Mahjayar's WebLog. : Random Thoughts

I am a PC and I am 4 1/2 – Cute!

Mahjayar — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:21:50 GMT

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery">Video: Kylie uses Windows Live Photo Gallery</a>

Cute..very cute.

Live Mesh Invites - First come first serve

Mahjayar — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:40:00 GMT

I have been using Live Mesh for quite some time now as they were our first Silverlight internal customer. Its been a pleasure to work with the Mesh team and its even more fun to be seeing your code being used in real life large scale online app. I have 2 Live Mesh invites to hand out. First two people to leave thier live/hotmail ids get them.

Update: They are all gone. If people want any more I see the Long Zheng has started a website www.ShareMesh.com for inviting and requesting Mesh invites. New users can register there.

Maheshwar Jayaraman

Setup my personal blog on a new domain. Finally!!

Mahjayar — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:30:00 GMT

After a lot of procrastination I finally got a new blog on my personal domain hosted at http://maheshwar.net/Blog. Thanks to all the people who responded via comments and emails to my earlier post asking for suggestions on domain hosting providers. I took the general consensus and got my hosting account with DiscountAsp.Net. I got the whole thing setup over a weekend and then found a very customizable blogging framework in BlogEngine.net to use for my blog. I have already made some changes to the framework it has been pretty straightforward experience so far.

I am going to cross post all my technical blogs on both sites but move my random ramblings over to my personal site. I have lot of mini Silverlight projects that I would love to host on that site once Silverlight is released (in beta or RTM format). For people who are interested in my following my other blog can subscribe to http://www.maheshwar.net/Blog/syndication.axd.

Experimenting with the new MSN Messenger IM Control

Mahjayar — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 07:22:00 GMT

Microsoft just announced the Messenger IM control. I took a quick look at it and found it to be pretty useful idea and want to test this out on my blog. Sometimes I get email from people who have follow up questions on a blog post and this would be a wonderful way to have a quick conversation if I am online. I am going to try it out for a few weeks and if its successful then I am going to add it to my personal domain as well. From looking at the code, I can see that the it doesnt have my login name in it and so *hopefully* I wont be spammed.

Its not like this Windows live is the first to do this, Google already has the "chat with contacts" embedded in GMail and then there is MSN web messenger. But this is the first time I dont need a login name to use the feature.

Windows Live is releasing some nice features. Now all I need is this feature integrated in Hotmail so I can have instant conversations with online contacts without needing the desktop client.

Recommendation for a good Windows based web hosting

Mahjayar — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 06:02:00 GMT

I have always toyed with the idea of having my own domain and I am finally ready to move my blog off to my personal domain. I was searching for good domain hosting providers and wanted to throw the idea out here to see if I could get some good suggestions.

I looked at Brinkster and liked what they provide but wanted to know if people had any feedback about them. Also they dont seem to provide ASP.Net development and Sql server database in their rookie account and the pro account seems too much for what I am looking for but I like the extras they provide such as wordpress blogging software and photo albums.

So here is what I am looking for in my domain hoster.

1. Windows based (so I can add my projects in WCF, Silverlight)

2. Good blogging software

3. Asp.Net, MySql/Sql server support.

4. Photo album

5. Support for media streaming.

Stuff such as decent storage and bandwidth is standard. I will continue my research but in case any of you have good opinions on a particular host then please share that information.

Suggestions?

Can you believe this!

Mahjayar — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 03:53:00 GMT

Funny way to welcome your new employees.

The video ends with one guy saying "this experience is going to last forever". Translation: "I need to visit my psychiatrist to erase this memory"

Funny clip

Mahjayar — Tue, 08 May 2007 21:38:00 GMT

Came across this really funny clip on SoapBox. Enjoy.

Tough Guy Audition

Video: Tough Guy Audition

Debugging the mystery of the crashing desktop

Mahjayar — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 05:51:00 GMT

My home desktop running Vista would crash with a blue screen everytime I logged in the main console if I had remotely logged in via TerminalServices prior to that. This was happening every time I connected remotely to the box and couple of weeks earlier I found another way of crashing it. I was able to consistently crash the system if I logged in as Guest and then login with main account. Prior to today, I never bothered to check why it crashed as I attributed the crash to some faulty driver not updated for vista and I had a simple workaround of restarting the computer before disconnecting from my remote session (I know its not the ideal way but it worked for me). My desktop is a Gateway T3306, a "cheap" desktop that I had purchased during 2005 thanksgiving. The desktop was bare bones and I had beefed it up by adding extra memory/disk.

Last week I attended David Solomon's 5 day course on "Windows OS Internals" and part of that talked about debugging a system crash dump. After the exercise I decided to come home and check the dumps to see which driver was actually causing the crash.

I started up Windbg and loaded the latest dump from \windows directory and the autoanalyze gave me the following output.

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (50)
Invalid system memory was referenced. This cannot be protected by try-except,
it must be protected by a Probe. Typically the address is just plain bad or it
is pointing at freed memory.
Arguments:
Arg1: dd05221e, memory referenced.
Arg2: 00000000, value 0 = read operation, 1 = write operation.
Arg3: 90ea9301, If non-zero, the instruction address which referenced the bad memory
address.
Arg4: 00000002, (reserved)

FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner

SYMBOL_NAME: win32k!SearchIconCache+20

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x50_win32k!SearchIconCache+20

BUCKET_ID: 0x50_win32k!SearchIconCache+20

Followup: MachineOwner

The followup usually points to a driver if it finds one in the thread callstack that caused the KiTrap0E error (crash). MachineName usually means that it didnt find a driver in the stack. Walking the stack using the k command produced the following output.

kd> k
ChildEBP RetAddr
a0c9fc30 81c8fa74 nt!MmAccessFault+0x106
a0c9fc30 90ea9301 nt!KiTrap0E+0xdc
a0c9fcc4 90ea93bc win32k!SearchIconCache+0x20
a0c9fce4 90ea94ab win32k!_FindExistingCursorIcon+0x4a
a0c9fd50 81c8c96a win32k!NtUserFindExistingCursorIcon+0xe5
a0c9fd50 77ce0f34 nt!KiFastCallEntry+0x12a
WARNING: Frame IP not in any known module. Following frames may be wrong.
001be900 00000000 0x77ce0f34

So the stack points to a Win32k thread trying to call a SearchIconCache method. Tried searching on the method name but didnt hit anything. So tried to see what it was trying to do with memory location dd05221e mentioned in the argument so the bubcheck. Did a unassemble at the return address for the Trap0E function and got this.

kd> u 90ea9301
win32k!SearchIconCache+0x20:
90ea9301 663b461c        cmp     ax,word ptr [esi+1Ch]
90ea9305 754e            jne     win32k!SearchIconCache+0x74 (90ea9355)
90ea9307 f6462004        test    byte ptr [esi+20h],4
90ea930b 7448            je      win32k!SearchIconCache+0x74 (90ea9355)
90ea930d 668b461e        mov     ax,word ptr [esi+1Eh]
90ea9311 663b4704        cmp     ax,word ptr [edi+4]
90ea9315 753e            jne     win32k!SearchIconCache+0x74 (90ea9355)
90ea9317 8d4614          lea     eax,[esi+14h]

The first statement compares a value pointed by pointer (esi + 1ch). ESI register had the value dd052202 and adding 1CH points to memory location dd05221e which is the same as the one pointed by the bugcheck argument. The memory at dd05221e pointed to nothing/garbage.

kd> dd dd05221e
dd05221e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05222e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05223e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05224e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05225e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05226e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05227e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????
dd05228e ???????? ???????? ???????? ????????

the address dd05221e is kernel mode address space and hence this meant some kernel mode code was pointing to a wrong address or had its address space overwritten by a rogue driver as the memory could have been corrupted long before poor Win32K tried to do what it was doing. The process that was running this thread during the crash was mobsync.exe and from running procmon on my live system I found that it was the Microsoft Mobile Sync service running within the "Plug n Play" svchost service. Apparently this kicks in when I open the "Sync Center" or when you plugin a Windows mobile device which I had done occasionally on this PC. To confirm whether this process was the culprit each time my system crashed I opened all Minidumps from \Windows\Minidumps folder. Vista by default stores minidumps of all crashes in \Windows\MiniDump folder but keeps overwriting the full kernel dump at \Windows\Memory.dmp. I was surprised to find that each minidump showed the same mobsync process as the culprit with identical callstack as the kernel dump. I was almost convinced to fill a bug with the sync team and add the kernel dump for reference but then I decided to check one more detail before filing the bug. I read up on the BugCheck code 0x50 and here is what the documentation had to say about it.

Cause
Bug check 0x50 usually occurs after the installation of faulty hardware or in the event of failure of installed hardware (usually related to defective RAM, be it main memory, L2 RAM cache, or video RAM).
Another common cause is the installation of a faulty system service.
Antivirus software can also trigger this error, as can a corrupted NTFS volume.

Great, the cause could be

faulty RAM (Which I ruled out as I just had a faulty RAM crash at work and the blue screen was completely different for that. I also confirmed this by looking at the BIOS log which usually mentions which DIMM faulted)
Video RAM
System Service (Which mobsync.exe is)
AntiVirus (I had to rule out service and video ram before trying this out)

My Video card is an integrated S3/Via UniChrome Pro card from S3Graphics.com and looking up their site for updated Vista drivers yielded no results. That leaves me with two options, spend $$ on a video card and hope the problem goes away or try to confirm the issue with the mobsync team before spending the money. I think I am going to opt for the second option. I plan on turning on Driver Verification for the video card and then trying to reproduce the crash to see if DriverVerifier catches it and if that doesnt help then file the bug and wait. I will update later on how my DriverVerifier experiment went along.

Bottom line is I got more out of "Windows OS Internals" class that what I had initially hoped and I would strongly recommend it esp for people working on drivers. Mark Russionovich made a guest appearance at the class talking about UAC and impressed everyone with his brilliance.

Maheshwar Jayaraman

World Record - Six sixes in an over

Mahjayar — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:06:00 GMT

Cricket lovers around the world rejoice. Sir Gary Sobers unique feat has been acheived by Gibbs in ODI's. I dont know how to compare this with any other sporting activity to explain this. Imagine hitting six consequtive home runs in the same game, now imagine doing the same with the ball bounced from the ground.

Commentary from cricinfo

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/wc2007/content/current/story/285608.html.

Herschelle Gibbs's six sixes off Dan van Bunge's fourth over was a record for international matches. Cricinfo's ball-by-ball commentator Sriram Veera captured all the excitement and action as it happened in this ball-by-ball description:

Herschelle Gibbs was in a murderous mood at Warner Park. He smashed his third six over long on © AFP

29.1 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, Violence! Gibbs charged down the track and hoicked it over long on.

29.2 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, Murder! Floated on the leg and middle stump line and Gibbs sends it soaring over long-off.

29.3 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, Carnage! Flatter one this time but it makes no difference to Gibbs. He just stands there and delivers. This one also has been sucked over long off

29.4 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, Wah Wah! Low full toss and guess where this went Yep. A slap slog and it went over deep midwicket! He is going to go for 6 sixes in this over!

29.5 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, Short in length, on the off stump line and Gibbs rocks back and swat-pulls it over wide long off. SImply amazing. What a batsman. This is pure violence!

29.6 van Bunge to Gibbs, SIX, He has done it! One-day record. No one has hit six sixes in a row. GIbbs stands alone in that zone. And the minnow bashing continues! Full and outside off and bludgeoned over deep midwicket

Update: Knew someone was gonna put this on YouTube.

Photosynth preview. Wow

Mahjayar — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:56:00 GMT

First VirtualEarth 3D and now PhotoSynth.No words to describe it. Check it out for yourself (esp the 3D overview of Piazza San Pietro).

Maheshwar Jayaraman

Is Live search usage increasing

Mahjayar — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 21:59:41 GMT

Robert Scoble has a post where he feels that Live search is getting better. I have been using Live search for quite some time and now use it fulltime as I find it excellent. Now you may think that I am biased as I work for Microsoft but that's not the reason. I was looking at my referrals log for this blog and in the last 3 months I see that live.com and search.msn.com brings in 20% of my referrals and google has gone down from 100% to about 76%. This is a huge improvement as same time last year I used to have 0 referrals from search.msn.com. My referrals is not such a huge collection and was wondering if people with higher referral volume see such similar spike.

I also see a lot of referrals from blogs.msdn.com and I am not counting those (They also use live search engine) as that's via a Microsoft site.

Will do a similar check in 6 months to see if that referral percent goes up for Live.com.

Maheshwar Jayaraman

FF vs IE debate - WOS (Wrath of Slashdot)

Mahjayar — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:51:00 GMT

Peter torr posted his experiences *Installing* (notice the bold on installing) firefox and got swamped with backlash comments from FF patrons. He then followed it up with a follow up post and I think both the posts are excellent. Gr8 posts Peter and keep up the good work. Poor guy, if there are about 400 moderated comments then I can only guess the amount of unmoderated comments he must have got.

One thing that most of the IE bashers forgot about the post was that the post never discussed features and only discussed the installing part of it. But from the reactions, seems like an IE user talking about FF is taboo and is bound to have a million "IE sucks, FF rules" comments. Now that sucks.. understand the context!!!!!

Personally, I use both FF and IE and keep switching back and forth based on what I am doing. Lets face it, FF is currently better than IE and has more features. But that doesn't mean its the most secure *here we go again.. :)*. Google's applications have been recently in the news for security holes and as FF usage grows, its bound to face the same problems like Microsoft and Google. Lets face it, hackers or virus writers have no loyalty towards any product and just enjoy making people's life hell no matter what the platform is and what the product is. All they want is a wider user base to get affected!!!! Only time will tell.

These kind of strong competition is good and will bring the best in both products, bottom line: Happy times for users where they have more features and options and security.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

MSN Desktop search beta - Usage update and my 2 cents

Mahjayar — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 08:34:00 GMT

I got more time to play with the desktop search are was about to post my views on it. There has been ton of blogging going on and more information related reviews and user experience can be found at msnsearch blog, scoble blog #1 and scoble blog # 2.

My first impression of the tool was "Good" and after using it for a couple of days, I think this is really a great attempt. Amazing what competetion can do to bring the best out of a company !!!! I wont reiterate all the "wow" or "not so wow" features of the desktop search and just concentrate on features that I found interesting or wanting.

1. Shortcuts and Command launcher: Assigning shortcut to launch a process (@ keyword) or launch a process (= keyword) sounds cool, but I already have that option mastered by typing Windows + R key. What I liked though was have shortcut for replacing words in query strings ($w option). Instead of typing the shortcut and the query replacements in the search bar, I want it to be accessible from the command prompt or the Start->Run menu. This would be super cool and a feature that will really integrate search with day to day developer activities. Imagine working on a c# exe in command prompt and on error invoke my favorite web search engine to learn more about the error without having to leave the window or press any hot key combination.

2. Indexing time: I installed this on my laptop and let it run completely until it said it finished indexing all my harddrive. Then when I click on "Index Now" to see what happens (my SDET instincts kicked in :) ), it reported another 11,000 files to be indexed. Thats strange..the indexer for some reason thinks there are more files to be indexed when the only activity I did was click on "Index Now"!!!. This considering that it reported to have indexed a total of 95000 files for the complete hard drive. Thats more that 10% of the files that it either didnt index the first time or "forgot" to index. Sounds like Enron accounting :)

3. Taskbar space: This was the part that I didnt really did not like. My laptop can accomadate only about 4 or 5 programs before I need a magnifying glass to see the small taskbar windows and this search text box takes precious space. I followed Scoble's suggestion to drag the textbox on to desktop and let it hover but once I let it hover and opened someother window, the search textbox could not be viewed or brought back. The only way to see the textbox again was to click on "Hide Deskbar" and "Show Deskbar" menus. That kinda sucks. I want the textbox to be like a "Mac Widget" that just hovers on my desktop and when I access the hot key "ctrl+alt+m" it should come on top of all other open windows. Hope the search team incorporates this feature in the next update.

4. Taskbar hidden: When I have the taskbar hidden and the press the hot key to search, I dont see the textbox but just the popup that normally appears on top of the Textbox.

Complaints aside, the tool is a wonderful. Its trully amazing and very very fast and effecient and secure and .... I had uninstalled google desktop search the day I hit my hotmail userid and found all my hotmail mails that I had opened without even needing to log on (help..) (thanks to google showing a cached version of my page). I dont have any such security holes with msn desktop search.

Bottom line: I love it but for the features required. Have posted it to the msnsearch blog feedback and hopefully its considered.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

MSN Beta Desktop Search Revealed

Mahjayar — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:08:00 GMT

As most of the WWW now knows, Microsoft had announced it would release a Desktop Search tool. The beta of the Desktop search was revealed today which can be downloaded at http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/. Have played around with it and the initial feeling is that it looks/works pretty cool. Would like to play more with it to find whats the functionality and speed is like. Some interesting features that I found are

1. Able to search PDF files by installing a Plugin

2. Search as you type

3. Integrates with Outlook

4. Accessible with a configurable hot key (default is ctrl + alt + m)

Bottom line: Amazing stuff and if beta is this, cant wait for the final version.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights

Mahjayar's WebLog. : Random Thoughts

I am a PC and I am 4 1/2 – Cute!

Live Mesh Invites - First come first serve

Setup my personal blog on a new domain. Finally!!

Experimenting with the new MSN Messenger IM Control

Recommendation for a good Windows based web hosting

Can you believe this!

Funny clip

Debugging the mystery of the crashing desktop

Cause

World Record - Six sixes in an over

Photosynth preview. Wow

Is Live search usage increasing

FF vs IE debate - WOS (Wrath of Slashdot)

MSN Desktop search beta - Usage update and my 2 cents

MSN Beta Desktop Search Revealed