January 2006 Entries
So a byte is a byte is a byte unless it is not! That in one sentence sums up my findings from yesterday. A byte in .NET represents a unsigned byte (0 - 255) automatically but a byte in Java is a signed byte(-128 - 127) and no there is no way to get an unsigned byte. I never really came across this problem till I was running some encryption algorithms on both. I need to encrypt a string in .NET and decrypt it on Java. For this I was converting the byte array into a hex string and asking users to enter...
I was very surprised to find that the .NET framework does not have an implementation of RC4. I read somewhere that .NET 2.0 will have access to RC4 but it is definetely not included in the 1.1 version. So I went out and found a good implementation of RC4. It is quite simple to use (I think) and has a simple function use. I could of course write one on my own but it is easier to reuse code and the license seems pretty liberal. Have fun! Oh and for those who really follow my blog, I am writing this...
To date, I have mainly been blogging about technical issues and problems. I generally hold back my views and tend to form opinions as time goes by. I have some opinions now - these opions are to be taken in light of the fact that I am not an expert. I am just a simple guy trying to figure out a big bad industry- software security. These opinions do not reflect the opinions of my employers or anyone associated with me or them in any other way. These are my trawlings - my free thought. I have created...
I did my stint in college with modular software design and have always asked the question "At what stage does it get too modular?" Let me explain that question a bit more in depth - It is noce to have a modular and pluggable arachitecture but the more pluggable and modular you make it, the more overhead you have. The problem comes when you are putting int oo mcuh overhead and not really using it. This in my opinion is the call that the software architect is paid the big bucks to decide. The problem...
I worked on the redesign of one of my components this week. The redesign was caused because of added functionality. We ran into a problem where we needed to choose the chain of dlls to load at runtime. To give a quick overview here is what we ended up doing. typedef long (_stdcall *getBlockSize)(long Size); HINSTANCE LoadMe=NULL; LoadMe = LoadLibrary("..\\bin\\MY.dl... if (LoadMe != 0){ getBlockSize pBlkSize = NULL; pBlkSize = (getBlockSize)GetProcAddres... "getBlockSize"); DWORD error = GetLastError();...