The Uphill Battle

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Object based querying of data sources

Very informative video from the Channel 9 team over at MSDN.
Object based querying of any (more or less) data source: arrays, XML, DBS, etc.

Some of the comments below the vid are interesting, particularly the comment about FoxPro. I've never used FoxPro, but I'm sure Delphi had/has similar methods for data source access (considering that Anders is ex-Delphi...) and I have vague recollection of Oracle doing something similar with Pro-C? But that was years ago, no idea where it went.

Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ

Thursday, October 06, 2005

At last a justification for having a WinCE4.0 PDA...

OK, so I've got this Harrier PDA/Cellphone, which is all well and good, but what really can you do with it (other than make phone calls, TXTs, crappy pictures and Solitaire?

Here comes the answer... get a 256+meg SD card for it and load Quake3A!

That's right, this guy has ported the now open source code from Q3A to WinCE4.0!

Now all I need to do it persuade the boss to let me get an SD card...

[BTW I've previously tried to get the SANDisk 256MB+WiFi card working with my PDA... it don't....]

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Remote surveilance of CRT's and LCD's

Saw an episode of Numb3rs last night, it included the remote surveilance of a computer LCD screen.

No while the monitoring of CRTs is well known (The US DoD first talked about it in 1947! ARC Search Results: Details pitty they haven't digitised this!) I hadn't heard of it being extended to LCDs yet.

OK, so I'm not security guru (I'm supposed to be developing most of the time), but I still hadn't come across this.

Various TEMPEST (see above ARC link and here) discussions mention that some LCDs do intefere with TV reception, leading to the conclusion that there might be something readable there... See here [first of three myths], here, here,

However you can get TEMPEST compliant LCDs here, here, here and even a whole range of computer equipment here.

But no sign of a device to remotely monitor LCDs yet...

This is as close as I've gotten. It mentions the CEI Tempest Receiving System, but all the pics are long gone and no mention of LCD support. But it does mention using telescopes to look at reflections... or even the modulation of the power LED on a montor!

Did just find this 2003 paper , so it is possible, and this guy has done it, but it's not the LCD screen that's being snooped on, it's the cable connecting the graphics card and the LCD! [in this case on a laptop]

I wonder if anyone has done any comparisons on the different types of graphics card and monitor/LCD connections? (DVI-Analog, DVI-Digital, standard PC[?], Mac, Sun...)

Very interesting field. Far more intreaging than the cracking of Excel passwords that I did at work today...