Smoke 'n Ashes

Argument between Passengers and Airport Staff over mismanagement - IGI A...

2012-01-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

For some reasons this video seems to be getting lots of hits in the youtube, so just sharing it on my blog as well. Well just to update my blog..

New year’s resolution

2012-01-05T09:21:00.001-08:00

Courtesy: Lets laugh a bit

Shocking but true brutal egyption police.

2011-12-18T10:12:00.001-08:00

What is this? Aren't policemen ashamed of what are they doing? (Egyption Police). This kind of brutality can't be tolerated in a civilized world.

Goto – Good or evil?

2010-12-28T07:39:00.001-08:00

Found a good article on the use of goto statements in the languages while, I was following up with posts on stack overflow. Here is a stack overflow post named Goto still considered harmful. It has some interesting discussion but I also found two articles by two great computer scientists discussing it in detail.

They have some interesting facts and information as to where goto is good and where is it harmful? A good reading nevertheless.
Beware

Linus (Linux Fame) also had something to share on goto here

Torrent Finder Domain Seizure

2010-12-24T15:56:00.001-08:00

Copied from: [http://torrent-finder.info/torrent-finder-domain-seizure.php]

On Thursday, the 25th of November 2010, the Torrent Finder domain ( www.torrent-finder.com ), registered with Godaddy, was seized by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without any prior takedown notice or specific allegations of infringing activity. The Domain IP was suddenly changed without the registrar's knowledge and the system displayed a "Pending Registry Action" message on the domain's status. No contact was given until Wednesday, the 1st of December, when Godaddy replied to my inquiries, giving a contact for an ICE agent.

On Thursday, the 2nd of December, David Snead who is representing Torrent Finder contacted the ICE agent in charge who told him that "the orders are under seal, but that the seal will be lifted today or tomorrow". However, we have not heard from them until writing this post. Another email from Godaddy clarified that the action was taken by VeriSign: "please understand that these actions were taken by Verisign at the Registry level; and not by Go Daddy". The story was first reported on TorrentFreak and NYTimes.com.

Torrent Finder is a meta search engine that searches other search engines through iframes redirecting users to other domains and websites that Torrent Finder does not manage or control; most of the sites are suggested by Torrent Finder users through URL suggestion form. There have been many explanations about the mechanism of Torrent Finder Search on the media and how it works just like Google or Bing despite that Google does link to .torrent files directly. "So, when is the U.S. Government going to seize the Google domain?" Inquisitr.com asks. And Torrent Freak writes "When a site has no tracker, carries no torrents, lists no copyright works unless someone searches for them and responds just like Google, accusing it of infringement becomes somewhat of a minefield - unless you're ICE Homeland Security Investigations that is" and many others ask the same question, for instance Techdirt and Technobuffalo.com.

…

For more visit: http://torrent-finder.info/torrent-finder-domain-seizure.php

Support electronic freedom, fight censorship. Like the torrent-finder facebook page and spread the news.

Funny–Indian Youth Education Series

2010-12-04T03:44:00.001-08:00

Random TV Presents Mahilao se Baatcheet : Ek Margdarshak (how to talk to the ladies – A Guide)

How to talk to the fairer sex. A guide for the Indian Youths

Credit goes to the original uploader.

SharePoint–Preventing CSRF using dynamic canary

2010-09-27T00:51:00.001-07:00

As you are aware SharePoint uses a FormDigest to prevent common CSRF attacks.

A Good article on SharePoint XSS and AllowUnsafeUpdates can be found here.

In a relatively obscure scenario you may want to call a SharePoint page asynchronously using AJAX. If so you will want to prevent CSRF attack on the target page and call SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest. But how to provide form digest to this page?

Simple! Just add a __RequestDigest variable to the Post request and call the TargetPage. Don’t forget to include a formdigest control on the TargetPage though or inherit from SharePoint master page.

var canaryValue = document.getElementById('__REQUESTDIGEST').value;
request.Send("__REQUESTDIGEST" +canaryValue+someFormData)

This code is assuming you are making the AJAX call from a SharePoint page which already includes a RequestDigest field and you can use this value to post to the Target Page.

Another method to get the request digest is to call GetUpdatedFormDigestInformation method on Sites.asmx webservice.

As an alternative of sending RequestDigest field in the Post Data, you can set the X-RequestDigest header on the web request to the Request Digest value and validate the FormDigest on Target (Couldn’t get it work for the ASPX pages. Works for WebService I believe).

request.SetRequestHeader("X-RequestDigest", canaryValue);

Behind the Code - Anders Hejlsberg

2010-09-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

Behind the Code with Anders Hejlsberg

Recommended C# Books

The C# Programming Language - Anders Hejlsberg
C# in Depth - Jon Skeet

Comic - Engineering Process

2010-08-28T04:48:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer: The intent of this comic strip is pure fun. No harm is intended to anyone.

Artist: Alone Dreamer

Copyright: Do not hotlink to the above images and Do not replicate the graphics without the prior permission of the author.

Comic - Triage Bug Bar

2010-08-28T04:37:00.001-07:00

Artist: Alone Dreamer

Triage bar goes high as a product reaches closer to the General Availability.

Comic - A Feature Team Meeting in Company

2010-08-27T09:08:00.001-07:00

Disclaimer – No offense is meant to anyone living or dead

A typical feature team meeting in a Software Company (Name withdrawn upon request).

Click the image above for the full version of the image

Credit: Alone Dreamer

Some VS Bugs

2010-08-21T14:25:00.001-07:00

Error

"the page has one or more <asp:content> that do not correspond with <asp:ContentPlaceHolder> controls in masterpage"

Apparently I’m using a wrong contentPlaceHolderId which doesn’t exist in my master page but that’s not true. Here is my Page

<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="Head" runat="server">
</asp:Content>
<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="Content" runat="server">
</asp:Content>

And my Master page looks like this

<head id="h" runat="server">    
    <title id="t" runat="server" title='<%$ CurrentPage: Title %>' />
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="Head" runat="server">
        <link rel="canonical" href="<%= CurrentPage != null ? CurrentPage.Url : Request.RawUrl %>" />
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>  
</head>

It all looks good to me so where is the problem? Error message is not very friendly in this case and error and solution both seems pretty weird.
Solution: The title tag should not be used as a single closed tag e.g. <title /> instead it should be written as <title></title> and the problem will go away. Look out for other tags as well such as <script />. It doesn’t work very well in the single close tag. Use explicit close tag wherever possible. Browsers are forgiving in nature but not the VS

Solution: Facebook Social Plugins not working in IE

2010-08-19T04:33:00.001-07:00

What to do when you’ve worked hard to integrate Facebook plugins with your website and they look cool on Firefox/Chrome but all of a sudden you feel disappointed when it doesn’t work at all in IE, or may be works sometime but not always (as in my case).

Being an avid IE fan and user, I can’t just sit back and relax when it’s not working on IE. So here is a small modification you need to make to your page when you feel you’ve done everything correct but your fb:like or fb:login-button are still not working.
Add the xmlns:fb namespace to your page and you are done. I just forgot to add this to my page and was living in frustration for one whole day until I came across this post. Then I realized it was a silly mistake and I should’ve added this before when my Visual Studio was complaining about the unrecognized fb tag

<html xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

I hope it helps some people implementing Facebook connect on their pages.

Bowling at its worst :)

2010-08-15T11:39:00.001-07:00

This is us playing bowling at Extreme Sports Bar Hyderabad.

Let’s see how we play :)

This is Suneet playing his second best lol..

Now you know how was his first best :) People moved their children away after his ball hit the pins Why?? ‘coz it hit the pins in the another lane… Lol

I was not behind though.. this is how I like to play

Dynamically adding Facebook XFBML plug-in to your page using jQuery

2010-07-18T01:54:00.001-07:00

I was trying to add some of the facebook social plug-ins to my home page at www.sandeeprawat.com which display a kind of splash screen at first (not a splash actually but a simple visible <div> and hidden content on the page) and then on clicking on the page, it renders the hidden content of the same page and adds some XFBML plug-ins and a twitter gadget. I didn’t want to download everything on the page load since it will never be shown to a user if she never click on the splash screen and it would mean unnecessary load time. So I what i tried to was to add the content dynamically on the onClick handler. Now here is the problem.

facebook SDK parses the DOM only on the doc load, so when I dynamically add <fb:like /> button after that, it is inserted successfully but doesn’t do anything and no iframe is generated which is obvious. I’ve scratched my head for long, tried various options suggested over internet but none of them worked for me, so I went back and added them statically to the page and make those controls hidden which wasn’t a good solution but at least it worked.

Now here is what I was doing wrong, I was using FB.XFBML.host.ParseDomTree and I also used FB.XFBML.Parse() as suggested by Facebook but I still couldn’t get that to work. Now the error was very simple, my syntax was wrong I should have used parse in small case instead of Pascal casing which caused me a fair amount of time to discover but at least it was a good learning. Mind you I’m new to the jScript world :)

Here is the code snippet I’m using to insert the tags dynamically.

$(document).ready(function () {

    $("#divStarter").click(function () {
        oTweet.render().setUser('talksandy').start();
        $("#divStarter").hide();
        $(".container").css("visibility", "visible");
        var poetry = $("#autoFetch").html();
        $("#poetry").html(poetry);        
        $("#fbReco").html("<fb:recommendations />");
        $("#fbFriendPile").html("<fb:friendpile />");
        $("#fbLike").html("<fb:like />");
        FB.XFBML.parse();
    });
});

Dandeli – Goa trip

2010-04-15T10:01:00.001-07:00

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

Permalink

Some pics from our trip to Dandeli and Goa. Trip was kool but nothing that we expected. We had more fun the last time we went to Hampi.

It’s a nice place to visit. You can do Jungle Safari, rafting, kayaking and all short of other cool stuff. Place is a bit expensive though.

It’s me. Who else did you expect? :)
Visit my Picasa or Facebook Album for more pics…
Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

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Trip to Hampi

2010-04-15T09:59:00.001-07:00

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

Permalink

Hampi is famous for its temples. Some cool images from Hampi. Trip was fun, we spent two days in Hampi

Note: Cross posted from Smoke 'n Ashes.

Permalink

Bindaas TV - Dadagiri Host gets slapped

2008-09-06T11:23:00.001-07:00

Embedded Video

Been a long time since I posted a blog, but this one is a world famous video of a relatively unknown Indian reality show Dadagiri where tv hostess gets slapped by a contestant which is deserved very well. Another Coward co-host whoever he is should be punished as well. Bunch of A***holes

This show should be closed for the good of society.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

ACDC vs M&M – Online Dance Battle

2008-06-06T00:44:00.001-07:00

Gone are the days of Street Dancing battle on streets. Everything going hi-tech these days And so did the Street Dancing.

ACDC (Adam/Chu Dance Crew) and M&M (Miley and Mandy) Cru are on the street (Online street Youtube.com) fighting for the title of largest online dance battle in the world history. So far it’s going good.

Check’em out on 10th June – They are ready to kill each other

Here is the First challenge from ACDC

M&M’s Response to the above

Some history (Copied from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA7dEWKAT7Y )

HISTORY:
April 10, 2008
Jon M. Chu and Adam Sevani challenge Miley and Mandy to "The Biggest Online Dance Battle in YouTube history". The rules are...there are NO rules. both crews are allowed to do whatever they want, however they want. Jon and Adam name their crew the ACDC (Adam/Chu Dance Crew). They release their first battle video.
April 15 2008
Miley and Mandy respond with a giant video to Madonna and Justin Timberlake's song, "4 Minutes". In 24 hours their video gets OVER A MILLION hits and become an instant YouTube classic. It gets posted on Perez, Access Hollywood, Yahoo News, Ellen etc. They even recruit one of Step Up's own to be in their video (Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan).
April 28, 2008
Adam and Chu release a teaser for their response to the Miley and Mandy video. It sets a date and time for the release of their next installment, "April 30th 9pm PST." Buzz grows.
April 30, 2008
There is an ONLINE frenzy on the ChuPictures youtube page where the fans have gathered for the live release of the battle video. Chu's youtube triples it's views in twenty minutes before the video has even been uploaded. Technical difficulties lead to the delay of the video release for 1 hour. Frenzy only gets bigger.

Icahn Moves to Oust Yahoo Board

2008-05-15T11:44:00.001-07:00

Following Microsoft withdrawal of Y! acquisition plan and signs of not reversing the decision, Billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy contest to Oust Yahoo!'s board, stating that Y! Directors acted irrationally and lost the faith of Investors and Microsoft.

Below is the Letter sent by Mr. Icahn to Y! Chairman Roy Bostock

May 15, 2008

Dear Mr. Bostock:

It is clear to me that the board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is quite obvious that Microsoft's bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative to Yahoo's prospects on a standalone basis. I am perplexed by the board's actions. It is irresponsible to hide behind management's more than overly optimistic financial forecasts. It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72% premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.

During the past week, a number of shareholders have asked me to lead a proxy fight to attempt to remove the current board and to establish a new board which would attempt to negotiate a successful merger with Microsoft, something that in my opinion the current board has completely botched. I believe that a combination between Microsoft and Yahoo is by far the most sensible path for both companies. I have therefore taken the following actions: (1) during the last 10 days, I have purchased approximately 59 million shares and share-equivalents of Yahoo; (2) I have formed a 10-person slate which will stand for election against the current board; and (3) I have sought antitrust clearance from the Federal Trade Commission to acquire up to approximately $2.5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. The biographies of the members of our slate are attached to this letter. A more formal notification is being delivered today to Yahoo under separate cover.

While it is my understanding that you do not intend to enter into any transaction that would impede a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, I am concerned that in several recent press releases you stated that you intend to pursue certain "strategic alternatives." I therefore hope and trust that if there is any question that these "strategic alternatives" might in any way impede a future Microsoft merger you will at the very least allow shareholders to opine on them before embarking on such a transaction.

I sincerely hope you heed the wishes of your shareholders and move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary.

Sincerely yours,

CARL C. ICAHN

Reference:
Icahn Moves to Oust Yahoo Board (Wall street Journal)
Icahn Letter to Yahoo Board

Microsoft withdraws its offer to acquire Yahoo!

2008-05-04T11:56:00.001-07:00

Here is the Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s letter sent to the Y! exec

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

· First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

· Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

· In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

· This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

· It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Reference: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080503/ballmer-to-yang-dear-jerry-drop-dead/
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx

An American Crime (2007)

2008-05-03T04:52:00.001-07:00

Couldn't resist myself from writing this post after watching this movie, based on one of the most terrible and heinous crime ever committed.

A young girl Sylvia Marie Likens tortured and murdered by Gertrude Baniszewski, her children and young people from their neighborhood in 1966.

Articles:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,835635,00.html
http://www2.indystar.com/library/factfiles/crime/history/likens_sylvia/sylvia.html
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0802948/

The Girl Next Door (2007) is another movie based on the same plot.

Honey Singh - Badshah (Adults Only)

2008-05-03T00:24:00.001-07:00

After the great success of hugely popular Zeast - Sutta song, here is one more explicit song, which is becoming extremely popular in the underground crowd. And the song is Honey Singh - Badshah.
Beware - Content is very mature and should be avoided by girls and kids.
Some of you might have already heard it but for others here it is

Got a chance to listen this few months back but after listening the same in a Pub in Chandigarh, I thought it's time to post it Live.
PS: I haven't contributed to this song :) This is one of my most popular post. Thanks guys and Baadshah!
(Posted From - Windows Live Writer)

IPL Cricket - Hyderabad - RC vs HD (Photos)

2008-04-25T08:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big fan of Cricket but cheerleaders in IPL 20-20 certainly attracted me to the Cricket Ground.
Here are some pics from the cricket match Hyderabad Deccan Charger vs Rajsthan Royals which RR won after a great fight [Thanks abhishek for correcting me].
Sania Mirza the famous tennis player also came to support team from her home city.

Direct Link to photographs

I've also added some Cheerleaders video on youtube which you can watch at
http://www.youtube.com/user/flyingdeath

Internet Explore and ACID2

2008-01-12T07:46:00.001-08:00

Finally IE 8 renders the above image correctly. On my browser IE 7 it still sucks.

So what the fuss is all about? Acid2 is a web test (though not a standard) which tells how browsers renders some specific features of web standard. Web Standards Project, publisher of the test, is an Web Standard Advocacy group. For a web developer, supporting ACID 2 means a better cross browser compatibility. They don't have to write different set of style and HTML code for different browser. It certainly make their life happier.

IE was one of the worst performing browser as per the ACID test but not any more.

As per the Blog post from IE Blog

"With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing web. This second goal refers to the lessons we learned during IE 7. IE7’s CSS improvements made IE more compliant with some standards and less compatible with some sites on the web as they were coded."

With earlier releases of IE, it used to break some of the the existing web sites. For example my blogger theme just didn't work with IE7. It was pretty much fucked up and I had to revert to some other theme. Hopefully I will not have to suffer any more.

Well DONE MSFT and IE team.