Toolbar icons

Ugh, what a pain. I’ve known for a while that most of the icons in Windows are not available for use by third-party developers (in the general case anyway) and have looked for some free royalty-free ones for a long time. Finally found some good ones here: glyFX, IconExperience, and Ximian’s OpenOffice ones (these are the ones used in modern Gtk apps). Though the first two are more the native WinXP feel, I think I’m going with the Ximian ones (under LGPL) since its a more extensive collection.

COM Interop

Just now discovering the awesome COM interop abilities of .NET. In order to implement some Certificate Store management (to make use of the WS-SecureConversation things), I first started with the .NET managed things in System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates and also in the WSE 2 namespaces. However, finding that inadequate (esp. for certificate validity checking and some native UI stuff), tried to go with native Win32 interop. However, soon realized how stupidly frustrating that was before encountering CAPICOM (really should’ve looked up more before going into the Win32 API stuff). And with tlbimp, dealing with COM is like dealing with any other .NET managed class. So, got a pretty good and (hopefully) pretty easy to use Cert picker.

Nevermind

Ah, well, maybe I should have just taken a closer look and thought more about the WSE samples before running off with the fingers at the keyboard. IssueSecurityContextTokenAuthenticated will take a X.509 Cert and encrypt the UsernameToken with the puublic key in the cert (as well as the Entropy generated on the client side). Since UsernameToken will send a wsse:PasswordDigest when PasswordOption.SendHashed is selected (i.e., hash of password + timestamp + nonce), and this is what will get encrypted, this is a pretty secure mechanism and I had to look no further. Well, to be a bit fairer to myself, the encryption of the UsernameToken only started with WSE 2 SP2, and is mentioned in the readme (and not the reference doc).

Finally Weekend

Been a busy week. Two events went pretty well overall. Esp. with the second, I think Unisys was pretty impressed with turnout, a good amount of which I think ACM generated.

Looking forward to the long weekend for some rest (i.e., sleep). But, definitely should finish Algorithms project. Don’t remember if I discussed it but this time its actually sounding (hopefully, will be) really cool. We’re doing two compressions – Huffman and Lempel-Ziv. Finally, something new and challenging.

Also, want to really try to get to the web service I want to work on. Hopefully, I can finally get the UsernameToken for initiating a WS-SecureConversation issue settled (I’m thinking there really is no better way than to do it over SSL – That is, do the handshake over SSL and then go onto regular HTTP using signatures with SCTs once the handshake is completed).

Brief Update

Well, past few days have been really busy as I helped organize two events for UCI’s ACM. First one turned out pretty well and so should the second.

Meanwhile, all technical stuff has been on hold except for writing a type and semantic checker for the Simple Sem compiler. I have to say that compared to the Lexer and Parser, this part was actually kind of cool – for the other parts, using some generator tools would’ve been much more exciting.

Anyhow, hopefully will get a chance to get back to more software stuff tomorrow evening. Oh, err, today in the evening. Wow, 4 AM. Ouch.

Stuff

E3 Day 3 was pretty much the same as Day 1. Kind of exciting, but again still just walking and lines and videos. Not many PC games but mostly console stuff. And that wouldn’t have been so bad if it were a lot more Next Gen Console stuff but nope. Just old console stuff with a few videos and very few tech demos for the next gen things.

Finished a testing assignment just in the nick of time. Mostly tedious and boring with some frustrating date handling details.

Trying to figure out how to use UsernameToken with WS-SecureConversation in a secure way without requiring so much work that it’d be better to just go with SSL or some other method.

Found out Saturday that a friend from Fremont died in a car crash. Very sad. Never really had to react to something like that and wondered how I’d feel. Now I know. RIP Maheeth Dass.

E3 Day 1

Sweet Video Games, Hot Chicks, … No shortage of those… But, yea, these are really applicable (even though they are from E3 2004):

[Link]

[Link]

Esp. the lines and the walking, and yes, comments on shortness. And, by the end feet were sore like hell but of course, its still exciting and most likely going to go back Friday for day 3. Would go day 2 Thursday too but have a stupid Software Tools and Methods assignment. Classes are becoming more and more just a hassle.

On Productivity

Ok, this is probably a widely known thing but doesn’t really apply till you actually face it: after a certain point late in the night (and early into the next day), your productivity drops to near zero. Anyway, I was finishing up my project on search trees and it was only around 4 AM that my Optimal tree finally started being optimal. Anyway, that’s over and done.

Xbox 360 looks awesome: [Video]

Look at the mind blowing specs on this thing:

• 3 symmetrical cores running at 3.2 GHz each
• 2 hardware threads per core; 6 hardware threads total
• 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core; 3 total
• 128 VMX-128 registers per hardware thread
• 1 MB L2 cache

And, the Graphics:

• 500 MHz
• 10 MB embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically-scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture

Check out [Link] (above specs are from here) for explanation of what this power means.

Project, etc.

So, this project (from previous post) continues to be not-so-exciting. The only challenge is in figuring out some frustrating and minor details.

Meanwhile, I got my 9-Guy for submitting an entry for Josh Ledgard’s logo design competition. Thanks to Josh for doing it – he’s one of the people contributing to Microsoft’s effort at building a better community relationship.

Lastly, I am in awe at the Unreal 2007 screenshots at Gamespot. Check ‘em out: [Link]. Cinematic quality graphics are now mainstream.

Project in Data Structures and Algorithms

… is the name of a course I am taking. I do like theory at times and thought I might enjoy this class. Now, I must say that I do in fact find the projects somewhat interesting but for the most part, they are kind of a bore. It feels like I am uselessly and needlessly writing routines that would be in any standard library (C++ STL, .NET System namespace, etc.). Do they have a twist though? Well, unfortunately, not much – the only addition is that I analyze some theoretical aspects of the routines I code up. But overall, I’m kind of disappointed.