Archive for Tech

Mistakes

January 24, 2008 at 2:40 pm · Filed under Tech ·Tagged , , , ,

999
106 *
———–
5994
0000
0999
———–
104894
———-

A silly mistake made in Maths course in Class 4.

Now we can do such calculations in a jiffy with training and materials read for CAT, GMAT and all other All India Entrance tests.
(1)106000 – 106 = 105894
(2)(106-1)(1000-106)=105894

“the quik brown fox jumps ovr the lazy dog”
Another silly mistake made in English lessons in class 3. Having thrived in the Indian educational system for 17 to 20 years, we would definitely have the ability to write pages together without any mistakes. If not, there’s always a word processor which helps with Capitalization and spelling corrections.

Are we sure we do not make such mistakes today? How many times have we misspelled variable names in source code and eventually regretted for the wasted build time? Of course, we call it a typo and not spelling mistake.:)

These are details we overlook considering the fact that the process and overview is more important. I encountered a similar problem recently. Trying to make patch sequencing work with windows installer, I screwed up the original base package I created. In the process, I had spoiled the code for multiple patching. With all my efforts being ditched, building the installer and patch over and over again, the only feeling that remained was frustration. Taking a break for a few minutes and looking back at the process, I figured out the mistake in version number format for patches.

Well, Why am I talking about this? (1) With so many people posting questions for the same problem and ending up without an answer in communities, this might be useful to at least one soul who’s made the same fault as me. (2) I’m trying to justify why I wasted more than a day. (3) When I wasted so much time in such a dumb issue, why don’t you waste 5 minute reading about it with a little bit of masala.:D

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YAC:Yet Another Crap

January 11, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under News, Tech ·Tagged ,

Edmund Hillary, First on Everest, Dies at 88
Report: MySpace issued subpoena in teen suicide case
Open Source Security Bugs Uncovered
Online Video Sites Double Popularity in 2007
Asteroid Unlikely to Collide With Mars
NASA sets new February 7 launch date for shuttle

Scanning through the news items today, I got a glimpse of the above few.
I’m not going to express in this post How good I feel about Edmund Hillary or the pain and sympathy I had on reading about Online harrassment. Nor about the excitement cast off because of the asteroid not hitting Mars. :(

Open Source Security flaws unveiled by Open Source Hardening Project. This is a subject of interest to me. I’m no open source guru. Nor am I an expert in proprietory software development model. But luckily, I’ve got the taste of both the worlds. A long lasting debate between FOSS gurus and companies: Open Source vs Proprietory Products. How many times had I heard this crap over and over?

Why should religion be brought into software? After all, a business is meant to make money no matter what your company’s vision and strategic direction might be. Do young open source Software Engineers lack the ability to step out and look at the overall picture?

This news item would definitely be an icing on the cake for companies giving out proprietory softwares. The new propaganda from their side which I heard in a recent meeting: “Does no virus till date mean, Linux is the most secure OS? Open Source Softwares have more security flaws than proprietory softwares. blah..blah..blah..”

Open source softwares have their own advantages. But they lack Customer focus. In proprietory softwares, a defect wouldn’t stay longer than the next patch cycle if a customer demands for a fix. This is one set back which is the main reason why companies think twice before adopting free softwares into their work environment.

I cannot reason out one thing: “Why would all Open Source enthusiasts target Microsoft as their villain when there are so many companies making proprietory softwares?”

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Infectados pelo Virus do Orkut

December 21, 2007 at 2:07 pm · Filed under Tech ·Tagged , ,

Google’s Orkut was affected with a XSS worm recently. It is similar to Samy Worm which infected MySpace users. Following are links to understand Cross Site scripting.

Robert McArdle’s Blog
WhiteHat Security describes XSS in detail
Wat is XSS? – From Wikipedia

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Tux

December 21, 2007 at 7:22 am · Filed under Tech ·Tagged , , , ,

This was my first post in my private blog..Tux

I was browsing through images of Tux in Google. Just thought, why don’t i write a script that keeps changing my background image every few minutes? Got into action sometime last week. Wrote a small script that changes gconf entry. The script was done. I had learnt a little bit of awk by the time i completed the script.

Setting up the script in crontab created some issues. Took a long time to resolve my silly mistakes like ending statements with ; in scripts :-) . The following are the links that helped me learn more about crontab.

http://reallylinux.com/docs/basiccron.shtml
http://www.adminschoice.com/docs/crontab.htm
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-do-i-add-jobs-to-cron-under-linux-or-unix-oses/

And this is my small script: changemytux.sh

dir=$HOME/tux
cd $dir
old=$(gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename)
count=$(ls -1 $dir/*.png $dir/*.jpg | wc -l)
if [ $count -lt 2 ]; then
exit 1
fi
while :
do
rn=$(($RANDOM%$count+1))
new=$(ls -1 *.png *.jpg | sort | awk -v rd="$rn" 'NR==rd {print $1}')
new=$dir"/"$new
if [ "$new" != "$old" ]; then
break
fi
done
/opt/gnome/bin/gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename -t string $new

At the end of the day, I had learnt awk, something about crontab and not to end all statements with semicolon;

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65535=100000

September 27, 2007 at 3:15 pm · Filed under Tech ·Tagged , ,

Another new bug for all Anti-Microsoft groups to pound on. Excel 2007 shows 65535 as 100000

 

Microsoft’s Bug Description: 6 floating-point numbers between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 have problems. The problem is only skin deep. It is an issue with the function that displays the number. In fact, the number is stored correctly in memory. MSDN Blog

But customers who checked the same are doubtful that it’s only skin deep. Few show examples that the cause could be more than the function that converts binary to displays the cell value.

I’ve always loved the creativity of the AMGs: One Example :- )

 

And I also hate when MS is cursed for the sake of nothing

“Tomorrow if i lose money because my bank uses Excel 2007, Will MS repay me?”

“Tomorrow if you gain money because your bank uses Excel 2007, will you share your profit with MS?” OMG, Who’s gonna stop this heck?

 

Now, What really caused the problem? We’ll get to know when MS is up with a fix.:-) Though there are interesting articles proclaiming the cause as multipliers divisible by 17 and floating point precision issues with the result.

But why should testing miss this? Test scripts for Excel are in VBA. Because the problem is in the display of the number and not in the value stored in memory(MS says), VBA would have fetched the correct value from the cell.

“There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.” – Alan J. Perlis

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