January 2011, links

Hardcore optimization story – Would you believe me if I claimed that an algorithm that has been on the books as “optimal” for 46 years, which has been analyzed in excruciating detail by geniuses like Knuth and taught in all computer science courses in the world, can be optimized to run 10 times faster?

Bjarne Stroustrup about C++0x and standardization.

Several of the Internet’s most popular Web sites – including Facebook, Google and Yahoo – have agreed to participate in the first global-scale trial of IPv6 on June 8, 2011.

Test your IPv6 connectivity with test-ipv6.com.

Neural Network for Recognition of Handwritten Digits in C# in Codeproject from Vietdungiitb.

Printing 1 to 1000 without loop or conditionals from Stack Overflow.

FireWire port is a big security hole

Today, reading Larry Osterman’s blog, I learned something new. I always knew, that physical access to computer / server almost always means, that it may be compromised in one or another way, like Cryogenically frozen RAM bypasses all disk encryption methods. More here.

One thing I didn’t know, is FireWire (IEEE 1394 interface) Security issues.

From Uwe Hermann’s blog:

… if you gain physical access to a PC or laptop which has Firewire ports … you can read arbitrary RAM contents from the victim’s system, overwrite arbitrary RAM contents with whatever you want …

Read more: Physical memory attacks via Firewire/DMA – Part 1: Overview and Mitigation

P.S. Rebooting my computer into BIOS to disable FireWire.

No ODBC driver after installing Oracle 11g R2

Today, after installing Oracle Database 11g R2 Client there was no ODBC driver listed under Data Sources (ODBC) window. First I tried to change Setup type to Administrator, then Instant Client, etc… noting worked.

Then I remembered my last issue with Same / different file problem on 64-bit / WoW64. As you remember, you cannot load 32-bit DLL, driver, etc. in 64-bit process. Read more about WoW64.

The problem is, that I have installed 32-bit Oracle on 64-bit Windows.

Now there are two options:

  1. Install 64-bit Oracle;
  2. If you can not do 1. (my case), then you can access 32-bit ODBC under:

    Start - Run - %windir%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

Microsoft have article The 32-bit version of the ODBC Administrator tool and the 64-bit version of the ODBC Administrator tool display both the 32-bit user DSNs and the 64-bit user DSNs in a 64-bit version of the Windows operating system.