Bejeweled Blitz is well known, since it has millions of players. As in my previous post, I’ve contacted the developers of “Pitilin.com” and they kindly sent me a special demo version of their Bejeweled Blitz Cheat to be reviewed in this small blog article. After testing it, I must confirm that the cheat works very well. It’s incredible how they create this automatic bots capable of playing the game almost “magically”.
I would had never been able to achieve such a great score without the Bejeweled Blitz Cheat. The bot allowed me to score higher than all my friends and brother…
They have also released a new bot for Keyboard Smash (aka Revienta el teclado in spanish). I’ve asked them to send me a demo version in order to write a review. But I have not received it, yet. I will post the review as fast as I get the Keyboard Smash cheat.
Funny caricature drawings make a wonderful gift or present, and will most certainly bring a smile to the recipitants face.
In a caricature, the artist exaggerates or distorts certain aspects of the subject whilst keeping an identifiable likeness to produce a cartoon type effect which is mostly complimentary in a humorous, comical or laughable style. On the other hand caricatures can also be drawn in an insulting or offensive style depending on their purpose.
Here I would like to introduce you to a caricature I had drawn for me and my wife and also introduce the website I purchased the caricature from. In this caricature you can see us on Easter Island, a place we love and visit frequently:
Agus & Mari on Easter Island
This amazing caricature was made by DimpleArt caricaturists. They firstly enquire as to what extent you want your picture exaggerating or distorting, giving you help and advice on the options available and then when they understand what you are looking for, they start producing the caricature. For us, it took under 4 days. At this point they email you to give you the chance to view your finished caricature. Their customer service is great and they ask if you are happy with the caricature and, if you want any changes, they will gladly make them.
Their communication is excellent and they want you totally happy with your funny caricature drawing. You will have full access to the members area of the website where you will find lots of goodies and software to enable you to manipulate your caricature (change clothes, bodies, etc).
Could we just point out at this point that your caricature will still need printing, which can be done either on your pc or saved and taken to a professional photo printing shop. We printed our caricature in poster size, and it looks awesome!
If you are looking for something unusual for your wedding then also think of the role a caricature may play:
Wedding gift caricature - A fantastic and well-received gift is a caricture of the couple!
Wedding date claimer - to help notify people of the special date - a caricature of the excited couple in a fun pose, with the wording of your choice.
You create your own very unique wedding invitations based on a caricature of you and your spouse-to-be.
Below are other examples of fantastic DimpleArt caricatures:
Tags: Birthday, Birthday Gifts, Caricatures, Drawings, Funny, Funny Caricature, Gifts, Wedding, Wedding Gifts, Wedding Ideas
This small article is a review of a .NET component that will help you in creating a pretty good splash screen in C# or VB.Net. After having made my own splash screens for several projects and having tried different approaches for the task, I’ve found this very useful component while surfing on the net. Far from being expensive and with a very well designed interface, this component is the right choice for those who don’t want to bother with all the coding themselves.
Once you import the supplied DLL you also need to import the Splash_Screen_Component namespace and you’re ready to go. One great feature about this component is that it runs on its own thread.
Here’s an example of how simple it is to use this component
1Splash.Start();
2Splash.SetBackgroundImage(Image.FromFile("./SplashBG.png"));
3
4Splash.State = "Loading Images";
5Splash.StateDescription = "Animated GIFs";
6loadGifs();
7
8Splash.StateDescription = "Animated JPGs";
9loadJpgs();
10
11// How to display a progress bar
12loadUIButtons();
13
14Splash.Vanish();
15
16private void loadUIButtons() {
17 int value;
18
19 Splash.DisplayProgressBar = true;
20 Splash.State = "Loading Buttons";
21
22 // load 70 buttons
23 for (int i=0; i<70; i++) {
24 value = (i/70.00) * 100;
25 Splash.ProgressBarValue = value;
26 Splash.StateDescription = "Current Button: " + i;
27 }
28
29 Splash.DisplayProgressBar = false;
30}
Ok, that’s it…!
Website: http://www.splash-screen.com
I’ll keep posting reviews about more useful components, feel free to comment and/or suggest other related components.
Tags: .NET, C#, Component, Control, Framework, Splash Screen, VB.NET
I am talking about the popular Facebook applications called “Pet Society”, “Brain Buddies”, “Who has the Biggest Brain?”, “Geo Challenge”, “Word Challenge”, “Typing Maniac”, “Scramble”, “Biotronic”, “Bowling Buddies”, “Minigolf Party”, etc.
“Who Has The Biggest Brain” is well known, since it has over 50M players. Some people have started breaking records using bots that recognize the objects in the game and do the calculations. Some of my friends were asking me about these bots so after researching, I decided to write a list of bots that I found very interesting. This will help you to make your friends jealous about your scores 
I contacted the developers of “Pitilin.com” and they kindly sent me a special full version of some bots so I can test them and write this small article. After testing them all, I must say they all worked very well. These are the bots I have tested:
Who has the Biggest Brain? Bot
The Geo Challenge Genius Bot is a great program. I achieved 69 flags (level 1) and I’m among the first 30 people in the world! I used it 5 times or so to get a score over 100,000! I would never been able to achieve such a great score without that magic bot. Brain Buddies Bot is also agreat tool that will allow you to get trophies and a great score.
A similar example is the Who has the Biggest Brain? Bot. It works like a charm…! It will answer 95% of the questions correctly. The Scales bot works very very well. The calculation bot is amazingly fast as is the Shape Order bot. The Missing sign bot is also very good but I rather prefer the Calculation bot. The bot allowed me to get the following throphies: Scales Craftsman, Calculation King, Missing Number Master, Shape Order Shaman, Masterful Score.
The other bots are as great as the Geo Challenge Genius Bot. But I’m lazy to write a review, sorry
Another related cheats/bots website I’ve found is:
http://www.facebook-game-cheats.com
with cheats for
- Mob Wars
- Owned
- Pet Society
- Who Has the Biggest Brain? Part 2
- Who Has the Biggest Brain?
- Mafia Wars
- Bowling Buddies
- Yoville
Tags: bot, bots, bowling buddies, cheat, Facebook, game, Games, geo challenge, hack, minigolf party, review, Reviews, scramble, who has the biggest brain, word challenge
Okay, I came across this error today:
Warning 1
The service System.Windows.Forms.Design.IEventHandlerService already exists in the service container.
Parameter name: serviceType
and it took me a while to find the solution. In my case, and I say this because I’m not sure if this will work in your case… the solution was as simple as cleaning the OBJ folder manually.
Other tip I can give you in case the previous one doesn’t work for you , is to add the following line to all your form Load events:
if (DesignMode) return;
However, in my case, cleaning the OBJ folder, was what brought peace and mental sanity back to me.
Feel free to post your experiences/solutions, so others can recover their peace of mind as well.
Tags: .NET, C#, Designer, IEventHandlerService, System.Windows.Forms.Design. IEventHandlerService, Visual Studio
After searching on google for a simple method to get the current installed version of the .NET Framework, I decided to implement my own. I have put this method in its own class, because there are probably a lot of other similar methods that could be grouped together.
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Security;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace YourNameSpace
{
public class SystemInfo
{
private const string FRAMEWORK_PATH = "\\Microsoft.NET\\Framework";
private const string WINDIR1 = "windir";
private const string WINDIR2 = "SystemRoot";
public static string FrameworkVersion
{
get
{
try
{
return getHighestVersion(NetFrameworkInstallationPath);
}
catch (SecurityException)
{
return "Unknown";
}
}
}
private static string getHighestVersion(string installationPath)
{
string[] versions = Directory.GetDirectories(installationPath, "v*");
string version = "Unknown";
for (int i = versions.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
{
version = extractVersion(versions[i]);
if (isNumber(version))
return version;
}
return version;
}
private static string extractVersion(string directory)
{
int startIndex = directory.LastIndexOf("\\") + 2;
return directory.Substring(startIndex, directory.Length - startIndex);
}
private static bool isNumber(string str)
{
return new Regex(@"^[0-9]+\.?[0-9]*$").IsMatch(str);
}
public static string NetFrameworkInstallationPath
{
get { return WindowsPath + FRAMEWORK_PATH; }
}
public static string WindowsPath
{
get
{
string winDir = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(WINDIR1);
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(winDir))
winDir = Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(WINDIR2);
return winDir;
}
}
}
}
How it works? It searches the .NET Framework installation folder and returns the highest version installed on the system based on the folder names. I think the code is straightforward. I’d like to know other people’s thoughts and ideas. I know about other ways (registry keys, etc). I also hope this code helps other people to save some time.
Tags: .NET, C#, installation, Path, Version
Since my beginning with computers, I was very intrigued and interested to know how computer viruses worked. Without thinking about the consequences they caused in the world of computers, I tried to learn more and more to achieve my goal of writing my own virus. Fortunately, to write a virus it was required an advanced level of knowledge of assembly language and a high degree of understanding about the internal workings and data structures of the DOS operating system.
By the time I had the necessary knowledge (several years later) the operating system being used was Microsoft Windows. Finally, I could create my own viruses that were obviously never released since at that time I was conscious of the damage that these programs could do, even when made as “benevolent” as possible.
Although coding a virus was and remains a real challenge, it is more difficult to create antivirus software. Such a tool has to be able to detect and block thousands of viruses before they act in the system. It is obvious that all this actions have to be performed in very short time slices. This will make the user feel comfortable and secure at the same time. Besides, viruses can enter the system by various means, hidden in many different forms, activating their payload only under certain occasions in a totally unexpected manner. As if all this was not enough, many types of viruses have emerged as a response from virus programmers to antivirus software developers. In addition, a lot of new viruses appear every day and are distributed mainly using the Internet.
In this article, I intend to appoint the ideas and concepts used by developers of antivirus and antispyware software. Moreover, I will explain why signatures are still useful. Given the complexity of many of these concepts, the interested reader is directed to links containing comprehensive information about the topics. I will also assume that the reader has some degree of knowledge about computer viruses.
Signatures
A signature is any sequence of bits that can be used to accurately identify the presence of a particular virus in a given file or range of memory.
Once we get a sample of a virus, the type of the virus (worm, rootkit, simple infector, etc.) should be determined. Only after that step, a signature can be extracted from the binary code. In many cases (e.g. EXE infectors, COM infectors, polymorphic viruses, stealth viruses, etc.) this will be possible and enough to detect the virus in the future. However, in recent viruses which are much more complex (e.g. metamorphic viruses) other techniques are required (behavior-based analysis). A full team of people is likely to be required to analyze these viruses very meticulously. They would also need to write custom detection routines manually, a very time consuming task.
Despite all this, and although many believe that signatures were used only in antivirus software of the 80’s, 90’s, and that they are no longer used, this is totally untrue. The truth is that signatures still play a fundamental role in the various virus detection algorithms used by current antivirus products. Let’s see a typical example of a signature. Suppose the following sequence of bits (in hexadecimal) corresponds to a signature for a virus called Doctor Evil:
A6 7C FD 1B 45 82 90 1D 6F 3C 8A OF 96 18 A4 C3 4F FF 0F 1D
One question that you’re probably doing is: How is a signature chosen for a given virus?
The answer is not simple. It depends mainly on the type of virus. For instance, if the virus is a simple EXE file infector, we just need to look for a sequence of bytes (as the one shown above) within the binary code of the virus. We must select a signature which is long enough to generate as fewest false positives as possible. For instance, choosing the following signature:
A3 B7 11 00
is probably not a good idea. This is due to the short length of the signature. Such a short sequence of bits is likely to be present in other executable programs that are actually not infected. That is why the length should be considerably long (more than 50 bytes). The additional problem is what signature to choose, because for an arbitrary virus we could find plenty of potential signatures. Nevertheless, not always the longest is the best… at least not in the case of signatures…!
People at IBM invented an excellent technique based on Markov models. I studied for several hours the contents of their article which is neither something extremely complex to understand, nor something simple. After that, I created a trigram generator and an automatic signature extractor in C#. For a given virus, this tool can automatically extract the signature with less likelihood of false positives. I could extract signatures for thousands of viruses within a few hours by using a virtual machine and the tool I developed. I was delighted to see hundreds of wicked programs working hard to infect my virtual machine. All the infected files were isolated and then analyzed by the tool in order to extract valid signatures. Finally, the tool stored all the signatures in a MySQL database.
I will describe the tool with more detail in a forthcoming article. I strongly recommend you to read the excellent article from IBM to get started.
Generic Emulation
It is relatively easy to detect the presence of a simple infector within an infected file. We only need to analyze certain areas of the file for known signatures. Even so, things get more complicated when the virus changes its form on each infection (polymorphism), or if it encrypts/compresses itself on each infection. The task gets even harder when these mechanisms are combined several times, even recursively. In these cases, the signatures must be carefully extracted from the clean (uncompressed/decrypted, etc.) image of the evil program.
To detect this type of complex viruses, the technique used is known as generic emulation. This technique (among others) was patented by the firm Symantec. Carey Nachenberg is known as the primary inventor and a chief architect in Symantec’s antivirus labs.
The idea is simple and efficient: in order to scan a program, its execution is emulated during a quantity of C instructions. All memory pages altered by instructions involved in the emulation process are analyzed. This has sense, since those instructions could be part of a decryption/decompression routine, etc., which is reconstructing the original virus and is precisely there, where we must search for known signatures.
Thus, unlike what many believe, signatures are still being used to detect these complex threats. The special support from emulation gives time for the virus to reconstruct itself in memory.
Optimizations
At this point, you may be wondering how antivirus products scan a file so fast even when they have to search for thousands of signatures. There are several answers and you will find most of them on Symantec patents. For instance, Norton Antivirus uses signatures beginning only with a subset of all the possible bytes. This trick allows a super-fast search because knowing the possible prefixes it is possible to cut the search space considerably. The bytes are selected according to their frequency of use in 80×86 machine code. Besides, not all files are actually emulated. More information can be found here.
