September 2005 - Posts

MySQL 5.0 Release Candidate (StoredProc, Updatable Views amongst the goodies!)

After 3 years (or so) of development MySQL v5.0 Release Candidate is out, this means we'll soon be getting the final... amongst the lovelies in this major bumb include:
  • Stored Procedures
  • Views (FINALLY!)
  • Triggers
Take a look at and the release candidate see what you think!

On a side note, google turned 7 today! Happy birthday you old fart, I dont know what we'd do without you!

Office 2003 Service Pack 2

Finally a new Service Pack for Office 2003, slipstream and enjoy!

Download: Office 2003 Service Pack 2
Download: OneNote 2003 Service Pack 2
Download: Viso 2003 Service Pack 2

The long road to Vista, diary of Microsoft's development changes... (Wall Street Journal)

Saw this yesterday on the Wall Street Journal and thought it was an interesting read.

The greatest part that struck me was about longhorn being 'so complex that its writers would never be able to make it run properly.' Thats a pretty big statement to make - publicly anyway - but I have to admit, Beta 1 and the later builds (including PDC Builds) of Vista are very solid and rightfully so if they intend to start CTP'ing Windows like Whidbey, its a great way to provide active feedback and get developers invovled.

Anyone who've been apart of Windows testing would know the fun we have in the early development processes;-) (Win2k anyone?)

EDIT:
Its been /.'d so head over here to see what people think:-)

4 Wisdom teeth out, painfully painful recovery.

Wednessday last week I went to get my wisdom teeth out - all four - and man I had no idea what I was in for, sure the orthodontist explained it all but he made it sound ridiculously simple and relatively painless/quick recovery. I got them removed surgically at hospital (so under anesthetic) and about 6 hours later I awoke and found myself swelling like crazy (which I expected) but after the first round of painkillers it became unbearable to sleep... and stayed in hospital till today (just got back!)

4 days later I'm still feeling it (although I'm off pain killers now!) and hardly ate much - Oats, Jelly, water and other vitamised food... painful painful painful... Reminded me why I try and stay away from Dentists and other oral doctors (unless their related...!)

So anyway, I've got a back log of emails to reply to (including comments sent from this blog) so I'll do that slowly this week. I still cant talk so dont bother calling or visiting.

C# 3.0... mmmm yummy!

Some have yet to try C# 2.0 but C# 3.0 is already coming along (think forward to Orcas after Whidbey but before Hawaii)...

Great interview on C# 3.0 on Channel9 that may whett your appetite.

The specification was just published and can be found here.

I've had my head inside the specs for a few days now so I'll comment more on it when I get time.

I've added '.NET 3.0 (Orcas)' to the list of categories to make it easier:-)

Unsafe server-side coding can land you in trouble...

I listen to music whilst coding like anyother sane coder, its what fills the void for a lonely developer at work. Lawyers, Accountants, Doctors, Drivers, Plumbers all have people around them to talk, but we IT nuts are usually head-first deep inside code where only the insane of the insanely live. So music is our only connection to the outside world.

Back to the point of this blog post, I went to the FoxFM website to "Listen Live", after finding in Firefox(who says I dont dig Firefox?) the popup wont show properly (Tools > Javascript Console):
Error: window.showModalDialog is not a function
Source File: http://www.fox.com.au/
Line: 60
So like anyone else who has no life I went to the source of problem and a little loosky... the ListenLive link opens a new window and gives us those nasty ads (they have to make a profit somewhere aye?):
  	function launchPlayerFOX() {  
var radioStation = "15129";
var url = "http://203.48.254.42/ad.php?rsid="+radioStation;
var w = screen.width; // Get the width of the screen
var h = screen.height; // Get the height of the screen
var resources = "dialogHeight: "+h+"px; dialogWidth: "+w+"px; dialogLeft: 0px; dialogTop: 0px; scroll: no; status: no; resizable: no; help: no; center: no;"
var winRadio = window.showModalDialog( url, "", resources);
}
So I browse to this URL in a new instance of Firefox:
http://203.48.254.42/ad.php?rsid=15129
Nothing too shabby, just the ad we're meant to be watching. Screw that, I dont need a mortage! View source it:
var theRSID = jsrsid.value;
var rsMediaFile = jsrsmf.value;
var url = "player.php?rsid="+theRSID+"&rsmf="+rsMediaFile;
var winRadio = window.open( url, "RadWin", "[WINDOW CODE SNIPPED OUT!]");
if (winRadio != null) {
 self.close();
}
and get the URL for the player:
http://203.48.254.42/player.php?rsid=15129
Ooops... I forgot about the rsmf (Radio-Station-Mutha-Faq'er? - Media File) looks like whoever wrote that script didnt think ahead about this and automatically assumed it would have been parsed (as well as rsid - Radio Station ID).... BIG MISTAKE! Just run that URL and see what happens, (please dont over-do it!)

If your a good person and didnt click on it heres what you would have got:
Notice:  Undefined index:  rsmf in E:\zeroklix\ZeroKlix\player.php on line 13
Warning: fopen(media/foxfmmelbourne/clickthru/txt): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in E:\zeroklix\ZeroKlix\player.php on line 49
Warning: feof(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in E:\zeroklix\ZeroKlix\player.php on line 50
Warning: fgets(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in E:\zeroklix\ZeroKlix\player.php on line 51
The last two lines iterate over and over and over (possible problem with feof?), whats more with a bit more of playing around you can get their clickthru/txt file that lists some data but I wont go into much detail there.

What should have been done would be to check that the file actually exists with file_exists() method and if so continue, otherwise you'd be stuck with the above.

So with that information we know that a company by the name of ZeroKlix hosts the content for them, its stored in E:\ZeroKlix and a few other things that I'll leave out for the time being. Not only that, but its quite easy to get the server to start to hiccup if we simply run that PHP script file(although after the 30 second timeout PHP will stop processing it).

Ohhh before I forget, heres the direct link to the FoxFM "Listen Live" stream:

http://203.48.254.42/media/foxfmmelbourne/playlist.asx

Enjoy!

Windows Vista and what it means to your pocket/life...

Reading the APC section on Vista and what Nigel Page (MSDN Australia) said about Vista's hardware requirements makes me shivver

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

Well it is a year away, so theres not much of an issue there (well with DDR-III, SATA-II not really 'there yet'), what concerns me the most is the DRM technologies MS have "bundled" with Windows to make the big boys and gals in Hollywood happy:

"In Longhorn, the computer determines that a video card is not faked or being intercepted, so there's a lot of onus on the writers of the drivers. It also checks If there are digital or analogue drivers. If only digital outputs are in use, it will then check a display has HDCP capability – high bandwidth digital content protection. The communication between the video card and the device is encrypted and only decrypted by the display device itself. If all that is true, the operating system says, "ok, gotcha, we are running on a protected video path which is OK for premium content… HD-DVDs, BluRay, or a video file that someone has marked."

"If you don't comply with PVP, we're going to downscale the quality upon playback… you're going to get a lower quality version; you're not going to get the high def content the way it was intended to be viewed. You'll find that most plasma displays have HDCP already. But this isn't available in computer monitors. I have not been able to find a single monitor that supports it. We are going to see a lot of change in this space.

So in otherwords, theres lots of encryption going on under the hood (one of the reasons why Vista will work better in dual-core/multi-core environments) so people cant play Videos or "hax0r" then like they used to.

"There's a LOT of encryption and decryption going on. We communicate on the PCI Express bus in a fully encrypted format because it is considered a public bus.

"The downside is that all your existing flat panel monitors and projectors aren't going to work with high-def videos in Vista. Bad news."

That last part nearly broke my heart. The lovely 2405FPW is useless when Vista RTMs...

So, will i drop everything and convert to Linux? Maybe daringly move over to Mac (maybe even grab an iPod and jump around trying to "act cool")? Hell no! Theres still 1 year to go and while I'm using other OS's outside of Windows (FreeBSD, Fedora and to a lesser extent OS X Tiger) I dont consider such a rush to move to a new OS just yet.

On a side note however, those of you who run Beta 1 and find its running "faster than XP" is because (as the article states) a bulk of the GUI code is now sent to the GPU, this alone makes Windows far more responsive along with the new graphics subsystem.


DivX Player 2.5.x vs Windows Media Player

I converted a movie from DVD to XVID to benchmark some CPUs and for the fun of it watched it with DivX Player and Windows Media Player to see if theres a difference.

Judge it for yourself:

Notice that the DivX Player is *alot* clearer and well defined? For instance take a look at Bill Nighy's eyes for instance (the guy in the middle) or the guy at the counter's hair (right), the image on the left is clearly defining the hair whilst the WMP version is a little blurry... Looks like DivX Player has got some additional processing on the image before being played...

I've switched to using DivX Player to play my XVIDs instead of WMP, earlier I was with PowerDVD but it seems to have trouble with my sound card at times (driver gets stuck in loops -> BSoD).

For those interested, this is "The Girl In The Cafe" which is a briliant movie (albeit a little too much propoganda) about a lonely guy who takes a girl he met at a cafe to the G8 summit in 2005 (yes its up to date!).

Firefox and Security, First hand experience...

I did a clean install of my notebook yesterday and decided to put Firefox back up, before the format i backed up the profile in the documents & settings folder in windows to see if a simple replace would work - I seriously didnt think it would but wouldnt hurt trying. After installation and launching firefox (this is without replacement) i got my profile created and all was good... but instead of replacing the profile from my notebook I took the profile contents from my main desktop machine and placed it into my current profile on the notebook and said "YES" to replace all;-)

Launch firefox and what do ya know, just like my desktop firefox only slightly smaller resolution... This includes *ALL* my autologin stuff (.NET Passport, this blog! etc) as well as saved form data all available as its wrapped into the firefox profile.

So conclusion, am I the only one laughing out loud thinking its all secure? Same goes for Thunderbird by the way.

All a malicious user has to do to mess with someone that uses firefox (and blantantly uses saving of data - like me:D) is grab their entire profile contents, create a new profile in Firefox, replace those contents with the poor usesr and voilla! you have their cookies, form data and (unfortunately?) their identity:-)

Nice to know I'm secure:-)