The First Computer Bug!!!

After a long long time I'm writing again , and I was wondering to change this template  very soon ;) Yeap Very Soon I'm going to change this template.

Anyways Did you ever wonder How this Bug came , I mean the Computer Bugs. The Nightmare of a Software Programmer . Yesterday I was reading a Wiki article and I have found How this bug came to the the buzz words of a programmer.

While the Legendary Grace Hopper (a.k.a Grandma COBOL) working on a computer her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system.

She is the person that did lot of things for the computer science and she bring the term to the popularity . 

First Computer Bug

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I Bought None

Recently my friend Thuru wrote a blog post about his phone history . Suddenly I thought to write about my phone history as well ,


Here we go ,

My First phone was

NOKIA 3220 which was owned by my brother and he gave it to me when he's leaving the country in 2005

This was a quite good phone and still my cousin using this phone



Then NOKIA 6600 came (It's also from my brother)

This was good but pretty large and sometime It's getting slow.



After that I used Motorola A1200

This was the best phone I've ever used . Stylish and Good Performance




Then came Nokia 3120 (I have ordered two phones for sell)

After that I've used a Windows Phone 6

Few months I sold that too.. :)



Then Came Nokia 6120

Then came the Android Fever, So I asked from my brother to send me a Android phone I'll pay for that ,


He sent me Samsung Galaxy Gio and said Keep the Money ;)

Currently I'm using the above phone and Nokia Lumia 800 which was a gift from Microsoft

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I'm Back

Hi Folks ,

After few Months I'm back . Lot of things has changed  new lessons came to my life (Of course I'll write them all ) . From now on I'm ready to blog  :)

~Kalinga

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I4G @ Microsoft … Dream It, Learn It, Live It

Last weekend was a busy one for me. I had to prepare for the Imagine cup local finals , because I led one of the top 6 teams in Sri Lanka this year. At the same day I had to leave the county as well..  
Now don’t ask what happened to the Imagine Cup, or Did you get the cup? . Life’s not fair folks ! Not at all.

Microsoft has initialized a new programme called “ Innovate for good” arround the globe recently. For the Asia Pacific region it was held on Singapore.
The purpose of this programme to get the help from youth to generate Ideas and help them to make a world better place. There were 100 youth from Asia pacific region gathered to this at 28^th and 29^th April 2012.

I was bit late because of my schedule and I was the last person arrived from overseas.(According to the Taxi Driver).

Day One

Day one was at the the Shangri La  Rasa Sentosa resort. It was conducted by Bernie Jones (MD,Impact Corporate Training ) , and there were inspirational story from Ponheary Ly,from Cambodia.She was awarded the CNN Heroes award by in June 2010.

 

 
                        Bernie is advising for our team

                                  My Team Mates (Employment) ,May from HongKong, Joseph from Taiwan , Harry from Indonesia.

 

 

Inspirational Story from Ponheary

                                             Outside View of the Resort


                    Harry & Wenjie is trying to make a Mind Map for our solution

 
        My Team mates (without Jay and Joseph) with Clair Deevy,Citizenship Lead , Microsoft APAC .

Day Two

Day two was held at the Microsoft Singapore office . It was a great experience to me. I met several Microsoft officials from there. We had a mentor from there, John Galligan (Regional Director , Microsoft APAC). Wonderful person to talk and I have learned lots of things from him.

MTC(Microsoft Technology Center) is refurbished few weeks ago and we are the first groups that got the experience of it.
I was there to experience how Data Center works and fortunately I got a chance to get inside of that room (18 Degrees cool in there…. ) 

 In there we made a solution for the visually impaired people and did a five minutes presentation on it.

There was a inspirational story from the Efren ,A teacher and a social worker in the Philippines . He was named CNN Hero of the year in 2009.

                                           Playing with Microsoft Surface 


                                                        Inside MTC


It was a short tour . Therefore I did not get a chance to look around … (May be the next time )

Anyway my special thanks goes to Mr. Wellington Perera (DPE Lead, Microsoft Sri Lanka) for the support he has given me all these years(This phrase is not enough to thank him… ) & Mrs. Janakie Karunarathne (Manager – Community Affairs , Microsoft Sri Lanka ) for nominating me  for this event as well.
Apart from that my special thanks goes to  Clair Deevy, (APAC Citizenship lead , Microsoft APAC) for organizing such events in APAC region . A very dynamic figure I have ever saw. Bernie Jones for his interesting training sessions and My team mates at the event .

P.S :- Oh Forgot to mention …. There’s one person I need to thank, A friend , A brother, A Mentor. Prabath Aiyya  for the Shuttle Service !!! .

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Free Vs Priceless

Hi folks!
Sri Lankans are normally and unintentionally very much like to get the free stuff from others. Whether they are are valuable or not!
Recently I’ve conducted two day workshop for the A/L IT Students. According to the government statistics ,
Uva Province has the lowest IT literacy in the whole country. I don’t know why and how this has happened. This is the true digital divide as I think.



(Image from http://www.statistics.gov.lk/CLS/index.htm)

I have shared some of my thoughts and experience with them freely because I think it is PRICELESS!!!
With me there were three speakers, My friend Rohana and Osada.Thanks Guys for the sessions
The workshop was a tremendous success for a pilot project. Most of the students in Badulla District who are learning ICT as their core subject in Advanced Levels   participated for this. Some of the students said that they don’t have an IT teacher in school for guide them.
Finally I would like to thank the people behind the scene. Mr Nimal Gunarathne (IT Teacher , Dammannda College, Mirahawatte ) and Dr.Jayalath Atthanayake for providing facilities for conduct the workshop.

and I will upload the pictures soon…

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Unified Communication with Lync

 

Hi there, Yes ! Finally I’ve found a time to write my blog. This time no more coding stuff. But recently I’ve been looking for  some information on this So called Lync. And Finally I’ve found it.

Before identifying what is Lync we need to Identify what is Unified Communication

Wikipedia states that ,

Unified communications (UC) is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, data sharing (including web connected electronic whiteboards aka IWB's or Interactive White Boards), call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). UC is not a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.^[1]

In its broadest sense UC can encompass all forms of communications that are exchanged via the medium of the TCP/IP network to include other forms of communications such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and Digital Signage Communications as they become an integrated part of the network communications deployment and may be directed as one to one communications or broadcast communications from one to many.

UC allows an individual to send a message on one medium and receive the same communication on another medium. For example, one can receive a voicemail message and choose to access it through e-mail or a cell phone. If the sender is online according to the presence information and currently accepts calls, the response can be sent immediately through text chat or video call. Otherwise, it may be sent as a non real-time message that can be accessed through a variety of media

 

Lync Server is a solution for implementing the above communication method. and simply we can say Lync is a platform which providing facilities for ,

• Instant Messaging
• File Transfering
• peer to peer facilities
• Video & Voice Calling etc;

 

One key feature of this  server is there are several devices which is specially made for this technology. Such as,

• Microsoft RoundTable is an audio and video conferencing device that provides a 360-degree view of the conference room and tracks the various speakers. This device is now produced and sold via Polycom under the product name CX5000.

• LG-Nortel and Polycom also make IP phones in a traditional phone form factor that operate an embedded edition of Office Communicator 2007. The physical plastic phones as referred by Microsoft are also named Tanjay Phones.

• SNOM has produced the first open SIP phone that also integrates to OCS

There are some eye catching videos about these features in Youtube.If you like you can just find from there.

 

References:-

Offical site for Lync
Wikipedia

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Brute force….

Hi there!, It’s quite late to write a new post due to my heavily busy weeks . Anyway recently I was able to break down a windows password(Of course it’s simple as ABC ) but I thought it might helpful to discuss about brute force attacking method.

There are several password finding methods,

1.Common and most time consuming one is so called ‘ Brute Force’
2. The other one is ‘Dictionary Attack’

 

and there are more ways, but it’s up to you to find .

So what is Brute Force.

According to Wikipedia…..

a brute force attack or exhaustive key search is a strategy that can in theory be used against any encrypted data^[1] by an attacker who is unable to take advantage of any weakness in an encryption system that would otherwise make his/her task easier. It involves systematically checking all possible keys until the correct key is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire search space.

but how it works ? That’s the question, Here’s how it works

lets see the password is “CDE”

We can write a simple program or a Script to input the password by key by key ,related to ASCII value.(This is a simple way)

First the program will try from  

AAA
BAA
CAA
DAA   and so forth .

Until it finds the ‘CDE’ character set.

It’s pretty time consuming task but there is a special version of brute force attack called ‘Rainbow Tables’ .I’ll write about them later .And there are number of ways to overcome this. One way is to encrypt the codes by “One type pad” cryptographic method. .

other common ways are,

-Add more characters other than letters or numbers such as ‘*’ ,’@’,’#’
-Use a bit long password. (But remember the password!)
-Imposing a 30 second delay between failed authentication attempts
-Locking the account after 5 failed authentication attempts

Like these things to find a key by brute force attack will take time than attacker expected! .

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