Razz's Ramblings

Pex - Automated White Box Testing Tool for .NET

2010-10-07T16:28:00.000-04:00

Haven't updated this blog in ages it seems. Its not that I haven't been working on interesting stuff all this time ... it's just that once you get out of your habit of keeping up with your blog, its hard to get back to it. I will try and be more regular and post all the cool and techy stuff I get to do, not to mention all the stuff I learn about on the web.

So first off is Pex (now called Pex and Moles) is a product of Microsoft Researchers Peli de Halleux and Nikolai Tillman. Pex is an automated white-box testing tool that will generate unit tests for your code with a pretty high code coverage. It uses symbolic execution to accomplish this. There's a significant body of research that has gone into automated test generation over the past decade or so, and concolic testing is one such area that has enjoyed a great deal of attention. Now, as a result, we can see the testing field evolving to incorporate these newly-developed techniques. You can read more about Pex here, or try it out for yourself at: pexforfun.com.

I took a course last fall (yes, it took me this long to blog about it!) where we had to use Pex on an open source project and present our results. It was an exercise in test generalization (using parameterized unit testing). We chose xUnit.net as our target program and employed Pex with Code Contracts on it. The result was a slight increase in code coverage (coverage was already pretty high), but we thought using class invariants and code contracts, in general, made the code more testable.

Windows 7 Upgrade

2009-10-23T01:34:00.001-04:00

Also posted on my personal blog, Waking Life.

As I mentioned in one of my posts earlier, I recently upgraded to Windows 7 Professional. Unlike the installation of Windows Vista which warned me that several of my software are not going to be compatible with it (most importantly, my anti-virus at that time), Windows 7 did not come up with anything of that sort. By setting device installation settings to Automatic, Windows 7 was able to locate the drivers for all plug-n-play devices (my camera, wireless mouse and most importantly, my legacy HP deskjet 3653 printer). It was a pain to get that same printer to work on Vista and I had to install drivers manually for the wireless mouse and keyboard.

As far as UI is concerned, the look-and-feel of the OS is pretty much like Vista except for the taskbar where you can now "pin down" your most frequently used programs. And by hovering the mouse over any open programs that are pinned to the taskbar, you can see a live thumbnail of the window courtesy of a functionality called AeroPeek. Another cool feature connected to the taskbar are Jump Lists, which allow you to access commonly-used features in a program by right-clicking on its icon in the taskbar. They are essentially a replacement of context menus for the taskbar and make your life a lot easier. For example, I can right-click on Windows Live Messenger on the taskbar and change my status. You can drag-and-drop other items on a program's jump list depending on what you access the most.

Besides being noticeably faster (in terms of general use, booting, shutting down and hibernating), one of the things I'm really glad they got rid of are those annoying UAC pop-ups that popped up every second asking your permission to run one thing or the other. Windows 7 also conserves more battery power for your laptop. It dims the display after 2mins of idle time. If you specifically increase the brightness of your display when running on battery, Windows 7 remembers that every time you disconnect the power chord (Vista didn't).

In other changes, Wordpad, Paint, and Calculator look completely different with ribbon bars and WordPad has the added functionality of opening .docx files now, so need to install Office 2007 compatibility packs for opening Word documents anymore. Several more usability features have been added in Windows 7 that allow you to snap windows to size instantly or clear the desktop of all windows by a quick back and forth motion by grabbing the top of a window. See these awesome ads for a demo of these features and more.

There's an automatic desktop wallpaper changer built-in allowing you to set your chosen desktop backgrounds at specified time intervals (default is 30 minutes). You can also finally change the background of your logon screen. Last but certainly not the least are libraries for arranging documents, pictures, videos etc. No longer are you restricted to put all your stuff in specific folders on the C drive. Libraries are the aggregation of your chosen files from all across the storage media in use. Gone is the hassle of remembering file and folder locations since you can access them at anytime through the libraries. The libraries also appear on Open/Save dialogs of all programs which makes file-management a piece of cake!

Ok thats all I could think of for now. In short, Windows 7 refines a lot of the things we saw in Vista while improving on its basic functionality. Boot times, resuming from hibernation etc. are noticeably quicker and everything works just fine. There's no reason NOT to like it. I'm certainly loving it!

Visual Studio 2008 Installer Problems

2009-04-18T22:36:00.003-04:00

If you're having issues modifying/uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 Standard, Professional or Team Editions, and your setup is continuously failing giving the following message:

A problem has encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.

No need to despair. This occurs due to a VS2008 hotfix - KB952241. Go to Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs; Click on View Installed Updates in the left pane and type 'KB952241' in the top-left search box. Double-click to uninstall it. Now, the Visual Studio 2008 installation should proceed without failing.

The alternate option of uninstalling and re-installing the whole VS2008 package is way too time consuming. Hope this helped save you some precious time!

Opening large text files in Windows

2009-03-28T20:24:00.005-04:00

If you were ever to run across the problem of opening large text files (upwards of 300-400MB), and Notepad comes up short for you, worry not for you have EditPad Lite. I had been using Notepad++ for a while but it simply refused to open one of my datasets (size:450MB) for a course project. Browsing for alternatives, I found this little gem which is free for non-commercial use. Sweet!

Microsoft Recite

2009-03-04T18:25:00.003-05:00

Another cool new technology preview from Microsoft. This time it's in the realm of voice recognition, aptly named Microsoft Recite.

From Nick's blog:

How it works -- geeked-out version

Microsoft Recite analyses speech features using an ensemble of supervised and unsupervised classifiers and employs a noise robust approximate indexing and scoring of generic symbol streams for matching.

To Install Microsoft Recite

Microsoft Recite is a free download for Windows Mobile devices (version 6.0 and higher). Simply direct the browser of your Windows Mobile device to http://recite.microsoft.com/download. Standard carrier rates apply to the data sessions and download time on your mobile device. Those fees are dependent on your data plan with your carrier.

Watch the demo here.

Office 2019

2009-03-02T16:32:00.004-05:00

Microsoft's vision for the future - 2019 to be precise. Impressive if you ask me.

While the technological progress in the last decade alone has been nothing short of astounding, we are still far from that point where all the technologies work together, interoperate with each other at one place. That's what Microsoft envisions for the next decade, and such is the pace of technological advancement nowadays that this may just become a reality in 10 years time!

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Video: Future Vision Montage&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Siftables - Smart Blocks

2009-02-13T13:37:00.002-05:00

Check out this cool demo by David Merril entitled Siftables.They're like minicomputers, that can work together and do fascinating things.

Elbot

2008-11-27T13:30:00.003-05:00

Check out this year's winner of Loebner Artificial Intelligence prize. It managed to fool 3 out of 12 judges into believing that it was a human as it answered queries posted by them. The other respondents were human as, you might have gathered, this is a simulation of Turing's test.

http://www.elbot.com

Go ahead and talk to it! :)

Assigning values to T-SQL varaibles using Dynamic Queries

2008-07-14T01:08:00.003-04:00

Although not recommended for security reasons, Dynamic SQL can prove to be quite handy when it comes to customizing queries to run on multilple tables/databases. There are certain situations when using Dynamic SQL is the better option, at the same time being reasonably safe. I ran into one such situation when I used it during a backend process of transferring records from one database to another, with the user completely oblivious to the whole thing.

Anyway, I ran into a little obstacle when I needed to assign the result of a query being run using dynamic sql to a local variable of a stored procedure. Here's how I resolved it:

-- Declare a variable to hold our sql statement
Declare @sql nvarchar(max)

-- Declare the variable that should store the result
Declare @vcTemp varchar(max)

-- Do a select on a table, basically write any query you want as long as
-- it uses our variable
Select @sql = N'Select top 1 @vcTemp = from '

-- Call the built-in sp_executesql SP specifying our varibale as the
-- output
EXEC sp_executesql @sql, N'@vcTemp varchar(max) output', @vcTemp output

-- Doing a simple select will reveal, the value has been read into it
Select @vcTemp

It was a cool new thing I learned, so I thought I'd share. Hope this helped.

All about NULLS

2008-03-30T21:47:00.001-04:00

Here's a neat little article on all you need to know about database NULLS, and common misconceptions when dealing with and/or comparing them with other values.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/links/668145/36205

Windows Vista Experience Index

2008-02-28T10:52:00.004-05:00

My Windows Experience Index for Vista Home Premium is 4.0 (as shown in the pic above). My PC's specs are:

Intel Pentium 4 2.6GHz.
120 GB 7200RPM Ultra-ATA HDD
1GB Kingston DDR-400 RAM
nVidia GeForce 7600GT - 256MB Video RAM

From Windows Vista's standards, my PC turns out to be a "very good performing PC" even though I have a pretty old processor and motherboard chipset. Vista loves graphic memory no end and my GeForce 7600GT gives it all the memory it could possibly need. This means that I can play my favorite games with reasonable detail (one or two levels below Full Detail) and that too with only 1 GB RAM. Browsing around on the Internet, you'd find people arguing whether or not 1 GB RAM is enough for Vista. As you can see from my specs above, it's more than enough as my PC runs smooth as hell. I can run Firefox, Windows Media Player (with video playing), AVG Virus Scan and MS Word and my memory consumption is 75% only and it's slightly sluggish. More than acceptable if you ask me.

Obviously, I am limited by my board to upgrade RAM (since there are DDR2's around which I'll end up upgrading to someday) ... but if you have 1GB, you need not worry you'll run Vista just fine. Just make sure you don't clutter your Windows with too many startup programs and other stuff that can potentially slow it down. There's a nice article here by the Vista team that can help you boost your Vista's speed.

Good old Windows

2008-02-17T11:28:00.003-05:00

You know you're running Windows when there are a plethora of programs that have gone unresponsive. there's no respite, as Task Manager simply does not show, neither does pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del do anything (In actual fact, it brings up an error that says: Logon process failed to create the security options dialog) And all I did was close a Firefox tab! Puhhleaseee! This leaves you with no option but to open Notepad, pen down a few lines in frustration and go for the RESET button.

Good old Windows! They should change it's tag line to something like:

Windows Vista - Crashes the same way as it's predecessor

And that's saying something! =)

Installing Apache, mySQL and PHP on VISTA

2008-02-05T05:49:00.000-05:00

I remember this installation on XP used to be simple as hell before mySQL5 came out and PHP stopped their built-in support. Then, getting the right DLL for Apache servers proved to be a problem and for some time, users had to download the DLLs for the newer version from the web! While it ain't so messed up any more, installing these things on VISTA is still a bit tricky - certainly not as straightforward as before. For the record, I have VISTA Home Premium so I don't really if some of the issues I faced here also hold true for other editions.

So, to get started, I first installed Apache in C: drive only to find out VISTA did not let it create the configuration files - httpd.conf and mime.types. A workaround, install somewhere else or copy manually. While the installation steps are simple and need no walking through, I would, however, suggest changing the Control Apache Server shortcuts to always 'Run in Administrator' mode and set compatibility to 'Windows XP SP2' for Monitor Apache Servers link to get it to work.

Next up is mySQL. This installation is a breeze and needs no explaining IMO - no seriously!

Lastly, PHP - having extracted the .ZIP to C:\php\ (or whatever directory you wish), make sure you copy the files ntwdblib.dll and libmysql.dll to C:\windows\system32\ or else you can say good bye to mySQL support in PHP. Also, remember to uncomment these lines in php.ini:
extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll

All this may sound simple enough, but without any prior experience of VISTA's circumspect behavior in such installations, this took quite some of my time. Btw, all this was in an effort to test Joomla's latest stable release for a bug fix which I'm glad to report has been fixed! Hurrah!

Here's the sofwtare versions I worked with:
Apache 2.2.4
PHP 5.2.2
MySQL 5.0
and of course VISTA Home Premium

Hope it helped!

Visual Studio .NET 2008 and the LinqDataSource

2007-09-23T13:26:00.001-04:00

View this cool video by Dan Wahlin where he demonstrates how terribly easy data reading / manipulation becomes with a LinqDataSource object. Personally, I haven't delved deep enough into the new ASP.NET version, but I plan to do that very soon. So more articles on Orcas and the like are sure to follow. Meanwhile, watch this great video!

View the Video!

Unit Testing Framework in Dynamics AX

2007-09-12T08:50:00.000-04:00

One of the impressive features of Dynamics AX is its built-in Unit Testing framework. You create classes using a specific naming convention so that they are runnable on the framework. In these classes, unit tests are written as individual methods. Each test case (or method - whatever you may call it) can include a number of tests in the form of assertions. Moreover, test cases can be contained within test suite classes or as part of a project in MorphX. Testing can be done from the Unit Test toolbar from which individual test cases, test suites, or test projects can be executed.

Test results can be viewed from the Unit Test toolbar that indicates the test passed or failed state, per case and test, and can even include code coverage measures for the classes and methods that are tested.

Nifty eh ?

Microsoft Dynamics AX

2007-07-23T08:40:00.000-04:00

Updates have been long overdue on this blog and now’s as good a time as any … so here goes. Having graduated from NED University as a Computer and Information Systems Engineer in March, I had been seeking meaningful employment opportunities and was fortunate enough to find a good job as a Software Developer at a promising software organization (name not mentioned on purpose).

The bulk of my work requires me to get acquainted with (for now) with Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0. For those who do not know what Microsoft Dynamics AX is, check out the Wikipedia article here. In short, the entire Dynamics solution is an attempt by Microsoft to gain some foothold in a market led by Oracle’s SAP solution. Anyhow, I have been most impressed with the work they have put into this great software and the potential it carries for more cool features. It has its own IDE called MorphX and programming language, called X++. It is object-oriented in nature and bears a close resemblance to C# and Java. Needless to say, I’ll be blogging a lot more about Dynamics from now on since now my job requires me to work directly with it. So more on it later, you could take a look at its official web site for now:

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/ax/default.mspx

Final Year Project

2007-04-08T10:13:00.000-04:00

Autonomous Roverbot using Scene Analysis

ABSTRACT
Autonomous Roverbot using Scene Analysis covers all the major aspects of Computer Engineering from Software to Hardware and from Signaling to Control. The idea behind the project is to develop an autonomous vehicle which will be controlled through a remote station. The vehicle is fitted with a wireless video camera which transmits live video to a base-station and is processed through MATLAB. The base-station, then, submits controlling signals to the vehicle to navigate through its course. Such a robot could be used for surveillance, scanning pipes (through manual or limited autonomous control) and tracking moving objects.

You can download the final report from here:
http://raza.abbas.googlepages.com/AutonomousRoverbotusingSceneAnalysis.pdf

The Presentation is also available; You can get it from here:
http://raza.abbas.googlepages.com/ARUSA_Presentation.pdf

Vista : More than just a pretty face

2007-03-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

Insightful look into the features of Windows Vista. Very well-written.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars

Vista Upgrade

2007-03-10T12:24:00.000-05:00

Now that I finally had my hands on a licensed copy of Windows Vista (Home Premium), I was itching to get it on my system and install it for good. I ran the `Upgrade Advisor` before starting the install and it pointed out a couple of issues that had to be fixed before I could proceed. Most of these issues were to do with programs which were simply not compatible for the new OS for e.g., NERO, TweakXP, Norton Anti-Virus, ZoneAlarm etc. but all that was understandable and I could always get their newer versions. But the thing that worried was a warning on the `Intel System Management BIOS Driver`. After every other driver from Intel checked out fine, why in the world did the Vista Upgrade Advisor had no idea whether this particular SMBIOS driver would not work ?! Anyway, a little research on the Internet cleared up the confusion and I proceeded with the Install.

To my amazement, the whole OS installation completed in around 15 mins! Kudos to them for that really and the process was ridiculously simple. Another fantastic thing was that every hardware device on my computer was detected in advance and was working already when I booted for the first time! Overall, Vista gave my system a performance index of 4.0 primarily because I have a 256MB graphic card.

Graphics really are the first thing you notice about Windows Vista. The new AERO themes are glassy and translucent and look quite cool although when you turn it off, everything goes back to the Windows Classic style. The Sidebar comes with a couple of nifty gadgets and more can be downloaded from the web galleries. Some of the new features including Calendar, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Media Center etc. are very neat I must say. You can now give movies and pictures tags which makes searching for them a whole lot easier.

The Control Panel gets a major makeover in the form of new 'Centers' and options. There's a Tablet PC Settings section which comes pre-installed in all editions (a bit presumptuous on their part tbh). One of the new things in here are the Indexing Options where you can configure folders/files to be indexed in order to make searching for them faster. There are extensive multimedia options available like Movie Making/Picture Galleries/CD and DVD Burning in Vista. Not to mention all the games in XP get a major face-lift in Vista and actually look quite good especially my favorite i.e., Hearts.

All in all, a visually spectacular OS but not too different from XP and like they said on CNET, there's no compelling reason for anyone running XP SP2 smoothly to upgrade to Vista. That's about for my first impressions for now. I'll get into more technical stuff later on and post my findings here. For now, check out my desktop below (which wears a rather deserted look at present). This shot was took using the all-new Sniping Tool that comes with Vista!

Graduated !

2007-03-08T09:26:00.000-05:00

We had our convocation today the NED University and I, along with my batch mates, were officially graduated ! The chief guest, Dr. Eshrat ul Ibad, was a no show leaving us wondering whether he'd gone headlong to welcome Meera jee into their prestigious (read pilfering) political party!

In terms of what to do next ... I'm keeping my options open for now, let's see what the future has in store for me.

Over!

2006-12-21T00:55:00.000-05:00

Am finally a Graduate ! Technically, there's still some time to go before I get that all important degree but done with exams, practicals and most importantly the final year project ! hurray !! Will do a post soon on the FYP with hopefully links to the Report and Presentation after I've uploaded them.

Chaining Cryptography Algorithms

2006-07-08T08:41:00.000-04:00

I did a little Symmetric Encryption project some days ago which required me to make a class implementing an interface. One of the methods that needed implementing involved encrypting a file and writing it out base64-encoded. In fact, the encoding requirement came later so I had the encryption bit done easily by reading from the input file and writing to the CryptoStream which in turn wrote to the underlying output file stream, and voila! we had our encrypted file.

After the base64-encoding requirement was communicated to me, it had me in a spin. I mean here I had a neat little method reading and writing to streams working seamlessly. Since CryptoStreams cannot be written to and read from at the same time, this meant I had to re-open the file, base64-encode it and then output it again. Terribly inefficient as I'm sure you'll agree.

Then I came across chaining algorithms (specifically cryptostreams), it was just the thing I was looking for. Maybe, I'm still an intermediate when it comes to dot net because I did not know about this earlier. Here's how it works: (Error-checking and input validation removed for readability).

//Our input and output streams
FileStream fsIn = new FileStream(inputFile, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);
FileStream fsOut = new FileStream(outputFile, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write);

//Create two ICryptoTransforms
ICryptoTransform base64 = new ToBase64Transform();
ICryptoTransform enc = alg.CreateEncryptor(); //where alg is the SymmetricAlgorithm object ofcourse

//Create the crypto streams chained together
CryptoStream tobase64 = new CryptoStream(fsOut, base64, CryptoStreamMode.Write);
CryptoStream cs = new CryptoStream(tobase64, enc, CryptoStreamMode.Write);

//So essentially, 'cs' writes to 'tobase64' and 'tobase64' writes to our output stream

// Now, create a buffer to encrypt input file in chunks rather than in one go
byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
int bytesRead;

do
{
// read a chunk of data from the input file
bytesRead = fsIn.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

// The input data is written to the crypto stream
// and automatically base64-encoded and written to
// the output stream
cs.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
} while (bytesRead != 0);

cs.Close(); //closes the underlying 'fsOut' and 'tobase64' streams as well
fsIn.Close();

And we're done. Pretty nifty ... eh?

Oblivion

2006-07-08T08:24:00.000-04:00

This blog seems to have gone into oblivion recently. Updates have been long overdue and while I have been updating my other blog (Waking Life), I don't know why I never bothered to post here. Anyways, first thing's first.

We finally decided on our final year project (and belive me, it was quite a decision). We chose to go for a Roverbot (a robotic rover vehicle ), much like the Mars Rover except a hell of a lot simpler. The title of the project reads 'Autonomous Roverbot using Scene Analysis'. This means we're going to mount a tiny wireless camera on the roverbot and use it to perform scene analysis. Scene Analysis involves image processing and it could be used to achieve a lot of different objectives like Object Detection, Tracking to name a few.

The idea is to modify a remote-controlled toy car and interface the remote with the computer and develop a software that can communicate with the car using this interface. This is just the communications bit, there will be a separate software module which will process images and issue commands to the vehicle. It's an exciting project indeed and we will be using tools such as Matlab and Intel's OpenCV to get it done. More on it later.

Final Year Starts!

2006-01-16T09:48:00.000-05:00

With the submission of the admission form and the deposit of the fee slip today, I officially got enrolled in final year! (although the third-year result isn't out yet but I should, in all certainty, atleast pass! :P)

New year brings with new tensions and this one is the biggest of all ... FYP (Final Year Project). Me has full plans to do a software project. Me and my friends whiz and UG first came up with an Urdu Search Engine, a full-fledged search engine designed from the ground up that would later on include translation services as well. Read more about it here:
http://www.nasim.org/thinktank/index.php/Urdu_Search_Engine

More ideas are here...
http://www.nasim.org/thinktank/index.php/Main_Page

We are still on the look-out for more ideas ... the deadline is still a week away but we have to come up with something fast. Here's hoping ... Later!

Database Management Systems Project

2005-12-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

CISD OpenCourseWare

Drawing from the popular concept of OpenCourseWare introduced by MIT @ http://ocw.mit.edu, I discussed the idea with one of my teachers and decided a similar system for our department would be a useful database course project for me. OpenCourseWare (or more popularly just OCW) is a simple website that offers free educational material to students and teachers alike.

The idea behind it is to share the knowledge so that it is open to all and not just our university. If realized completely, it would eradicate the need for photocopied hand-outs and all other material teachers want their students to get as it will be all be available in electronic form (PDF, DOC etc.) and could be downloaded from the website itself.

To the left is a snapshot of the homepage.

There are three types of users that access the system: first the Users (Anonymous, need no authentication), secondly the Teachers which login to their separate accounts and upload course materials (assignments, hand-outs, projects etc.) to their assigned courses' pages. Lastly, the Administrator, who has the rights to add/edit courses and teacher accounts and basically has the task of managing the whole thing.

It is a very interesting project indeed, and could be extremely useful for all if adopted by the department. We are told that we will be giving a demo of it to our Chariman, lets hope that goes well and things, for once, do change for the good.

Unbelievable CGI Image

2005-12-13T13:01:00.000-05:00

This is what games may look like in 10 years, this image is completely CGI, amazing.

read more | digg story

Software Engineering Project

2005-12-06T08:26:00.000-05:00

CISE Messenger

Here's a little intro to my software engineering project this year titled the CISE Messenger.It's a simple LAN-based messaging software meant for use in the CIS department (hence the name CISE) .. whether it is actually used for that purpose remains to be seen.

There are two major parts: the Server and the Client. The wonderful thing about it is that the server is multi-threaded i.e., the server can respond to a large number of connecting clients simultaneously rather than on a first-come first-serve basis as in a Single Threaded model. For those of you who don't know much about threading, click here for a nice and easy tutorial of sorts.

The server supports some basic IM operations like one-to-one text messaging, ability to change nicks etc. There is an audio conversation support too, using DirectPlay, but the code used for that is old and error-prone since the Voice classes have now been deemed obsolete by Microsoft so there's not much support about on the internet. Nevertheless, it works ... only just!

Here is a screenshot of the dummy Client logged on

The namespaces utilized were System.Net and System.Net.Sockets which provide classes for TcpListener(the server), TcpClient(the client) and Socket (for communication between two points) and ofcourse System.Threading for implementing threads.

This was my first dip into threading and it's not easy, you have to be very careful when handling threads and remember to close them and make sure no two threads work on the same objects at the same time .. etc. etc. It is pretty interesting, and I will develop it further later.

So Far (Not) So Good

2005-11-20T03:09:00.000-05:00

I am blogging again after what seems like an eternity. The special semester that us poor Nedians have to endure is close to being over, which is a big relief! We have three more papers to go and among them one really difficult one of Digital Electronics. It's been the same story as the last two years again .... the not so good part that is.

Exams should never take this long, close to 2 months in our case! I mean 2 months is 1/6th of the year and all we do in this time and study and then vomit whatever out we could on the day of the paper and then basically forget about it. The only stuff we're ever going to remember from this year is that interests us and that which is related to our field. It's an endless debate I know and there are lot of factors involved too including us students, who aren't exactly free of blame too.

Still, life moves and as one of my cousins so often says 'This too ... shall pass!' I'll end on that note, wish me luck!

Violent Quake hits Pakistan

2005-10-08T11:46:00.000-04:00

A powerful earthquake measuring a whopping 7.6 on the richter scale has hit Pakistan today. A country which is not used to such earthquakes and where the majority of the population is poor, was bound to suffer heavy losses as a result. While an apartment block in Islamabad grabbed all the media attention, the real damage was done in Azad Kashmir where according to reports entire villages have been "wiped out" and as much as 80% of Muzaffarabad has been destroyed. Particularly disturbing were the stories of deaths of schoolchildren, scores of them, as many as 400 in a single school! The tragedy is well and truly beyond comprehension.

I remember seeing a documentary on the National Geographic channel an year or two ago about the formation of the Himalayas. The sub-continental region comprising India and Pakistan used to be a separate continent till it joined up with mainland ASIA thus creating the Himalayas and the other mountain ranges. What it also did was to create extraordinary pressure under the earth's crust, which is released from time to time in the form of quakes. Scientists on that program said the region was due to get "severe" quakes in the coming decades, which sadly was found to be true today.

BBC's website also carries a similiar article on this titled S Asia's deadly Himalayan fault.

Our thoughts and grievances are with the people affected by this disaster. May God give them the courage to live through such treacherous times. Amen.

Tension++

2005-10-04T03:24:00.000-04:00

The tension levels got a whole lot higher when the clock struck midnight on September 30th, we had entered the foresaken month of the exams! yikes! Exams at NED seem to last forever... and Eid holidays don't exactly help either. It'll be ages before I breath the free air again, after December 12th to be specific (dang!). This way of taking exams makes me sick really, its
like an open invitation to everyone to feel 'tension-free' the entire year and start caring only in the last month or two ... and this happens year after year.

Nevertheless, as one of my friends told me here to Break The Chain, or Don't Complain! so i'll be keeping my trap shut for now. Wish me luck, need it now more than ever.

There goes yet another year!

2005-09-07T09:41:00.000-04:00

We entered the last academic week at NED this Monday and after that, we'll be through with Third Year! Gosh! Has it been that long? It seems only yesterday I was wandering care-free on the streets of Abu Dhabi and now that I come to realize, almost an year has passed since then. Life has moved on so fast, and this year has been the quickest and the toughest one without a doubt. But maybe, that's down, in part, to the quality of teachers we had this year. I'll say no more.

It's that time of the year again, the time I hate the most ... when we have to prove ourselves by sitting through this thing called the exams. Why couldn't they just take my word for it and gimme a good grade :P! Maybe in the future they'll just do memory scans to see how well we're prepared for the test without getting us to actually sit through the damn thing. Now, there's a thought for the future.

The projects are almost done, and I will post screenshots of them once they're 100% complete. The premier league kicked off last month, so that's got my attention for the time being. And with the acquisition of Michael Owen by the Toon, things couldn't be more exciting. I've got a separate blog for all my Newcastle United rants btw @ http://nufc.host.sk, if you wanna check it out that is.

Birthday Boy!

2005-08-06T14:06:00.000-04:00

Today happened to be my 21st birthday! ... Thanks to everyone who wished! ...

The only downside, and a real big one, is that I was not able to celebrate with my complete family yet another year. It's been amazingly long since all of us have been together at one place at one time, 4 years I reckon! ...

For all those of you who get to see their family often, you guys are damn lucky!

Recent Graphics Work I did

2005-07-18T14:31:00.000-04:00

Below are two of my recent works in graphics. The first is the cover of our department's annual magazine, and the second one is a flyer for a conference being held in our university. Whether they get selected or not, remains to be seen. Comments are welcome.

VISION 2005
[ This isn't actually complete yet, as you probably would have noticed that it's something a couple of things down the center and right hand side. The fate of this logo rests in the hands of the editors, it will be completed once I get the thumbs up from them ]

SCONEST 2005

Time Flies!

2005-07-01T00:24:00.000-04:00

It does! ... It seemed only a couple of days ago the holidays started but now a sneak at the calendar reveals what I don't want it to! :P ... That it's been a month since then and there's not much time left, 2 and a half weeks infact.

Summer holidays in NED aren't much fun. We have several projects to take care of plus a plethora of assignments and useless work that's never gonna do us any good ... really does my head in! But thats the way it is, however backward that may sound, we have to live with it.

One of my very good friends Faisal is in India to attend TechEd in Delhi! I envy him! . I wish I could be there too, having thoroughly enjoyed my experience at PDC this year. Such exposure is priceless really for someone who's getting ready to enter the practical and professional life.

The projects are going on steadily, I have successfully used the DirectPlay Voice API to host a voice-chat session using my Messenger and am now working on the client part. I will post the details of that as soon as I'm done with the client bit.

That's about all that's going on. Will post again soon, but right now I gotta take care of those damn assignments!

PDC: Day Three

2005-06-15T14:29:00.000-04:00

With the departure of Rafal, the only "great" speaker left was Clemens Vasters. I attended two of his sessions on Avalon and Indigo, both had brief intros to WinFX also. Clemens is a great speaker, he's from Germany but his english is excellent. Although, he claims to be closer to Indigo more than Avalon, but his work on one Avalon app where he designed an animated CD case using XAML was just beautiful. In his own words, he "could look at it all day!". This new vector-based graphics engine that powers Longhorn is quite wonderful actually. For the first time, we'll witness the wonders of 3D graphics in windows apps. The only downside is, that one has to know XAML in order to write effects making use of Avalon technology but I'm sure there will be designers available in time which will simplify the task considerably.

Clemen's other talk on Indigo was interesting as well. As it turns out, Indigo's services will be implemented over components. They have the ability to run separately from IIS even. A lot of stuff here was new to me ... but I'm sure I'll run into them in the near future.

The other talk was about ASP.NET 2.0 given by Goksin Baker. It started with Master Pages, which are a real nifty addition I must day ... will reduce the use of User Controls in some cases. Bascially, you place all your common content across your website like the (left navigation menu) in the master pahe as simple HTML, and the portions of page which will chanage on a page-by-page basis are represented by 'ContentPlaceHolders'. The control for this purpose is the control. All sub-pages will make use of controls to add content of their own to a specific place holder (distinguished by their ID, obviously). So, the actual page that is served on the web-server is a combination of the master page and the content page, which has filled the content place holder on the master page with its specific content.

Next on was Themes, which contains skins specified in '.skin' files. Skins are defined by defining styles of the different controls we'll be using on our website. This information will go into the .skin file, and for it to be applied ... it's parent Theme must be applied first (since Themes contain skins).

Besides this Goksin gave a brief insight into the 50 or so new controls added in 2.0. Some of them is pretty common stuff, already developed like LoginControl, CreateUserControl, FileUpload etc. but some were really interesting AutoCompile, Callback and Wizards. Looking forward to working with them.

It all ended with the closing ceremony late in the evening, where everyone gave a rousing farewell to Clemens and the rest of the speakers, thanking them for travelling to a place like Pakistan, and especially Karachi. I hope they'll be back next year.

All in all, PDC like before proved to be a great learning experience about what's hot and where technology is headed in the next few years, future areas of research and development and lots of new ideas.

PDC: Day Two

2005-06-14T14:22:00.000-04:00

I blogged about the Service-Oriented Architecture being talked about a lot in this year's conference, and this day was no different. I started it off with a presentation by Rafal Lucaweicki on Envisioning the Service-Oriented Enterprise. He paints the picture of a world where our applications will either become services or will consist of services themselves ... meaning a 'service' will gain so much popularity that it will be adopted at all levels. Today, its exactly the opposite .. most of the work we do is synchornous with other things ... the "While You Wait" approach, we would be approaching a more asynchronous world in the future. With the help of Smart Clients, services will provide us with reliable, offline and disconnected data access. Future services will have formal interfaces and will be independent of other services to a certain degree. Such services will force the adoption of standards, schemas or contracts will be developed to govern services. Business processes will slowly drift away from Resource Management logic in apps. Ofcourse, this is all theoretical right now ... what actually will happen and how services will actually function is yet to be determined.

The second session I attended was by Arvindra Sehmi and he spoke on Software Factories and DSL Tools. For most of us who don't know what a software factory is, he described it as a domain-specific process which has domain-specific tools and languages. Such factories will help
automate menial tasks. The level of automation in apps is going higher with every version of .NET CLR. The idea behind DSL is to transform general purpose IDEs we use today into Software Factories which are strictly domain-specific. In fact, we use DSL tools even today ... such as the Windows Forms Designer and SQL, but they themselves are too general. Future DSLs will be much more specific to what we want to do.

Automation will go a step further with automatic code generation with DSLs. For that we'lll have custom designers which will sit on top of Visual Studio, which is a general IDE, and help us design the kind of app we want by providing us with a customized toolbox, a drawing surface, our own notations etc.) The idea is very sleek, and Mr. Arvindra did a good job of delivering the presentation. DSLs will reduce code-writing even more ... Maybe even completely since some apps could possibly be developed in the future with the combination of two or three DSL Tools working at different stages of development, who knows!

The other two sessions I took were about Visual Studio Team System and Cryptography in .NET 2.0. Got loads of new and important information from Rafal in Cryptography, as for the VS Team System, it looks like a wonderful feature for companies and software houses to manage their projects using Visual Studio.

PDC: Day One

2005-06-13T23:11:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the first day of PDC. It all started with the Opening session early at 9.30 AM. Most of it was pretty formal stuff except for a presentation by Rafal Lucaweicki, where he outlined future technologies that will change the way developers work. As ever, his lecture was pretty interesting.

The most unfortunate thing about this event is that we have good speakers, talking on great topics BUT at the same time! We have four tracks running in parallel and first off for me was the Connected Systems track where Rafal gave an overview of what exactly is a connected system, and some brief information on Service Orientation. His vision of service oriented machines sounds very sleek, but may take a long time coming. Most of his description was pretty abstract in nature, and is a great topic to research on for us developers.

Connected Systems, as you would imagine, are based on Service Orientation. This is the new phrase we're hearing at this year's event ... every year there's something new being talked about it and this is pretty much it this time. SOA calls for a greater degree of independence of little modules of business processes so that we design our logic without worrying about other factors (for e.g, the type of database connectivity etc.)

Next on was Stepehen Forte with his lecture on Data-Driven Cahcing using SQL Server 2005. Most of this session turned out to be pretty ordinary except for Steve's antics and his jokes. He is a real animated character (like most Americans, I'm told). The only new thing I learned during this session was the introduction of DB Specific datasource controls in Whidbey along with the addition of SQLCacheDependency which allows us to define cache dependency based on changes to a certain database table (A much needed addition, I must add).

He didn't talk about Web Server Caching (mentioned on MSDN as a future enhancement in ASP.NET), instead he chose to talk on pretty much old stuff, OutputCachine and the Cache API.

I stuck around to take his third session, which was about XQuery in SQL Server 2005. The MS guys have added a brand new datatype, called XML to the db fields. This is testament to the fact what a huge success it has been, it is extensively used in Longhorn and its underlying technologies. We can now store xml directly in the database, in its own specialized field and query it using new ways called FLWOR (pronounced as 'flower') expressions, where F=FOR, L=LET, W=WHERE, O=ORDER BY and R=RETURN. These queries can be used in conjunction with traditional TSQL, which is pretty cool. We can output results as an XML datatype or a SQL scalar record. Moreover, we can manipulate data to output new XML using 'sqlcolumn:' and 'sqlvariable:' attributes. I'll post a link to his presentation as soon as I find one.
The new XML fields can be constrained by a schema, where can set conditions like allow only certain tags to be accepted or set limits on the attributes of those tags etc. Nice stuff.

More lies ahead on the second day of PDC, looking forward to that. My professor Saqib Ilyas will be delivering his lecture too, on Web Services. Will post tomorrow's details hopefully tomorrow :P!

PDC comes to town!

2005-06-12T20:40:00.000-04:00

Me and my friends went to the Pearl Continental on Saturday to pick up our PDC delegate kit. PDC, short for Pakistan Developer Conference, is THE place to be right now. Arranged by Microsoft Pakistan, it is a three-day conference of sorts, where guest speakers from all over the world will deliver lectures on the latest technologies like SQL Server 2005, XML, Web Services .NET 2.0 etc.

The three-day agenda and the list of speakers are here. Really looking forward to attending this event.

Tech Talk

2005-06-06T14:57:00.000-04:00

I'm pretty much a software guy, and listed are some interesting projects I've done and am doing ...

goWallpapers.com
Always had a hobby of sorts of collecting wallpapers, thought why not put my collection up for download ... from that was born goWallpapers.com ( originally getWallpapers.com, lost that domain to some corporate bassa ). Did the website in ASP back in 2001 when there was no .NET or atleast I hadn't heard about it. Recently moved it to ASP.NET as things have gotten clearer in me mind (the concepts n all).

AddressBook
A pretty straight-forward information management utility with an XML data store. First dip into working with XML at the back-end, nice stuff.

Automated Teller Machine
My first year project, made solely in C/C++.

I've taken the following projects this year for subjects of Software Engineering and Database Management Systems respectively ...

LAN Messenger
A network messaging utility that gives its users the ability to have text and audio conversations. The audio part is something totally new to me. I am almost done with the text-bit. Making this on Visual C#.NET with the help of System.Net.Sockets.

For the audio bit, I plan to use the Managed DirectX Libraries. I have got my hands on DirectX 9 SDK, which has some really good samples and documentation for using DirectSound and DirectPlay.

Open-Course Ware (OCW)
The idea is inspired by MIT OCW ( http://ocw.mit.edu ), although will not developed at the same scale as that. Me and my team are supposed to develop an OCW system for our department that will provide visitors the ability to download Lecture Notes, Assignments, Related Tools etc. for each available course. Teachers will have their own separate accounts, so they can upload new test schedules, assignments n stuff.

The project is very much in its design phase right now. We have come up with the Database Design for this, I may post it here ... its open course-ware, so might as well be open-source :)

More on me

2005-05-16T21:54:00.000-04:00

Before starting going on whats going on in my life and my take on it, I should give out a little more info on myself ...

I live in Karachi (the southern city of Pakistan), currently studying in NED University aspiring to become a Computer Information and Systems Engineer. My passions include Football, Programming and Graphics. I'm still learning the trades of programming after coming to NED having met some great programmers here ... and there's still a long way to go. Not even sure if I'll end up as a good programmer or not, but I guess I can try. I have to admit, I'm more into all things visual ... graphics and website designing.

I am not the smartest kid on the block either, average in studies (although thats mostly down to me not working hard enough :P). I know, I know that sounds lame but thats the way it has been since Matric when I missed A-1 grade by just 2 marks!! ... yeah, you can shove that in my face now ... :P

I'm crazy about Football ... I've been following the Toon Army (Newcastle United Football Club, for those who don't know) since 1997 and been a black and white since. I am certainly NOT like those glory-hunting muppets who support ManYoo, Arsenol, Chelski ,Bayern etc. ONLY because THEY WIN and for no other reason. Not many people in Manchester support ManYoo I have to come to know, and now that they've been bought by that rich bassa Glazer ... I hope he takes them down for good!

Enough about football, I also love all things sci-fi. Movies, Novels everything. Lord of the Rings trilogy is out of this world ... similarly, am a big fan of Riddick (his two movies) and Star Wars too (looking forward to its third prequel) ...

Thats about it for now ... will start regular blogging very soon.

Welcome!

2005-05-07T08:40:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my personal blog! Lots of content to be added pretty soon ... watch this space.