Dilbertology, New age Software Engineer

First Security Hole in Vista

First of the many holes in the Microsofts much hyped Secure Vista. Check this article published today

Vista security flaw blow to Microsoft

Hutch and Security

couple of months back, i needed to make a payment of hutch, and since i could not find any time to goto a hutch shop, i tried their online payment service at http://www.hutch.co.in, you can register your mobile number in the site and then using the options in their site you can make online payments. curiously i wanted to check how good their website is and how secure it was, i went to the viewbills section, which will allow you to view all the bills online, with information about the numbers you called , your address and amount etc. They had provided a great security feature in their page !!!, to stop people from seeing their highly secured HTML, they open their dialogs in a new window and disable the menu and right click so that people will not be able to view what they are doing.

it takes any tom a minute to see the http request going out from a webpage and i just opened the source of the information they are sending, to my Horror i saw them embedding a common username and password in the information they are sending and i could easily change some details in the Post request and Bingo !! i was seeing the details of other users !!!!!, unbelivable ?believe it, thats how secure these websites are.

I called up the hutch call centre immediatly and told them this problem and after trying 15 mins and listening to their "You and I song", finally it got connected, and a girl picked up and said how she can asssit me. I reported the problem i found and she cooly said "its not possible sir !!, and she then advised me that i may be doing something wrong !! and she wholeheartedly explained where to click properly !!, it took me 10 mins to make her understand the problem, when i started telling the details, it was over her head and she told me she will transfer to tech dept, so after 2 min one more guy came online and i explained him the problem, he didn't have the patience to listen to me and asked me to send a mail to customer support !!!!, well for all this time i thought i am doing a favour for them and know i knew its our problem if we are using their service !!. I left him my number to call if he want details and till date never heard back. I also sent a mail to their support explaining the problem and till date no replies.

Last month beforw coming to france, i happen to visit the hutch site again and just checked if they have corrected this issue !!, No no they thought may be sharing all the bills online is not a big issue !!, its democracy so everybody have right to information, is not it ?!.

After that while having coffee with one my system admin friends, i told this story to him and he happened to be working at Hutch previously and he didn't believed me, i showed him right in his machine and hew was surprised and he called few of his friends in Hutch and told them.

Next day i heard from him that the issue is corrected now. May be they have corrected now, i didn't check. The point i am trying to make here is, how service providers in india so careless about security ??. they think purchasing costly servers and installing few softwares and sending data will make their service secure (you can even see this big words in any website that their site is SSL 10000000 encrypted, when a software itself is fundamentally flawed, no technology will help you to make a secure service. I hope some higher manager from hutch read this and takes necessary action. even if they want to contact, my email is there and they are welcome to contact.

This is just one example, may be if i look really seriously into their site i can find lots of problems, and same applies to all other service providers. Please be careful with security in your sites, make security a priority, people trust you big companies and leave the information in your hands for granted. i am not trying to cram here about this not so big effort of mine in finding the problem, I am as worried as you people what if another guy is doing the same and accessing my account ?!.

Is C++ and COM still relevent

Most of the people who join as freshers in my company ask this question sometime or other. Most of the applications we develop nowadays is generally in .Net and when they start to learn the nuissances of this new platform, they want to know how best they can go about learning it. Most of the guidance they get is to catch hold of a famous authors book or to consult MSDN quick samples and to get started. well, i agree if you want to learn a concept in most primitive way and still able to create applications then it looks fine. But its like trying to be a Zidane in one month after starting football.

The only way you can master and understand any technologyis to go in depth into its basics. .Net platform was not a discovery done at one shot, it is the final culmination of 30 years of software progression and is built upon numerous technologies, so when you want to master it, it takes lots of effort and reading into these foundation elements. Its a pity to see programmers nowadays offfered with the comfort they have, day one they see the Visual studio environment which allows them to create a running application in 5 seconds, according to me this is a complete disaster for a programmer in his initial years, he starts to look into the API provided in the MSDN and goes about programming within a month, resulting in increasing productivities for his company, but in reality he is no better than an computer operator who is trained to do a particular job and when a new programming platform comes he starts this cycle once again.

For me if you want to be a real programmer, you should be first very strong in your basics,
Operating system working and atleast some knowledge of C++ programming and bit of knowledge about the hardware will not hurt. if you are writing any serious Component based applications then a small investment in the COM, DCOM and Corba is a Must. without knowing the shortcomings and forte of these technologies, you can never grasp any technolgies which are built on their learnings.

"You should know the Past, to Build the future !"

Coming back to the initial question of relevence of C++ and COM, YES !! they are still highly relevent to all of us, not because still 80-90% of the good software out there (atleast on MS platforms) are done using these, but these are the main foundation blocks on which new technolgies are built upon, go and dust off those old C++ and COM books and start reading today.

Here are few good COM links

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/html/a3b78086-0f02-4b3f-a856-46bfcf4457f4.asp

http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_ole.html


Recommended Books
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Essential COM, By DonBox

Inside COM, By Dale Rogerson

Some Good Artciles
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http://www.codeproject.com/script/articles/list_articles.asp?userid=24366
http://www.codeproject.com/com/comintro.asp

Programmers of 21st Century

There is an interview of Bjarne Stroustrup published in MIT website (if you don't know stroustrup stop reading further). He discusses the future of C++ and also his opinions about the modern day software and languages, very interesting reading, don't miss it.

Trouble with Programming
More Trouble with Programming

http://www.research.att.com/~bs/MIT-TR-original.pdf

Also there is a wealth of information at http://www.research.att.com/~bs/interviews.html check it out !!

Check also Stroustrups site at http://www.research.att.com/~bs/

Brittle Pot

Its 12:16 AM on the clock and i could not sleep, so plugging myself to net again and blogging about few of questions that causing me headaches from past 2 days.

1. Few months back few of my french friends were in Bangalore, while coming after finishing lunch from a restaurant, they asked me a question, what i feel about where India is heading, can indias future built upon software ??.

2. Saw one of my friend Aruns Site, he mentioned somewhere that few of his friends asked the question why he is creating a website and also he mentioned he was no good at maths when in college, allthough he is appreciating now !!, that when he applied it practically (Through concept of photography), is there something basically wrong here ??.

3. One of my friend working in IISC who is working on pure science on Fluid Mechanics, was telling the difficulty of getting himself a properly paid job.

4. if you do a survey of the resumes in any software company in india, you can see most of the engineers from science different than Computers !, and who are really good in their respective subjects. whats the great fun here, if you just want some people, who want to be software TypeWriters (read as Engineers !), remove these time consuming degrees and start some langauge training institues.

5. A guy who really doesn't know whats the difference between an OS Thread and Chinese Noodle is still paid a Bomb just to email and chat in companies, on other hand a pure mathematician ends up being an teacher for primary school ?!!.

6. you wake up every morning and think of what are you going to do that day and inside you feel suffocation and you can feel somebody inside you trying to get out, but could not due to the self articulated boundaries.

7. What exactly i am doing !?, am i really happy in the things i am doing ?

8. I always thought the things they teached in college and school, was nothing but some *%&*^W@#, after 4 years out of college i still feel the same, but the irony is the same system is praised everywhere, is it just me or the world has gone mad !??

9. A Physics Lecturer teaching about Atom, shouts at a student who asks a question on planetary motion. is he rightful in doing this ?

10. Ask 99% of the Software Engineers, why exactly they are in software, the answers range from undying love for technology and opportunities for creative thinking !!, well only one word comes to my mind about them, Bu*@#$!. So does it mean, other feilds are dead and superior than the computer science ??

11. Where we all went wrong and was there really any options ?? or is it too late to correct ??

12. Are we all cowards in accepting our helplessness and becoming slaves to the society, bound to moral values and relations and fear for survival, is there any way out ??!

13. When we say we think, are we really thinking !!??

14. Time for me to go to a Psychiatrist ?? for getting above questions in my mind !!.

you think the above questions are anywhere related ??? I will be happy to see some comments,

Some Flash Back

My Friend Arun has finally has his website up and running, check out at www.voidmain.in !!, but still needs to implement his feedback feature so am using this entry for that. today i had to take day off from office, since i had a bad headache and some eye problem, due to the temperature variations here in france, which is new to me. When i started to read his website all the flashback of my yester years started to runlike a 70 MM movie. How can i forget those years !!.

First i need to tell something about this guy, its rare to find nowadays people with as diverse interests as arun, i met around in 2002 when i joined my first company xxxx in mysore, i was just out of college then and i was looking for some job then (well my life itself can be a big novel, and one day i really want to share all those experiences). it was 2002 and it was a disaster year for all us fresh graduates to land up in a Job. but one of the companies in my home town was kind enough to offer me a job and that too with a salary !!, (my first salary was 4000 Rupees !! that was lots of money for me then). i reached office that day early in the morning and was waiting for joining formalities to complete when i saw this guy in his spectacles with a cotton bag on his shoulders with plain clothes walk in, he looked more like a poet trying to sell one of his books !, later i came to know, he had come for an interview for J2EE position in this company. that time for me it was really hard to understand when he told he left a good job in bangalore after working for 8 years !! and wanted to settle in mysore (and working for 2 years in bangalore, now i know why he did so). there are very few people working in this IT feild, for whom i have some respect left and Arun is one of them (personally he is very close friend of mine), he is one of the fellows who gives the respect the programming really deserves and enjoys it at the same time, currently he is happily working as software consultant in mysore.

Coming back to the website itself its as diverse as arun itself :), good to see plain o html website after a long time !!, quick to load with not much glibberish. you can find varied topics from art to technology there, but few of the topics really interested me, one being the chess controversies by my another chess friend vishwas and another one by arun, "learnig curve". regarding the former's article, since i am chess player myself, i have my share of comments to share on that , which i will be discussing soon in more than detail soon. Every time a olympic happens, everybody in india wonders, when small countries never heard of, can win so many medals why India, Country with one Billion Homosapiens cannot win some medals !!, i hope to provide some of the answers, atleast from chess perspective, in my next blog entry.

Now the main topic i wanted to write from long time. After arun mentioned in one of his articles on how he was involved in implementing object javascript, he left out one more thing there, they were also the first team to implement that application in AJAX which is the fancy name you can heard nowadays everywhere, we never heard of those fancy names in that time and the version of AJAX we implemented at that time was done inhouse by us.


i want to tell you all about a small interesting story here, when i decided to look for better opportunities and make a switch to bangalore during 2004, one of the companies i went for interview was WIPRO, at that time in my mind there was only 2 companies in the world one was WIPRO and another was INFOSYS, unfortunately the technologies i was working with GIS and OORDBMS were seldom heard of those days (atleast in the companies i went interview for), and there was not any fancy names for the technologies like Object based ECMAscript and asynchronous client scripting (now AJAX), the team lead in wipro who took my first round knew well i am almost a fresher in industry terms (i was 1 year experienced then), after asking initial CLR and namespace questions, he wanted to show his technical superiority on me and started asking do i know AOP (its aspect oriented programming), allthough i knew little bit, i thought it was safe to say no, now our lead had a bright shine on his face and asked do i know MDA !!, i said no sir, but you i do have worked with some good techniques on client side object based javascript and client side asynchronous programming and SVG!!, that guy never heard of these things (because still there was no fancy names given for this like MDA, SOA, SOAP ... and still no books avaailble), in another 5 mins my interview was over and i knew as soon as it finished that i will not get that job. b Now if any Wipro aspirants going for interview, don't be surprised if you encounter the same guy, trying to scare a fresher and stamp his authority asking some AJAX questions !!.


In short career span of 4.5 years i have worked in 6 companies, yes you read right !!, some due to job change and some due to acquisitions of small fish by big whales (read companies) and this has given me a chance into different work cultures and to meet different people ranging from Project managers to highend CEOs, its quite an experience to work with different kind of project managers and CEO in service modelled companies in India. I have been reading Dilbert comic by Scott Adams and some of the strips are really amazing, since i have experienced the same scenarios numerous times !!, i really want to go on discussing on each of those but it will be too long for a single blog entry, i will be just insert some of those strips for you to enjoy :). its 12:45 PM on my clock and time to catch some sleep :)

Best way of learning

Somebody asked me oneday, what is the best of learning, well i was lucky to have some friends from college, who were really good at this, the way of learning is not reading book after book, its the way of seeing things differently and questioning yourself at each point. don't take any information on its face value, simply because einstein has told e=mc2, doesn't mean we can take it for granted, you have to go indepth into a problem domain to appreciate the things. be it e=mc2 or any thing in programming for that matter. in the end keep in mind you are as good as you really know you are, and not in the way people think you are !, be ready at all times to accept your shortcomings, there is nothing wrong in accepting your weakness, but the strength lies in willingness to correct yourself and learn. and to conclude, no body can teach you things, they can guide you, you should be your own teacher. i really pity some people walking around assuming they know certain things, infact once you get the feeling that you know something, you are digging your own hole.

I have been leading some projects in last few years and people tell me i am a disaster as a lead, may be when it comes to people management, i am surely am. But i always tried to stop people from making same mistakes, what i did with my life, sooner or later people do realize that :) and appreciate, for others i can only opologize. leave a comment if you think i was wrong !.

My Technical Blog

I will limit this blog to my experiece in Pacy and my phiolosphical Talk, for the technical side of me, you can check my site at www.abstractlabs.co.in, well not yet, still have to upload the site contents from my laptop to the site. well atleast for vishwas who keeps on reminding me about the site :).

After a long break (well i did right in deciding to take a break and slowing down past 2 months !!) i am now feeling the itch to get started again and in a big way :), the change of place and work has surely brought my firy spirits back !!.

Cross Roads

The week went very quickly, with work. The days feel very short here since it will be pretty late when we see the sun shining and also gets dark quickly in the evenings.

it was pretty cold today morning, with normandy recording a new low of -2 Centigrade and looks like it will continue its dip in the coming days. Have got fed up with the food at the restaurant, one week it was ok to try, but nowe i am really missing my food. our cargo has arrived in france, but it will take us another 2 weeks to get the cargo, since we still don't have a house here. we went around the town yesterday, with the help of a german lady in the marketing team and we visited few houses, but 1 was 2 small and another was ok, but was pretty bad in shape. we will be going on monday to see few more and hopefully we will get one or else we need to see houses in vernon or evreux which are 15 and 20 KM respectively from here, the former looks good bet, but the problem is transportation, since only few buses are there.

After long time in my life, i am spending time alone far away. This assignment is giving me lot to think about myself and my life ahead. for sure i know, i am at the cross roads in my journey of life and this is a important stop. the journey has his price, but its worth the price, since i am able to view and experience life from different perspective both personally and at work.

Now i know, what experience really means, its like a man trying to climb up the tower, at the bottom you don't have any fear, your feets are firm on the ground, but as you start climbing up the ladder, the surroundings grew larger and your vision broader, you will get to know how narrow your vision was before. After climbing few steps you will really notice, you don't have ground to support and you are on your own and the fear of height gets into you and here you need to decide you want to get down or continue. this is the critical stage and your ascendency depends on how strong you are in the next few steps and i am not talking about my career here !.