July 30, 2007 7:49 am by Jal
We all know that when we switch on a computer system, it does take time to process “something” until a sexy girl occupies your desktop screen and GUI icons appear beside. But very few of us know what it actually does. In fact, it is one of the most crucial things that a computer should perform – The everyday process of Booting.
For a computer to undergo a successful boot, its BIOS, the operating system and hardware components must all be working at their optimum level. Even a slightest disruption in any one of these components may result in a failed boot sequence. The whole process is explained here in the simplest manner.
→ When we supply a sufficient AC to the computer system, the CPU (Central Processing Unit) initializes itself because of series of clock ticks generated by the system clock. As the ROM BIOS stores the first instruction (which is the instruction to run the power-on self test), the CPU looks for ROM BIOS for its first instruction. The power-on self test (POST) then checks BIOS chip and CMOS RAM. If there is no battery failure, it goes on initializing the CPU and checks for hardware devices like hard drives, ports, then the keyboard and mouse, ensuring at every stage they are working properly.
→ Now the BIOS waits for the CMOS chip to tell it where the OS is located. The drive order that the CMOS chip looks to in order to locate the OS is called the boot sequence. However, one can also change this sequence by altering the CMOS setup. In the appropriate boot drive, the BIOS will first come across the boot record to find the commencement of the operating system and the ensuing program file that will initialize the operating system.
→ Now its time for BIOS to copy the OS’s files into memory and to handover the control to the OS itself. OS now loads the device drivers needed to control the peripheral devices like scanner, printer, optical drive, etc. The denouement of the boot process occurs with the handling over of controls to the user, after which he/she can operate the programs installed on the computer system.
July 23, 2007 4:07 am by Jal
Hitting the markets with the code name “Orcas”, Visual Studio 8 will prove to be a blast for the developers. Despite being in the beta phase, it has the following striking features:
- Inbuilt .NET 3.5, including ASP.NET Ajax Framework.
- Selection criterion to which .NET version you wish to write codes for.- Visual Studio 2008 introduces large number of features that increases productivity and make the life of developers easy.
Components
.NET 3.5
Unlike its previous versions, Visual Studio 2008 will not target to any one particular version of .NET. The user has been given the privilege to select the .NET version he/she wants to write code for. So what’s new in .NET 3.5? Well, it has all the features of the previous versions stuffed together + ASP.NET Ajax Framework + Full support for core .NET 3.0 functionality. Numbers of templates are here to give you a greater flexibility. Moreover deployment of applications has been made easier.
ASP.NET
Creating stunning sites using Web 2.0 having Ajax built-in is a dream come true for web developers. We have here with us the Ajax Control Toolkit – a set of useful drag and drop controls for web pages that adds lots of functionality without writing a single line of code.
Other Enhancements
LINQ – Language Integrated Query. It’s useful for encapsulating different data sources into objects using a up-to-the-minute modeling technique and then uses the simple LINQ object sentence structure to perform queries in opposition to the model.
Java Intellisense – Useful for writing client-side scripts for web much faster with lesser errors with a provision for debugging afterwards.
Web Designer – Visual Studio 2008 has a fully featured, armed and armored webpage designer with considerably improved, better handling of CSS and XHTML.
In a nutshell, Visual Studio 2008 is a great new release for developers which will lead to better products overall in terms of protection, constancy, consistency and user interface.
July 5, 2007 14:29 pm by Jal
Many of us deal with these terms almost everyday. Yeah, they are among the most widely used picture formats. But now its time to be aware of them because a technical error in these formats makes it easier for hackers (read crackers) to stuff in them, malicious codes which may prove fatal to your system. So if you are a hardcore Photoshop geek, it is advisible to deal with pictures only from a known source. During a test, loopholes were detected in Windows XP and Windows Vista. The only trigger the hacker waits for is the opening of the image in a photo editor software like Photoshop, Elements, Paint Shop Pro, etc. And voila! The hacker is in your system!
As the security in the above mentioned operating systems is increasing day by day, it is getting a tough job for the hackers to intrude a system which is being updated regularly. Hence they are now turning towards more neglected programs like photo editors to get an unauthorised entry to the system. The solution as of now, is to think twice before opening files having BMP and PNG extensions and keep the anti-virus software on the system updated with the latest anti-virus definitions.
