Best Programming Language To Learn

I think it was 1988 when I learned my first programming language: Basic. I will never forget the first day when teacher wrote I = I +1 on the screen, and for a second it made no 'matheatical' sense at all :) I liked Basic!

Anyway, most Engineering applications were written in some variation of Fortran then, so that's what I learned in college. I never really liked Fortran. At the time, Computer Science students were learning Pascal, Turbo Pascal was very popular. One of the students who was very good at it gave a couple of us free lessons and that's how I learned it...

Then, when I started to work at 1993, I realized that 'Excel' (version 4, then) was 'the' application that was used for everything around me. Accounting was using it as well as Engineering teams. So, I learned about Macros and later VBA, which made life so much easier! At some point, I jumped from VBA to VisualBasic.

When 'Web Master' became a cool term, I learned about html and ASP. That was a nice combo and helped me do a lot of cool stuff around year 2000.

Later on, when I started to dig into Unix/Linux world, it became clear that Perl would help and together with shell scripting; it did in a big way when automatic tasks in Unix! Although I became proficient with VBScript/WMI scripting, ActivePerl is still my preferred choice in Windows b/c of it's spectacular power with regular expressions (Well VBScript became better with regular expressions and introduced "Dictionaries" (Hashes) yet I don't think it matches Perl).

So, I was thinking what to do next? Java has been out there for quite a while. I was interested in PowerShell but became disillusioned with version 1. AutoIt3 seems interesting but not super easy or intuitive. I keep on hearing about Python (check out this link for some resources) but I am not sure if it adds much on top of Perl...

That's why, I was quite interested when I saw the subject on LifeHacker. There is a lengthy discussion about it. Take a look if you are interested...

While waiting for GDrive

Still waiting for highly speculated Google GDrive to become available... In the meantime, http://www.getdropbox.com/ seems like a nice try...

Have Phun!

I just saw a cool science tool named Phun. Here is what it is 'about':

Phun is a Master of Science Theises by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt for supervisor Kenneth Bodin at VRLab, Umeå University. The solver is based on work by Claude Lacoursière
Phun is meant to be a playground where people can be creative. It can also be used as an educational tool to learn about physics concepts such as restitution and friction.

Watch out this pretty cool video and you will love it too...

Vista - Cannot Open Control Panel (Fixed)

World of Warcraft was giving me headache yesterday. FPS near Ogri'la was only 4fps, although lag was not too bad (~150-200ms). So I decided to disable addons, defrag HD blah blah. I was also using procmon from sysinternals to see if there was anything hogging Vista...

I noticed SearchIndexer was a bit troublesome and stopped the service. While there, I went thru the list and disabled a couple of other that did not seem useful/applicable. One of them was "Software Licensing".

Software Licensing Service Description:
Enables the download, installation and enforcement of digital licenses for Windows and Windows applications. If the service is disabled, the operating system and licensed applications may run in a reduced function mode.

Apparently, if you disable this service you cannot open Control Panel. It looks like it's coming up but then disappears immediately. Enabling/starting service fixes the issue...

Vista - Still Bluescreens

After installing Vista SP1 RC1 and moving Page file to a different hard drive, I was finally not able to get rid of BSODs when computer was idle...

After a coupel of weeks, unfortunately freezes and BSODs came back. The last one I had said something like:

Win32k.sys

Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
STOP 0x00000050 (0xFFC000000,all zeros,0x964E0FB3, All Zeros)...

Apparently, Microsoft has a hotfix for this. There is an article titled "Error message when you start a Windows Vista-based computer: "STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 )

However, this article mentioned issues during startup, which was not really my case. I kept on looking and found another KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939720 about STOP: 0x00000050.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617 I get the feeling that one of the drivers is not playing well with vista. I ran c:\windows\system32\verifier.exe to see if it will be able to help me pinpoint the issue.

SysPro Policy Reporter

A colleague showed me this cool free tool called "Policy Reporter".

Policy Reporter makes it much easier to understand how Microsoft implements Policy Processing, which is not really transparent...

It reformats the log provided in %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode to give a more meaningful display.

It provides a Tree structure on the left which shows major events reported in the Log. Selecting an entry in the tree structure displays that section of the log in the view window.

It also has a "Performance History" tab that loads Group Policy Performance information from the registry, including the time taken to apply the policies and what policies were applied.

It also has some other nice features such as 'Search' and 'Export to Excel'.

Note: You must activate Verbose logging to get detailed information. Policy Reporter assists in doing this.

Free Online Educational Courses

Just came across two useful links:

• 200 Free Online Classes
• 100 Free Podcasts from Best universities in the world

Windows Vista SP1 RC1 Issues

One of my computer is locking up almost every day. I leave it alone at night, when I come back in the morning I see it BlueScreened. I googled "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" and tried to find something that would explain my BSOD with Vista to no avail... and decided to try Vista SP1 RC1.

I downloaded the stand-alone version and tried to install it. It bluescreened half way there after half an hour or so (well, it said SP1 update can take hours in the screen so half an hour is great).

I tried on my other Vista machine and it even did not get that far. Then, Microsoft refreshed RC1 and I decided to try it again as my Vista keeps on locking up.

So, I browsed to Windows Vista Service Pack 1 page, and downloaded Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh (Build 17128) – released 01/11/08. When unpacked it has 3 files in it. I ran the cmd, which entered a registry key that enabled me to see an Update for Vista SP1 Control Panel > Windows Update > "Check for Updates".

Update actually installed 3 files, rebooted. Then I went back to Windows Update and clicked "Check for Updates" but it did not find anything. I waited and tried a couple of mins later. This time it finally found SP1 RC1. I clicked install and it froze on me after a few mins.

I tried a couple more times suspecting that whatever issue was causing my lock-up , it was preventing update from finishing. And Windows Update was able to finish the download but it failed to install it. Error code: 80070005. Unfortunately Vista help did not list this error code.

After some search, I realized that many other has seen the same issue and the only solution I saw was Aaron Stebner's blog entry. Apparently, MS messed up permissioning and Windows Update does not have enough permissions to write some reg keys/files.

I followed the instructions mentioned. I do not know if this will work for me yet. I will post a follow up later.

[Update - 01/21/2008]
I ran the script from Aaron's page. It did a lot of things but failed to reset permissions on 7 keys. I rebooted and tried again, it kept on failing. I also tried running SP1 update but it too failed...

I looked into the error Kernel_Data_InPage_Error, I was getting. I had the following error codes: 0000007A (0xC020BF84, 0xC00009C, 02a266860, 0x82FE130D)
ntfs.sys - Address 82FE130D base at 82EF8000 Datestamp 47214597

So, there are 4 block of error codes:
1st set is about Lock Type (0xC020BF84)
2nd set is the I/O status (0xC00009C)
3rd set tells us about Current Process when BSOD occured(02a266860)
and 4th set mentions the memory code where error occured.

As per this article at MSDN, my issue was 0xC000009C, or STATUS_DEVICE_DATA_ERROR, is typically due to bad blocks (sectors) on the hard disk.

As my Page File was in C drive, probably there was some bad blocks in the C drive. Unfortunately, chkdisk did not help. So, I moved the page file to my other drive.

No lockups since then. And to my surprise, Vista SP1 RC1 installed successfully today!

Bill Gates last day at Microsoft from CES 2008

Earlier this evening Bill Gates gave his final Microsoft keynote at the 2008 CES show in Las Vegas. Throughout the keynote he made many references to what he will do with his free time once he retires from day to day operations at Microsoft. It turns out, Bill has big plans in addition to his foundation after all.

read more | digg story

Disposable Web Accounts

So, we are in 2008 now. After taking the final two weeks of 2007 off, I am back to work and catching up with e-mails & diggs. As I was looking at the most popular technology content in the last month, I noticed the subject above.

5 “DISPOSABLE” Web Accounts to Keep Your Identity Safe is the actual title of a wonderful post from makeuseof.com.

BugMeNot was already one of my favorite firefox addons. I especially liked "file.io" service...

Path Maximum Transmission Unit (PMTU) Black Hole Routers

Windows XP SP3 promises detection of Black Hole Routers, which is supposed to improve over all networking experience especially for laptops. While investigating the subject, I came across a good, comprehensive article about PMTU (Path Maximum Transmission Unit) at Microsoft site.

By default PMTU Black Hole Discovery for TCP/IP is disabled on Windows XP machines. It can be enabled though:

Setting: EnablePMTUBHDetect
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD Value: 1

"Changes in PMTU black hole router detection in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Vista" is a good follow up article.

Enabling of PMTU Black Hole detection and changes are all result of Microsoft's "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack".

The Cable Guy from Microsoft has an article on enhancements that "Next Generation TCP/IP Stack" (terrible name IMHO) offers.

Vista BSOD

My vista install started to crash when there is a lot of disk activity. It would crash every other day at first. Then, at some point it started to go down shortly after I initiate PowerUsenet downloads.

I looked at MS documentation for 0x0000007B and concluded that it had something to do with Sata controller. Article suggested to replace cables as it could be caused by a faulty cable but doing so did not help.

Then, I bought a HighPoint Tech TocketRaid 1742 PCI card. Documentation suggested to simply install the card and point to the driver location once Vista detected it. Unfortunately, Vista kept on blue screening once card was installed and I could not reach the logon page.

I installed the card on an empty PCI slot and connected back my Promise SATA controller. After the Vista came up I installed drivers, shutdown pc and removed the promise controller. Then, I reconnected my SATA HDs to the new controller and succesfully booted.

I hope this will end my BSOD issues....Time will show.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) Test Drive

Ubuntu 7.10 was released yesterday. Below is my first hand impression of new release. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, if you will...

Getting the image:
I tried all North America mirrors to find a fast image download site but I guess because of first day rush, all were slow, download speeds around 50 KB/s. After a couple of hours, I was able to access Georgia Tech mirror which let me download at speeds of 2MB/s, so I got the image in a matter of mins.

I usually use Lauchpad.net to order my free copies of Ubuntu, which is an awesome feature of Ubuntu Distro.

Because of firewall rules, I could not use torrents in my environment. Not sure how that would change my experience.

One thing I noticed was that Europe/Asia had a lot more mirrors and when I tried them I got almost the same download speeds: ~50KB/s. I hope more 'fast' mirrors are added for North America soon.

Installation:
Ubuntu installs were always good but not without hickups... When I was reading reviews, I had read something like 'Installation was even easier than Vista'. I attest to that now.

I decided to wipe out earlier version and install it on my IBM T40. I popped in the CD, live-cd install completed in a few mins. Then I clicked install shortcut on the desktop and installation started.

In all installs up to this version, time would always be incorrect, this worked fine. Install time was short and I had to click 'next' a couple of times to confirm keyboard, regions etc and enter username/pwd.

Devices:
When I say devices, I should confess that I don't really have a lot of devices to check the functionality. What has always been painful for me was Wireless Access. I have a netgear wireless card, which was automatically recognized, drivers were installed and was ready for me to use after reboot.

The only thing I noticed was, it was not available during install and at some point Ubuntu install warned me that I did not have internet connectivity, so Security Repositories/Updates would not be available at the time. No biggie.

Post-Install:
One of the exciting things I saw in 10 rocking features in 10 days series of articles was about Tight integration of Firefox with Ubuntu. So when I browsed to blogger site, firefox popped up a message for "missing plugin".

Unfortunately, things did not work as advertised after that. Flash Plugin was supposed to be installed seemlessly. Instead I got an error when I tried to install it.

In fact, once I clicked "close", it told me that plugin was installed and I needed to restart firefox. Of course, that was not true...

I also tried Firefox > Tool > Addons to install some plugins like GreaseMonkey but no luck there either. It kept on complaining about source not being available. If you look carefully, you will notice a type in "available".

I know some may think I am just being picky now, but I hate to see such typos as it gives you the impression of sloppiness. Ubuntu is a 'high-quality' distro, such small stuff does therefore matter (at least to me).

I am not sure if this is a bug or if there is some back-end issues here though. Because I also got a "Service Outage" page when I was trying to get some more explanation on what's going on.

Anyway, I am sure I can still download and install these stuff manually as I used to.

Screen Resolution: It always bothered me with Ubuntu/linux installs not to be able to easily increase screen resolution from current setting. Ok, "easily" is a relative term. Because normally, you would edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then logout / log back in to see changes. That's a "no no".

In fact, in Ubuntu preview, Lifehacker touched upon this point: "It might not seem like a revolutionary feature, but users can now change their screen resolutions and refresh rates without having to log out or hack around in terminal."

I think it should be like in Windows, where all resolutions are listed and when users chooses one, it's tested and user is asked to confirm if it was OK. This is still missing from "easy-to-use" Ubuntu and require a bit more tech skills.

OK, I guess I will post more when I have more time in my hands to play with it. This is it for the time being. Oh, before I forget, I loved the fact that Compiz is the default window manager in Ubuntu now:)

Edit 10/22/2007: I am having an issue with Ubuntu start up. It does not start properly and a black screen is displayed. I play with the mouse and touch a few keys, I see HD activity in the meantime and after a minute or so logon screen shows up. I have an ATI card on this IBM T40 laptop, not sure what exactly is causing this but no update has resolved the issue yet.

Enable / Disable Outlook 2007 Rules

As a Blackberry user, one of my pain-points is with the pst files. Here is how it goes. Let's say Outlook is open and I get an e-mail, my rules process it and move it to one of the pst folders. Problem is that I don't get it in my BlackBerry.

Of course, if outlook was closed, or if the rules were not processed, that message would end up in my BlackBerry. As I want to keep outlook open, I have to disable the rules. There is no manual way of quickly doing this. If you look at Outlook Rules > Run Rules, you can not, for example, select all with Ctrl+a. You have to click and select each one of them. Painful!

So, I decided to create a macro, that would automatically disable the rules, or enable & run them. Idea is that in the morning, I will keep the rules disabled so that I will get them in my BB, and time to time I will run enable script to move them to psts.

Below is the code. In Outlook, you can
* press Alt+F11
* Expand Project1 (VbaProject.OTM)
* Expand Microsoft Office Outlook Objects
* double click ThisOutlookSession
and paste the code in there.

Then you can simply Press Alt+F8 and chose the action...


Sub DisableAllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = False
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: DisableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Sub Enable_Run_AllRules()
Dim colRules As Outlook.Rules
Dim oRule As Outlook.Rule
Dim count As Integer
Dim ruleList As String
'On Error Resume Next

'Get Rules from Session.DefaultStore object
Set colRules = Application.Session.DefaultStore.GetRules

' iterate all the rules
For Each oRule In colRules
oRule.Enabled = True
oRule.Execute ShowProgress:=True
count = count + 1
ruleList = ruleList & vbCrLf & count & ". " & oRule.Name
Next

colRules.Save

' tell the user what you did
ruleList = "These rules were enabled: " & vbCrLf & ruleList
MsgBox ruleList, vbInformation, "Macro: EnableAllRules"

Set colRules = Nothing
Set oRule = Nothing
End Sub

Rounded Corners with CSS

I was looking for a way to create rounded corners without using images. I came across "Nifty Corners Cube" which does exactly that and more.

Digg - The Pictures Section!

I check Technology Section of Digg.com at least a couple of times daily. I am not sure exactly what purpose the new picture site will serve but it's another way of 'sharing', which is a good thing.

[UPDATE]
Heh, this site turned out to be a 'rogue' one :) Still... I like the idea.

read more | digg story

Install Ubuntu On Windows - WUBI

I saw an article about installing Ubuntu on Windows at Ubuntu-Unleashed Blog. It talks about an open source project called "WUBI".

Premise is very simple: You install an application called Wubi on Windows XP/Vista which uses an "alternate" (text based) Ubuntu ISO file to install Ubuntu in the windows partition in a 'single file' and give you an option to boot into it.

What does that mean? You do not need to have separate partitions to install linux/windows. It installs necessary drivers to access NTFS share, and does pretty cool stuff like importing your favorites/booksmarks.

When I was testing the application, which you can download via this link, it could not connect to a download site for ubuntu alternate image. So, I checked c:\wubi\install\ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso.metalink and used one of the US sites to download it.

I copied both the alternate image and wubi executable to the same directory and then ran the executable. GUI part is quick, actual installation takes sometime. It's advised to defrag your machine prior to installing it.

This is a cool idea and I hope it gets official acceptance from Ubuntu! Check out Wubi Forums if you are interested.

Lifehacker's Top 10 Gnome Desktop Tweaks

The default desktop environment for Linux users, Gnome, is fast, organized and very easy to learn. But Gnome is also very powerful and highly customizable. Today's top 10 lists the various ways you can tweak Nautilus and the Gnome desktop to turn Linux into a productivity powerhouse.

read more | digg story

Who owns what

Above picture, which lists some of the companies bought a few Media conglamorate, was put together by Amy Webb and is getting circulated a lot these days. It gives an idea about how much of Internet these few companies own.

Online Storage finally taking shape

Just want to note this article about Online Storage and what big 3 (Google, Microsoft, Apple) are doing about it. I think online storage makes perfect sense now that we have faster internet connection.

I only tried Microsoft's Windows Live SkyDrive and it looks pretty good but of course 500MB is 'nothing' if you seriously want to keep your files online. It maybe enough if you only want to keep 'some' files