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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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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Use Your Camera to Stitch the World!

Hi folks!, Very Happy New year.This time I’m not going to explain a developing tool ;).

This is just a web app by Microsoft and this thing have some amazing capabilities . So what is this ? This tool called Microsoft Photosynth. This will allow you to virtually build an Environment with the help of your captured photos.

You didn’t get it right? Yes . OK Imagine you are in TajMahal(Hope you are not Shah Jahan!!) Now you have a Digital Camera.What will you do . Shooting ,Shooting like this is the end of the world!. Then what will you do just uploading those to FB or someplace.

Imagine If you can visualize a 3D map with the help of your photos of TAJ MAHAL ! Now this is the place where the Photosynth comes in.

Photosynth can Generate the map.This is a remarkable technology.Just give it a try.

To view those synthed images you need Silverlight .So Install them. And there is a Guide on how to Shoot photos for photosynth.

Here is an Example.

This is the Guide

Happy Synthing!!!

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F.A.Q s of Microsoft Student Champs….

Hi there ! Microsoft Sri Lanka has initiated a student community called Microsoft Student Champs and I’ll tell what is this community and how it acts and so forth;

1.What is Microsoft Student Champs.?

MSC is a Student Based community which was initiated by Microsoft Sri Lanka .This  is like Microsoft Student Partner Program in Other countries.

2.Is it just a technical community?

Nope.It’s not .For the Survival of IT related graduates they need more than something which they normally don’t get from their Universities .This community will provide those things for them.

3. What are the other things?

Well,You can improve your presentation skills,How to face for an Interview(Improve your Soft Skills.).Sharing the knowledge with Other university people and Industry professionals.And there are so many things that you can get from this.For this MSC Organizing a Non-Tech meeting too.

4.Well . How  I can join to this community?

Any University Student can join to this community.This Month is especially for the new comers!.We called it Networking Month.

You can log in to the champs web or visit our Facebook Group for getting the latest Information on this community.

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.NET Workshop @ SUSL

 

A two day .NET Workshop was organized at Sabaragmuwa University of Sri Lanka on 30th September and 1st of October and the Workshop was conducted by the Microsoft Student Champs Community.

The Opening Ceremony was started with a keynote speech which was conducted by Mr.Wellington Perera (Director –Developer Platform Evangelism,Microsoft Sri Lanka) and following speech was done by Dr C.P Udawatte (Dept Head-physical sciences,Faculty of Applied Sciences)

 

In this workshop there are several areas are covered with .NET technology such as,

• C#.NET
• OOP with C#
• ADO.NET & SQL Server
• Web Services
• ASP.NET

Behalf of the Champs community Several Students Ambassadors,

• Madusha Nanayakkara
• Chanaka Herath
• Prageeth Sandakelum

and

Sachira Chintana as a Student champ came to the conduct the workshop

and Two Guest speakers,

• Mr.Prabath Fonseka
• Mr.Chandana Athauda

came to share the knowledge of them with the students.

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Greenfoot- Java Game Programming and Learning Programming made easy!

Greenfoot is actually a Framework,It is very very helpful for Novice Programmers and this is mainly aimed for JAVA assignments which have two dimensional grids(Like burick! burick !! Games) :D.
Greenfoot has,

• Framework for creating two dimensional grids in JAVA
• Integrated Development Environment(class browser,editor,compiler,execution,etc)

Framework:-
Framework has two responsibilities,

1. Make it easy to create graphical representations of objects.
2. Control the execution (start, stop, step) of a simulation loop.

IDE of Greenfoot
The greenfoot environment contains the typical elements of a development environment:

• A source code editor
• A class browser
• Compilation
• Execution control
• A debugger

Who should use greenfoot?(Adopted from Authors)

Greenfoot is aimed at programming at high school level or above (from age 13 up). It can be effectively used at school level, college and university, and even in advanced university courses. The students at high school levels might not be as commited to programming and we have tried to create an interesting program that should engage the student. In order to do this, we acknowledge that students have different opinions on what might be interesting. Hence, we sought to create a flexible environment that could be customised for the specific group of students. Furthermore, in the design of greenfoot we considered the different learning styles of students. you can  download this  from Greenfoot.org and it needs JDK also.

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Windows Phone 7 Programming-Ebook

Hi there Microsoft press has announced Giving an ebook about Programming Windows Phone 7 and this was written by Petzold(you know him right ? Programming windows ….etc ;) )And this Excerpt Edition has only 6 chapters but 11 to go!

Here are the contents of this Book,

Part I   The Basics

Chapter 1   Hello, Windows Phone 7

Chapter 2   Getting Oriented

Chapter 3   An Introduction to Touch

Chapter 4   Bitmaps, Also Known as Textures

Chapter 5   Sensors and Services

Chapter 6   Issues in Application Architecture

 

Part II   Silverlight

Chapter 7   XAML Power and Limitations

Chapter 8   Elements and Properties

Part III   XNA

Chapter 20   Principles of Movement

Chapter 21   Textures and Sprites

Chapter 22   Touch and Play

You Can download this from here.

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Facebook Stories-Share your story…

 

Facebook Stories is a newest introduced functionality of facebook.Basically its a facebook Application which will helps you to share your thoughts with others in a different manner.

You can see others stories by location or themes,and in the front page there is a Bing map included to show the stories came from.Its a pretty interesting thing.  Isn’t it?

You can go to the Facebook Stories through stories.facebook.com

But still 3 stories from the Sri Lanka posted!!!,Hope it will increase soon :).So share your stories with FBians.

P.S:-FBians is a new word to name people who with and use Facebook .Its  came from my mind just now! You can pronounce it  as Fibians!!!:D

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Best Personal Management Site-From Lifehacker

Hi there .This is not my personal blog post this was taken from Lifehacker.com but i think it’ll useful to you.:D

Mint won by a significant landslide—perhaps the most significant in Hive Five history—which probably won't shock anyone. Despite the Hive being dominated by one contender, however, we still reap the benefit of seeing four other very viable personal finance management sites.
Mint took home 85% of the vote followed by Yodlee MoneyCenter (5%), Buxfer (2%), Mvelopes (1%), and ClearCheckbook with (1%). Each runner up offers a different set of tools and approaches than Mint so it's worth your while to hit up the Hive Five and investigate which is the best fit.

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