Stray Thoughts

Developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio have a new way to highlight their skills, get recognition for the amazing work they do every day, and add some competitive fun to the development day.

Visual Studio Achievements, a Visual Studio plug-in, enables developers to unlock badges and compete against one another for a place on a leader board based on the code they write, its level of sophistication, and the Visual Studio capabilities they use to do so. Developers finally have the ability to actually show their friends, colleagues, project managers, spouses and customers how good they are at what they do all day and sometimes into the night.

Each time you earn a badge, a unique page is created with your profile picture, the badge and a description. You can tweet about achievements, share them on Facebook, and show a list of achievements on your blog using the Visual Studio Achievements Widget.

Download : Visual Studio Achievement Add-in

Tags: Visual Studio Achievements, microsoft

 nmap 5.61TEST4 released with a number of interesting features.

• a spidering library and associated scripts for  crawling websites.
• 51 new NSE scripts, bringing the total to 297.
• a substantial decrease in the size of the Mac OS X installer due to the removal of PPC support.
• a new vulnerability management library which stores and reports found vulnerabilities.

More information can be found in the release notes.

Tags: NMAP, Networking

A new vulnerability advisory by security firm n-runs describes how hash tables in PHP5,Java,ASP.NET and others can be attacked with deliberate collisions in the hash function, leading to a denial of service (DoS) on the web server in question. Microsoft have already responded with an advisory of their own, other vendors are likely to follow.

• n-runs Advisory
• Microsoft Advisory
• More information from Microsoft

Tags: HASH Collisions, Web, PHP, JAVA, ASP.NET

Galle Fort a photo by hirantha on Flickr.

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DSC_0420 a photo by hirantha on Flickr.

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