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Pastimes : Windows 8 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (303)	12/6/2012 4:34:39 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 357

So the first app listed in the Windows Store today is ESPN. I downloaded and installed it on a couple systems. On both of them it opens to the logo, then crashes back to the Metro interface. Anybody else want to install this and see what happens...

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (303)	12/7/2012 1:43:18 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 357

When I opened the ESPN app a few hours later it worked fine. Have no idea what that was all about...

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (303)	2/21/2013 9:24:44 PM
From: FJB	Respond to of 357

Xamarin 2.0 reviewed: iOS development comes to Visual Studio Write your iOS software from within Windows. Yes, really. by Peter Bright - Feb 20 2013, 2:55pm CST arstechnica.com Excerpt: The remarkable part about this is, well, it all just works. Get the software installed and you can create Xamarin.iOS projects in Visual Studio. Visual Studio's usual platform options are extended to include iOS devices, and it gains two special debug targets: the iOS Simulator and a physical iOS device. Although this is perhaps the most striking feature of Xamarin 2.0, it's also an odd one as there's not actually a whole lot to say about it—because, again, it just works. This is iOS development in real Visual Studio. Visual Studio's key bindings, Visual Studio's text editor, Visual Studio's menus, Visual Studio's autocomplete and IntelliSense—even Visual Studio's debugger—are all provided and work in the usual Visual Studio manner. Want to use Visual Studio's integration with TFS or the new git integration? You can do that, because you have nearly the full range of Visual Studio features and capabilities available to you. Want to run unit tests with Nunit? Go right ahead. Prefer to use the ReSharper plugin for its richer refactoring and IntelliSense support? That will work just fine. This is truly developing on Visual Studio. Behind the scenes, things are a little more complicated. The traditional Mono and .NET compilers produced a bytecode called IL (Intermediate Language) which is just-in-time compiled on the end-user's machine. However, this kind of technology is prohibited on iOS. Instead, Xamarin uses an OS X machine to compile its software and deploy it onto hardware. Xamarin development in Visual Studio needs both Windows and OS X available: Visual Studio runs in Windows and it connects over a network to OS X. The OS X machine has the iOS SDK. Visual Studio controls it remotely, using the Mac for all build-related tasks. The programs are actually compiled using Apple's compiler and tools, so they are in every important sense identical to programs written in Objective-C. The setup I used had everything running on a single system. Visual Studio ran in a virtual machine inside VMware Fusion, with the iOS SDK and Xamarin build components installed on the OS X host. But the two don't have to use the same hardware. If I had a Mac Mini tucked away in a cupboard, that would work too.

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (303)	8/3/2013 11:17:06 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 357

Am I the last guy to know about this. That is sad if I am... Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet By David Goldman @CNNMoney April 8, 2013: 1:41 PM ET money.cnn.com NEW YORK (CNNMoney) "When people don't see stuff on Google, they think no one can find it. That's not true."That's according to John Matherly, creator of Shodan, the scariest search engine on the Internet. Unlike Google ( GOOG, Fortune 500), which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. ( Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.) Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month. It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot. Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan. What's really noteworthy about Shodan's ability to find all of this -- and what makes Shodan so scary -- is that very few of those devices have any kind of security built into them. "It's a massive security failure," said HD Moore, chief security officer of Rapid 7, who operates a private version of a Shodan-like database for his own research purposes. Related story: Hackers take aim at key U.S. infrastructure A quick search for "default password" reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use "admin" as their user name and "1234" as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all -- all you need is a Web browser to connect to them. In a talk given at last year's Defcon cybersecurity conference, independent security penetration tester Dan Tentler demonstrated how he used Shodan to find control systems for evaporative coolers, pressurized water heaters, and garage doors. He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city's entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put into "test mode" with a single command entry. And he also found a control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each. Scary stuff, if it got into the wrong hands. "You could really do some serious damage with this," Tentler said, in an understatement. So why are all these devices connected with few safeguards? Some things that are designed to be connected to the Internet, such as door locks that can be controlled with your iPhone, are generally believed to be hard to find. Security is an afterthought. Related story: If you're using 'Password1,' change it. Now. A bigger issue is that many of these devices shouldn't even be online at all. Companies will often buy systems that can enable them to control, say, a heating system with a computer. How do they connect the computer to the heating system? Rather than connect them directly, many IT departments just plug them both into a Web server, inadvertently sharing them with the rest of the world. "Of course there's no security on these things," said Matherly, "They don't belong on the Internet in the first place." The good news is that Shodan is almost exclusively used for good. Matherly, who completed Shodan more than three years ago as a pet project, has limited searches to just 10 results without an account, and 50 with an account. If you want to see everything Shodan has to offer, Matherly requires more information about what you're hoping to achieve -- and a payment. Penetration testers, security professionals, academic researchers and law enforcement agencies are the primary users of Shodan. Bad actors may use it as a starting point, Matherly admits. But he added that cybercriminals typically have access to botnets -- large collections of infected computers -- that are able to achieve the same task without detection. To date, most cyberattacks have focused on stealing money and intellectual property. Bad guys haven't yet tried to do harm by blowing up a building or killing the traffic lights in a city. Security professionals are hoping to avoid that scenario by spotting these unsecured, connected devices and services using Shodan, and alerting those operating them that they're vulnerable. In the meantime, there are too many terrifying things connected to the Internet with no security to speak of just waiting to be attacked.

To: Brian Sullivan who wrote (303)	3/5/2014 2:57:46 PM
From: FJB	1 Recommendation Recommended By Brian Sullivan Respond to of 357

The Microsoft-backed F# functional programming language is gaining traction, with the platform showing a meteoric year-over-year rise on the Tiobe Programming Community Index gauging language popularity. Ranked 69th on the index a year ago, F# has risen to the 12th spot in this month's rankings, with a 1.216 percent rating. As the index headline notes, "F# is on its way to the Top 10." Microsoft Research's F# page says the language is object-oriented and enables developers to write simple code to solve complex problems. "This simple and pragmatic language has particular strengths in data-oriented programming, parallel I/O programming, parallel CPU programming, scripting, and algorithmic development," Microsoft said. F# originated at Microsoft Research; the F# Software Foundation has been formed to advance the language. The Microsoft Cloud Platform Tools group technically is in charge of F#. infoworld.com