Technology
HowTo: Enable Aero mode in Windows server 2008 R2
Feb 17th
I recently was setting up a build server and chose Windows Server 2008 R2 to be the OS. Since I was also looking for something like a centralized deployment server for my development team to quickly reflash their testbeds, I was very h appy to see the 2008 R2 server’s “Deployment server” role…but, wait, this is a big saga and is for another post. This one is all about “Aero”!
After installation, I noticed my Windows server 2008 R2 booted in “Windows classic” mode. This was an eye sore, to say the least, after having used Windows 7’s themes. My machine has GeForce 9500GS along with the proper x64 driver. So I know it is capable of doing Aero. But, Windows “Personalization” option was not allowing me to select any Aero theme.
Quick googling showed me that I was not the first person trying to solve this – Here’s the link I used & found very helpful – http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/01/09/windows-server-2008-r2-beta-aero-enabled-workstation/. Though I had “Desktop experience” feature installed, my “Themes” service was not enabled.
I set it to “Automatic” and started the service. But, still Windows was not allowing me to set the Aero theme. If you are facing the same issue, remember to reboot at this point — that is after enabling the “Themes” service, do reboot once. Once logged in again, you will be able to switch to Aero!
BTW, its been close to 2 years now since I posted here — was heads down on a project all the time 
. We did a Wireless Display solution that recently hit the market. Will post more on it soon.
HowTo: Buy Wii points online from India
Aug 5th
Though Nintendo hasn’t officially launched Wii yet in India, the number of Wiis in India *is* increasing. 3 of my friends, who returned from US last week, bought Wii I don’t know how they got hold of one, as it is in extremely high demand over there now!
One of the initial problems you’d face trying to setup the Wii in India is the power converter. You *cannot* plugin Wii directly in to one of our power sockets, it will just burn! Unless you want to do the burn-in (!?) test with your Wii, I suggest you go out and buy a 220-110v power adapter (stepdown). It is available in many wattages, for Wii a 50W or 100W should suffice.
The only other thing you’d find a bit problematic is buying Wii points. Mine is a US Wii, so whenever I try buying Wii points online, it asks for a credit card along with the US address / Zip code blah blah…this one can be real irritating! Don’t lose heart though. There is a simple/effective method (Based on this post). The trick is to find a region which accepts Indian credit cards with out asking too many questions The region found by the original poster is Brazil.
How to buy Wii points from India (Thanks to StringFellow):
- Change your Wii country to Brazil. You will find this option in Wii Settings section. Wii will now ask you to confirm the user agreement for the new region. Do press ACCEPT here, else you will get an error later when accessing the Woo shop.
- Go to Wii Shop. If you already have “My Nintendo” account at Nintendo.com linked to your Wii shop account, Wii will warn you that the link will be broken. Don’t worry about this message. You can set this up again later.
- Once in, click on the “Add Wii points”. Enter your CC number, name, expiry date and CVV. In the next screen enter any random Brazilian postal code. I used Brazilian Discovery Channel postal code. You can find more of these postal codes in Google.
That’s all, it should work! I bought USD30 worth of Wii points and it worked flawlessly. Once you have the points, you can reset your Wii country to USA (if yours is a US Wii like mine) and reconnect the Wii Shop login with your Nintendo.com login.
What to do with the Wii points?
You can buy Wii Channels, Virtual Console games or WiiWare games online from the Wii shop, using the Wii points. I strongly suggest you buy Wii Internet (Opera) channel. It costs only 500points (USD5.0) and it is worth it. Quickly checking the Orkut, sitting in the couch is bliss, I tell you
HowTo: Use Dosbox as a Quick & Dirty disassembler
Apr 19th
Dosbox is an open source DOS emulator available for many OS flavors. Dosbox allows you to run any old DOS game, relive some of the golden games of DOS era. It has full support for multiple video standards (VGA, CGA, Tandy,…) and sound cards (Adlib, SB, …). Amazing program! I was even able to bring up Windows 1.0 under that
Not many use this powerful emulator as a disassembler though. I have used this technique to disassemble many programs with out resorting to IDA or Sourcer.
Switched to 1Mbps Airtel Unlimited DSL
Apr 19th
When BSNL came up with the 2Mbps and 1Mbps plan, most of my friends who had Airtel 256Kbps line, jumped on to the BSNL bandwagon. I didn’t, for the simple reason that BSNL came with a data transfer limit! That is, only the first 1.25GB or so is free every month and after that you pay per MB. Ridiculous! Since I have had some bad experiences earlier with my 512Kbps/1.5GB-limit Airtel plan, I decided to stay away from all these and stick to my good old 256Kbps *unlimited*. Soon after that, Airtel upgraded me to 512Kbps unlimited, which I took with out much thinking. Now, after 1 year, Airtel offered (again!) to upgrade me to 1Mbps unlimited!!
The total amount comes to 2,222INR/month. Only today the 1Mbps plan got activated. Look at the following picture to see my new 1Mbps in action, downloading MinGW at 128KBps Worth every penny (or paisa…whatever!!)
21 Virus and other Malware payload videos
Mar 26th
When I was uploading my Cascade virus video yesterday, I found a lot of interesting videos on the same topic. I enjoyed them thoroughly. I am listing the ones that I found interesting here to make things easy for others to find these videos easily. Hope you like this list too.
Do let me know if you come across any such videos online, I am a big sucker for these
Following "In Action" videos were all uploaded by onNeutral. Professionally done. excellent stuff! I haven’t included any info on the worms/virii he talks about, as he has added more than enough info in the videos (read the red ticker bar to the bottom in all these videos)
1) In Action: Blaster Worm
See the Blaster worm attack another computer and how both of them attack a simulated http://windowsupdate.com server.
2) In Action: Melissa Worm
Cascade Virus: Down the memory lane.
Mar 24th
I have always been fascinated with computer virii. My first exposure to computer virii was back in 1994, when my 360KB floppy disk got infected by STONED. The hype around virii was so much and I was so misinformed, I kept that infected disk in the jacket, away from all other diskettes I owned for 2 weeks!! No, I am not kidding.
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:
Virus group 29A disbanded – who’s next?
Mar 10th
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.
2008 Top 20 Billionaires: What do they do with so much money?
Mar 8th
Warren Buffett overtook Bill Gates and that Mexican fellow to become the world’s richest person. His net worth is at $62 billion USD.
Pop quiz: Do you know how many zeroes are there in a billion??
New Yahoo R&D lab: Is Yahoo hiring or firing?
Mar 6th
Yahoo announced a new R&D lab in Bangalore yesterday. This lab, it looks like, will be the center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies. To quote Washington Post: “The company has hired Rajeev Rastogi, who has moved from head of Bell Labs India to lead the new lab, and assemble a team of scientists and engineers to focus on new approaches to information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing, the company said. It did not provide details of the number of staff it plans to hire for the lab. The company plans to hire sociologists, micro-economists, and computational scientists among other categories of staff for the lab, the spokeswoman said.“
Interestingly, only recently Yahoo! India asked 45 of its employees to quit. And, AFAIK, Yahoo is expected to let go many more across the world. So, why is Yahoo! opening a new R&D lab in India now? All the new reqs that have been posted in their job DB, as well as the walk-ins they have setup show that the new lab is not going to be staffed only by internal transfers…hmm…external hiring in full flow, when internally, people are being redeployed. Crazy, eh?!
Also, what is the guarantee whoever joins now in this R&D lab won’t be asked to leave tomorrow, when Microsoft takes over Yahoo?! Hmm..too many “what if”s, I feel.
Spamless inbox == Utopia??
Feb 16th
I get only spam in my JumbledThoughts inbox nowadays. My wife never misses to make fun of this; Though it is irritating (getting spam, not my wife’s jabs!), I have learnt to live with that, like all the other netizens. Daily my mail client downloads close to 50 mails, 40 out of which tell me why I should buy viagra or how to become the next richest man in the world (Have you ever wondered why the person who sent that didn’t become richer using his *own* technique??). After being spammed for 10 years now, I have kinda become an expert in weeding out the unwanted mails. But, amongst all the usual crap, the following mail caught my eye some days back.
Dear Sir/Madam,I am Mr. G. Bertino, STMicroelectronics Company. GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.Our company deals on the importation and
exportation.Such as we mainly manufacture & export all kinds of micro and
electronics,who has it worldwide headquater s in GENEVA
SWITZERLAND.My company is currently recruiting Representatives/Agents
that will assist us with some logistics jobs as well asreceiving
payments on our behalf and remitting back to us.Please contact
us for more information if you are interested in being an agent
of my company. You will be given more information about the job
and your remuneration.I expect your favorable response.
Regards,
Mr. G. Bertino
STMicroelectronics Company
website: http://www.st.com/stonline/
