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. ...

It seems that a routine software upgrade knocked out 80% of the UK govt. PC’s at the Dept. for Work and Pensions. Though the article mentions Microsoft and EDS, it does not mention the real reason for the issue, just says that “Staff at the DWP found that they were unable to use their desktop computer after a number of technical glitches knocked out 80,000 of the department’s 100,000 terminals.” ...

Does anyone know if Xbox games are protected by region just as DVD’s are? E.g. I bought my XBox in USA, and if I buy a game here in London, would that work in the XBOX or it won’t? I forget, but someone was mentioning to me the other day that it wont. Any ideas?

Since, I am new to London, I would like to get your perspective on which are the good restaurants in the London area? What gems do you hold dear to your heart and wish to share so some poppers like me can also enjoy them? Sure, I have checked out the usual suspects , in addition to the ones I know from USA. ...

I am not a big gamer - I hardly ever play a game, the only one I have finished (without any cheat codes) is Halo and I loved it! After, reading the CNN review on Halo2, I cannot wait for all my stuff to reach here from California and then go and buy this. Have any of you played this? What do you think? Is there someone in London who I can come and meet and see what this looks like? ...

As I start working on some stuff, I have been thinking of this. Essentially when you are dealing with mobile devices, by their very nature they are disconnected in nature, and not always on a network (such as desktop or laptop). In multi-user environments, the challenge is how to you keep the data concurrent between the “online” and “offline” version? Typically there are two scenarios either you do optimistic concurrency or pessimistic concurrency. The earlier being a device (rather a client/user), submits both the currents and previous state and then the data is updated only if there have not been any changes since the device last synched. Pessimistic locking is when the application locks all the records the device intents to update - this of course is not a good idea. ...

Addison-Wesley and Developmentor have provided TheServerSide.NET with the entire book of Essential XML Quick Reference for free download. Essential XML Quick Reference is for anyone working with today’s mainstream XML technologies. It was specifically designed to serve as a handy but thorough quick reference that answers the most common XML-related technical questions.It goes beyond the traditional pocket reference design by providing complete coverage of each topic along with plenty of meaningful examples. Each chapter provides a brief introduction, which is followed by the detailed reference information. You can get it from here .

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 ). ...

Is the new MSN Search (Beta) any better than Google? I still use google as my primary search engine, but have played around a little with this, though not quite seriously to pass any judgement on it (yet), though it certainly seems much better than their previous release . I will try and use it more and post my findings here, till then what do you guys think? ...

Adam Nathan writes , about a “special” version of the .NET Framework 2.0 (Beta 1) , which if you use to run your managed code, then gives Microsoft feedback on what portions of the .NET Framework and Win32 api you use and are dependent on. The idea is to help MS maintain backward compatibility as newer versions of the framework ship and also help them prioritise their things to do. ...

Well as you can tell, I thought of trying out the new skin called Luxinterior Light , earlier I had Luxinterior Dark running. It seems with the days quite dark (and grey) here in London and with darkness coming around 4:30ish in the afternoon, it was perfect time to add some “cheer”. This one though now seems too cheerful to me *grin*. Do you prefer anyone or even care? Does anyone even come here and sit and read all my gibberish…. ? ...

Extremetech has an article evaluating the US release of Bow-Lingual which aims to translate “dog” to “English”, i.e. converting simple dog barks to phrases. There is a wireless mic that hooks up to the dog’s collar and a unit that you hold to see the result. When the dog barks or whines, the recording device is triggered which then records raw, unfiltered sound for the next three seconds. After recording, the sample is segmented into four equal length audio components, each coming in around .75 seconds in length, each of which is broken down into voice prints and matched again a “database of voice prints”. ...

Well, its been a few long days since I posted anything and now I am back - though slowly. The reason I was offline (not literally - thankfully) was because I was moving - not only cities, but companies and countries too! I was in lovely, beautiful, amazing San Francisco Bay Area and now am in the exciting London (where I have had the sun for the last three days and that might be a new record). I quit my previous company ( Capgemini ) and joined a new one ( Avanade ) and for now going back to my roots of product development. ...

ASP.NET has a pretty interesting HTTP runtime architecture if you have ever dug into the covers. The basic run-time support has API’s as powerful as ISAPI (in IIS). ASP.NET offers IHttpHandler and IHttpModule interfaces that offer you similar functionality. I will get into each one in a little bit of detail, but at a high level IHttpHandler is analogous to what would be an ISAPI extension in IIS and IHttpModule would be analogous to what a ISAPI filter in IIS. As a matter of fact, each asp.net page (.aspx) you have in your project is essentially an HTTP Handler. ...

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Microsoft’s developers have fixed the code issues when you use Firefox to view the sample code in MSDN. The code would all be screwed up and “mushy”, but now that has been fixed and Live bookmarks also work that earlier use to break. The fix for the code is supposed to be only in CSS, and you can read up on all the gory details . ...

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? ...