Passwords

Recently, I encountered a common issue in programming. My perl application needs to use a service account to pass some parameters to another application. One of these params is a password. So, question is how do I pass the password to the other application while securing it from people who can view the source code...

I will not go into details of the solution I came up with but discuss the "password issue" we face everyday. In today's world, almost every site requires username/pwd, give you the same simple password recovery options etc.

So, if someone is trying to hack into your account; the first thing they will try is the 'password recovery' option of the site. Some sites allow you to create your own question; but most don't. The answer to these common questions may not be that difficult to find out considering how much of our information is exposed.

What's worse? It's common knowledge that people use the same password most of the time on web sites. Assume you have a password and make it unique for each site. Much better safety but that approach is not fail-proof either if you think about the possibility that a couple of your passwords may be exposed and someone may figure out your system...

How about using a say MD5 (now broken and not safe) or SHA1 hash instead of password? Well, good thing about hash is that it's one way function. So, if you are not using the same password; then the hashes you will use will be unique for each site.

Sounds great; right? Guess what? Most sites; even the very respectable financial ones have restrictions on your password that will make them quite unsecure.

Take a look at Microsoft's often cited "Strong Password: How to create and use them"

Following is from American Express Password Change Page:

Your Password should:

• Contain 6 to 8 characters - at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
  
• Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
  
• Be different from your User ID and your last Password

Check any password you create with these rules against Microsoft's Password Checker

Not surprisingly; you cannot get a strong password with these restrictions.

Only 6-8 chars, and not even case sensitive?

You cannot use any special characters??

What were they thinking ???

How about storing passwords? Well, long story short; it seems that Passpack is leading the pack. Check that one out...

Bypassing Internet Censorship

It was interesting to see how much content leaked out of Iran although government censorship. Today I saw an article about psiphon, a software (guide here) that helps circumvent censorship. More information is available at their site: psiphon.ca

There is also an informative guide there titled "Everyone's guide to bypassing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide".

Vista Sleep Problems

Vista on my Fragbox2 PC has a problem with sleep mode. When I click the Start > "Power button", it works for a couple of seconds; then I hear a "click" and HD and most of the PC shutsdown but fan keeps on running.

I could not remember if I had updated the firmware on it since I bought it last year but I suspected my Asus P5E-VM DO had something to do with this. Unfortunately, I failed to find anything on Asus forums.

Today, I was trying to locate what key was causing PowerDVD registration reminder to pop-up via Sysinternal Procmon and noticed that my Philips camcorder was constantly querying registry. I decided to disable it.

So, I ran Start > msconfig and while there started to clean up other unnecessary stuff like pesky Adobe Acrobat's acrobat_sl.exe.

That's when I looked closer at two Logitech start-up processes:

• SetPoint.exe
• KHALMNPR.exe

I knew that they belong to my Logitech G7 software; the only reason I had installed them was to dynamically increase/decrease sensitivity while playing World of Warcraft. As I quit playing it; there was no reason to keep the software. I checked the forums anyway and found out that someone else was complaining about Vista not going to sleep mode with these running.

I disabled them and rebooted. It worked. Vista sleeps happily now :)

Update:

Well, it was not happily ever after :(

I did solve the problem for good though:

Apparently there are two Sleep levels in BIOS; S1 and S3 ( dont know what happened to S2). So, I had to go into BIOS and change sleep level to let it go to 'deep sleep'.

How fast is Google Alerts?

I just got a google alert; which told me that I had blogged "XML++". I recalled that I had created a Google Alert when I heard about the service quite some time ago.

I checked the alert and I had set it to be "comprehensive" and send me alerts "as-it-happens". Hmm, 'as-it-happens'? Judging from the time passed between alert and my previous blog post; it took Google ~1hr to detect my blog entry. That does not sound like 'as-it-happens' to me.

Ps. Umm, and I wonder what's up with the timing? I posted this at 00:20am EDT but see the posted time as T23:06-5:00 ???

XML++

Well I could not find a better title for this post as it touches several different but connected subjects as you will find out below...

I've been an Outlook user for over 10 years and I've used it as my contacts manager until recently. Although, I am guessing very few people use it, one of the features I like is the ability to add a picture.

Times have changed. Facebook has pictures, e-mail and other contact information that I would normally keep in Outlook. Still, I would want to have Outlook as my 'authorative source' as I control what information goes in there.

Grand Central (now known as Google Voice) and gmail also has contacts and now that Google separated Google Contacts as a stand alone product; I decided to take my contacts online.

Problem is importing from Outlook to Google Contacts strips many fields, pictures being one of them. Plus there is no product out there that would import updated Facebook information to Google Contacts.

I am quite surprised that it does not exist actually but understand that Facebook is using some measures (like e-mail address is displayed as a graphics file instead of text; so any software that needs to read it need some sort of ocr capability + it may violate Facebook's terms).

All hope is not lost. There are some applications that partially helps:

• FoneBook is a Facebook application that lets you import some information:
  [Fonebook does not, and will never export phone numbers or email addresses - Facebook does not allow this!! Feel free to join this group to petition for it to change http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47429104064]
  
  [For a Mac version you might want to try AddressBookSync - http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=43678885451]
  
  Fonebook is used to transfer contacts photos and infomation from Facebook™ to Outlook®. If your phone then supports Outlook® synchronization you should be able to have your contacts photos on your phone when they call you!
  
  This application works with both Outlook® 2003 and 2007. It is also know to work with most modern Nokias and all Windows® Smartphones/PDAs.
  
  The application currently copies a contacts photo, profile web address, about me details, status details and if you are using Outlook® 2007 their birthday

• I also found out that apparently there was an application called Facebook Downloader which made it to LifeHacker but it has been taken down by Facebook for violating their terms.
• OutSync lets you select Facebook contacts and select their pics with Outlook
• Gupdate is another facebook application; that attempts to sync Facebook data to Google Contacts. It can also add new contacts if they do not exist. Well, I tried it but it did not seem to do anything for me.
• There is a .NET application by Koushik Dutta, a software developer, that only attempts to import pictures from Facebook to Google Contacts. Source Code is available too.

On that last note, Koushik was referring to Google Data API & Facebook Toolkit which brings me to the real reason I am blogging this. While digging thru the Google Data API, I saw a link to "The Annotated XML Specification", written by one of the XML co-authors, Tim Bray in 1998.

I was reading thru it, and found the annotations extremely helpful. So, I googled to find more on Tim Bray and found his blog "ongoing"; It's quite entertaining and enlightening.

One of his recent blog entries titled "Nastiness"; his observations and recommendation are simply awesome. He is thinking very clearly and communicating well. I am adding his blog to my Google Reader (so should you :p )!

That article actually dragged me into the incident blog and I have read some extremely well written, thoughtful articles and comments.

For example:

• Reaction from Sarah Allen, who was there.
• Liz Keogh looks at how talks like this lead to cognitive associations that lead to problems.
• I also loved this comment about "Respect" & it made me reconsider some of the things I do
• Lastly, enjoyed Giles Bowkett's rants

Vista Post-SP2 Black Screen. Is Vista slower?

There are tons of XP vs. Vista posts on web. To be honest, I have a pretty fast PC and never I could care less if Vista is a couple of seconds slower than XP; it's still fast. This post is not looking to make a comparison but it is more about a couple of useful things I discovered when I was looking around post-sp2 upgrade. Here is what happened...

Post-SP2 Black Screen

I've downloaded and installed Vista SP2 on one of my laptops and noticed that there was an extended period of "black" screen during boot time. I did not pay much attention to it but today I noticed the same thing on my desktop post SP2.

Vista Logs

It tickled my curiosity and I started looking around. Soon, I found out that Vista Logs are incredibly detailed and there is abundant information to diagnose such stuff. That is great news because I always hated XP's inability to tell me what was causing slowness during boot. I would sit there and watch for 4-5 mins painfully while my laptop crawls to a start. Of course I tried invaluable Sysinternal tools like Procmon to watch boot process and try to sift thru hundreds of thousands of records which was mostly useless...

So, first I headed to Control Panel to see what was Vista reporting recently:

Control Panel > Performance Information and Tools > Advanced Tools

I have not seen anything in the recent "Performance Issues" section that suggested that I was seeing a degradation of system boot but interestingly enough there was some clue to another issue I was seeing on my Pc recently; it just would not go to Sleep mode...

You will notice that at the bottom of the dialog box; there is a link to the Event Viewer; and that's the beauty of Vista. This basically means that Vista is in fact going thru performance logs and giving you a summary of recent events...

Diagnostics-Performance

To get to Diagnostics-Performance logs, you can click the link above or open up Event Viewer

Start > run > eventvwr.msc then browse to

Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Diagnostics-Performance > Operational

Under the Operational, you will see tons of events logged. There a couple of Task Categories.

• Click on "Task Category" and
• Select "Group Events by This Category"

From category names, it's clear that "Boot Performance Monitoring" is the one that should give us the information we are looking for.

In the screenshot above you will notice that; Vista is in fact telling us about the time it took to boot. There is more, if you click the details tab, there is actually a breakdown of boot time! I think this is a very neat feature b/c I still remember how painful it was for me to use a stopwatch to record each phase of XP boot visually and then try to match them to whatever was recorded by extended Group Policy logs and Event Logs... It's all there; in the event logs now.

When I looked at break-down of boot times, it was not easy to tell what some of them were; so I googled and in fact found an article titled "Microsoft's hidden diagnostic tool unlocks Vista startup secrets". Well, there is not much there other than what I had already found out but it mentioned two parts of boot time:

MainPathBootTime measures the time it takes for the system to load all drivers and services that are critical to user interaction and get to the Windows desktop where the user can begin doing things.

BootPostBootTime includes all the other drivers and processes that aren’t critical to user interaction and can be loaded with low-priority I/O that always gives preference to user-initiated actions that execute using Normal I/O priority.

I tried to find the follow up writing on ZD net but after spending 20mins to no avail; I gave up.

I filtered by Event ID 100-190:

• On the left pane, right click on "Operational"
• Click "Filter Current Log"
• Replace "" with 100-190

And started to look at boot times. Apparently my boot up time was around 80000milliseconds (ie. 80 seconds) but the latest boot time was a whopping 262sec (4.3mins). Unfortunately, there was no smoking gun; and Windows did not report anything unusual in this case.

This may be OK though; because I remembered that I had also installed Office 2007 SP2 and had not rebooted yet; so this might have been the cause of delay. To be sure, I will need to reboot a couple of times and measure them to see if I was still getting 80secs.

During the investigation, I noticed that at times, some apps (McAfee Antivirus, Rawr etc) were causing delays and Windows were reporting such events. By the way, the same log is also used to determine what is blocking a machine from sleeping or causing delays during shutdown.

Conclusion

So, is Vista slower than XP? Maybe but I don't care. With XP, I could never tell what was causing slowness. Now, at least I have better visibility. Overall, I like Vista more.

Google Chrome Standalone Installer

Google Chrome Standalone (aka offline) installer is available in a openly hidden :) link here:

http://www.google.com/support/installer/bin/answer.py?answer=126299

This version is probably more suitable for Enterprise environment as it does not attempt to auto-update itself. Auto-Updating / Home-Dialing software is usually a no-no as Enterprise IT would want to control the deployments and phase them in.

Amazing Wallpapers

I just wanted to drop two wallpaper links here that I enjoyed browsing:

• InterfaceLift.com
  
• Graffitiwallpaper.com
  

RIP: My Falcon Fragbox 2

I bought a Fragbox 2 gaming computer from Falcon Northwest last month. The first time I ran World of Warcraft on it, it felt awesome. Everything was incredibly smooth; I had all the settings in the game maxed up but I was never getting less than 60fps. I thought it was worth the ~$2000 and 2 weeks wait time!

Some specs:

MB: Asus P5E-VM Micro ATX Q35 Motherboard (AS-P5E-VM )

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 - 3.16 GHz 1333 FSB ( INTC2E8500 )

RAM: Crucial 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz ( CR-4GBK2-6400 )

Video: NVidia 8800 GTS 512MB PCIE (NV8800GTS512 )

Storage: Seagate Sata 750GB HD 7200 RPM

ST50EFCS 500 watt power supply ( SS-ST50EFCS )

Two days ago, I was getting ready for Karazhan raid and suddenly my fragbox started to stutter. Everything became slow and at some point it became unresponsive, I was not able to restart it. So, I hard booted it by pressing the power button and all hell broke lose!

Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. To fix the problem:

1.Insert your installation disc and restart your computer

2. Choose your language settings, and then click "next"

3. Click "Repair your computer"

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer manufacturer for assistance.

File:\Windows\System32\config\system

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: Windows failed to load because the system registry file is missing, or corrupt.

I tried to reboot a couple of times hoping it would clear but it did not seem like the kind. So, after trying safe mode and every other option without moving an inch closer to booting into Windows, I gave up and attempted to reload Windows Vista...

Install seemed to go smoothly but after the reboot; same error showed up. As a last resort, I used the Recovery Disc that came with the Fragbox 2 package. Recovery stalled at 30% and I was prompted to either ignore the errors or abort recovery. I chose to ignore the errors but recovery did not go thru.

I attempted recovery again and to my surprise, it completed this time but no joy after reboot:

Windows has encountered a problem communicating with a device connected to your computer.

This error can be caused by unplugging a removable storage device such as an external usb drive while the drive is in use, or by faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-rom drive that is failing. Make sure any removable storage is properly connected and then restart your computer.

If you continue to receive this error message, contact the hardware manufacturer.

File: \Windows\System32\Winload.exe

Status: 0xc00000e9

Info: An unexpected I/O error has occured

At this point, I looked at the warranty document and was happy to see that this:

Falcon Overnight Service

Your Falcon Overnight Service Policy: How It Works

Summary: If your Falcon system should develop a serious hardware problem that we can't solve via telephone technical support, we will pick it up via overnight courier, correct any problem, and overnight it back to you, The Falcon Overnight Service covers any applicable instance within one year of the date of purchase.

So, I sent an e-mail to support@falcon-nw.com with all the details of the issue and steps I have taken and asked them to call me back...

That brings us to today. I called them to follow up and talked to a technician who suggested that I should open up the box and re-seat cables... OK, unscrewing a couple of screws and opening up a box is no big deal but I am sure many people may feel uneasy about doing this. They do not need to know how to do this...

Anyway, I went ahead and re-seat the cables which seemed firmly in place anyway and of course nothing is fixed. Falcon support also told me that I should run some hard drive diagnostics. So, I asked where I would get the diagnostic application and he said he will send me instructions.

It's been a couple of hours since the conversation but they have not yet replied to my e-mail with instructions. I called them up a couple of times already but keep on getting Voice mail. So, I left VMs...and waiting.... Arrrgh!

[ Update - 09/04/2008]

Apparently, Falcon Support team was calling me back...but they were not calling my work number instead of the number I left with them. Anyway, person I talked to was a soft spoken, very kind person. After sorting out the miscommunication, I agreed to follow the instructions to download a Seagate tool and use it to test the drive.

I reseated the cables on the motherboard side and re-ran recovery disc as they suggested; which resulted in the same error. Then I downloaded the Seagate Diagnostic tool from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS207EURO.iso . 20mins after starting the diagnostic in "Long Test" mode, it stopped at 17% done. Waited for another hour but it was clearly not moving. So, I aborted the process and checked the logs which did not have anything useful about test.

I sent another e-mail to support detailing what I have done and the results. They called me back and and I said "I think at this point, I'd better ship it to you guys'. The sense I get from talking to these guys is that they sure would like to avoid shipping it if possible and work with you to fix it if you are willing to work with them, but they are not 'forcing' you to do that.

I was willing to work with them but I don't think anyone reading this should be worried if they are planning to buy a Fragbox from Falcon and would not be willing to do troubleshooting in case they hit a similar issue.

On the plus side, when I was purchasing the system, they refused to add a second hard drive as the configuration was fixed and they were not willing to modify it. Now that I encountered this issue, I asked the support person if it would be possible to buy a second 750GB Seagate drive from them and would they install it for me. He said yes and told me they could even install a drive that I would ship them if I had any extra. I am waiting for them to confirm the price. I hope it is not too much above market price.

[Update - 09/24/2008]

So, it took Falcon a week to fix issue(s) on my Fragbox 2...

• First they replaced the Seagate 750gig hard drive and added the second 750gig I bought from them.... During testing, they found out that issue did not disappear.
• Then, they replaced motherboard. During test, they realized that one of the RAM chips were defective although it had passed RAM test.
• After replacing RAM, all went well and they installed Windows, updates drivers etc. Falcon creates a Recovery disk. So, that disc did not get created successfully at first but second attempt was successful. Oh, they also print a funny custom DVD cover with my name on it :)

They kept me informed via e-mail updates all along and I told them that although I could not wait to get back on my Fragbox, I would rather a bit and have it tested thoroughly, which they do and at the end they send a list of all checks they performed.

Of course, it sucks that my Fragbox had all these issues only after 2 months but it's clear that they are using the best parts and testing it; so cannot blame them for that. Now that I have a second drive on it, I will be able to use it not just as a gaming (ie. World of Warcraft) computer but as my main workstation at home replacing HP workstation xw6000.

Search Commands from Microsoft Office

Woot! I never liked the ribbons as it made it more difficult for me to find out when I was looking for a command. I found myself going to help and searching many times.

Well, help is here. Microsoft seems to listen! In their www.OfficeLabs.com site, they released a new toy called Search Commands, which makes finding command in office very convenient. Try it out, if you are one of those users annoyed by ribbons.

Best Programming Language To Learn

I think it was 1988 when I learned my first programming language: Basic. I will never forget the first day when teacher wrote I = I +1 on the screen, and for a second it made no 'matheatical' sense at all :) I liked Basic!

Anyway, most Engineering applications were written in some variation of Fortran then, so that's what I learned in college. I never really liked Fortran. At the time, Computer Science students were learning Pascal, Turbo Pascal was very popular. One of the students who was very good at it gave a couple of us free lessons and that's how I learned it...

Then, when I started to work at 1993, I realized that 'Excel' (version 4, then) was 'the' application that was used for everything around me. Accounting was using it as well as Engineering teams. So, I learned about Macros and later VBA, which made life so much easier! At some point, I jumped from VBA to VisualBasic.

When 'Web Master' became a cool term, I learned about html and ASP. That was a nice combo and helped me do a lot of cool stuff around year 2000.

Later on, when I started to dig into Unix/Linux world, it became clear that Perl would help and together with shell scripting; it did in a big way when automatic tasks in Unix! Although I became proficient with VBScript/WMI scripting, ActivePerl is still my preferred choice in Windows b/c of it's spectacular power with regular expressions (Well VBScript became better with regular expressions and introduced "Dictionaries" (Hashes) yet I don't think it matches Perl).

So, I was thinking what to do next? Java has been out there for quite a while. I was interested in PowerShell but became disillusioned with version 1. AutoIt3 seems interesting but not super easy or intuitive. I keep on hearing about Python (check out this link for some resources) but I am not sure if it adds much on top of Perl...

That's why, I was quite interested when I saw the subject on LifeHacker. There is a lengthy discussion about it. Take a look if you are interested...

While waiting for GDrive

Still waiting for highly speculated Google GDrive to become available... In the meantime, http://www.getdropbox.com/ seems like a nice try...

Have Phun!

I just saw a cool science tool named Phun. Here is what it is 'about':

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

Watch out this pretty cool video and you will love it too...

Vista - Cannot Open Control Panel (Fixed)

World of Warcraft was giving me headache yesterday. FPS near Ogri'la was only 4fps, although lag was not too bad (~150-200ms). So I decided to disable addons, defrag HD blah blah. I was also using procmon from sysinternals to see if there was anything hogging Vista...

I noticed SearchIndexer was a bit troublesome and stopped the service. While there, I went thru the list and disabled a couple of other that did not seem useful/applicable. One of them was "Software Licensing".

Software Licensing Service Description:
Enables the download, installation and enforcement of digital licenses for Windows and Windows applications. If the service is disabled, the operating system and licensed applications may run in a reduced function mode.

Apparently, if you disable this service you cannot open Control Panel. It looks like it's coming up but then disappears immediately. Enabling/starting service fixes the issue...

Vista - Still Bluescreens

After installing Vista SP1 RC1 and moving Page file to a different hard drive, I was finally not able to get rid of BSODs when computer was idle...

After a coupel of weeks, unfortunately freezes and BSODs came back. The last one I had said something like:

Win32k.sys

Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
STOP 0x00000050 (0xFFC000000,all zeros,0x964E0FB3, All Zeros)...

Apparently, Microsoft has a hotfix for this. There is an article titled "Error message when you start a Windows Vista-based computer: "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 )

However, this article mentioned issues during startup, which was not really my case. I kept on looking and found another KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 about STOP: 0x00000050.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617 I get the feeling that one of the drivers is not playing well with vista. I ran c:\windows\system32\verifier.exe to see if it will be able to help me pinpoint the issue.

SysPro Policy Reporter

A colleague showed me this cool free tool called "Policy Reporter".

Policy Reporter makes it much easier to understand how Microsoft implements Policy Processing, which is not really transparent...

It reformats the log provided in %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode to give a more meaningful display.

It provides a Tree structure on the left which shows major events reported in the Log. Selecting an entry in the tree structure displays that section of the log in the view window.

It also has a "Performance History" tab that loads Group Policy Performance information from the registry, including the time taken to apply the policies and what policies were applied.

It also has some other nice features such as 'Search' and 'Export to Excel'.

Note: You must activate Verbose logging to get detailed information. Policy Reporter assists in doing this.

Free Online Educational Courses

Just came across two useful links:

• 200 Free Online Classes
• 100 Free Podcasts from Best universities in the world

Windows Vista SP1 RC1 Issues

One of my computer is locking up almost every day. I leave it alone at night, when I come back in the morning I see it BlueScreened. I googled "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" and tried to find something that would explain my BSOD with Vista to no avail... and decided to try Vista SP1 RC1.

I downloaded the stand-alone version and tried to install it. It bluescreened half way there after half an hour or so (well, it said SP1 update can take hours in the screen so half an hour is great).

I tried on my other Vista machine and it even did not get that far. Then, Microsoft refreshed RC1 and I decided to try it again as my Vista keeps on locking up.

So, I browsed to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 page, and downloaded Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh (Build 17128) – released 01/11/08. When unpacked it has 3 files in it. I ran the cmd, which entered a registry key that enabled me to see an Update for Vista SP1 Control Panel > Windows Update > "Check for Updates".

Update actually installed 3 files, rebooted. Then I went back to Windows Update and clicked "Check for Updates" but it did not find anything. I waited and tried a couple of mins later. This time it finally found SP1 RC1. I clicked install and it froze on me after a few mins.

I tried a couple more times suspecting that whatever issue was causing my lock-up , it was preventing update from finishing. And Windows Update was able to finish the download but it failed to install it. Error code: 80070005. Unfortunately Vista help did not list this error code.

After some search, I realized that many other has seen the same issue and the only solution I saw was Aaron Stebner's blog entry. Apparently, MS messed up permissioning and Windows Update does not have enough permissions to write some reg keys/files.

I followed the instructions mentioned. I do not know if this will work for me yet. I will post a follow up later.

[Update - 01/21/2008]
I ran the script from Aaron's page. It did a lot of things but failed to reset permissions on 7 keys. I rebooted and tried again, it kept on failing. I also tried running SP1 update but it too failed...

I looked into the error Kernel_Data_InPage_Error, I was getting. I had the following error codes: 0000007A (0xC020BF84, 0xC00009C, 02a266860, 0x82FE130D)
ntfs.sys - Address 82FE130D base at 82EF8000 Datestamp 47214597

So, there are 4 block of error codes:
1st set is about Lock Type (0xC020BF84)
2nd set is the I/O status (0xC00009C)
3rd set tells us about Current Process when BSOD occured(02a266860)
and 4th set mentions the memory code where error occured.

As per this article at MSDN, my issue was 0xC000009C, or STATUS_DEVICE_DATA_ERROR, is typically due to bad blocks (sectors) on the hard disk.

As my Page File was in C drive, probably there was some bad blocks in the C drive. Unfortunately, chkdisk did not help. So, I moved the page file to my other drive.

No lockups since then. And to my surprise, Vista SP1 RC1 installed successfully today!

Bill Gates last day at Microsoft from CES 2008

Earlier this evening Bill Gates gave his final Microsoft keynote at the 2008 CES show in Las Vegas. Throughout the keynote he made many references to what he will do with his free time once he retires from day to day operations at Microsoft. It turns out, Bill has big plans in addition to his foundation after all.

read more | digg story

Disposable Web Accounts

So, we are in 2008 now. After taking the final two weeks of 2007 off, I am back to work and catching up with e-mails & diggs. As I was looking at the most popular technology content in the last month, I noticed the subject above.

5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe is the actual title of a wonderful post from makeuseof.com.

BugMeNot was already one of my favorite firefox addons. I especially liked "file.io" service...

Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) Black Hole Routers

Windows XP SP3 promises detection of Black Hole Routers, which is supposed to improve over all networking experience especially for laptops. While investigating the subject, I came across a good, comprehensive article about PMTU (Path Maximum Transmission Unit) at Microsoft site.

By default PMTU Black Hole Discovery for TCP/IP is disabled on Windows XP machines. It can be enabled though:

Setting: EnablePMTUBHDetect
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

"Changes in PMTU black hole router detection in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Vista" is a good follow up article.

Enabling of PMTU Black Hole detection and changes are all result of Microsoft's "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack".

The Cable Guy from Microsoft has an article on enhancements that "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" (terrible name IMHO) offers.

Vista BSOD

My vista install started to crash when there is a lot of disk activity. It would crash every other day at first. Then, at some point it started to go down shortly after I initiate PowerUsenet downloads.

I looked at MS documentation for 0x0000007B and concluded that it had something to do with Sata controller. Article suggested to replace cables as it could be caused by a faulty cable but doing so did not help.

Then, I bought a HighPoint Tech TocketRaid 1742 PCI card. Documentation suggested to simply install the card and point to the driver location once Vista detected it. Unfortunately, Vista kept on blue screening once card was installed and I could not reach the logon page.

I installed the card on an empty PCI slot and connected back my Promise SATA controller. After the Vista came up I installed drivers, shutdown pc and removed the promise controller. Then, I reconnected my SATA HDs to the new controller and succesfully booted.

I hope this will end my BSOD issues....Time will show.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) Test Drive

Ubuntu 7.10 was released yesterday. Below is my first hand impression of new release. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, if you will...

Getting the image:
I tried all North America mirrors to find a fast image download site but I guess because of first day rush, all were slow, download speeds around 50 KB/s. After a couple of hours, I was able to access Georgia Tech mirror which let me download at speeds of 2MB/s, so I got the image in a matter of mins.

I usually use Lauchpad.net to order my free copies of Ubuntu, which is an awesome feature of Ubuntu Distro.

Because of firewall rules, I could not use torrents in my environment. Not sure how that would change my experience.

One thing I noticed was that Europe/Asia had a lot more mirrors and when I tried them I got almost the same download speeds: ~50KB/s. I hope more 'fast' mirrors are added for North America soon.

Installation:
Ubuntu installs were always good but not without hickups... When I was reading reviews, I had read something like 'Installation was even easier than Vista'. I attest to that now.

I decided to wipe out earlier version and install it on my IBM T40. I popped in the CD, live-cd install completed in a few mins. Then I clicked install shortcut on the desktop and installation started.

In all installs up to this version, time would always be incorrect, this worked fine. Install time was short and I had to click 'next' a couple of times to confirm keyboard, regions etc and enter username/pwd.

Devices:
When I say devices, I should confess that I don't really have a lot of devices to check the functionality. What has always been painful for me was Wireless Access. I have a netgear wireless card, which was automatically recognized, drivers were installed and was ready for me to use after reboot.

The only thing I noticed was, it was not available during install and at some point Ubuntu install warned me that I did not have internet connectivity, so Security Repositories/Updates would not be available at the time. No biggie.

Post-Install:
One of the exciting things I saw in 10 rocking features in 10 days series of articles was about Tight integration of Firefox with Ubuntu. So when I browsed to blogger site, firefox popped up a message for "missing plugin".

Unfortunately, things did not work as advertised after that. Flash Plugin was supposed to be installed seemlessly. Instead I got an error when I tried to install it.

In fact, once I clicked "close", it told me that plugin was installed and I needed to restart firefox. Of course, that was not true...

I also tried Firefox > Tool > Addons to install some plugins like GreaseMonkey but no luck there either. It kept on complaining about source not being available. If you look carefully, you will notice a type in "available".

I know some may think I am just being picky now, but I hate to see such typos as it gives you the impression of sloppiness. Ubuntu is a 'high-quality' distro, such small stuff does therefore matter (at least to me).

I am not sure if this is a bug or if there is some back-end issues here though. Because I also got a "Service Outage" page when I was trying to get some more explanation on what's going on.

Anyway, I am sure I can still download and install these stuff manually as I used to.

Screen Resolution: It always bothered me with Ubuntu/linux installs not to be able to easily increase screen resolution from current setting. Ok, "easily" is a relative term. Because normally, you would edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then logout / log back in to see changes. That's a "no no".

In fact, in Ubuntu preview, Lifehacker touched upon this point: "It might not seem like a revolutionary feature, but users can now change their screen resolutions and refresh rates without having to log out or hack around in terminal."

I think it should be like in Windows, where all resolutions are listed and when users chooses one, it's tested and user is asked to confirm if it was OK. This is still missing from "easy-to-use" Ubuntu and require a bit more tech skills.

OK, I guess I will post more when I have more time in my hands to play with it. This is it for the time being. Oh, before I forget, I loved the fact that Compiz is the default window manager in Ubuntu now:)

Edit 10/22/2007: I am having an issue with Ubuntu start up. It does not start properly and a black screen is displayed. I play with the mouse and touch a few keys, I see HD activity in the meantime and after a minute or so logon screen shows up. I have an ATI card on this IBM T40 laptop, not sure what exactly is causing this but no update has resolved the issue yet.

Enable / Disable Outlook 2007 Rules

As a Blackberry user, one of my pain-points is with the pst files. Here is how it goes. Let's say Outlook is open and I get an e-mail, my rules process it and move it to one of the pst folders. Problem is that I don't get it in my BlackBerry.

Of course, if outlook was closed, or if the rules were not processed, that message would end up in my BlackBerry. As I want to keep outlook open, I have to disable the rules. There is no manual way of quickly doing this. If you look at Outlook Rules > Run Rules, you can not, for example, select all with Ctrl+a. You have to click and select each one of them. Painful!

So, I decided to create a macro, that would automatically disable the rules, or enable & run them. Idea is that in the morning, I will keep the rules disabled so that I will get them in my BB, and time to time I will run enable script to move them to psts.

Below is the code. In Outlook, you can
* press Alt+F11
* Expand Project1 (VbaProject.OTM)
* Expand Microsoft Office Outlook Objects
* double click ThisOutlookSession
and paste the code in there.

Then you can simply Press Alt+F8 and chose the action...


Sub DisableAllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = False
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: DisableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Sub Enable_Run_AllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = True
oRule.Execute ShowProgress:=True
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: EnableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Rounded Corners with CSS

I was looking for a way to create rounded corners without using images. I came across "Nifty Corners Cube" which does exactly that and more.

Digg - The Pictures Section!

I check Technology Section of Digg.com at least a couple of times daily. I am not sure exactly what purpose the new picture site will serve but it's another way of 'sharing', which is a good thing.

[UPDATE]
Heh, this site turned out to be a 'rogue' one :) Still... I like the idea.

read more | digg story

Install Ubuntu On Windows - WUBI

I saw an article about installing Ubuntu on Windows at Ubuntu-Unleashed Blog. It talks about an open source project called "WUBI".

Premise is very simple: You install an application called Wubi on Windows XP/Vista which uses an "alternate" (text based) Ubuntu ISO file to install Ubuntu in the windows partition in a 'single file' and give you an option to boot into it.

What does that mean? You do not need to have separate partitions to install linux/windows. It installs necessary drivers to access NTFS share, and does pretty cool stuff like importing your favorites/booksmarks.

When I was testing the application, which you can download via this link, it could not connect to a download site for ubuntu alternate image. So, I checked c:\wubi\install\ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso.metalink and used one of the US sites to download it.

I copied both the alternate image and wubi executable to the same directory and then ran the executable. GUI part is quick, actual installation takes sometime. It's advised to defrag your machine prior to installing it.

This is a cool idea and I hope it gets official acceptance from Ubuntu! Check out Wubi Forums if you are interested.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Gnome Desktop Tweaks

The default desktop environment for Linux users, Gnome, is fast, organized and very easy to learn. But Gnome is also very powerful and highly customizable. Today's top 10 lists the various ways you can tweak Nautilus and the Gnome desktop to turn Linux into a productivity powerhouse.

read more | digg story

Who owns what

Above picture, which lists some of the companies bought a few Media conglamorate, was put together by Amy Webb and is getting circulated a lot these days. It gives an idea about how much of Internet these few companies own.

Online Storage finally taking shape

Just want to note this article about Online Storage and what big 3 (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are doing about it. I think online storage makes perfect sense now that we have faster internet connection.

I only tried Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive and it looks pretty good but of course 500MB is 'nothing' if you seriously want to keep your files online. It maybe enough if you only want to keep 'some' files

A (much needed) update for Vista

Today, when I saw MS KB938194 titled "An update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista" and look at the issues it resolved, it reminded me of my experience with an ATI card when I moved to Vista:

A couple of months ago I bought a nice (=expensive) ATI all in wonder X800 video card and it worked perfectly fine under Windows XP when I was playing World of Warcraft (WoW). Then, I installed Vista. All seemed fine for a week or so and then hell broke loose...

At first, I would not be able to play more WoW than 5 minutes. It would freeze and I had to reboot. Then it got worse so that I could not even play 30 secs. I gave up and started to use my other PC to play the game.

It got even worse when Vista started to freeze even when I am not playing a game but just playing any video file. At some point, my pc was totally unusable as animations were too much to display.

One of these days, I saw a sign that CompUSA shop near my house was getting closing and there was a close-out sale. I bought ATI X1600 Pro & retired the problematic one but promised myself to test it out on my Windows XP box to see if the problem would present itself there too...

Read this article for more on Windows Vista issues and possible fixes coming out...