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My New Mobile

Amit Bahree — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:40:39 GMT

Major Network Attack

Amit Bahree — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:21:53 GMT

Wow! Looks like a lot of bots suddenly woke up – major attack in progress.

Grrr … b**tards!

Moving my Study

Amit Bahree — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:59:39 GMT

Well, not really – am not moving my study at home, but if I was this feels like that.

Image detection - how, what, where - any insights?

Amit Bahree — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:00:24 GMT

I don’t have much experience with image detection in a video, and wanted to understand what options are possible – all I know it is not as simple as “CSI” makes it out to be – yet.

Here is the scenario:

Say I have a remote controlled aircraft (a mini helicopter) which among other things has a camera fitted which is filming over a certain area. I use a training set and somehow “train” the camera to look for certain objects and recognise data points of that object and learn it to recognize that object (for example a human in Pink). Now once this is trained, if the helicopter is over another area and recording I want it to be able to recognise these pre-trained images in that video feed and do something if something is found (e.g. a human in pink).

The closest “CSI” analogy I can think of is – the facial recognition which they show to be iterating through hundreds of photos comparing data points (which of course as we all know this is mostly fiction – but that is a discussion point for another day).

So the question:

What does it take to compare objects in video feeds? I am not really interested in knowing how to “train” and find a pink human – but rather how to reliably and possibly quickly (within reason of course) compare and see if two are the same of the pattern. This should also reduce the false positives – e.g. a pink table might look like a human in pink with the environmental factors (shadows, sunlight, rain, angle of camera, etc.). I have read a little online but don’t have any experience in the subject.

Has anyone done this (or something similar) in the past or have any pointers for me?

Creating an Event Source via a Reg File

Amit Bahree — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:55:37 GMT

If you ever tried to write to the event log, without an event source for that application created you will get an exception saying something along the lines of that you do not have permissions to create the event source.

If an event source does not exist, it is automatically created. The creation of the event source is a privileged operation and requires elevated privileges (a.k.a admin privileges) which of course might not always be possible if running a web application.

The easiest way to create this event source is via a reg file. An example is below (credit goes to my colleague Dominic to provide me the original sample).

Note: you need all the lines below including the “Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00”.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Eventlog\Application\YOUR-APPLICATION-NAME-GOES-HERE]

"EventMessageFile"=hex(2):43,00,3a,00,5c,00,57,00,49,00,4e,00,44,00,4f,00,57,\

00,53,00,5c,00,4d,00,69,00,63,00,72,00,6f,00,73,00,6f,00,66,00,74,00,2e,00,\

4e,00,45,00,54,00,5c,00,46,00,72,00,61,00,6d,00,65,00,77,00,6f,00,72,00,6b,\

00,5c,00,76,00,32,00,2e,00,30,00,2e,00,35,00,30,00,37,00,32,00,37,00,5c,00,\

45,00,76,00,65,00,6e,00,74,00,4c,00,6f,00,67,00,4d,00,65,00,73,00,73,00,61,\

00,67,00,65,00,73,00,2e,00,64,00,6c,00,6c,00,00,00

Upgrading Enterprise Edition to Ultimate (Vista or Win7)

Amit Bahree — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:40:43 GMT

If you are ever in a situation where you want to upgrade say from Vista Enterprise edition to Win 7 Ultimate edition - by default you cannot do this. When you insert your Win7 disc you won’t find the upgrade option available and the only way you see forward is to do a complete fresh install (after backing up your data of course). However, that is very time consuming and of course generally a lot of pain.

So here is a tip to get you to upgrade without doing a complete fresh install where you “fool” the installer in thinking you have a different version to allow you to upgrade.

You need to do the following steps, before inserting the Windows DVD

Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe
Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
Change the key: ProductName from "Windows 7 Enterprise” to “Windows 7 Business” or to “Windows 7 Ultimate”
Change the key: EditionID from "Enterprise" to “Business” or to “Ultimate”
Do not restart!
Now insert Windows DVD and start upgrading (the option Upgrade will not be graded out anymore)

Of course you will need the appropriate licences and still need to activate, etc.

New MCE

Amit Bahree — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:15:10 GMT

I build my first MCE a few years ago and since then not looked back – despite a few of my screw ups. In our household the MCE is used a lot and it really has changed the way we watch TV. One starts taking things for granted such as the ability pause live TV or rewind when you did not quite catch the last dialogue. And this was brought more in focus when during the transition from the old MCE to the new MCE (more on that in a second).

I decided to build another MCE– mainly as the old MCE had started dying. It was not dead (yet), but had started to hobble towards its grave. There were a few things which were bugging, such as:

Every few minutes the display card would stop for a second or two and then start working on its own – and the frequency of this occurrence was slowly increasing.
I already had changed the memory once as it got corrupt. Also this was only 1 GB and Vista was quite slow.
Disk space while not an issue was something to keep an eye on.
Channels were not being changed reliably – which meant you had to remember to change the channel to whatever before say going to bed at night so it can can record that program, etc.

I wanted to buy a MCE instead of building it and had my eye on the Sony TP Series – which in my opinion is a beauty. Unfortunately, the sales guys were not sure if this can be used with Sky (that’s Satellite TV for those not familiar). I did not want to buy it and then if it did not work get in the whole hassle of returning it.

So I decide to build one again. Looks were important as this sits in the living room and cannot look like a “computer”. Also efficiency and noise both were important. Wanted this to be green and quite.

Here is the config of the new MCE:

Case: Moneual 932 case which has a 7 inch LCD Touch Screen built in.
Power Supply: Zalman Z500 Heat Pipe cooled PSU
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H iG45 Socket 775 with Onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX. I wanted a G45 chipset mobo which could do HDTV and had a fanless northbridge.
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33 Ghz
RAM: Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Kit CL5 1.9V
HDD: 2 x Western Digital 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM Green Power
DVD Drive – I had originally gone for a BluRay drive, but because of the layout of motherboard in the case, could not get that to fit (more on that another time) so used an existing DVD drive I had. I don’t have HDTV, so not having BluRay drive is not a deal breaker in any case.
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD 3450 512MB DDR2 VGA DVI TV Out PCI-E Graphics Card. The mobo on board graphics card is quiet powerful (for MCEs) but it only has one VGA out and I needed two – one for the TV and one of the touch screen on that case. Hence why i got this fanless graphics card.
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV HVR1300

I got Win 7 RC1 running on it without any issues and its lovely! I have pictures I took along the way and will be uploading them here sometime soon.

Follow me on Twitter

Amit Bahree — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 20:28:34 GMT

Interestingly I am more active on Twitter over the last 2-3 weeks than here; I guess that might be because it is easier to dump a quick thought – which I suppose one can do here but kind of “seems out of place” (yeah, weird!).

Another contributing factor is I have been extremely busy – both on work front and also on the personal front (between relatives visiting and my assignments does not leave me any time).

Also, I finally got around to building a new MCE – so whatever little free time I had went in that – life was very interesting the few days we were “in between” MCE’s the old one was disconnected and the new one was not up and running yet (that’s a story for another time).

Lastly, the fact I want to move away from CS 2007 to Wordpress has also somewhat been at the back of my mind; the more I post, the more data I will need to move and the more headache.

I should get more active here soon (once I get some time), until then follow the tweets.

Letters

Amit Bahree — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:33:26 GMT

This is a collection of leave letters and applications written by people in various places of India … of course English is not their strong point.

1. Infosys, Bangalore : An employee applied for leave as follows:

Since I have to go to my village to sell my land along with my wife, please sanction me one-week leave.

2. This is from Oracle Bangalore:

From an employee who was performing the "mundan" ceremony of his 10 year old son: "as I want to shave my son's head, please leave me for two days..."

3. Another gem from CDAC. Leave-letter from an employee who was performing his daughter's wedding:

"as I am marrying my daughter, please grant a week's leave.."

4. From HAL Administration dept:
"As my mother-in-law has expired and I am only one responsible for it, please grant me 10 days leave."

5. Another employee applied for half day leave as follows:
"Since I've to go to the cremation ground at 10 o-clock and I may not return, please grant me half day casual leave"

6. An incident of a leave letter

"I am suffering from fever, please declare one day holiday."

7. A leave letter to the headmaster:

"As I am studying in this school I am suffering from headache. I request you to leave me today"

8. Another leave letter written to the headmaster:

"As my headache is paining, please grant me leave for the day."

9. Covering note:

"I am enclosed herewith..."

10. Another one:

"Dear Sir: with reference to the above, please refer to my below..."

11. Actual letter written for application of leave:

"My wife is suffering from sickness and as I am her only husband at home I may be granted leave".

12. Letter writing:
"I am in well here and hope you are also in the same well."

13. A candidate's job application:

"This has reference to your advertisement calling for a ' Typist and an Accountant - Male or Female'...As I am both(!! )for the past several years and I can handle both with good experience, I am applying for the post.

RAID Blues

Amit Bahree — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:59:28 GMT

On my machine running all the VM’s at home – one disk has failed. I have not replaced it, instead marked it as OK and am rebuilding the volume now. Second time this has happened – if it happens once more then maybe it is time to actually replace the physical disc.

*Sigh* I hate disc failures.

foldl' better than foldl

Amit Bahree — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 12:13:00 GMT

In Haskell the foldl' function defined in the module Data.List is better than foldl because that does not use a thunk. A thunked expression requires an internal stack. As an expression can grow infinitely large, the runtime imposes a limit on the size of this stack. As the simple example below shows that given a large enough input the stack will overflow.

Prelude> foldr (+) 0 [1..100]
5050
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..100]
5050
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..1000]
500500
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..10000]
50005000
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..100000]
5000050000
Prelude> foldl (+) 0 [1..1000000]
*** Exception: stack overflow

On the other hand, foldl' while similar to foldl does not build up on thunks and in real world programs is probably more useful.

Prelude> :module +Data.List
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..1000000]
500000500000
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..1000000]
500000500000
Prelude Data.List> foldl' (+) 0 [1..10000000]
50000005000000

Red Rum

Amit Bahree — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:09:20 GMT

This is pretty cool – saw it on BBC’s One Show, a dog saying Red Rum.

Interesting Find #18

Amit Bahree — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:16:29 GMT

Cloud vs. Cloud – guided tour of Amazon, AppNexus, GoGrid and Google. Azure is missing but given its late-alpha/early-beta state not surprising.
SheevaPlug Development Kit – this is a development platform targeted for use as a plug computer, and designed to run network-based software services and has a embedded Marvel Sheeva CPU core; quite interesting.
Office 14 – next version of Office will have “online versions”.
Loopa Bowl – the link has all the details; buy it here (in the US).
KidsMenu – an OS for Kids - seems to be a shell running on Windows.
Boogie – an intermediate verification language.
New windows mobile ads – I do feel like throwing the phone sometimes.
MachineIP.com – name says it all – pretty cool. Of course nothing new but makes it easy in situations where you don’t have access to the tools or the non-techy friends/families you have out there.
Microsoft Web App Gallery – cool, open source tools build on MS stack.
Resetting your Admin pwd in Vista – quite scary actually. (via The Dogmatix).

Network Attacks

Amit Bahree — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:55:03 GMT

I am getting DOS attacks from the following IPs at home. Some of these are honeypots.

89.139.84.130
86.151.215.171

And Port Scans from this guy/gal (apparently in China)

61.139.105.163

Creating a bootable USB drive for Windows

Amit Bahree — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:46:26 GMT

Dave has an excellent post on how to create a bootable USB drive for installing Vista or maybe Win 7. You could also use WinRAR to extract your ISO directly on to the flash drive (after formatting it as NTFS of course). A couple of points to remember though:

Make sure you use a “flash” drive (or USB stick) and not a USB HDD drive as some of those have issues with this.
Check different USB ports – all of them may not allow to boot up.

WHS now on MSDN

Amit Bahree — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:42:55 GMT

Windows Home Server (the amazing little box), is finally available on MSDN. I had bought an OEM license soon after it had come out and have been using it for some time at home. This can only be good and allow a wider set of adoption. If you have not used it – I would highly recommend that you do. Here is the screenshot from MSDN:

Win 7 and loading ISO’s

Amit Bahree — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:13:29 GMT

If you are on Win 7 (any build) you will find quickly that Daemon tools don’t work on that. Even if it was working, I would in any case recommend ditching Daemon tools and recommend using Virtual Clone Drive which not only is free but also works like a champ. I use it on Vista as well.

Google Street View in UK

Amit Bahree — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:10:30 GMT

After legal and environmental issues, finally Google has launched street view for UK! There are 25 cities covered only at this point; I know both London and Oxford are covered.

You can check out the Computing Lab at Oxford (where I study) or Avanade’s offices in London (where I work).

{via Mark}

A homage to Farts

Amit Bahree — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:38:02 GMT

A fart it is a pleasant thing,
It gives the belly ease,
It warms the bed in winter,
And suffocates the fleas.

A fart can be quiet,
A fart can be loud,
And some often leave
A powerful, poisonous cloud.

A fart can be short,
Or a fart can be long,
Some farts have been known
To sound like a song....

A fart can create
A curious medley,
A fart can be harmless,
Or silent , and deadly.

A fart might not smell,
While others are vile,
A fart may pass quickly,
Or linger a while......

A fart can occur
In a number of places,
And leave everyone there,
With strange looks on their faces.

From wide-open prairie,
To small elevators,
A fart will find all of us
Sooner or later.

That farts are all bad,
Is simply not true-
We must never forget....
Sweet old farts like you!

Poetry @ its finest.

Disable Auto-tuning on Windows

Amit Bahree — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:37:23 GMT

Receive Window Auto-Tuning is a feature in this version of Windows that improves networking performance when you are using newer networking hardware, but the feature might cause problems with older networking hardware. Sometimes, disabling Auto-Tuning might solve your problem.

To disable Auto-Tuning:

Click the Start button , and then, in the Search box, type cmd.
Press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to run the program as an administrator. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
At the command prompt, type netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable, and then press Enter.
When the process has finished, restart your computer. If this procedure does not solve the problem, you can turn Auto-Tuning back on by repeating steps a and b of this procedure, typing netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal, and then pressing Enter.

Vista Tip – launching apps as admin

Amit Bahree — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:34:50 GMT

This is probably not new, but I was not aware of it until recently. To launch an application as an administrator you press CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER when using the Search box – instead of just Enter. Pretty cool if you are a keyb guy/gal.

MIT’s Wearable 6th Sense

Amit Bahree — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 07:13:27 GMT

MIT’s Media Lab has a prototype of a wearable 6th sense - pretty damn cool – initially seems to get you thinking “what is the point?”; but sit it out and it will all make sense! Of course the whole “6th sense” is glamorizing it a bit, it is more JIT info.

I wonder what happens if your phone is not in a 3G/HSDPA coverage and what the battery drain on the phone is with the data connection always on and how big is your phone bill (most people don’t have unlimited data options on their mobile).

Am tweeting now

Amit Bahree — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:36:36 GMT

Although I have had an account for some time on Twitter, I just have not been bothered until now. Anyways, that is changing – am tweeting now. You can follow me there if you choose to – though not sure if I am going to make any more sense there than here.

Avanade Surface Demo

Amit Bahree — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:20:25 GMT

This is a cool Surface demo build my a few colleagues which showcases a hospitality demo. We build this and got it up and running out of our Avanade London office. :)

What Blogging Engine (other than CS)?

Amit Bahree — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:57:04 GMT

I am using Community Server 2007 for my blog. I originally started in .Text (which some of you ‘old timers’ might remember as being open source) and had modified the code a fair amount to something I wanted. Over the years stuck with that and then CS 1.0, 2.0, etc as .Text was ‘morphed’ into Community Server (CS) from Telligent.

While overall I have been happy with CS 2007 off late I have been quite put off with it due to a few reasons:

I liked the open source elements and CS now is just too commercialized for my taste.
Even though I have configured comments and feedback – all of that is broken and I just can’t seem to fix it (part of the reason is not having too much time to dig into a lot of details).
Upgrade to CS 2008 fails – miserably – many moons ago I spend a whole day trying to get this upgraded and it just did not work. No one on Telligent’s forum could successfully point to what is wrong. I rolled back to CS 2007.
Upgrades other than not working – generally are quite painful.

I am ready to move to something else – but there are a few things that need to be supported:

I host my own domain (stating the obvious if you are reading this), etc so need this running in something I control – or in other words hosted blogs (e.g. MSN, Google’s, etc.) are out. I already have IIS and SQL Server database.
Need to be able to move my existing posts from CS 2007 to whatever I move to.
Preferably: Support multiple blogs – though right now it’s only one, but some off the family members might want one later.
Need to support XML-RPC (a.k.a MetaWeblog API)
Ability to post code and script snippets – am ignoring the XRC issues obviously.

I have looked at BlogEngine.NET and that does look quite promising. Has anyone used that? What about the other things out there such as Wordpress and Movable Type (don’t know much about them)? There are quite a few listed here but I am not sure which one is fit for my needs..