Intel’s 32nm Chips Ready for MIDs and Notebooks in 2009

2:47 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

In 2005 Intel revealed its 65-nm manufacturing process, then 45-nm in 2007. Today, in keeping with its "tick-tock" strategy, Intel is announcing a further shrinkage to its manufacturing process as it ends the development phase for 32-nm chip circuitry. That puts the chips on a production schedule for Q4 2009 -- interesting as Intel's rumored 32-nm Medfield chip wasn't expected until the first half of 2010. According to Intel, the new chips incorporate second-generation high-k + metal gate technology with transistors that switch 22% faster than its current 45-nm Penryn chips. Why should you care? Well, the smaller chips are cheaper to manufacture which should translate to consumer savings. They also require less power than Intel's notoriously power-friendly Atom-class chips. As an interesting side note, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Intel has also disclosed a variant of its 45-nm process (the Lincroft-based Pine view we presume) "that is tailored to create chips for portable computing devices that require low power consumption." Uh, those wouldn't be targeting ARM by any chance would they Intel? Wink wink, nudge nudge.

PlayStation Home Launching globally tomorrow, December 11th

2:30 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

We knew it was coming this month, now we have the day: tomorrow. Yup, PlayStation Home will launch globally on December 11th. The 3D virtual on-line community is like Second Life, only with the risk of root kit. Hot. All kidding aside, the new service gives PS3 owners a customizable place to chat (voice or text) and play games with other PlayStation Home users through personalized avatars. Just like real life except without acne and all your social shortcomings. Home will be available to download and "experience basic features" for free -- some services (like creating a "club") will require cash though, so be prepared.

E-Wave Chip Protects Against Scary, If Not Scientifically Proven, Threat of Cell phone Radiation

2:26 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Cell phone radiation is spawning worries that it can do everything from making sperm stupid to popping popcorn... which means it's prime time to start selling "cures" like this "radiation reducing" E-wave phone chip.

Omega, a Belgian health products company that usually markets things like suntan lotion and wart treatments, is branching out into protective tech gadgets. It's E-wave chip, which attaches onto phones, allegedly offsets electromagnetic radiation and neutralizes the "heating effect" caused by electromagnetic signals. All tests to prove these claims seem to have been done by Omega itself.

In case you've run out of tin foil hats, this little device is now out in Belgium for $50. It'll be rolled out to the rest of the cell phone radiation fearing world in 2009

Beijing to be World's Largest Wi-Fi City in 2011

2:20 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Free Wi-Fi

 

Beijing may become the world's largest city to be blanketed in free wi-fi by 2011. Officials, happy with an Olympics test run, are now rolling it out to everywhere. Watch for censor ganking though.

Novatel's Portable MiFi Does 3G Wi-Fi in a Beautiful Package

2:18 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Today, Novatel introduced a portable 3G hotspot router, the sleek and minimalistic MiFi, which transforms 3G internet access into a Wi-Fi hotspot wherever it goes to multiple users.

In addition to being a portable internet hotspot, the MiFi also allows VPN support, custom landing pages, automatic email-syncing and remote management. The internal battery will supposedly last for four hours of use, or 40 hours on standby with one charge. Novatel says the MiFi will be available the first quarter of 2009 through retail outlets and carrier services, for roughly $200 as reported by Engadget. [Boing Boing and Engagdet]

Top 5 considerations while setting up your MySQL backup

2:13 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

List of top 5 items that have to be considered before deciding on a MySQL backup implementation are:
* How fast and how easy do you want the MySQL Recovery process to be?
* What will be the impact of MySQL Backup process on your Application?
* What will your backup configuration look like? (the What, Where, When, and How of MySQL Backup)?
* How will you manage your backup process and backed up data?
* What kind of tracking, reporting and compliance requirements does your business have from your MySQL backup implementation?

The white paper provides detailed insights about the above considerations. Your feedback is welcome.

Software protection

2:10 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

I've been meaning to write about this for a while. It's a very simple topic, but developers get all emotional and stop being rational as soon as the magic "code protection" and "piracy" words get invoked. I'd like to say I'm not promoting copyright infringement nor saying developers don't deserve to be compensated for their work. Now that that's out of the way...
The two things most developers want to stop are unauthorized installing (license enforcement) and "code protection". Code protection is a very weak concept, mainly revolving around thinking people are going to steal your precious algorithms. Protection is easy to deal with, so I'm going to cover that now.
Before VMs like .NET were popular, most of the code protection I've seen revolved around the code that implements the license enforcement. Developers would write all sorts of nasty-clever-clever code to make things hard for the crackers. You see this sometimes when you run an application and it complains about a debugger being installed or running. With Java and .NET, disassembly got easier. This made it extra easy to patch any license code, since the disassembled code was in a high level language like IL. The response, and our first enemy of the day, was obfuscation.
Obfuscation takes your assembly and screws up all the metadata. On top of that, it might go and rewrite sections of your code to obfuscate the flow of the program, or perhaps indirectly load strings. The downside of course is that debugging gets really hard cause all your method names are now unreadable, reflection is broken, etc. Depending on the techniques an obfuscator uses, you can run into some other troubles. For instance, whatever obfuscator VistaDB uses is really broken, as it generates bad IL that just happens to work on MS CLR, but crashes (rightly so) on Mono. Not to mention that certain IL tricks are not verifiable, hence you can't use the code in lower-trust scenarios.
But what does obfuscation accomplish? Crackers ALWAYS win. Even the "most difficult" license system with hardware dongles and activation get cracked. The response I usually hear is "well it raises the bar". So. What. "Raising the bar" is totally pointless..
For physical security, raising the bar is good in general. For example, if you buy a safe, it'll prevent a lot of thieves from getting to the valuables. Sure, there are higher level thieves, but you've weeded out a lot of the population around you, and the benefit is very real. Now some punk kids can't just go in and vandalize and "casually steal" your valuables.
But for computerized tech, the "bar" is the highest level attacker. If your valuable is "cracking my serial verification code", as soon as the "high level thief" cracks it, he can go write a simple program anyone can download. So the REAL bar is "user googles for a crack". That's what needs to sink past all the emotional nonsense developers go through when protecting their code. No matter what kind of complex protection schemes you put in, then obfuscate it on top of that, if the product has value, _someone_ will crack it, and all your users can just download the crack.
This isn't a maybe, this isn't a "possibly", this isn't theoretic, this is the exact reality. There is *nothing* you as a developer can do to prevent this (apart from make your product suck so much no one cares). [If there is, I'd love to hear it.]
So, obfuscation has zero value in preventing cracks, serials from getting out. And it has downsides. Just read the VistaDB blogs/forums to see real world problems only because they use an obfuscator.
What about "protecting special algorithms"? From who? If your competitors are good, they'll figure things out regardless. If they suck, they won't be able to do much with it anyways. I think the biggest threat is some overseas group disassembling your code, slapping their logos on it, and reselling it. That's a clear and obvious loss if they are making sales. But, obfuscation isn't really going to stop it, just raise the bar a tiny bit. In this case, since you're dealing with a limited number of "pirate companies" that exist for profit, perhaps obfuscating has a bit of value. But think: If someone can not know your source code, not be able to provide support, etc. etc., but can still outsell you and your marketing, perhaps you have business issues.
The one other place I hear people using obfuscation is to protect an app from "casual hacking". WTF does that mean? You mean you're afraid your sales clerk might decompile the PoS application, but give up quickly? You think it means you can safely store passwords in the binary? I'm not sure what such developers are thinking, but I'm guessing they did a poor security analysis of the situation.
As a side note, this is not particular to VM platforms like Java and .NET. Check out Hex Rays. They do a fine job *decompiling* optimized native code. I've seen it in action; it makes it easy to take any native app, decompile it, figure it out, then work with the assembly code. So these .NET devs thinking they are so leet cause Reflector messes up and hence no one can figure it out... sigh.
Finally, a nice real-live demo. Look at Spore and other games using heavy DRM and protection mechanisms. Obviously Electronic Arts has an unlimited budget for getting the "best" type of protection. Yet the protection proved utterly useless against piracy. Just go to ThePirateBay.org and search. Yet they certainly introduced more bugs and user hate. (Of course, the REAL motive behind such DRM is killing the used games market. For this, all they need is stuff that honest users won't break.)
P.S. The reason I finally wrote all this is because VistaDB just took the silliness to the next level. I got their 3.4 Trial, but it crashes on Mono because the obfuscator emits totally invalid IL code. Their official response was that Trials aren't tested on Mono. I bought the product and the "stable" builds still have the same busted IL code. Awesome protection; stopping paying users from using the software rocks!
I suppose I could understand IF they had some awesome trade secrets. BUT, they provide a source code license. So an evil VistaDB competitor just buys a source code license to get all the details. How is obfuscation helping ANYONE here? (Note the runtime has no licensing; only the developer install.)

Command line WCF Proxy Generation for Silver light 2 RTM

2:06 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

I have a scenario where my web service app exposes several interfaces, and I want to use all of them from the Silver light UI. The code generated by SvcUtil isn't completely compatible with Silver light's WCF, meaning you need to do a lot of fix up to make it work in SL. Looking in the forums, I see mentions of "slsvcutil" and "slwsdl", but I've been unable to actually find these programs. The only thing that Silver light has is "Microsoft.Silver light.ServiceReference.dll", in the "Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v2.0\Tools\ServiceReference" folder.
I opened that DLL up in ildasm, and it appears to just be some classes that work on a ServiceContractGenerator. Digging in deeper, yep, they just go through the generated CodeDOM and fix up stuff that isn't compatible. For instance, IExtensibleDataObject isn't supported. SL WCF also doesn't handle having Sync and Async methods (i.e, SomeOp and Begin/EndSomeOp) since they both have the same action. (You'll get an "An item with the same key has already been added" error.)
My main problems with the cutesy "Add Service Reference" UI are:
- I can't figure out how to tell it to use multiple WSDL files and share the data types.
- It generates a ton of files and VS gets all obsessive over them for some reason.
- It generates a lot of extra code (like the useless Client Base stuff, and the idiotic/useless "event based Async pattern" code). Extra code just clutters up Intelligence, so why bother?
[Add Service Reference is great for demos and perhaps simple one-offs... I can't imagine dealing with it for anything slightly complicated.]
So, I took the MSDN code sample for the ServiceContractGenerator, and hacked it up to do what I needed. Then I added the 2 lines to pass it through the Silverlight ServiceReference fix up thing, and presto - things look great. Usage is simple:
Usage: slsvchack <clr namespace> <outputfile> <wsdl1> .. <wsdlN>
The options are hard-coded to what I use and makes the most sense for Silverlight apps (in my opinion). I want to do a full fledged "SLSvcUtil.exe", but I think the right approach there is to dissassemble SvcUtil and patch in the Silverlight.ServiceReference stuff. But, I don't have the time right now.
Code: slsvchack.cs.txt (2.95 KB) [It's in C# 'cause the MSDN sample was, and my edits were minor. ]
Binary: slsvchack.exe (8.5 KB) [I'm too lazy to link in the Microsoft.Silverlight.ServiceReference.dll, so you'll need the Silverlight SDK installed.]

Code

Windows Live Installer for Windows 2008

2:02 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

I wanted to install the new Windows Live -- Messenger looks better (normal windows instead of custom, yes!). Unfortunately, the installer (wlsetup-web) has an annoying version check. Fortunately, it's nothing OllyDbg couldn't patch.
For the paranoid, you can check it against the original:
>fc wlsetup-web.exe wlsetup-web.original.exe
Comparing files wlsetup-web.exe and WLSETUP-WEB.ORIGINAL.EXE
00019DDD: C3 6A
00019DDE: 90 20
I've only tested on Windows 2008, 32 Bit, English, and I only installed Messenger. But it appears to work just fine. (I had to manually uninstall the current Messenger version first.)
Here's to hoping the final version of the "new wave" of Live removes this check for us. Enjoy!

wlsetup-web.exe (990.5 KB)

Misc. Technology

Weekend Roundup 1

1:57 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

This week, I’m a day late, but I have some new links to some interesting software products, a virus warning, and more news:

New Applications:

• ”Open Data Center Network Management System” - Late last week, I got an email asking me to evaluate and comment on this new application.  I haven’t had a chance to install or look at it yet, but I wanted to throw it out to everyone until I have time to review it myself.

  This appears to be an ideal solution for documenting network data centers, racks, patch panels, routers, etc. - especially for those of us who have to maintain a frugal IT environment (like my office).

• This one isn’t new, but I just found it for the first time today.  “Royal TS“.  This is a good replacement for the “Remote Desktops” MMC applet that isn’t available (at least not easily available) on Windows Vista.  It allows you to organize your Remote Desktop sessions in a nice console list.

Exploit / Virus Warning:

• This item was more tailored for delivery on Friday, but it doesn’t hurt to reinforce the importance of making sure that your Adobe Acrobat software (either the reader or the creator) is up-to-date.  Last Friday, there was an open exploit using PDF files of the Adobe Acrobat (or Microsoft Windows, if you prefer) flaw that allowed your computer to run exploited code.   I noted two attempts of this virus emailed to my office early morning Saturday morning, but my spam/virus gateway was updated to filter it out.

More News:

• I’m posting in the Microsoft Newsgroups once again (primarily in Vista Networking, Server Networking, DFS, and DNS).  It’s about time that I got back to my “roots”.
• I had the joy of helping someone install Leopard this weekend.  It seems nice and quick, but I don’t know if I could stand using the Mac OS X user interface long enough to use it.  Also, Parallels was not working properly on the machine I saw, so that would preclude me from using it in an office situation (AutoCAD doesn’t exist in Mac OS X, nor will it ever).

That’s it for today.  Have a great week if I don’t post again this week.  I’ll try to be more active than that..  And feel free to send comments.  I’m open to criticism… 

Networking and IT World for the past week:

• MS Internal use of Network Access Protection Channel 9 Video - Jeff Sigman (of the NAP team) and Brent Atkison (of MS-IT) talk about how NAP is implemented on the Microsoft network.
• Ubuntu 7.10 (GutsyGibbon) has been released, both in Desktop and Server releases. For the benefit of others at the office, we have implemented some of our public web servers on Ubuntu (although I am more a Centos or BSD dude…). Downloads are still rather slow due to the Slashdot effect.

Weekly Wishlist:

• x64 version of PageDefrag for my servers.
• A working version of Veridian on two of my AM2 systems that should support Virtualization, but are disabled due to processor stepping level.

Task List for the week:

• Installing the RTM build of Windows Home Server at home…
• Upgrade my Trixbox installation and implement OpenWingo soft phones…

Want Multiple Outlook Sessions at one time?

1:52 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

This is from a mailing list that I am on:

So, without further adieu, we are proud to present you with our “Extra Outlook” tool that allows you to launch as many Outlook instances as you want. All you have to do is configure the profiles you want, and then type: Extra Outlook.exe “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE” (after you download it, of course).
Attendees of past Microsoft Ninjitsu classes have been using it for some time now (as all attendees get special access to the Hammer of God Member’s Site) and we’ve not heard of any catastrophic failures (you know, like having all mailbox data destroyed without any hope of recovery).

I’ve wanted this for a while now and have bugged it in Office 10 and Office 11.  I have both a personal exchange account and a work exchange account and have not liked having both, I have coped by using my Smartphone for my personal account (as the office does not provide me with cell phone service) and use Outlook for work email.

Quick Vista Networking Tips

1:49 PM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

After spending the past two months wading through the Vista Networking public newsgroup over at msnews.Microsoft.com, I have come up with the following tips that will save the users from many problems:

1.  If you are having network access/connectivity issues AND you have a Norton or McAfee network security (not AV, but I won’t go there on that one) product, your issue is more than likely the Norton or McAfee product.  I haven’t been answering these questions as I made a conscious decision years ago to never let either of these software manufacturers near any computer system I own/manage.  However, there have been countless posts in which Norton/McAfee security products are either blocking communications altogether, or have otherwise made networking the PC’s virtually impossible.

2.  Make sure you disable network auto tuning to get faster file copying/network access to other workgroup/domain computers.

This is easy, though.  Run the following command from a Command Prompt as an administrator:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

netsh int tcp set global rss=disabled

3.  If you can’t enable sharing, make sure that you have identified your network as Private.  If it is unidentified or Public, you will not be able to enable sharing (without hacking).

I would hazard to guess that these three issues probably represent about 50% of the issues on an average day.

How to Shrink Document by One Page in Word 2007

2:03 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

A document whose last page is mostly blank is a waste of printer paper, especially if you have to make a lot of copies. Your letters and mailings will also look mere professional if they fill the pages nicely. If Print Preview reveals a skimpy last page.  Shrink One Page button in Word will tweak the fonts lathe document to make it a page smaller. Don't like the results? Just press Ctrl-Z to Undo.

Display your document in Print Preview (by either clicking on the Print Preview button on the toolbar or choosing the File, Print Preview command)

Click on the Shrink to Fit button on the toolbar of the Preview window

Click on the Close button to exit preview and return to your previous view

Word will automatically reduce the font size of the document (maintaining the relative font sizes).

Gmail Adds Video and Voice Chat

1:59 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Google announced that it is integrating a voice and video plug-in for it Gmail Chat offering that lets you see or hear the friend with which you are chatting.

The feature looks cool, and it’s exceedingly straightforward. When you’re in Gmail, your contact list will show a little green camera icon next to any buddy who has a Webcam, is online, and has installed the Gmail Voice and Video Chat plug-in (which works with IE 7, some versions of IE 6, Firefox, Safari, and, of course, Chrome). Click the icon, and you get a chat window with video in the bottom right-hand corner of the Gmail interface. (You can also blow it up to full-screen mode.)

In order to access Gmail Video and Voice Chat, users have to install the voice and video plug-in.Installation is easy and only takes a few seconds to download the plug-in. Once the browser is restarted, a "Video and more" menu will appear at the bottom of the Gmail page. Go to the menu and select "start video chat." It will take a few moments for the video call to connect with your friend.

Protect your PEN/USB Drive from Virus

1:45 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

World is shrinking, and so are the data storage devices. One common device which every one use is USB devices like thumb drive, PEN drive, USB Hard disks etc...

After floppy disks which were earlier prone to many viruses, now it is time for USB Devices. Below are some safety precautions that you may perform before transferring data from USB devices.

1) When you plug in the USB device in your system (Desktop / Laptop), you will most likely be prompted by a popup window as shown below.

2) Dont select any of them, simply click cancel.

3) Goto Start -> Run and type cmd to open the Comman Prompt window

4) Now double click My Computer Icon (which is usually present in the desktop). It should show the list of drives available in this machine. Check the drive letter of the inserted USB Device. (As in above case it is (I:))

5) Go back to the command prompt and type the drive letter and hit Enter.

6) Now type the below command and hit Enter. This command displays all the hidden files and folders in the current working drive (I: Drive in our case)

    I:\> dir/w/o/a/p

7) You will be able to see a list of files, after you run the above command. In the list, check if you see any one of the files mentioned below,

    - Autorun.inf

    - New Folder.exe

    - Bha.vbs

    - Iexplore.vbs

    - Info.exe

    - New_Folder.exe

    - Ravmon.exe

    - RVHost.exe

or any other unknown .exe files that you are unaware of and you have not copied to the device earlier.

8) If you find any one of the files listed above, you are right!!! you have got a virus in your USB device. Don't panic, it will be transferred to your system and start its duties only when you start copying the files to your computer's hard drive.

9) Now that you have confirmed that you have virus in your USB device, now type the following command and hit enter

    I:\> attrib -h-r-s-a *.*

    attrib command is for displaying and changing the attributes of the files.

10) Now Delete each of the files that you were not aware of and found to be on the above list by using the below command and hit enter

    I:\> del <filename>

    For eg. I:\> del Autorun.inf

11) That's it, you did it!!!!!!!! now your USB Device is free of virus.

Note: Some viruses are vulnerable to antivirus softwares. When unnoticed these viruses sits in system registry and doesnot allow the antivirus software to locate the source file. But it generates a virus child file in all the folders of the system. Antivirus software may detect the child file and delete it, but it keeps on generating. It cannot be stopped until source virus file is removed.

Vista SP1 CHKDSK disaster

1:41 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Last night I had one of those bone-chilling experiences - my Vista failed to boot. And it would not recover. No Safe-Mode, nothing.... nada.

This occured after I told DiskKeeper 2008 to do a Boot-Time defrag of my notebook's hard disk, and to afterwards run a good old "chkdsk". Doesn't sound harmful, does it?

The boot-time defrag worked perfectly, but when chkdsk ran, it started to pick up errors, and it tried to fix them. More specifically, it came up with the error: "Replacing invalid security id with default security id for file xxxxx" and fixed this for over 200 000 files (all the files on my hard disk). When the notebook rebooted, Vista simply failed to boot.

After firing up my old notebook (so that I could connect to the Internet and start  researching the problem) and asking the Google-Genie about my problem, it became apparent that this is a well known problem in the world, but that Microsoft is essentially turning a blind eye to it. This issue has been known since Vista SP1 came out, and have been occurring many times - but there is still no formal response from Microsoft. Nothing on TechNet, or any official Microsoft forum.

Some non-Microsoft forums had some recommendations - none of them nice, as they all revolved around restoring the system from a "System Backup" (something I'm going to do from now on), and re-installing everything.

So that's what I did.

First I booted from my Vista DVD, which allowed me a command console and access to my hard disk. This allowed me to copy my most precious files to a USB hard disk.

After this, I formatted the partition, and reinstalled everything. (I'm still busy - it takes forever to get my machine set up with all the developer tools I need)

I suppose I gain a "nice clean machine" from the experience, and I did not lose any data (that I know of), but I wasted a good 10 hours on installing software.

Conclusions:

1. NEVER run CHKDSK on Vista SP1.
2. Always have a "System Backup", made by Vista's Backup Tools, on an external Hard Disk. (From this I could have restored my system in an hour - Boot from DVD, Restore)

Microsoft Office as a Online Web Application

1:38 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Microsoft announced at PDC that they are working on a "light" version of Office that will be available as a free-of-charge web application. It will work even on Linux, and won't require Silverlight (although Silverlight can be used to provide a better experience). It even caters for business and collaborative scenarios and works with SharePoint (the online "Live" version).

It would not replace the desktop version of Office, which will remain the "flagship" product.

Here is a nice FAQ about the new "Online Office": Microsoft Online Office FAQ

What is Image Composite Editor?

1:37 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Microsoft Image Composite Editor is an advanced panoramic image stitcher. The application takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution. The stitched panorama can be saved in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Deep Zoom

Microsoft releases free Chart Control

1:36 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

 

.NET Developers everywhere recently rejoiced when Microsoft released a new Chart Control, designed to be used in ASP.NET 3.5 web applications as well as "Windows Forms" applications. This follows Microsoft's earlier acquisition of Dundas - known for their Chart Controls.

Though the source for the controls are closed, the controls are downloadable at no cost, and can be distributed royalty free. Good enough for me!

Can't wait to put these to good use! I can smell a sparkling SharePoint web part in here somewhere...

What you need:

1. The Chart Control - must be installed in GAC
2. Visual Studio 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls

You also might want:

1. Chart Controls Documentation
2. Chart Controls Samples

Examples:

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET 3.5,WinForms,Charts,Development