Grinell Glacier trail
Originally uploaded by Santosh Dawara.
Between Hanging valleys you can see the Many Glacier Lake far in the background. The picture was take in the Glacier National Park, Montana, USA.
Year: 2005
Hack my PC
My Dell Windows XP PC had a sticker on it that say “Please hack me”.
Well, I didn’t see the sticker. Not for a while. I read a very basic article on hacking by Roger Grimes at Infoworld. He talked about passwords sniffed from wireless networks. Their encryption broken in a matter of seconds. I thought it was too easy, it couldn’t be. I had to try it myself. I hopped over to insecure.org downloaded Cain & Abel installed it and was ready to go. Cain is a sniffer + cracker. I had to see for myself.
It took me less than five minutes to sniff the traffic on my private network, send it to the cracker and launch a dictionary attack on the SMB traffic collected. I found two vulnerable accounts, “Administrator” and “Guest”. Both accounts had *no* passwords. The Administrator account was especially worrisome – it never showed up under the account list in my XP control-panel. I never even knew it existed. I had never logged into it (XP offers to create a user account with administrator privileges at install-time). The Administrator account is also my system ‘root’, pardon my reliance on Unix jargon.
Dissapointed in myself, I quickly peeled the sticker off by disabling the two accounts. Maybe I can fix the vulnerability comprehensively by eliminating my dependence on Windows entirely.
Generics in the Java Programming Language
Sun introduced Generics with Java 1.5 recently.
Whenever a developer created a Collection in older versions of Java, he had to rely on run-time checking to enforce type safety in the Collection. Run-time checked does provide flexibility. However, 90% of the time, Developer’s never really designed to use that flexibility. Imagine creating a Collection of different types of Objects with nothing in common, how often would one have to solve a problem that required just that? Even in that 90%, 10% of the time, that flexibility was abused. Now Imagine writing an interface that takes a Collection as an argument. Let’s say there exist two different implementations of that interface (or template) that expected a Collection each with types that differ from the other. The horrors, the interface designer never intended the interface to be used in that way. Thus, interchangeability is not enforceable.
I just did rely on anecdotal evidence to justify the use of Generics. A very obvious example.
Yes, Generics is just as much a fix as it is a feature.
This is my repository of articles and people on Generics.
Generics in the Java programming Language. [Sun.com]
Generics in the Java programming Language. [Sun.com] — A tutorial by Gilad Bracha.
Bruce Eckel’s Java weblog. [Artima] — if your not happy with just the tutorial but want to look at the advanced material, hop over to Eckel’s journal and follow his Generics blogs. Or, 🙂 just get your own Blog up and running and send me a link.
Hello world!
Thanks WordPress.com. This is my first post. I have been playing with wordpress for the last hour and frankly, it makes blogger.com look ancient.
My blog’s moved over to wordpress
… Sukshma [wordpress.com]
Generics in the Java Language
Sun introduced Generics with Java 1.5 recently.
Whenever a developer created a Collection in older versions of Java, he had to rely on run-time checking to enforce type safety in the Collection. Run-time checked does provide flexibility. However, 90% of the time, Developer’s never really designed to use that flexibility. Imagine creating a Collection of different types of Objects with nothing in common, how often would one have to solve a problem that required just that? Even in that 90%, 10% of the time, that flexibility was abused. Now Imagine writing an interface that takes a Collection as an argument. Let’s say there exist two different implementations of that interface (or template) that expected a Collection each with types that differ from the other. The horrors, the interface designer never intended the interface to be used in that way. Thus, interchangeability is not enforceable.
I just did rely on anecdotal evidence to justify the use of Generics. A very obvious example.
Yes, Generics is just as much a fix as it is a feature.
This is my repository of articles and people on Generics.
Generics in the Java programming Language. [Sun.com]
Generics in the Java programming Language. [Sun.com] — A tutorial by Gilad Bracha.
Bruce Eckel’s Java weblog. [Artima] — if your not happy with just the tutorial but want to look at the advanced material, hop over to Eckel’s journal and follow his Generics blogs. Or, 🙂 just get your own Blog up and running and send me a link.
Ray Ozzie at Microsoft
His memo on Internet Services adoption in Microsoft.
Bill Gates’ views on Ozzie and his role at Microsoft.
— Ozzie’s Online Charge [Business Week]
What the Bleep do we know?
Before you go out and watch the movie, you should consider that the movie only presents one point of view [Wikipedia.org]. Not all Quantum physicists believe that the Quantum physics is connected to conciousness in the way the movie describes it. In fact those who do are in the minority.
Now I don’t even remember who recommended it to me. I wish I could speak to him and let him know about this.
In the end I guess I am interested more in efficacy, a narrow view that might hurt.
What about Ramtha’s school of enlightenment [Wikipedia.org]. Not a very credible school.
Hack my PC
My Dell Windows XP PC had a sticker on it that say “Please hack me”.
Well, I didn’t see the sticker. Not for a while. I read a very basic article on hacking by Roger Grimes at Infoworld. He talked about passwords sniffed from wireless networks. Their encryption broken in a matter of seconds. I thought it was too easy, it couldn’t be. I had to try it myself. I hopped over to insecure.org downloaded Cain & Abel installed it and was ready to go. Cain is a sniffer + cracker. I had to see for myself.
It took me less than five minutes to sniff the traffic on my private network, send it to the cracker and launch a dictionary attack on the SMB traffic collected. I found two vulnerable accounts, “Administrator” and “Guest”. Both accounts had *no* passwords. The Administrator account was especially worrisome – it never showed up under the account list in my XP control-panel. I never even knew it existed. I had never logged into it (XP offers to create a user account with administrator privileges at install-time). The Administrator account is also my system ‘root’, pardon my reliance on Unix jargon.
Dissapointed in myself, I quickly peeled the sticker off by disabling the two accounts. Maybe I can fix the vulnerability comprehensively by eliminating my dependence on Windows entirely.