Chillout Lounge

Humanoid robot gets Pocket PC brain

A group at the Institute for Computer Science of the University of Freiburg (Germany) has used a Pocket PC as the "brain" of a small autonomous robot. "NimbRo RS" placed third in the balancing challenge of the Humanoid League competition at RoboCup 2004 in Lisbon, by successfully walking up and down a ramp without falling.


Read more at http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS4750901902.html



posted by Logu Krishnan : 11:28 AM

Smartphone and .NET - My Session @ Chennai .Net User Group

Yesterday I spoke about smartphone and .NET at Chennai .NET
User Group[CNUG] 2nd Year Celebration @ Tidel Park Auditorium,
Chennai, India. The event was oversubscribed :-) There were around
320 including 70-100 students from various colleges in and around
chennai.

We had a full day celebration, with 4 technical sessions. While I
was speaking about smartphone, half of the crowd did not believe
that everything i spoke about was possible on a mobile phone, but
they seem to believe after demos. I had planned to stress about
the business implications of mobility, and took a while to make
the crowd's head nod and say... yes mobility is required... and
it does has some business implications... but i had to rush up on
the last 10 minutes...

During the Chalk Talk session and after my session, I had opportunity
to speak to lot of people... one thing I observed is lots of students
were more interested on mobility than the developers. And the developers
who spoke to me had some interesting questions...

Anand started with keynote and we had sessions on ASP.NET 2.0 by
jerome, Mono and Rotor by Sriram, VB.NET by naresh, C#2.0 by
dhamayanthi. and Mahalax managed the whole event, and she had
put in lot of efforts to run the show.

however whole day was fun.

posted by Logu Krishnan : 9:44 AM

I'm back to Chennai

After a week long ceremonies of my sister's marriage,which ate all of my time this month... :-) Just landed in chennai, and I'm back to work now... clearing my backlogs... 713 mails... out of which 500 would be junk/spam.... grrr...

posted by Logu Krishnan : 1:45 AM

Offline Again

I will be offline for whole of this week... I'm here at my hometown for my sister's marriage. This marriage has kept me very busy this month, and personal life took over my professional life... I'm fully engrossed on the marriage work...phew indian marriage is a bit tough!! :-) but many things are getting streamlined in my life and heading towards a proper direction... anyways,I should be up and back to form next week...and should move ahead without any hassles in life :-)

posted by Logu Krishnan : 12:40 AM

A bit of WINDOWS Internals

Recently, while programming with the Audit Policy Setting, I was little puzzled on how windows manages these policies internally. After initial research, a document sent by aradhana finished my research.

Finally, here is how Windows Stores AUDIT Policies internally, Windows XP has 9 Policicies, which can be set using secpol.msc



These settings are stored in the Registry at \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY\Policy\PolAdtEv
and stored in disk at %WINDIR%\System32\Config\SECURITY

The SECURITY File at disk is not even accessible to Administrators, these files are available only to SYSTEM Account and Authentication Packages. and If you are inquisitive like me to know whatz stored as the binary data, here is the view of binary info of SECURITY File



The same is stored in the Registry at \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SECURITY\Policy\PolAdtEv
But you cannot access this key using RegEDIT. but there is a alternate way to extract the contents of this Key. Hint:Use the Scheduler, The Scheduler service runs under SYSTEM Account. So this can help us to extract the contents of this registry key.

C:\temp>at \\scape005 19:39 CMD /c "regedit /e c:\temp\mykey1.txt HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policy\Poladtev"



The output of mykey1.txt in my computer is [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policy\Poladtev]
@=hex(0):01,17,f5,77,01,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,02,00,00, 00,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,09,00,00,00

This can be intercepted using, the following legend info, the key is of the following format
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policy\Poladtev]
@=hex(0):ZZ,ii,ii,00,AA,00,00,00,BB,00,00,00,CC,00,00,00,DD,00,00,00,EE,00,00,00,FF,00,00,00,GG,00,00,00,ii,00,00,00

Now, we need to lookup at the corresponding values. i.e. To check if the Logon/Logoff auditing is enabled, check out the 9 value in the comma separated list. In my computer this is "02", which means Failure Auditing is enabled for this policy. Simple. Similarly, you can read up further data settings.


ii - Ignore these values.
ZZ - 01 indicates auditing is enabled, 00 means disabled.
AA - Restart, Shutdown, System.
BB - Logons and Logoffs.
CC - File and Object Access.
DD - Use of User Rights.
EE - Process Tracking.
FF - Security Policy Management.
GG - User and Group Management.


If the value of the AA / GG letter is 01, success auditing is enabled.
If the value of the AA / GG letter is 02, failure auditing is enabled.
If the value of the AA / GG letter is 03, success and failure auditing is enabled.


posted by Logu Krishnan : 8:11 AM

A Dinner with Shu-Fen Cally Ko

Last weekend Shu-Fen Cally Ko visited Chennai, She is the Regional Director -Community and MVP for Asia Pacific and Greater China. Abhishek Kant - MVP Lead, accompanied her.

Anand M, had Planned the Dinner at Residency Towers. All the MVP’s assembled at the venue by 8 PM, and we went ahead to “The Southern Aroma”, a south Indian delicacy at Residency. The Hall had a good south Indian ambience, and a guy over there was playing sitar in his guitar!! [ouch! Am I misinterpreting ?] Vaidyaraman joined us little later.

Update:Here is a small video of MVP Dinner. Download Video file





Everyone started ordering their food, since I’m a **Forced** Vegetarian these days[grrr…], I did not had much choice and had to order the tomato soup [Gosh! I’ve never been a vegetarian in my whole life, and this tomato soup was simply but Rasam – in south Indian style :-)], Everyone Hogged chicken[:(] and I could barely watch and eat my plain Appam with the Stew Anand had ordered :-)

It was Fun talk, and some interesting things we clarified with Cally was, how to identify the difference between a Chinese and Japanese, the answer by Cally was, "Japanese women would wear a ornament on their neck, hair and/or on hands, and Japanese men would have a very different hair style, and usually Chinese would not opt that hair cut", and immedietly she was put to test the man who stood near by us, to identify him either as Japanese and Chinese… She passed the test by rightly identifying him as japanese...:-D Cally was interested in knowing about the South Indian Food, and I explained her the process of making Idly, Appam, Idiyappam etc… and we did order the same foods, and she managed to eat the idiyappam with her Spoons and Forks :-) one surprise was that she claimed that she cannot eat easily with the Chinese chopsticks, whereas her kid would easily eat peanuts with chopsticks… Yep!! Peanuts with chopsticks?? I myself couldn’t imagine eating using chopsticks… that should be hard :-D

Then we came to business, Abhishek wanted some suggestions and feedback on MVP Program [except the suggestion of changing the MVP Lead ;-)] lot’s of things were discussed regarding MVP Academy, Channel 9-India, Product Teams contact, Hardware pool, Articles, PSS Support etc. Both Cally and Abhishek were in the listening mood and responded patiently.

And while we were out of the Southern Aroma it was almost 11:30 and could hear the roaring sound of Bikes & Barrels… The Dance Pub of Residency…. though it was very tempting to get in, we were good boys[!] and returned back to our homes.

Overall, that was a pleasant evening, and it was surprising to see a Regional Director of Microsoft spending her time, with MVP’s here in Chennai. She was very down to earth and very cool and professional :-)

Moments captured using my XPhone :-)

Cally & Me	Vinod, Abhishek, Cally	Anand M & Vaidhy	Vadivel, Vinod, Abhishek
Anand,Cally,Vinod,Rajesh	Cally @ CNUG Session	Cally @ CNUG Session	A View of CNUG Session

posted by Logu Krishnan : 8:04 AM

Atlast, I Got my MSDN MapPoint Service Account Details

I just got my Map Point Account details mailed by the MS MapPoint Team. This is valid for one year. OK Time to plunge into Map Point :-D


posted by Logu Krishnan : 8:01 AM

A Clear win for Open Source

Recently there was a specification for Document Management, and the client was sliding towards java, but was ready to listen on implementing it differently using Microsoft Technologies. So, I had to dig a little into the specifications.

The project was very interesting as it involves
1. WebDAV – Extension to HTTP 1.1

2. Delta V – This is a cool extension protocol to webDAV, that provides versioning capabilities to Web.

3. DASL - Adds cool searching and locating extensions to webDAV, this project was kick started by Xerox PARC in 1998.

4. Lucene indexing - A Indexing File Format to contain sequence of documents with simple definition: A document is a sequence of fields->A Field is a named sequence of terms->A Term is sting.

5. Novell Netdrive – dosen’t require a prelude :-)

6. Goliath – This will be the client on Mac OS


Since the client was specific on the OS as Linux, I thought this might a good opportunity to get the hands dirty on MONO ! as I was reading through the specifications and some initial research, I happened to hit at Jakarta SLIDE and Catacomb and was surprised to see that SLIDE supports Delta V , DASL and WebDAV. And was pretty much the project the client has asked for ?!!! Now I have to consider on choosing Microsoft technologies…. Because it really makes sense to develop the software in Java considering the cost and delivery time for the project. Since Jakarta SLIDE is open source project we could easily customize it, but implementing Delta V and DASL from scratch in Microsoft World would almost increase the development time thrice ?!! Though it might be Fun and kinda Adventure, we cannot do this at the cost of the customer !!! so, finally I had to give up the specifications to the java team in my office !!! hmm… though I have different opinions on open source, at this moment open source clearly wins.

One another instance where I took advantage is, when I had to implement a portal inside the organization as fast as possible. I took out the Portal SDK from Project Hurricane and setup the portal in 20 Minutes time, with some graphic changes. Project Hurricane an open and free community portal built using .NET FRAMEWORK. Project Hurricane Portal SDK is developed by Dominic and Mark [MVPs based out of UK]. Hurricane is also extensible, pluggable, skinnable !

Open source does help improve the world mutually. And I like this mutual benefits.


posted by Logu Krishnan : 7:56 AM

Yikes….. WMI dependent on Event Log Service ?!!

Recently, one of my friend had a requirement to check for the Eventlog Service state and the startup type. Though I was pretty sure that event log service state cannot be changed and only startup type can be changed, still passed on the code to check the state for the service

strComputer = "."



Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" &

 "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")



Set colServices = objWMIService.ExecNotificationQuery("Select 

* from __instancemodificationevent " & "within 10 where TargetInstance 

isa 'Win32_Service'")



i = 0

Do While i = 0

    Set objService = colServices.NextEvent

    If objService.TargetInstance.State <> _ 

        objService.PreviousInstance.State Then

        Wscript.Echo objService.TargetInstance.Name &  " is " & 

objService.TargetInstance.State & ". The service previously was " & 

objService.PreviousInstance.State & "."

        		

    If objService.TargetInstance.Name="Alerter" Then

        Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" 

& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

 Set colProcessList = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * from Win32_Process

Where Name = 'Notepad.exe'")

	

		For Each objProcess in colProcessList

			objProcess.Terminate()

		Next

End if

    End If

Loop

And the following to check the Service Startup state,

strComputer = "."

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _

& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _

("Select * from Win32_Service where StartMode = 'Manual'")

For Each objService in colServiceList

Msgbox objService.Name

Next

and was pretty sure on the code, so I tested with “Alerter” service as I was lazy to reboot the machine. That guy was pretty cool and used in his code….

He started testing the code by changing the startup type of the event log service, immedietly the code plunked !!! It threw an error “Dependent Service Not Found!!!”

I was little confused, and when I checked the WMI Service, the service was dependent on Eventlog service !!!!!!!!!!!!!! I really do not know this….

Man… Still I Could not find out the reason why WMI is dependent on Event Log Service ????!!! Anybody ???? To me there are no logical reasons behind this ??? alternative checking @ registry…. Somehow I always consider touching registry is ugly !!!

Finally, WMI Dosen’t work if my eventlog is stopped…. Huh….. learned something new !!!!


Can somebody tell me the reason behind this behaviour ? Any Takers ?!!!


posted by Logu Krishnan : 7:54 AM