.NET Application Security Seminar

The planned Microsoft .NET Application Security Seminar was held on time (3:30) on Wednesday, 26th April 2006. The speakers were Mr. Rai Yawar and Mr. Kashif Akram. Mr. Akram first started his presentation on implementing security in .NET applications, covering both desktop and ASP.NET applications. He also focused on the one click deployment feature in .NET 2.0. Mr. Rai Yawar then followed, focusing on protecting distributed systems from hack attacks. He also focused on WSE 3.0.

Attendance wasn't as high as expected, which is sad, since I was really excited about the topic of the Seminar, and expected people would be too. Security is an issue not covered extensively in academic material that we are taught.

At the end of the event, goodies were distributed amongst the audience and the speakers, since there were more goodies than the people left at the end of the event.

Storing Recursive structures in databases

A couple of weeks ago, me and a few friends were discussing the best way of storing a tree or any recursive structure in a database (no no, we aren't perpetual geeks :) we were discussing some possible interview questions that we might fact at job application interviews).

The solution we decided on was a simple on, that we'll have one table to house all the nodes, with a Parent_Node_FK attribute, which will specify the parent of each node. The root node will ofcoarse have a null entry. Traversing/Retrieving the tree from the database in this case would require recursive calls to a function that will get one node at a time, which is obviously not scalable for extremely large trees.

So I sat online to find a more elegant solution. I found a nice one in the article Storing Hierarchical Data in a Database by Gijs Van Tulder, which uses a modified preorder traversal of the tree and stores numbers in the database allocated to each node during the preorder traversal. This reduces the retrieval of the tree from the database to just a single query, which gets all the nodes in one go. You just have to do simple postprocessing to get the actual structure of the tree.A much better approach imo.

.NET Application Security Seminar on the 26th

The Microsoft .NET Application Security Seminar has been scheduled to be held on the 26th of April (coming Wednesday) in LUMS (A-13 Auditorium). The event will inshallah start at 3:30pm and should go up till around 5:30. The speakers weren't given a lot of time to prepare for the event, just 2-3 days, so I hope they can come up with good content, and top their presentations that they gave in the Launch. Mr. Rai Yawar will be returning to give a presentation, and we will also be having a speaker from Multilynx, a Microsoft Partner in Pakistan.

Would have been nice if Mr. Saqib Ilyas were speaking, since people at the Launch liked his presentation...

With Bolan (LUMS crappy mail server) down most of the time these days, I'm having a hard time advertising about this event. I guess I'll have to rely on user groups and going to students and facultly members individually to get them interested about the event. As always, students from FAST are interested in attending the event, and I'm hoping to seeing quite a few of them at this seminar as well.

Gonna have to go into turbo mode for the next couple of days, deadlines are piling up really quickly ... wish me luck for the event people! (And if you're in lahore on the 26th, COME!!!) ^_^

Applying at Microsoft

Since most of us are entering the job market these days (yours truely included), we've been scurring around trying to apply for every eligible job possible.

People in Pakistan can apply at Microsoft by sending their Resume's to pakcv@microsoft.com. Be sure to check out this post on Microsoft's job blog, which contains instructions on what to write in your resume. Be sure to check related items in the left column on this page, which contains interview tips and other useful stuff.

Good luck to all who are applying for work this year!

BSA vs Piracy

Read in the news paper today that the BSA (Business Software Alliance) has given a grace period till late May 2006 (don't remember the exact date), after which it will start cracking down on piracted software used by businesses and home users. I say its about time, since piracy is the number one cause why our domestic tech industry is not flourishing. 80% of the software used in Pakistan is pirated, which is a HUGE percentage.

But before you start uninstalling your copy of 'special edition' Windows XP and start looking out the window for suspicious government people, have a look at this story on The News website (dated Jan 25 2006). Apparently there was a grace period which ended on the 29th of January 2006, and I don't think there was a huge anti-piracy campaign following that. I hope there is one this time around, 'cause we certainly need some shaking up.

I guess I'll go and start saving money for a licensed Windows Vista.......

Entertaining Midterms and Hot Prescotts

Today I gave the midterm of Distributed System, probably one of the best taught courses at LUMS. Its being taught by Dr. Umar Saif, who has a really different teaching style than the rest of the CS faculty at LUMS ... he actually makes studying sprawling and complex distributed systems fun. The midterm was a nice change from the mundane papers that I've become acustomed to giving for other courses, it actually made you think about the problem, and have a laugh or two about it as well. For instance, we had to come up with a naming scheme for robots in the Borg collective (Star Trek anyone?) ... too bad most of the people in the class didn't know what the Borg were. :( Anyway, and then there was a question about the Yoogle search engine (Yahoo! and Google?!). We should have more guys from MIT teaching at LUMS...


On a completely different note, being the owner of an Intel P4 Prescott, you kinda get basic fire-fighting training, or rather, it should be a pre-requisite before you buy the damn thing. I've owned one for about 2 years now (I religiously count the number of Summers the P4 has passed without buring up in my face). The year (actually the month ... no wait, the week) I bought mine, it blew up twice in a week. I spent most of those days in Hafeez Center watching 'technicians' trying to figure out why my system was heating up so much. They finally changed the MSI motherboard to an Intel one, and the temperatures kinda went down. Then I had to buy a Rs. 4000 cooling fan for my processor (which comes with its own nifty regulator ... woohoo!!) to keep the temperatures of the cpu at around 50C. Every summer, one or more of the power cables inside the cpu burns up and I have to get it replaced. This year was no different, but instead of waiting for it to happen, I caught the burn symtoms early, and cut the wires and taped together fresh portions of 'em so that they should (hopefully) last through this summer.

So the moral of the story is, stay away from Intel Prescotts! They are HOT (in the very very bad sense)!

.NET Security event and Im. Cup

By next week (by the 25th of April), we'll be having a .NET Security related Microsoft seminar at LUMS inshallah. Still have to get the time and place reserved, and work on the advertising. The last Microsoft event, Launch 2006, went pretty well, hope this one goes even better.

Haven't met the speakers yet, and don't know what exactly they'll be talking about, but should be fun. Looking forward to this one.

My hopes of a LUMS team going for the Software Design invitational at the Imagine Cup this year hit a snag today. Ali Abdullah's group was planning on sending their .NET 1.1 project for the competition, but they've run into problems while converting it into .NET 2.0 :/. I'll probably get together with them tomorrow, and figure out a solution.

Shifting...

Since this is my first entry on my NEW blog at blogger, I'll introduce myself I guess. I'm Jaffer Haider, currently a Computer Science student at LUMS (only for a couple of months till graduation though, so won't be one for long). After my BSc is done, I hope to get a decent job, and well ... lets see where life takes me from there on. :)

My previous blog can be found here (host at thespoke.net). It was made primarily as a log of my activities as a Microsoft Student Ambassador. The spoke proved a little dull for me, so I've shifted to blogger, which seems much more alive if you will. Should be fun blogging here.