1.      This was a jigsaw the we solved to get pictures with following words

go a little soft to find the latest one:-

picture of chicago the movie -----> statue of elvis  ---------> picture of london's eye Millenium wheel ---------> painting "whistler's mother" ---------> ?

2.      This one had a song playing that I cannot put here. I solved it without using the song

why lock the key to common wealth?

pro bono help is not an encoded art

so, wales decided to share me with you

but now you have to play your part

at the land where this song comes from

people call me fast

who am i... ask me!

(other clues - poster of Fast and the Furious, Greek-English dictionary and Greek grammar books in a shelf, a globe/sphere in the background, piece of jigsaw puzzle in the background, audio clip of a song that sounds Hawaiian/Italian/Greek)

3.      Do not use view source to crack this and find the font for encrypted part. You are supposed to do the decryption on your own and thats not the only thing you need to crack.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

ana feels threatened while everyone finds me cool

now no one needs to sit like a dumb fool

i am an ugly bipod with huge antennae

i have a titanium front

and a solgel infra-red posterior

unfortunately this time machine uses no such material

who am i?

                        htaed neercs

4.       And the last one.

To reach the gate of glory and fame

You will have to guess my name...

My master's fame flew at unseen heights

When his tireless and unfed creation lost two dozen clocks

My master joined hands with the lord of the 'unexplored' skies

Together they created me and my swift brother...

My mischievous kin jumped off my belly

and disappeared into the ether...

If you think my master got cross,

You would be right, but it was no loss...

Here are the solutions:

1. This was very straight forward. Blue Gene, the IBM super computer. Royal DNA (Gene) born out of sand (which is how you make silicon). It is the most powerful in the world now. Its kin can beat the russian master (which would be Deep Blue) and they proved to the japanese that they are faster (they beat Japans Earth simulator to take the top spot).
2. We first went looking for somthing related to "Flash Gordon comic strip" but that was a wrong path to follow. We then just thought of looking into NASA missions to Mars and found the answer. Mars Exploration rover Spirit. it downloaded the first photograph on tuesday 6th Jan 2004 and then it abruptly ceased communicating with mission control due to a "Flash memory anomaly". It recently went over "Husband hill" (spouse).
3. With this one we tried a lot of things but we finally got it by fluke. Akash had this stupid idea that the mystry part is related to the The Impact Theory by Luis and Walter Alveraz. This led us to K/T boundry and iridium and bingo we found our "Tennant". rest we just fitted. IRIDIUM - discovered by Smithson "Tennant". in London. - Atomic number 77 - Fortran also used 77 as version. 77 satellites planned but only 66 deployed, i.e. 6 taken out of 666 (devil's number). "Calling planet earth" tag line for failed Iridium project of IBM.

There are few more in the coming post.

We(me, Amit Chat and Satej) are taking part in the onlie treasure hunt organized by ISB folks. The first day was a breeze the moment we saw the clue we had the answer. Here is the clue:

I am the royal DNA born out of sand
Most powerfull- who has conqured the Earth land
My kin can out-think the russian master
I have proven to the Japanese that I am faster....
Who am I?

 

Second day we went on a wrong track but still the answer was logical

On Tuesday,
I had downloaded the book that Alex Raymond wrote in 1934,
but it got corrupted …
I went on a drive over the red hills with my spouse…
and made history!!
Listen to the song to know my soul...

<Song: Here I am from Sprit of Cimmeron by Brayan Adams>

while I rock and roll the unexplored...
What is my name?

Third day was bad we just got it with our team + akash and khushboo searching for anything related to physics and chemistry on MSN\google\wiki.

We looked at all the constants (the value of Gravitational constant is 6.67*POW(10,-11)),  all the heavely bodies affecting earth.

We racked our brain with periodic table for atomic number 66 (Dysprosium) but no luck.

 And most baffling was the relation of this photograph with the answer. We even searched for all the Nobel prize winners in field of physics and chemistry to figure this out.

My coming into your world is an ancient mystery.
A tenant in London discovered me and made history.
To formulate and translate someone borrowed my number.
But all I did was go around and then go into deep slumber.
I missed the devil by one over the boundary.
Called earth and left everyone in quandary.

So… who am I?

Do you have an answer?

Tell me if you can crack this relationship. And now i have to solve todays clue. will keep you posted.

-ankur

using System;
using System.Threading;
namespace ConsoleApplication2
{
class Program
{
static Thread t;
[STAThread]
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.CancelKeyPress += new ConsoleCancelEventHandler(Console_CancelKeyPress);
t = new Thread(ChildThread);
t.Start();
t.Join();
}
static void ChildThread()
{
try
{
throw new Exception();
}
catch (Exception)
{
try
{
Console.WriteLine("going to sleep");
Thread.Sleep(10000);
Console.WriteLine("out of sleep");
}
catch (ThreadAbortException e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
}
}
}
static void Console_CancelKeyPress(Object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)
{
Console.WriteLine("aborting");
if (t != null)
{
t.Abort();
t.Join();
}
}
}
}

Run the code and press CTRL+C to repro.

Club this issue with try\retry code in Abhinaba's blog and you have infinitly waiting call. May be this is the reason The Old New Thing advices against using retry indiscriminatly. 

Explaination that I got from the feature team:

What I don't like About this:

1. As mentioned the call should not be blocking. This leaves the user waiting indefinitly. I have hit this bug making a webservice call and there was an IISREST on the server my call got stuck till there was a timeout at the client side and a Thread.Abort() on given thread was just waiting!!!
2. There is no way to say Abort no matter what. So you may end up adding complex logic to have a clean exit. see my earlier blog.
3. And to top that there is no documentation arround this. We would have been doomed if we were not in Microsoft. It was easy for us to just mail a discussion group and get a very quick response from the right people. Though they acknowledge this but I know its not an easy process to get the documentation updated after release. Just hope that they do it.

Either you can use archieve feature in VSS to remove that history from VSS. You can find this in documentation of VSSConverter. But this process can be cumbersome as there is limit to the size of history you can archieve. So you may end up doing archieve of individual folders.

The other option could be a hack (I have come to love this word after my experience in converters :)) based on implementation of incremental migration feature of VSS and this is what we are going to talk about in this blog.

So we just added incremental migration to VSSConverter that looks for checkin comments for figuring out if its a incremental migration and from which point in time it should restart migration. Knowing this we can fool converter by modifyng the required checkin comments to start migration from where ever we want. This can be used to do migration of partial history of VSS. How to do this:

1. Do a snapshot checkin from the point you want your migration to start.
2. Add the project mappings to the top level folders (destination folders in settings file) in the checkin comments.
3. Add a timestamp to the start of checkin comment of last checkin under the destination folders. For instance add "{3/10/2003}" if you want to migrate from 3/10/2003 onwards.
4. Run the VSSConverter and you have your partial history migrated :).

Case 1: Migration takes a lot of time so I will migraqte a copy of my VSS repository and continue working on the original. after migration of copy I will migrate the delta between original and copy.

Case 2: Migration was stopped in the middle due to power outage/ i had to kill the migration in the middle. I need to migrate from that point onwards.

How it works.

Vssconverter adds Project mattings specified in settings file to checkin comments of destination projects specified in settings file. So if your settings file has entry

<Projects>
  <Project From="$/proj1" To="$/TeamProject/proj1" /> 
 <Project From="$/proj2" To="$/TeamProject/proj2" />
</Projects>

then converter adds a comment to "ADD" action of "$/TeamProject/proj1" and "$/TeamProject/proj2" a checkin comment the above mappings

-----------------------------------------VSSConverter Project Mappings. Do not modify.----------------------------------------
  <From="$/proj1" To="$/TeamProject/proj1" /> 
 <From="$/proj2" To="$/TeamProject/proj2" />

this is to check that a user accidently doesn't tries to migrate wrong repository or uses a wrong project mapings.. Vssconverter adds action time of every vss action in checkin comments. this time is used to determine time stamp of last action migrated. When next time converter is run if it finds project mappings in the checkin comment of destination projects  it assumes it to be incremental migration. then it checks for time stamp of last action migrated as stated above. Converter then migrates actions only after the last action migrated.

 
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;
namespace perf_test
{
class Program
{
static bool exit = false;
static object lockObject = 3;
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Thread threadWait = new Thread(new ThreadStart(WaitMethod));
Thread threadProcess = new Thread(new ThreadStart(ProcessMethod));
threadWait.Start();
threadProcess.Start();
threadWait.Join();
threadProcess.Join();
}
static void WaitMethod()
{
lock (lockObject)
{
Console.WriteLine("Starting wait");
Monitor.Wait(lockObject, 5000);
exit = true;
Monitor.Wait(lockObject, 5000);
Console.WriteLine("Ending wait");
}
}
static void ProcessMethod()
{
while (!exit)
{
Console.WriteLine("Processing");
}
}
}
}
 

(It says 5003 ms spent in ProcessMethod() and 10028 ms spent in WaitMethod())

heres my explaination to what happened.

looking very simplistically sampling is just a statistical data about what your processor was busy doing most of the time. what is done is at regular intervals a snapshot of what is processing is taken. so it misses out if some thread is in wait or sleep.

Instrumentaion modifies your binary and adds code at each function entry and exit. this way yoy get the exact time that was taken by a peice of code to execute including the time spent in wait.

this becomes very evident if you are profiling an application that makes lots of web calls. All such calls go for wait in WebRequest.GetResponse() method and sampling doesn't report the proper time spent in such calls.

If you are just stuck on settings file you can use following settings file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 
 <SourceControlConverter>
 <ConverterSpecificSetting>
            <Source name="VSS">
                  <VSSDatabase name="e:\myrepository"></VSSDatabase>
                  < UserMap name="e:\Migrate\Usermap.xml" />

<!-- uncomment it if you want to specify a SQL server by default we use SQL express installed on you system -->
<!--    <SQL Server="my sql server" /> -->
            </Source>

 <ProjectMap>
  <Project Source="$/my folder1" Destination="$/my Team Project/my folder1"></Project> 
<Project Source="$/my folder2" Destination="$/my Team Project/my folder2"></Project>
<!-- u can add more mappings depending on number of folders you want to migrate -->
 </ProjectMap>
  </ConverterSpecificSetting>
 <Settings>
   <TeamFoundationServer name="My TFS name" port="8080" protocol="http"></TeamFoundationServer>
<!-- assuming your server is set for http protocol and port is 8080 change this according to your install -->
<!-- you can specify the name of output report file here. it should be an xml-->
<Output file="VSSMigrationReport.xml" />
  </Settings>
</SourceControlConverter>

I came accross a mail thread which deals with the problem i was facing some time back. Sharing it to you all.

Problem:

I have written a windows service in .Net that uses the ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem() call to do some processing. Each work item to the thread pool takes the same type of object to process (although with different arguments). At any given time, there will be a max of 8 items that I would have added to the thread pool. Each thread would take approx < 1 min to finish the processing.

Is there any way for the Service.OnStop() method to know which threads in the threadpool are running processes started by the main thread and is there any way to graciously stop those threads so that the system remains in a clean state when the service is stopped?

Solution:

1.

I’m not sure if this is the correct way, but the way I do it is the following:

Create a bool that your worker threads check to determine whether they should return immediately (e.g. public bool Shutdown_Now = false). Then in your OnStop() do: Shutdown_Now=true; Now you might want to assume that your threads have quit, but in the event that they haven’t, your service will fail to stop (which is probably a bug). Generally to prevent this from ever occurring, I’ll store a reference to Thread.CurrentThread whenever a worker thread starts. Then when OnStop() is called, I’ll notify them to quit with the Shutdown_Now bool and wait to see if the threads are still running after N seconds. If they are, then I’ll call thread.Abort().

So long as you keep track of all the worker threads being used and make sure you dereference the threads that have completed, you shouldn’t have a problem

2.