A couple of days ago someone shared a folder where an ASP Net application was running. This under a Win2K8 (R2 I think) and suddenly the whole application was broken with some strange messages like:

“Could not load file or assembly” and some of my assemblies names

My first idea was that the IIS user was somehow removed and was not able to access the application folder. I set the user with the appropriate permissions on the folders and nothing! I removed the offending share and nothing!

After googling and trying different things I tried the following

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727>caspol -u -ag All_Code -url "C:\SomeCompanySite\bin\*" FullTrust

and, that´s it, the application was running again :)

Turns out (and this is fully documented) that a share runs in a more strict context, thus my application was dying on me.

You can also run caspol to trust the share if you want to.

BTW, you might need to run that command from the Framework64 folder.

Federico

I´ve installed openSuse 11.3 64bits since it seems to have the most complete and up to date distribution of mono. Since installing it, making my usb wireless card (D-Link DWA-125) has been a pain. Finally I had it working with NetworkManager but I noticed that it kept dropping the connection without any reason. Not only that (this may happen) but I could not restart my connection. It simply refused to reconnect.

After running lsmod I noticed the name of the kernel module handling the device: ra2870sta. Then I went to the manofacturer´s site and downloaded their lastest driver for Linux, the file name is 2010_0709_RT2870_Linux_STA_v2.4.0.1.tar.bz2. There is a Date column in the downloads table saying 07/09/2010. I really do not know if that is really the date of their latest update, but the version is 2.4.0.1.

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It´s always nice to see reverse engineering resources in our own language and by our people. I´ve been out of this subject for some years and I am happy to see this community. It´s obvious that there is no lack of brain power and there is some excellent material (really good). Wanna see what’s this about? Check:

Ricardo Narvaja´s site.

Yashira.

Cracks Latinos (Google Group)

Nifty community logo is also included (not done by me:

Happy reversing :)

Last week I read an interesting post that used the show “The Office” to analyze general organizations. Some of its ideas sounded too strange for me and after all ”The Office” still lives in fiction and that tends to eliminate or exaggerate tiny but numerous factors present in a work environment. Anyway the definition of the layers in the organizational pyramid and the enunciated principle left me thinking and kind of agreeing at least partially.

The Gervais principle as Venkatesh calls it says:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

In order to understand it, you need the definition of the layers population. I think these definitions shocked me the most, from the top of the organization to the bottom as in the picture:

Sociopaths enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top. The contribute creativity in early stages of a organization’s life, neurotic leadership in the middle stages, and cold-bloodedness in the later stages,  where they drive decisions like mergers, acquisitions and layoffs that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are also the ones capable of equally impersonally exploiting a young idea for growth in the beginning, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life  idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies.

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Recently the components company Telerik released the beta version of a couple of products directed toward TFS users and managers. Of course both products make heavy use of Telerik’s visual components, in this case the WPF suite.

The first one (in my arbitrary order) is the TFS Dashboard. Basically it shows several little reports and indicators on the project status. It also shows failed builds and the reason why they failed. I am not using Team Build right now so I could not check that. Below is a screenshot of how the dashboard works on my current project.

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I always have the desire to learn new stuff. Usually (and thanks God for that) I always learn something new in my projects .... but not always what I want :).

One pending issue has been nHibernate for some time. And if like me you want to learn about it you can check these excellent webcasts by Steve Bohlen. (Techsmith codec required)

The download for the whole "season" is a bit large but they are worthy, specially if you are nHibernate ignorant like me.

I wish there were more Steves to create all the other webcasts I am missing!

Federico

Today I set myself to start learning Smalltalk. For unknown reasons (availability, laziness, incompetence, who knows?) all of my OO teaching in university was using the venerable and powerful C++.

Years later I see that C++ while powerful on its own was probably not the right language to start with objects, it drags a big weight because of its C familiarity, so OO concepts might be a bit obscured by the language itself.

Being in Houston alone and without a car (Houston is amazingly not "walk friendly") I decided to see for myself what I missed in the past by learning some Smalltalk now. Probably it is not going to be the same experience, years of using other languages and platforms are probably an obstacle while trying to learn something new, previous experience clouds and blurs your ideas (like C++ clouded my vision of objects). Anyway I am willing to give it a try. According to Smalltalk gurus and followers my mind should be blown away and a whole new vision of objects may appear in front of me. I want to believe these people are not under the effects of any psychotropic (this guy's writing doesn't help the cause).

In any case, I am about to try two different environments.

Squeak (free and open source)

VisualWorks (free for non commercial use)

I know there's a Smalltalk implementation over the Net stack, including wrappers over the library to present it as standard Smalltalk library. I will try that later since I do not want to be diverted by other familiar stuff.

Right know I am in the hunting for good learning material ...

If my mind is blown away ... surely I will be writing about that.

Federico

The company I work for was recently distinguished as one of the top ten companies to work in Argentina (145 companies participated in the survey). This is more amazing if you take into account:

a) we all take the survey (does not matter if you are a functional analyst or manager or junior developer).

b) we are among giants in the top ten.

I am probably not the most involved guy in this (greetz go to Julio, HR, Diego, Juan, etc) but anyway it is nice to see the company being awarded again.

You can see the list here.

Federico

I have a Canon 570IS camera. A simple point and shoot model. It has the ability to save video that you can later download like you download the rest of the pictures.

The problem with these avi files is that they use a codec that is not installed into Average Joe's computer. The codec is called something like Picvideo MJpg, apparently a very fast encode/decode codec used by many photo cameras. The audio is encoded with standard PCM encoding. Full data for the avi file:

Video: MJPG 480x640 30.00fps [Stream 00]
Audio: PCM 22050Hz mono 352Kbps [Stream 01]

Now. I needed to send a video to someone who doesn't have the mjpg codec and doesn't know anything about computers. I do know that he (my brother) has a codec pack installed including xvid, one of my favorite codecs. Also, files using mjpg are not exactly light. One of my little videos of 35 seconds used 22.8MB so if I wanted to send the videos, I'd like to make them smaller. So the idea is to:

- Get smaller files

- Get files using a more friendly codec

To do this I used Virtualdub, a very well known video capture/processing program that I already had downloaded and the Xvid codec that I already have on my system.

One more thing. If you used the camera rotated to shoot the video, you can "straighten" it from the ZoomBrowser Ex (cool piece of software bundled with Canon cameras) or later, in this case I will do it later with Virtual Dub and one of its filters.

gn="justify">

So I fire up Virtualdub and open the video file:

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A couple of weeks ago I had to use the XmlSerializer. I used it before almost for the same reason. To exchange information between some systems. In my particular case I was using very simple DTOs. In case you don't know it, the XmlSerializer is known for being slow. When you ask for an instance of the serializer using the DTO type in the constructor, there is some process going on behind the scene. All of this happens the first time you ask for the instance.

1. The serializer checks to see if it is a known serializer (it maintains an internal cache). Being the first time you ask for this type it won't find anything.
2. The type you sent gets reflected to death inside the System.Xml.Serialization namespace. Information is gathered from your classes (public properties, fields, attributes to modify the schema, etc). All of this is stored in mapping information.
3.  With all the mapping information. The serializer proceeds to create code (yep to create it) using the facilities provided by a CodeDomProvider, in this particular case, the CSharpCodeProvider.
4.  The new code which include functionality to serialize and deserialize is compiled (all of this because you instantiated a serializer...) and the result is a temporal assembly usually named [your type].XmlSerializers. The name might be followed by some number under some circumstances but usually you won't see nothing there. Remember this is the name of the assembly not the name of the dll file. If you use some tool like Process Monitor you will be able to see csc (the C# compiler) launching when you instantiate your serializer. In my case I see something like:
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