The Short and Simple Story of the Credit Crisis

One of the best explanations to this situation.

Adrian

Second Life susceptible to SQL injection

The famous 3D World created and powered by its residents had a big vulnerability that allowed the full access to all client accounts, their personal and payment data.

Even if the vulnerability was corrected by now (after being reported around 3 months ago), we are questioning how a company like Lindenlabs with an yearly profit of more than 400 K$ coming from Second Life, is not capable of taking their database security to a higher level.

Source: HackersBlog

Adrian

Windows Mobile 6.5 Beta Leaked

It is really good news to hear that Microsoft is concentrating his attention on the long-forgotten OS – Windows Mobile. And we are getting closer and closer to the official release day with the leaked version of Windows Mobile 6.5 beta.

The bad news is that the only compatible pocket pc phone for the moment is HTC Blue Angel, so anyone using other Windows Mobile devices is out of luck for the moment (me included).

Judging from the screenshots and the presented features, Windows Mobile 6.5 is no more than a minor upgrade over Windows Mobile 6.1. The biggest difference worth mentioning is the new face that offers a slight improvement of the user experience. 

The leaked version was available on XDA-Dev . Apparently Microsoft did something about this and forced them to remove all the links. But if you got a Blue Angel and wand to give WM 6.5 a spin, it still exists on various sources on the internet.

Adrian

Microsoft TechDays 09

This week I decided to take the time to participate in some of the conferences that were on the agenda of TechDays 09.
Today was the first of the three days dedicated to the conference.
To enumerate some of the objectives of the sessions I found interesting – Windows 7 and Surface, Cloud Platform “Azure”, WPF, Silverlight & .NET 3.5 SP1, Visual Studio 2010 & C# 4.0, XNA, etc.



To conclude, I had no regrets about participating – the presentations were high level and refreshing regarding the technology.

All the videos are available here (French).

Adrian

Experimenting with experiments...

Today I lost around 3 hour sitting in front of my laptop realizing how I, from time to time (and curiosity) willingly but unconsciously test Microsoft's "masterpiece".

After being a happy tester of the Win 7 pre-build 6950 from October (right, the second leaked version), happy not because of stability reasons but because as an experimented developer that puts first time the hands on something new, I took precautions and until January when the official beta was released, I kept myself from messing too much with the new OS, not to mention never even thinking about really working on it. In January, amazingly and unexpectedly, the official beta 7000 installed flawlessly over the 6950, and I thought I should take things more seriously and start deploying the "laboratory" on it.

I still remember that with the exception of a number of annoying bugs (problems with insomnia, or waking from it, memory leaks, drivers ..), the system was relatively stable (conditioned by a daily bases reboot).

But with the unofficial leak 7022 that was supposed to contain kernel patches for some of those problems, I lost 3 hours today and everything I installed on the ex-win7-system. One and a half hour of updating the system, 20 minutess of updating registry&services, crash, another 20 minutes trying to rollback the old system and that's about it. Not to mention the dead periods of time between.

Surely being too confident in M$ developer's skill is a "must NOT".
I ca still hear from some that build 6956 is the most stable of them all. No problemo, I believe turning back is never an acceptable solution. So .. Tomorrow (night maybe) is a new day and I will try a fresh install of 7022.

Adrian

Windows 7 build 7025 leaked

Apparently the leaked Windows 7 build 7022 is already out there. It was suppozed to be officially available starting from April 08.
The leak is already available for download on various P2P networks.
The build was compiled on 15 January.

Adrian