently the character set a-z;0-9 [8] is supported which means that hashes created from lowercase plain text with letters and/or digits upto a maximum length of 8 characters are supported. They user RainbowCrack for cracking which essentially is a hash cracker. While a traditional brute force cracker try all possible plain texts one by one in cracking time, RainbowCrack works by precomputing all possible plain text - cipher text pairs in advance and store them in the file so called “rainbow table“. It may take a long time to precompute the tables, but once the one time precomputation is finished, you are able to crack the cipher text pretty fast. ...

I found an interesting behaviour in the Page rank feature of the google toolbar in IE. For example when I view this blog with the fully qualified URL i.e. http://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit my page rank shows up as 7/10 and when I view it using the abbreviated URL http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit (no www.) then it shows up as 3/7. You can see both the screen shots here and here showing this behaviour. ...

Microsoft today released a patch for Download.Jet (32 bit edition) which I would highly recommend everyone to install - make sure you select your OS’s language before downloading it. If you don’t want to install the patch and prefer doing it manually then keep reading. I had another post a few days ago which talked a little more on this virus, if you care to read. ...

There has been a number of interesting things I have started noticing lately. With the whole recent virus fiasco I changed my IE security setting to High - which lead to almost every site I visited on any regular basis to crap out (which sucks and is a big failure on people like me who help design and implement some of these systems, but that is another story for another day). To my surprise I got an error saying that gmail used and ActiveX control and would not work without that. Very Interesting, because for those who come from the good old world of COM, would know that an ActiveX control is really nothing but a lightweight COM control, and why would Google, which to the best of my knowledge does not use any MS technologies need that? Check out a screen shot if you want. ...

Hopefully you have heard of the new Download.Ject virus that is also known as JS.Scob.Trojan, Scob, JS.Toofeer and have taken the corrective steps to fix it. Like most other users, I primarily use IE ( about 85% of the time and FireFox the rest of the time) and need to be careful of this threat - especially on what it does. If you have not done anything to prevent this I seriously recommend that you do ASAP. I have a brief description on how to fix this and what it does. ...

Found this on Scott’s blog , but Borland is now blogging (W00T) and using the same open source code as me. You can get their feed here . I quickly eyeballed it and seems like lotsa interesting stuff. ...

Scott (the author of dotText - the open source bits running this blog), has an interesting question to ask, is Unit Testing important for all to include it in all the edition of Whidbey of only Visual Studio Team Systems. I think this should be a moot point. In my opinion no developer can say he/she is feature complete if they have not done a “unit test”. How can one know if their code does what it is supposed to do? Sure the QA/Test team is there, but their job is to ensure your code meets the functional requirements, but the basic building blocks only a developer knows best and it is their responsibility to ensure that they test it. Sadly, a lot of developers and designers have the attitude of “That is the QA’s job” - unfortunately they could not be further from the truth. I also find developers who do a unit test tend to have less bugs in their code (Note: this is my personal experience and recording, there is no experiment or sampling conducted). Since I am one of the advisor’s for PAG (representing the company I am employed with), I recently got the opportunity to review some of the new testing best practises they have coming out - lots of good common sense stuff - keep a look out for that in the near future. I will be posting some stuff from there here in the next few days too. Anyways, I would love to hear your viewpoint on the whole issue? ...

BBC is reporting that the first ever computer virus spread by mobile phones has been sent to anti-virus firms. No infections have been reported and the worm is harmless but it is proof that mobiles are at risk from virus writers. The worm, known as Cabir, infects phones and devices running the Symbian operating system. Anti-virus firms are divided on whether it will open the floodgate to similar viruses. Because the worm requires Bluetooth technology to travel, it is geographically constrained to a radius of about 30 metres. Then it is dependent on someone having Bluetooth turned on within that range. And as a final blow to its progress, any unsuspecting phone user in the vicinity would have to accept the virus which would be preceded by a warning that the source of the file is unknown. ...

Nearly three years ago TechDirt wrote about breakthroughs in atomic entanglement that could lead to advancements in quantum computing and teleportation. It seems that much of that research has continued as two separate groups of researchers have now used entanglement to successfully teleport the quantum state of an atom . As the article points out, the fact that two separate research groups came up with similar results (using slightly different methods) is particularly promising. It is amusing, though, to note that just about every article discussing atomic teleportation feels the need to explain that this is nothing like Star Trek style teleportation. ...

If you want to see how heave your site is then browse over and plug in your url and check it out. Here is how the numbers for this blog came up to: Load Time by Connection SpeedConnection SpeedDownload Time14.4Kbps85.93 seconds28.8Kbps44.96 seconds56Kbps24.84 secondsISDN (128Kbps)13.22 secondsCable (512 Kbps)6.30 secondsT1 (1.44 Mbps)4.82 secondsSDSL (1.544 Mbps)4.76 secondsADSL (2.0 Mbps)4.59 seconds Page ObjectsSizeObject TypeURL137443HTMLhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit/4672CSShttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/skins/bahree/style.css2990IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/login_icon.jpg1052IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/atom.gif953IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/Comments.gif138IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/link.gif130IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/xml.gif88IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/arrow_on.gif4CSShttp://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/customcss.aspx It also told me what was broken - which means I should take out the time to fix it. Here is a subset of the stuff that is broken: ...

I was in meetings today with Microsoft and going over some client stuff that I cannot really talk about here. But at this client the “hot backup” is done on a remote NAS over a OC192 line and I was like what the heck is that? Turns out that has a bandwidth of almost 10 gigabytes/sec (9.6 gb/s to be exact) - wow! Imagine all the things one can do with that pipe. Drooool! What is the fastest you have used? Till now I have worked on an OC12 - once this is up this would be my fastest! ...

I don’t get it. Anatoly discusses how he (along with other people he quotes) don’t use the debugger in C# or any other managed code and letting the runtime find the exception and let it “deal” with it. Now I don’t know these people and they could probably be correct in the context of the applications they write, but I don’t agree with their viewpoint. Sure there are applications that would not warrant the use of a debugger (like HelloWolrd *grin*), but most of the applications I design and work on are fairly complex and the debugger is a very invaluable tool! Exceptions are very expensive (as discussed here ) and should be used wisely! Of all the features of Whidbey, the one I am most excited about is the huge improvements in the debugger and also how you an extend the debugger with GUI to inspect your complex data types. The point also holds for any managed language and not just .NET. What do you think? ...