When did human know to make nano structures?

Well, it's far longer than what you might think.

The Damascus steel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel) already contains nano structures in it. The steel making process to make the Damascus steel started as early as the 3rd century.

You can read details of the nano structure here: http://www.crystalresearch.com/crt/ab40/905_a.pdf

Until now, the process of making Damascus steel has not been rediscovered. The process itself was lost probably due to various reasons. Read the Wikipedia entry above for that.

What is interesting from this, is that we are not as advanced as we thought compared to older civilization. Are we starting to rediscover what ancient human did thousands of years ago?

Mediterranean Missile Test Detected by Voronezh-DM Radar?

This news: http://en.rian.ru/military_news/20130904/183151257/Russia-Defense-Ministry-Israel-Playing-With-Arms-After-Israel-Launch.html
mentions that the missile launch (which was described as a test launch by both Israel and USA) was detected in Armavir region of Russia. This is the relevant news quote:

The launch was detected at 10:16 a.m. Moscow time (6:16 a.m. GMT) by radar in the southern Russian city of Armavir

Now, if you look at what radar installation is in Armavir, you would find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronezh_radar. This means that the Voronezh-DM radar is working as "advertised". It's powerful enough to detect ballistic object(s) thousands of miles away. Feel free to disagree in the comment section :-)

[New Article over at Infosec Institute] Introduction to Automated Captcha Solving

My article on (introduction to) solving captcha automatically is online just now over at: http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/introduction-to-automated-captcha-solving/

I hope it adds into your repertoire if you haven't know it yet :-).

Stack Imbalance on .NET P/Invoke

The stack imbalance warning when debugging .NET code which used P/Invoke to call DLL function is mostly caused  by wrong parameter calling convention. This post explains in more detail. The default parameter calling convention when using the dllimport attribute is stdcall calling convention, as you can see in this link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.dllimportattribute.callingconvention(v=vs.100).aspx. This is the relevant excerpt:

The default value for the CallingConvention field is Winapi, which in turn defaults to StdCall convention.

This caused the stack handling becomes incorrect if you don't set the calling convention in your P/Invoke function declaration. Below is an example on how to do it right.
This is the DLL function declaration in C:

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif

__declspec(dllexport) void set_log_filename(char* log_file_path); 

#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif

and this is the P/Invoke function declaration in C#:

  DllImport("captcha_solver_dll.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
  public static extern void set_log_filename(string log_file_path);

As you can see, I set the set_log_filename() function calling convention to "cdecl" in the C# code above. After this, there is no more stack imbalance warning during debugging.