I recently purchased 2x2GB Memory upgrades for my fantastic Dell XPS M1210. To upgrade the memory there were 2 slots one located at the base of the laptop (the black bottom) and the other was located below the keypad. I searched a lot on the Internet but could not find the location of the 2nd slot.
The owner’s manual also did not mention the location of the DIMM B slot (the 2nd memory slot). See the details on the manual about how to remove the keyboard to reach the 2nd memory slot.
The key to reach the 2nd slot is to first remove the hinge cover (the cover that has three button saying Power, “Media Direct”, etc.). The hinge cover is not screwed so you can just lever it up using a thin, flat object and pop-it up, remove the three screws fixing the keyboad, pulling the keyboad out and right in the middle you will see the memory slot.
Hopefully, this post will help someone upgrading memory on their Dell XPS M1210.

Another trip to the wilderness…not really…but into a desert. This time to Joshua Tree National Park but this one was with a difference. In the past few weeks we have covered most of California and started with Arizona. I guess this was one of the last stops as far as camping trips were concerned. Come next week and I’ll be getting ready for a flight to New York!
Joshua Tree national park is a dry, arid land with loads of Joshua Trees all around the place. It is basically a stargazer’s paradise.
To get prepared for the trip we simply took out a car of one of my friends (Sudeep) and left. We required a pair of binoculars and the search began with gaining some know-how about binoculars. Found some really cool links thanks to google. I gained some really important tips about choosing binoculars. Then came the tough part…going and actually buying them. Well… this task for responsible for our delay in reaching the park. We got a really decent pair of binoculars (10×50 for $26.43 incl. tax from Walmart). All along we were wondering whether actually what we had heard (about Joshua being a stargazers paradise et. al) was true. As it turns out it really is a fantastic place but for a novice astronomer, he/she needs to carry a book that explains different constellations that you see. The most amazing part was we got to see a white band of light across the sky which people call as Milky Way!
In fact, we were so mesmerised by the view of the stars that we left the top of the tent open to sleep with the light of the stars creeping in through the top of the tent! Although I can honestly say that it was not the sole reason for leaving the roof open…we were really lazy people 😉
After sleeping for a few hours, we got up with the sun really beating down on our tent with gusto and left for Key View point. The nights are completely different from the days…at night the beauty of the sky and the cool breeze makes one feel really comfortable but in the morning it almost pains to see the desert…but I guess that’s what is the nature’s diversity! Then after visiting key view we made our way back to LA and on our way stopped by at Artesia for some good Indian Buffet Lunch!
All in all, a different but exciting trip into the desert!
-Rajat.

It can get interesting to test the security of thick client applications. If you start debugging you could end up losing a lot of time with not too many results. Of course, time is always at a premium when you pen testing in a week long gig. There are a couple of tools that can really help you to gain insight into a thick client (i.e., an application written in a binary format such as an executable, ActiveX control, flash object, etc.) and communicating to a server using the client/server model.
The need for a proxy to hook into the communications is a prime need and EchoMirage can do a great job of hooking into function calls related to win32 sockets, openssl functions. You have to select an active process for Echomirage to inject into or you can even spawn a process from the menu options in EchoMirage itself. It’s a great tool with a built-in editor so you can edit the traffic. However, sometimes you have to be careful because it’s binary data that you are editing so while editing it is easy to mess up a few flags, etc.
Another great tool is actually a plugin for OllyDbg called UHooker that can let you specify which functions you want to place a hook into. You have to configure a binary editor of your choosing and the functions to be hooked into in a .cfg file. The documentation for Uhooker is located here.

cURL (groks URL) can be used as a SOAP client to send XML SOAP requests to web services. But the problems that I was facing in sending the data directly with the -d switch of curl is that DOS command shell would greet me with an error message:

< was unexpected at this time.

But there is a great way to send data in the POST requests by using the -d switch with the @ symbol. For example to send the xml data in the xmlfilewithdata.xml in the POST request to http://www.somesite.com/thewebservice you could use the following command:
curl -d @xmlfilewithdata.xml http://www.somesite.com/thewebservice

Off go all the errors and there it is …. your SOAP client – cURL!

If this is the error you are getting then one of the solutions is to reset your root password on the MySQL database server.

$ pkill mysql
$ sudo mysqld --skip-grant-privileges
$ mysql

At this point you get the mysql command shell. You will need to update the root password and flush the table when you reset the password.

mysql> set UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('YOUR_NEW_PASSWORD') WHERE User='root';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now that you’ve flushed your passwords, just restart your mysql daemon.

$ sudo pkill mysqld
$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start
$ mysql -u root -p
Enter Password: YOUR_NEW_PASSWORD
mysql>

You should be all set now!

I recently got a Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 player just for kicks to check it out. Seems like the hardware runs a stripped down Windows install having FAT32 file system on it. What was interesting was, that somehow my files got corrupted and had to format the drive (My Computer -> eSansa(G:) -> Right click to “Format..”). All the folders disappeared and when I restarted they reappeared. What seemed to crash it was the presence of a few folders that I created not realizing that Sansa did not support folders as the HelpDesk person told me. Makes me wonder what kind of unstable condition would a folder creation have caused. I think I’ll need to further research this error.

A simple way to install Backtrack 4 on a USB stick is to use UNetBootin. UNetbootin can be used to create live (i.e., bootable images with a fully functional OS on it) USB images. This is the first time I tried this route and it seems to work alright.
Otherwise, if you are the linux fans, our good old friend dd does a great job.

dd if=bt4-final.iso of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=noerror,sync