Posts

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. ...

If you have had enough of Clippy, check this out. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity!

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. ...

Now this probably has to fall in the News of the Weird category, I would probably have fallen asleep, drooling on the computer, which would have caused something to short circuit and then blow up the machine, and eventually get the house on fire. Hence, not work losing your house over this.

You probably already heard this, but Chris Sells has a new column on MSDN called Longhorn Foghorn , that describes each of the “ Pillars of Longhorn ” - this is something which IMHO developers would understand and appreicate. In the first article he explains the “Pillars” and then in the next two goes onto build Solitaire. You can download the sample and play with it too. ...

Shadowfax is an interesting set of “Reference Solution” that is being worked on by the PAG group at Microsoft. I think this would be a very important piece in the whole SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) space, with getting bits out the door in a quick and reusable fashion. Basically this is a similar implementation of Indigo in todays technologies (i.e. those that are currently shipping such as .NET). This “unifies” the four messaging options you have today: ...

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? ...

I am not sure if I should buy this t-shirt or not? What do you think? :)

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. ...

Microsoft is planning on releasing a Longhorn Refresh to geeks like me at WinHEC next month. I am looking forward to that as there are just too many leaks right now. On an average on a machine with a 1gb of mem, I have to reboot on an average every two hours otherwise the memory workingset get way to huge with all the disk thrashing!

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. :)

I posted an article (click here or on the title) on what the Zachman Framework is all about. I find it so surprising that in today’s world, I came across a whole bunch of people who call themselves as “Architects” who have no idea or clue as to what the Zachman Framework is. I am not trying to be critical towards those people, they are probably very smart and know their stuff, but I figured maybe its a time for a crash course. ...

Today, on one of the computers at home, Meenakshi accidentally installed one of the spy-wares (via a popup - which interestingly was not blocked). This changed the search engine used by IE, installed some toolsbars and opened a whole bunch of popup windows. Also disabled some of the other legit toolbars that were running (MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Anyways, it took me a good 3+ hours to track the bugger down and clean up the whole machine. What a pain and waste of time. But it got me the opportunity to document what I did and hopefully you can benefit from it. ...

Ladies reading this (are there any btw), I am just the messenger, so don’t shoot me. Per my dear friend Karan “…the thing about women is that they wont let u die they will keep u alive, in pain and agony, screaming and shouting, but wont let u fall over the edge…. “. He can be flamed here . ;)

Here is a very old post I found lying around on my disk by Brian Harry, he was the Product Manager of the CLR team at Microsoft (he might still be, I just don’t know). This is a long and very interesting read on the issue of resource management and the deterministic finalization of .NET. Brian provides the backgorund so most people (who were flaming MS at that time), understand that this is really a hard problem to solve. Happy Reading…. ...

Here are some excerpts from my slide deck on XAML. If you need to see the complete powerpoint, let me know and I can either mail it to you or upload it here. If you don’t know, XAML is the new Extensible Application markup language that is part of Longhorn. If you have the PDC bits you should be able to run these. I am skipping on most of the details of the controls, probably will post that some other day. ...

This is probably stupid (and old news now), but if you saw the xaml demo during the PDC of Avalon (presented by Don Box I think), here is the code to reproduce that sample. Please note that you would need to change the source tag in the Video class to a path that makes more sense for you. Also, as always, please use common sense when running this. Don’t flame me if something blows up. :) ...

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. ...

The year is just getting started, and that can mean only one thing: It’s time to reflect on the most shameful, dishonest, and just plain stupid tech moments of 2003.

I forget where I read this recently, but it stuck to me. Humans are failure machines, we are not success machines. We fail all the time and almost all the things. And it is only through this “weeding” process we get the feedback for the failures and learn how to correct them and then do better. Well … at least the smart ones learn to how to correct them.

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. ...

Unfortunately, I am not one of the lucky guys with a smartphone, but for those who do have one, Lutz Roeder, released the code and the binaries for Digger (a copy of Dig-dug from the good ol Dos days) for the Smartphone. It needs the Smartphone 2003 and .NET CF.