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 was playing with ClickOnce which is new in Visual Studio 2005 and thought it was pretty cool. Basically, ClickOnce is a deployment technology that enables self-updating Windows applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce applications can be self-updating; they can check for newer versions as they become available and automatically replace any updated files. You can specify the update behaviour; an administrator can also control update strategies, (e.g. making an update mandatory). Updates can also be rolled back to a previous version by the end user or administrator. ...

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: ...

Thanks to Murthy for sending this one. BBC has a story , where Swedish researchers found that using your cell phone for 10 years or more increases the risk of ear tumours by four times! The Karolinska Institute study of 750 people found the risk of acoustic neuroma rose by 3.9 times on the side of the head the phone is used. There was no increase in risk on the other side of the head - giving an overall rise in risk of 1.9 times. Acoustic neuroma is a benign tumour in the auditory nerve, which can cause brain and nerve damage. It affects one in 100,000 people. ...

I was recently playing with the new compact framework part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 (which is released with the VSTS Edition) and am having a tough time getting to the emulator to wok when I try and debug the application. This is a simple hello world application and I tried using all of the following emulators with no luck: Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator (Legacy) Pocket PC 2003 SE VGA Emulator Every time I try and “Deploy” to that the emulator comes up fine and I can connect to it, etc. but it cannot install the application for it and always get the Deploy error message (see the screen shots below). Also every time I try and “Power Off” the emulator, it comes right back up and does not really quit - it does not matter, if I save the state or do a soft or hard reset. All this time VS.NET is waiting for the emulator to exit. Ultimately I have to kill the process (DeviceEmulator.exe). ...

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. ...

Microsoft today just released another update on a security hole. This honestly is good, that the holes are being identified and being plugged. Yes, I am sure there are the “bashers” who would scoff at it, but the reality is, in the millions of lines of code across various products, such thing creeps in and its better to accept the responsibility (Microsoft) and do something about it rather than being in denial. ...

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. ...

Though Don Box does try and explain Indigo in five minutes , he misses “Why” Indigo as he explains again . :)

NY Times is running a story that highlights on how more companies are using Blogging for hiring employees. Five years ago, few people had heard of blogs, now, more than two million Americans are blogging, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and blogging is spreading in the job market, said hiring managers and experts who study blogging. Job seekers use blogs to establish a strong online presence, display their skills and advertise their availability. For many just out of college, the blog is an essential networking tool because it is common for bloggers to link back and forth to others with recent posts. Corporate recruiters, in turn, use blogs to draw in qualified candidates, and they search for potential hires by reading bloggers who write about topics relevant to a particular industry. A driving factor behind job market blogging is the search engine Google, said Elizabeth Lawley, associate professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “If you are thinking of interviewing someone, it’s almost standard now to Google them online and see what you find,” Ms. Lawley said. “If that person has a blog, it’s usually the first thing that comes up.” ...

Picked this up from Karan’s post and was quite glad to read it. FAT has been around fro ages and Microsoft trying to patent it does not fit in the common sense mode thinking that most of us are use to (ya right!). Its the same as some bright people in USA tried to patent some of the Ayurvedic medicines that have been practises in India for the past five thousand years, which identify a person’s constitution and treats the person with diet, exercise, meditation, herbs, massage, sun, and breathing to bring harmony to the physical, mental, and spiritual health of the individual. ...

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? ...

Bruce has a post (which I verbatim here) highlighting one of the small changes in Whidbey which will make life easier for a whole bunch of us. In Whidbey, the name of the .snk file is included as a property on the project and is picked up my msbuild when compiling. To get to it: Right-click on the project in the solution explorer and select Properties. Click on the Signing tab. Provide the path to the .snk file. How is it done today? As Bruce reminds us (and I verbatim here) signing assemblies in VS2003 and earlier meant adding attributes to the AssemblyInfo file, something similar to the following. ...

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. ...

Tom Krueger is a Microsoftie and spends a lot of his time dreaming up and working on Smart Clients. He was a very quirky and informative post on the Fastest way to build 10,000 records on a Device? Tie one end of a piece of string to the WiFi antenna, if your device has one, and tie the other end to a tin can. Enumerate the 10,000 records on your desktop computer and verbally dictate each record into the tin can. Performance: slow; Success rate: zero. Implementation: easy peasy lemon squeezy. Purchase a flock of carrier pigeons, 10,000 in number. Hand-write each record onto a piece of paper and attach to the bird. Aim the bird at the device and release. Performance: slow: Success rate: zero. Implementation: possibly very messy. Move to SQL Server. RDA and Merge Replication are your friends. Performance: good! Success rate: >1,000,000,000 pigeons. Implementation: well documented. Hire 10,000 people and get them to memorise one record each. Get them to follow the device wherever it goes. Performance: In theory, should outperform Oracle for record access. In reality, you’re statistically likely to get a few “slow” records Success rate: Depends on the demographics of your recordset. Implementation: costly, just like Oracle :) Populate the DataSet on the server and transmit as a DataSet object using Web Services (). Performance: suffers from a serialisation/serialisation overhead which is costly with 10,000 records. Success rate: Jackpot, baby! Implementation: piece of cake. Re-architect your solution. No one should need 10,000 records on a device. Don’t even think about loading that into a ListView either :) ...

Karan pointed me to this one on Yahoo and the boy am I glad that my dad is 8000 miles away in India! :o) Though I am a vegetarian, this could easily enough be “Paneer” . :o) ...

Is something as simple as do the T, K and V parameterised types make sense versus mnemonics in Generics a hot item to talk about? You bet, people cannot seem to get enough of it .The crux of the issue here is do T, K, V, etc in examples like List, IDictionary<K,V> make sense versus something like List, IDictionary<Key, Value>. Apparently both sides make seemingly valid arguments and from what I gather, its also a hot discussion topic within Microsoft. There have been examples that point out that c# is supposed to be easy to understand and not messy as shown in this example . But in the long discussion here are the main points in favour of descriptive names: ...

Ah, the political heat is in the air here in the US and the mudslinging is in full swing. Here are the Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals: 10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents. 9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form. 8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton. 7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair. ...