RK's Rambling

So finally we have BBM for our Android and iOS devices. Well done BlackBerry! But then again you are stuck in the waiting list and losing your patience waiting fro that sweet invite. Well I see a lot of my friends in my friend-list getting stuck at that phase and even after more than 36 hours of the release I still see them getting nowhere. Hence I thought of giving them a heads up. Fortunately I myself didn't have to wait a single moment for the BBM invite. Actually i got the invite before I even installed the app, all courtesy to my friend in BlackBerry (yeah you deserve a "Biriyani" :D ) But for those who are still waiting. Try this neat little trick. This worked on a few mobiles I tried here. But be warned due to the nature of the trick this may stop working anytime. Install the BBM app, launch it, and then register your email address to join the waiting list. Return to your home screen and force close the app. Relaunch the BBM app. You should now be...

Recently I am getting a lot of request to send items to my friends to India. And each time I have to make them understand the delivery and the custom import charges make them quite infeasible to get them delivered. So I thought about putting up an estimated cost of what it gets charged. Category Items to import Customs Duty Books Books (educational) 0% Computers Laptop, Computers 16.85% Computer Printers 16.85 % Laptop Battery 28.85% Hard Disk (Internal) 6.03% Hard Disk (External) 16.85% Processor 6.03% Other Computer Peripherals 16.85% Cables & Wires 25.85% Tablets iPad 16.85% Mobile Mobile Phones 6.00% Phone Accessories 28.85% Music & Games DVD/ CDS (movie) 28.85% Software DVD 16.854% DVD Players, Blu-Ray 28.85% iPod 28.85% Video games 28.85% Gaming Consoles 28.85% Photography Digital / Video Cameras 28.80% Digital Still Image Camera 16.854% Web cameras 28.85% Camera...

I will be conducting a workshop on Web Programming using JavaScript on UTDallas on October 6th. Everyone is invited to participate. Registrations are taken at UTD Marketplace . I will be covering basic JavaScript along with jQuery. You can get a detailed overview about what is in store from UTD Event Comet Calender . But If we find participants with interest then I might go to some more depth including some very interesting examples and hands-on.

  I want to be an optimist Being a software engineer involves a lot of pessimism: a lot of thought in the software engineering process revolves around things that might go wrong, that are going wrong, that have gone wrong, or that went wrong. Over time, professional pessimism has been bleeding over into my personal life, and many times I tend to think more of things that could go wrong than about things that are going right. There are times, though, when I want to be an optimist against the odds, and that even applies to the world of mobile gadgets. I want phonebloks to succeed. This is a great idea on paper. I hope that they can manage a level of integration that makes the size, weight, price and shape competitive with integrated solutions. I hope that going through a common backplane doesn't hurt battery life or system speed. I hope that hardware drivers can be made portable enough. I hope they can resolve the issues of antenna performance on a variable-geometry device,...

IE memory garbage collection ( Mark Sweep algorithm ) object address leak vulnerability Information disclosure, Windows IE9/10 Description: Since IE9, Javascript date uses 1 bit to mark * num * and * object * pointer. However, in most object structures, there are data field that does not use the bit to mark. IE Mark Sweep algorithm JSCRIPT9!Recycler::ProcessMark will mark the object in the structure. Because this is a general class, it cannot process correctly the num in the object structure that does not have the marked bit. Therefore, JSCRIPT9!Recycler::ProcessMark will wrongly think these num are object pointers and mark the wrong tag. This will cause some objects cannot be released correctly, and may also leak the object address to bypass ASLR. If the garbaby collection contains the code to * defrag * memory blocks, it might lead to potential more serious issues such as buffer overrun due to the incorrect operation of the object pointers (which should be a num). Det...