University of Moratuwa tops GSOC 2009

University of Moratuwa has been able to top the Google Summer of Code program, yet again. With 22 participating students university of Moratuwa was far ahead from the second place, University of Campinas Brazil which had 12 participating students. I’m glad i was a part of this success. Here are some stats of GSOC 2009.

When Linux crashes

Yes Linux been another piece of software, gets crashed once in a while. Once I used to work with a Ubuntu machine that after 10 hours of work would always get stuck when trying to shutdown. Luckily for Linux users there are some options before reaching for the power button.

You can use a sequence of <alt + sysreq(Prnt Scrn) + key> to issue commands straight into the kernel even when the system is in a total non responsive state.

For example the following sequence of commands can rescue you from a crash and would execute a safe reboot.

ALT + SysReq + r
ALT + SysReq + s
ALT + SysReq + e
ALT + SysReq + i
ALT + SysReq + u
ALT + SysReq + b

Here you can find what each command actually does.

For the easiness of remembering the commands, the idiom, ‘Raising Skinny Elephant Is Utterly Boring’ is used.

Remember that the above commands would only work when the system is in a non-responsive state. Otherwise it would just throw a bunch of print screen windows at you.

I am on GitHub

Github is a web based project hosting service based on git that has social networking concepts embedded into it. They call it Social Coding. Apart from standard version control facilities github includes social networking features like RSS feeds and followers. Currently I have the GSOC 2009 project hosted in github and hopefully many more in the future.

You can follow my social codings at http://github.com/kasun.

I am selected for summer of code 2009

I am so happy to announce that I am selected for Google Summer of Code 2009. Over the next 4 months close to 1000 students from over 70 countries would work with close to 150 open source projects to make the world a little better place.

I am selected to work with Maemo and will be using Python. After programming all this time with Java I was planning to move to Python. This will be a great chance for me to learn Python while contributing to an open source project and on the process getting paid by Google.

Thank you very much Google for this wonderful program.

Digit launched

Digit, an online IT magazine was launched on the 1st of this month. I would be covering a series of articles on the topic of SCJP study guide. There is a good combination of articles from programming guides for newbies to advanced articles such as agent techniques and IT news.

Installing vodafone HSDPA modem in linux

I got a Vodafone(Huwaei) HSPDA modem and installing it in linux was well, not a nice experience. I had ubuntu 7.1 in my computer and I had to install wvdial to get my modem to work in linux. That was not very difficult until I decided to update my system to ubuntu 8.04. Wvdial comes intalled in that version of ubuntu but strangely the modem would not work. I tried many things unsuccefully before i found an easy way out, upgrading the network manager.

If you are planning to use the vodafone HSDPA modem with linux my advise would be to update your OS to the latest version and then upgrade the network manager to 0.7.

In a debian based distribution such as ubuntu you can use the following urls to upgrade the network manager.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/network-manager/ubuntu hardy main

insert the above urls to /etc/apt/sources.list file and enter the command, ’sudo apt-get update’ to update the update list. Then update the OS using command, ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ or using update manager and the network manager would be updated to the latest version. Then making a connection using the modem should be straight forward.

How to make sure your XP machine is safe

How safe is your windows machine? Would Putting a password for your account and changing the administrator’s password, guarantee your machine’s safety? No it won’t.

Windows passwords are stored in a file called SAM which could be located at C:/windows/system32/config folder. It’s inaccessible from within windows. But all you need to get access to the SAM file is a bootable Linux CD. Once you boot from a Linux CD you can just navigate to the specified location and copy the SAM file. Believe me it is easy as that.

If you use Backtrack which is a popular Linux distribution used for penetration testing rather than a normal Linux distribution you can try to crack the SAM file without leaving the targeted machine. Backtrack has all the tools you would ever want for these kind of things. You can use ‘john the ripper’ to try to crack the SAM file with the use of a dictionary file. Which is nothing more than a collection of possible passwords. Or you can use this tool called chntpw which can be used to inject a username and a password to the SAM file. Then you can use that username and password to log into the system.

If you are booting from any other Linux distribution you can just copy the SAM file to a pen drive and take it home! yes take it home and crack it. You can use a tool like ophcrack to crack a SAM file.

Ok then here is the good news. You can easily protect yourself from these kind of attacks. The best way is to put a BIOS password and change the boot order in such a way that first choice to boot would be the hard drive. This would prevent booting the machine from bootable disks. If that is impossible, it is best to use characters other than alphanumeric characters such as ‘$#%’. These symbols make it hard to crack passwords.