AES vulnerable but not broken yet!

Researchers from Microsoft and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium have proved that the AES algorithm used in online transactions and wireless communications is vulnerable and can be broken in this article. I got my CISSP certification in the beginning of this year and learned all through that AES is the most powerful and unbreakable algorithm. Now we do need to make a note that this algorithm has now become brittle but not yet broken yet, as the technologies and resources available to carry out this task are still under construction!

Cursive writing, now a legacy?

I still remember my childhood days when my grandmother used to discipline me when my cursive writing went bad. The next generation may not have this opportunity of knowing, let alone learning cursive writing in school. I read this article about several states (Indiana being the recent one) adopting a program that makes cursive writing an optional skill set and keyboarding or typing skills are a mandatory in the school curriculum. I was thoroughly disappointed after learning this fact and can only hope that schools in these states will continue to teach cursive writing along with typing skills since this is up to the school to decide.

Celebrations for the 'D's

Eventful year so far for my son Dhruv who is now two months old. India have won the ICC Cricket World Cup couple of days after he was born and recently the Dallas Mavericks have won their first NBA Championship in the franchise history. Little 'D's arrival, big 'Dirk' gets his first ring and first ever NBA championship to 'D'allas. Looks like it's the year of the Ds! See the celebrations with my son, all along!

Feature that's a bug!

Inserting an installation CD-ROM, DVD or USB drive automatically initiates the "autorun.inf" program. This program apart from opening up attractive flashy screens on loading the disc can also be a carrier of some nasty program embedded by the attacker to compromise your system or access your system files. This program can be turned off by pressing the "shift" key while inserting a CD-ROM or USB drive. A permanent solution would be to change the registry settings. The usage of USB drives and Firewire in the form of ipods and other day-to-day electronic accessories can be of greater risk to your laptop/computer than expected.

CISSP

I got notified last week that I have successfully passed the CISSP examination. One final step of getting my endorsement and experience reviewed before I can be tagged as a CISSP. Very glad it's behind me now!

Convert MKV to VOB and split for PS3 use

Use the 'mkv2vob' freeware to convert a .mkv file to mpg format. If the output generated is greater than 4gb, it cannot be transported to PS3 due to the FAT32 format constraints. mkv2vob has a setting under the 'configuration' tab to force it to split the output after it reaches the specified file size.

ITILv3 Certified

Successfully completed the ITILv3 Foundation certification today!

iPhone 2.0 Upgrade and the new App Store

The new 2.0 version of the iPhone firmware is now successfully installed on my old iPhone. For the past week I have been busy exploring and installing some applications from the new iTunes app store. Here is the summary of the Top Ten "Free" apps that I have installed until now. The "Piano" app is pretty cool as well but is not free and costs $5.99.

1. AOL Radio - Rated this No.1 as I have been waiting for long to listen to live Radio (Local + National). This is pretty good although it has about a couple of minutes of delay in transmission. I like it!
2. Shazam - Awesome app that listens to playing music and spits out the Album, Song details. I tested it in my Car and it even worked in CVS Pharmacy with all the ambient noises.
3. Bloomberg - iPhone has a native "Stocks" application, but Bloomberg goes an extra step further to give more details and charts in the landscape mode.
4. BoxOffice - Nice app that lists all movie times screened in a particular location. It also lists all the new movies according to their rating.
5. Jobs - CareerBuilder's app enables you to search for Jobs based on location on the go!
6. Remote - Control iTunes music on your PC/Mac using the iPhone as a remote
7. Jott for iPhone - Listens and converts the voice into text as a ToDo list. VoiceNotes is a similar app but just plays the recorded voice back. The voice convertion to text takes about 2 minutes.
8. Twittelator - Useful app to post into Twitter
9. SportsTap - Check live Scores for any Sport - NBA, Soccer, NFL, F1, Tennis, MLB but not yet Cricket.
10. YPmobile - YellowPages Mobile is the YellowPages app that list all local businesses based on the location. Great app!

Rest of them are other good to have apps.

TypePad, WHERE, Pocket Express®, vSNAX Videos, Currency, Blip Solitaire, Morocco, iPint, Puluwai, Scribble, Stanza, eReader, midomi, Light, myLite, FiatLux, NowLocal, Save Nenjis, VoiceNotes.

I guess more apps are cooking in the pipeline! Watch out...

Home Projectors and HDTVs

I have been using a 720p Optoma HD70 DLP projector to watch DVDs and some HD channels. My set-up comprises of the projector, bunch of HDMI and component video cables, HD tuner from DishNetwork and a Panasonic Home Theater System. I project the 110'' screen image on my white wall that partions my kitchen and dining. See it yourself in the picture! The lamp life for this projector is 2000hrs and I have consumed about 900hrs in 18months. CircuitCity had offered a bulb warranty for 4 years for an extra $130. This covers the replacement of the bulb (one-time only) within those 4 years and is completely worth, as the bulb itself costs more than $300. On the whole, the choice of buying a projector over a Plasma/LCD HDTV was cost and space effective at that time. Now, the cost of 1080p HDTVs has come down drastically and the 1080p projectors are still pricey! There are other factors that need to be factored while choosing a home movie projector such as appropriate ambience lighting, lamp-life, lamp-intensity, contrast ratio to name a few.

Handy Trip Organizer

Mark Dixon's weblog is one of my most regularly monitored blog. In his recent posts, he pointed to Tripit which is an automatic online trip organizer that conglomerates all the information from your email itineraries and generates a single trip summary. All you need to do is register and keep forwarding your email confirmations and itineraries to plans@tripit.com and rest is taken care of. This is particularly helpful when you have booked flight tickets, hotel and car, all from different websites. The final consolidated trip summary you receive from tripit also contains - weather forecasts, map information and driving directions. Best part of this service is that you can view your trips from your mobile handheld through the mobile site. You can always sync your outlook calendar to your mobile but this product makes it much easier to get to your trip plans all at one place!

Tulips in "Holland"

Enjoy the Tulips in the picture taken with my iPhone on a rainy day
trip to the Dutch village in Holland, MI. Typically Tulips bloom
around end of April and start of May which is a good time to visit.
Entry fee to the garden is $7 and $12 for the Dutch village.

Mobilize Your Blog with Plusmo

I had successfully created a PlusMo widget for my blog. You can now subscribe to my blog (and several others if you want to!) and read my posts instantly on your mobile phone. You will have to register at PlusMo if you are a first time user. In case you are interested in mobilizing your own blog, follow the steps listed below:

• Set 'Allow Blog Feeds' option under Settings->SiteFeed to full and click Save
• Register at PlusMo and select 'Mobilize Blog' under Publish and click the 'Get Started" button
• Select the Button of your personalized choice and enter http://yourblogname.com/atom.xml in the Blog URL field and click next
• Script will delivered for using it in your blog home or website.

Gift Worthy!

My wife gifted me an iPhone for my birthday earlier this year. I have been enthused the way it has improved my communication especially when I am on the move. I have started mobile blogging again and my last post (and the picture) about the Pistons game was infact posted from my iPhone! I had read some reviews about the poor quality of the camera in the iPhone, unavailabilty of the zoom functionality and inablity to capture video. Other downsides mentioned include that the iPhone was not prepared to be business ready, but with the release of iPhone firmware version 2.0 and SDK slated in June'08, hopefully most of these issues will be resolved. All those issues apart, I have been using this gadget for various purposes on the go - GPS locator, video iPod, google maps, weather, news, stock market fluctuations. Specific third party applications (which will be supported by Apple in the future) help me find a movie theatre, restaurant based on a zip code or find the latest score of an ongoing match - be it Cricket, Soccer, NBA or NFL. Of course! All this with the touch of screen. I have come across people who complained that the touch screen is only for people with slim fingers, which I believe is not true as there is an option to maximize the viewing area before you make click. One other thing I really miss in the iPhone is the radio option. Many people have already complained about this missing feature in the iPod. Most of the cool third party applications for iPhone are listed in several blogs, websites and run into hundreds in number. I have my home screen already running into three pages which would be an overkill on the memory space once these applications become native. I plan to make a comprehensive basic list of these applications that I find very useful in my future posts.

Pistons Vs Wizards

I was at the Palace of Auburn Hills watching the Pistons beat the Wizards on 11th of April. Enjoyed being there early enough to watch the player introductions by John Mason and the invigorating 'Sheed' dance. I am sure it will be a lot of fun to watch the Pistons run for the
championship one more time!

Pasword Sync/History and other issues in IDM 6.0

1. CONFIGURATOR CAPABILITES: Creating a new user with Configurator capabilities is possible but the bulk account administrator capability along with several others, will vanish after the password is reset and the expiry date removed from the user object and the user has logged in. If the user is not logged in then the user account is in expired state and might cause problem if we are doing a major migration move.

 

2. PASSWORD SYNC THRESHOLD: New password sync process with JMS, seems to have problems syncing the password immediately. The "passwordsyncthreshold" is an important variable that needs to be set. Default setting is 30secs but 10sec is advised for the time being.

 

3. PASSWORD HISTORY ISSUES: Listed below are the major issues in dealing with password sync, password history in IDM and AD:

 

(a). Password history on IDM is not case-sensitive by default, i.e., all the passwords in the histroy are stored in uppercase. But password history on AD is case-sensitive. This causes the password histories to go out of sync. Hot fix provided by Sun.

 

(b). Resetting password on IDM doesnot put this password in the history unlike a change password. But in AD any change/reset is stored in AD history. This again causes the password to go out of sync. Still looking for a solution.

 

(c). Password change on AD triggers a recursive password change on IDM and AD as the message is passed onto the JMS queue twice and then stops. This behaviour occurs even if the AD resource is listed in the passwordsyncexcluderesourcelist and passwordsyncthreshold is set to more than 10secs. This could either be because of the two workflows coming into play when a password change occurs - ChangeUserPassword WF and SynchronizeUserPassword WF.

 

4. AUDIX AND MAINFRAME ISSUES: Audix and Mainframe adapters are not completely fucntional in the new IDM 6.0 version. Hotfix provided by Sun.

To change a DNS record on your computer

Locate the "hosts" file under "C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc". Open this using a textpad and add the ipaddress at the end, then enter tab and enter the DNS name to which it should map. Close all the browsers and test by entering the new domain name.

Limitation to the number of Roles in Sun IdM

When number of roles for a particular user are added continuously, at one point, even changing the password or authentication answers and saving the account through the administrator interface of Sun IdM, will fail. This is because the maximum allowed length for the text in the user object is 256 characters. This limitation is removed and set to unlimited in the IdM Version6 SP1.

Remote login to Sun/Unix boxes from Windows/Unix systems and other general commands

Listed below are few generic things, one need to keep in mind:

1. Use Exceed software to rlogin to a remote UNIX/Sun box. With this set-up you can open the BPE from on local Windows system by logging into the remote Sun box.

2. Use the command ./lh setRepo -c to check which database is pointed to the idm repository.

3. If you want to open the BPE on your local Sun box, you need to set the environment so that it will be able to display the GUI. Use the setenv DISPLAY ipaddress:0.0 or refer http://scv.bu.edu/Graphics/xstuff.html.

Auditing Authentication Answers modification in Sun IdM

Whenever there is a modification of answers to the authentication questions of a user in Lighthouse/Sun IdM, this event will not be audited.

Server not booting after a restart

Sometimes the application server where the IdM application is deployed, doesnot come back-up as expected after a maintenance restart. This could be due to the hung Source Adapter Task. To overcome this problem, delete the "source adapter task" TaskInstance if it shows-up on the list.

 

Run the following commands from the lh console:

 

listO TaskInstance (if Source Adapter Task shows up on the list, then delete it)

delete TaskInstance "Source Adpater Task"

delete TaskSchedule SourceAdapterTask

 

Now, restarting the server should work smoothly.