8 Traits of Effective IT Leaders

#1 Leadership means focusing on the needs of others, not yourself

Real leaders try to provide service - to their team, their customers, and anyone else met. Leadership is not a 9-to-5 job. By focusing on the needs of customers, and then trying to align his or her team in ways to meet those needs as well as the needs of the team, a leader gets the job done and develops followers. Customers want to work with a leader because a leader team produces results. Your team wants to follow your lead because you take into account its needs and requirements.

To improve your leadership skills consider spending as much time with your customers as you do with your team.

#2 Leadership comes from your actions, not your title

Some of the best leaders don't have CIO or VP titles. Leadership in fact has nothing to do with title or pay-grade. Leaders lead because others want to follow them. Why would anyone want to follow a leader? Because a leader motivates its followers, gives them purpose, supports them, guides and mentors them, and even "takes flak" to protect them.

To be a better leader you need to ask yourself some hard questions. If you are not leading then you are dictating, and no one follows a dictator.

#3 Leadership makes you accountable, even if it's not your fault

A leader take full responsibility for his or her mission and with this comes accountability for failure. Leaders don't blame their team, or complain about unreasonable customer requirements. Leaders set expectations by focusing on the needs of others (Trait #1) and build consensus for what can be accomplished. If something goes wrong, a leader accepts responsibility - even if it was a team member that was the cause.

Think about the last time someone on your team made a mistake. Did you support and counsel them? Did you turn the failure into a learning opportunity? Or did you ridicule, shun, or punish him or her?

#4 Leadership is not a 9-to-5 activity

Being a leader means focusing on the needs of others and helping others when they fail. This can require additional work, even after hours. Often it is only personal engagement that uncovers the root cause of an unhappy worker. And many times these root causes present opportunities for improvement beyond the single worker.

Do you stay and work with the team? Not just being in the office, but do you actively engage and work to deliver when required?

#5 Leadership takes trust from your followers

When you focus on the needs of others, motivate your team, and satisfy your customers, when you take responsibility for success and failure, when you engage with your team on a personal level, then you build trust. Trust does not come easily. You have to earn trust. It won't come because you have an impressive title. You can't buy, barter, or steal trust. You have to earn it. You have to follow the first four traits on a regular basis for enough time to have earned the trust of your customers and team.

Do your customers trust you? Does your team get behind your ideas because they know you will protect and guide them?

#6 Leaders get their best ideas from their team

The best ideas are not going to come from the leader, but rather from those being led. A good leader develops consensus for a project based on its relationships to customers, company, and staff. Exactly how the project should unfold is often best left to the team to determine. Nothing so engages and commits a team to a leader than for them to be part of the design of the solution. No one knows the job better than the person who does it every day.

Do you dictate schedules to your team or do you and your teams negotiate on how to get things done? Ask your team for their ideas - and then use them. Just remember trait #6 - always give the credit to the team. The leader's credit comes only by crediting the team he or she leads.

#7 Leadership thrives on diversity

I love the story about the IT group at a major retailer. The business needed to know the conversion ratio: that is, how many people entering a store purchased something. IT began brainstorming traditional IT solutions -- complicated, highly automated, and expensive. On a whim, an IT leader asked a non-IT person how they might determine how many shoppers who came into a store actually purchased something. The non-IT solution after just a few minutes of thought was to hire a couple of temporary workers and have them count the number of people entering the store and then leaving with a shopping bag.

Instead of the typical all-consuming and expensive 18-month IT project more likely to fail than succeed, they got a cost-effective low-tech solution in a few hours. The best ideas come from those who don't think as you do. Expand your circle of relationships; nurture those who think differently from you.

#8 Leadership comes from continuous communication

To be able to lead and embrace these traits requires communications skills. I'm not talking about superior comedic skills when presenting. I am talking about person-to-person verbal and non-verbal communications.

This is counter-intuitive, but to present your ideas requires that you listen. To understand and accept the ideas of others requires that you talk. These are skills many people never develop, but all true leaders seem to have mastered.

In a meeting, do you do most of the talking? When you are listening to others, are you an active listener, repeating what you have heard to make sure you understand what was said?

How to break or hack Windows XP password

If you want to hack or break the password of any windows XP system then you should have physical access to the system and then follow these simple steps.

In case of user password boot the pc in safe mode by pressing the F8 key and then selecting the Safe Mode option. You can now log on as an administrator and XP wont prompt for the password. Incase of an administrator account try rebooting the pc in DOS.

access C:\Windows\system32\config\sam and

Rename SAM as SAM.mj

Now XP wont ask for password next time You Login. Also

=> Go to the cmd prompt.
=> Type net user *.

It will list all the users.
Again type net user "administrator" or the name of the administrator "name" *.
e.g.: net user Jayanthi *(where Jayanthi is the name).

It will ask for the password.

Type the password and there you are done.

Logging In As Administrator:

Hold the Ctrl-Alt key and press Del twice. This will bring up the normal login and you can log on as Administrator.

To unhide the Administrator account so it does show up:

Start Regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows NT \ CurrentVersion \ Winlogon \ SpecialAccounts \ UserList

Unhide the Administrator key by giving it a value of 1

nJoy…….

How to Disable or Enable USB in the computer?

Now days there are certain type of viruses and spy-wares that are spreading from pen-drives just because of the unprotected use of Pen drives because usually user does not scan the pen drive before its use by the updates anti virus software’s. This situation got worse on shared computers. So, some of the administrators block the USB ports so that system does not get infected by this way. You can also disable and re-enable your system's USB ports by a simple trick.

How to disable USB storage accesses for a certain group of users this disabling and re-enabling of USB ports is based on a simple registry entry. By following these simple steps anyone can disable and re-enable the access of USB ports.

To disable the access to USB port, in Windows XP and Windows 2000

1. Click Start, and then click Run.

2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.

3. Locate, and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor

4. In the right pane, double-click Start.

5. In the Value data box, type 4, click Hexadecimal (if it is not already selected), and then click OK.

6. Quit Registry Editor.

To re-enable a disabled port:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
3. Locate, and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UsbStor
4. In the right pane, double-click Start.
5. In the Value data box, type 3, click Hexadecimal (if it is not already selected), and then click OK.
6. Quit Registry Editor.

Serve your company better…… - Elango C

Memory Leaks Detection: A Different Approach

There are different ways to manage dynamically allocated memory

Experienced C/C++ programmers know what it means to properly manage dynamically allocated memory to avoid memory leaks. Michael presents an alternative approach.

---

Experienced C/C++ programmers know about the need to properly manage dynamically allocated memory to avoid memory leaks. Unfortunately, many of us still find ourselves in a tough position when there is a memory leak in the software. How is it detected in the first place? Simply looking at the task manager (or other appropriate tool that shows memory-use statistics) indicates that the memory used by the process is constantly growing. That means that the memory use is expected to remain constant. But the program must allocate memory, at least at the beginning of its life. Therefore, a more precise description would be that the process is running for a while, the input rate is constant, and the memory continues to climb. The interpretation of the input rate depends on the purpose of the program; for a web server, for instance, it can be network traffic throughput, or the number of requests per second.

How do you attack this problem? Assume that your first attempts at just looking at the code failed, and you need to get help from an automatic memory-leak detection tool. While your favorite tool may use unique techniques to trace memory allocation/deallocation and different algorithms to organize that information at runtime, it most probably works like this:

1. From the moment the program starts, it traces each memory allocation (probably with additional information, such as a call stack).

2. It registers all released memory.

3. Before the program terminates, it prints out information about each unreleased memory block.

When Good Isn't Good Enough

In many cases, there are two reasons why memory-leak reports won't give you much useful information. First, they complain about many nonexisting memory leaks and miss many real ones.

Say, for instance, that there are many memory allocations that are never released by design. Those are the static members, allocated at the beginning of the process, and Singleton objects created later using a lazy initialization strategy (for instance, your web server may load a static file to the memory when it is first requested). Other examples include custom memory pools, which can allocate up to a certain maximum number of objects, then reuse them through the rest of the process's life. In all these cases, the memory is never released. Although it's a good practice to clean up all resources, it doesn't always happen. I can even give you a reason for releasing those objects—it slows the shutdown process of your program. But what's more important is that all the memory used by the process is automatically reclaimed by the operating system (on most modern systems), and while the process is running, the size of all that static memory is known in advance and is strictly limited.

The second reason is that memory leaks, which would be missed by such reports, can be defined as "Java-style memory leaks." That is, although the object is no longer needed (at least according to the program's logic), it is never deleted because you have a valid pointer to that object, probably lost in some cache or other container. And if this object is properly wrapped with a smart pointer, it will be deleted at the end and won't appear as a memory leak. Needless to say, this is a common reason for constantly growing memory.

Any remaining classical memory leaks, which can be detected in the usual way, may still be missed because they're hard to discover in the background of other false alarms.

Detecting a Better Tool

So let's make a wish list of requirements for a memory-leaks detection tool (I'm only talking about management of runtime info regarding memory use, and not about techniques to trap allocations/deallocations made by the program):

• They should let you begin registering new memory allocations at any arbitrary point of time. You will let the application properly initialize first.
• They should stop monitoring memory activities and get a current-leaks report at any time.

Returning to the web server example, assume that it holds a session context per user—this is some information needed to process all requests made by the same visitor. As you don't want to keep this information forever, you release all related objects after a timeout of 20 minutes from the visitor's last request. Figure 1 shows a schematic lifetime of session objects, assuming that you start monitoring at time 1 and end at time 7.

At time 7 (when you end memory monitoring), session objects for Ron and Superman are still alive, and they were allocated during the monitoring interval. As a result, those session objects would be listed as memory leaks, even if you know that they aren't. That is exactly what you tried to prevent.

As a solution, you need to rethink the second requirement and replace it with:

• You should be able to stop registering new memory allocations, while still updating the state on each released object.
• At time (c), you want to get a report of all memory blocks allocated in time period (a)-(b), which were not released within the (a)-(c) time interval.

For the imaginary web server, assume you've started the process at 10:00. You can begin all monitoring at 10:10; turn off new allocations tracing at 10:15; and only at 10:40 get the final report of all memory leaks (for objects allocated in the five minutes between 10:10 and 10:15). Such flexibility in activation times and separation of new and delete processing are key points in building a better memory-leaks detection tool.

When thinking about additional features it might have, I would add:

• Start monitoring only memory allocation made from a specific thread or group of threads.

Again, this is a good way to focus on specific areas of processing, ignoring unnecessary noise in reports. For example, a web server may have a pool of threads that handles user requests. You suspect that the memory leak is hiding in the code processing those requests, so you want to filter out all allocations made from other parts of the code. In many cases, you still want to process all memory deallocations, even in other threads (for example, you may send objects from processor threads to a special logger thread, and have the latter release those objects).

External Tools Versus Integrated Solutions

There are trade-offs in deciding which tool is most appropriate for your project. The first step is choosing between an independent external tool or an integrated solution that requires some changes in your source code.

The clear advantage of the first option is the ease of use—you just need to plug it in to the application, no extra work required. Going back to the list of expectations from the memory debugging tool, you will probably need to give up the last requirement— selection of threads—because external tools are not aware of the internal layout of the process. You will also need to guess the best times to start/end monitoring, without knowledge of the current state of the program.

On the other hand, adding simple code to your web server allows you to monitor specific threads while it processes a single request. You may prefer to invest some effort now, and build an infrastructure that will make memory debugging much easier in the future. In the long run, it will save you a lot of time.

Existing Tools?

Are there existing tools that implement the functionality I've examined here? To be truthful, I'm not aware of any commercial memory-profiling tool, but there are a couple of open-source projects that implement this approach:

• Windows Leaks Detector (sourceforge.net/projects/winleak) for Win32 attaches to any running process (no source code required), provides a basic UI to start and end monitoring memory activity, and finally produces a report of all memory leaks with full call stack information. It also lets you automatically add debugger breakpoints when memory allocation occurs.
• LeakTracer (www.andreasen.org/LeakTracer) for Linux requires special compilation of your project.

Mebroot / Rootkit – The New challenge to the Security experts.

Internet security experts are warning Windows users about a new Rootkit that steals login details for online bank accounts.

These are then sent back to the criminals for either selling to the highest bidder, or for use by themselves to drain the victim’s funds!

What is a Rootkit?

A rootkit is a malicious program (or combination of several programs) designed to take control ("Administrator" access) of a computer, without authorization by the owners.

Typically, rootkits act to obscure their presence on the computer through "subversion" or "evasion" of the operating system security mechanisms. A rootkit will conceal running processes from monitoring programs, or hiding files or system data from the operating system.

Sometimes, they are also Trojans as well, thus fooling users into believing they are safe to run on their systems!

Why is Mebroot Different?

The Memboot rootkit (first called this by security firm Symantec) is unusual in that it tries to overwrite part of a computer's hard drive called the Master Boot Record (MBR).

This is where a computer looks when it is switched on for information about the operating system it will be running.

"If you can control the MBR, you can control the operating system and therefore the computer it resides on!" wrote Elia Florio on security company Symantec's blog.

How Does Mebroot Infect a Computer?

Mebroot has been deliberately installed at websites controlled by the criminals and targets those website visitors who have not patched their computers with the latest security updates from Microsoft.

Once it installs itself on the vulnerable computer, it then contacts a remote server on the internet and downloads additional nasty software called "key loggers".

These special software programs are designed to capture all your passwords and login information and send it back to the criminal gang.

Analysis of Mebroot has shown that it uses its hidden position on the MBR as a beachhead so it can reinstall these associated programs if they are deleted by anti-virus software!!!

Most of these key logger programs lie in wait on a machine until its owner logs in to the online banking systems of one of more than 900 financial institutions it has been programmed to recognize.

Leading security firm iDefense has said that Mebroot was discovered in October 2007, but only started to be used in a series of attacks in early December 2007.

The Russian virus-writing group behind Mebroot is are specialists in stealing bank login information.

What Can a Computer User Do - Some Notes:

# Computers running Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 that are NOT fully patched are all vulnerable to the virus. Make sure you have Automatic Updates turned on!

# Make sure you have an up to date security suite installed! If you don't then consider:

# CA Internet Security Suite PLUS 2008 which is 15% off until 31st March 2008 if you enter coupon code CAISS15 during checkout process.

# Although the password-stealing programs that Mebroot installs can be found by security software, such as CA Internet Security Suite, few commercial anti-virus packages currently detect its presence. Although this will change in the coming months now they know what to look for. (At least for now they will block the key logger Trojans from stealing data.)

# Mebroot cannot be removed while a operating system is running. However running the "fixmbr" command from within the Windows Recovery Console successfully removes the malicious MBR entry.

# Independent security firm GMER has produced a utility that will scan and remove the Mebroot stealth program! Please note that this is an advanced tool and not to be used without some caution:

# It seems that so far Windows XP is the most vulnerable operating system so far.

# In ADDITION to running your normal security software, consider running Threat Fire along side for better protection. By constantly monitoring the activity on your PC ThreatFire’s ActiveDefense technology is able to hunt down and paralyze threats that are too new or too clever to be recognized by traditional security software.

...and stay safe!