Mixed Radix Numeral System class and Counter

Mixed Radix Calculator

   My 'Mixed Radix Calculator' creates a counting system of radices (plural of radix), such as base 12 or mixed radices such as Minutes/Hours/Days/Years: 365:24:60:60. I choose the left side to be the most significant side. This is merely a personal preference, and my MixedRadixSystem class supports displaying both alignments.

   Of course you dont have to choose a mixed radix numeral system, you can count in an N-base numeral system, such as base 7 or a more familiar base 16. Another feature lies in my RadixNumeral class. Each numeral, or place value, supports having its own dictionary of symbols.

- View the code at its GitHub - https://github.com/AdamWhiteHat/MixedRadixCalculator

      (Project released under Creative Commons)

-  52:7:24:60:60:1000  -

  A numeral system (or system of numeration) is a writing system for expressing numbers.


  The most familiar one is of course the decimal numeral system. This is a 10-base numbering system. Computers use a binary numeral system. The base is sometimes called the radix or scale.

  Not all numbering systems have just one base. Take for example, how we currently divide time: There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365 days in a year. This is called a mixed radix numeral system, and one might express the above mixed radix system like: 365:24:60:60.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_radix
  http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Base.html

Uses:
  I haven't found a lot of use cases for it yet, but it is interesting. I originally built this because I wanted to experiment with numeral systems that uses increasing consecutive prime numbers for each radix, as well as experiment with some off-bases, such as base 3 or base 7.

  In a single base, say base 7, then 'round numbers' with only one place value having a 1 and the rest having zeros, such as 1:0:0:0:0 (in base 7), such numbers are powers of 7, and ever other number except for the 1's place value is a multiple of 7.

  A mixed radix numeral system can represent a polynomial, and possibly provide for a simpler way to visualize and reason about them.

  Yet another possible use is to make a numeral system with a base that is larger than and co-prime to some other target number (say 256) to make a bijective map from every value in a byte to some other value exactly once by repeatedly adding the value of the co-prime, modulus 256. This can appear rather random (or sometimes not at all) but the mapping is easily determined given the co-prime. I have talked about this notion before on my blog
  https://csharpcodewhisperer.blogspot.com/search/label/Coprime

  If you like this project you would probably like my project EquationFinder, it finds equations given constraints
  https://github.com/AdamWhiteHat/EquationFinder

Threaded Equation Finder

Threaded Equation Finder

Find arithmetic equations that equates to a given 'target' value, number of terms, and operators.

View the GitHub - Download source .zip

Introduction

   You should all be familiar with how a typical computer works; you give it some variables, describe some quantities of some resources you have, choose an algorithm, let it process, and it returns to you a result or outcome. Now imagine a computer if you could work with a computer that worked the other way around. I believe it was Douglas Adams that described the notion of an all-together different type of computer; That is, you tell the computer what you want the outcome to be, and it goes off figuring out how to get there and what you need to do it. Z3, the Theorem Prover, and the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) solver (and probably others) in Microsoft's Solver Foundation do almost exactly that.
   There is also the idea of Backcasting, which is a similar, but different idea.

   My program isn't as fancy as all that, but it does find equations that equates to a given 'target' value, albeit at random. You define constraints other than just the target value, such as what operators are allowed in the equation, the quantity of terms there, and the range or set of allowed terms.
For example, how many different ways can 9 nines equal 27, using only addition, subtraction, and multiplication, if evaluated left-to-right (ignore the order of operations)? Turns out there are only 67 ways.

(above) Application Screen Shot

How it works

   The actual approach for finding equations that equate to an arbitrary target or 'goal' value is rather primitive. By way of Brute Force, several threads are launched asynchronously to generate thousands of random equations, evaluate them and keep the results that have not been found yet.

   This is something I wrote approx. 2 years ago. I dug it up and decided to publish it, because I thought it was interesting. As this was an 'experiment', I created different ways of storing and evaluating the expressions, and have made those different 'strategies' conform to a common interface so I could easily swap them out to compare the different strategies. I have refactored the code so that each class that implements IEquation is in its own project and creates its own assembly.

   There are two fully-working strategies for representing equations: one that represented the equation as a list of 2-tuples (Term,Operator), did not perform order of operations, and was rather obtuse. The other strategy was to store the equation as a string and evaluate it using MSScriptControl.ScriptControl to Eval the string as a line of VBScript. This was unsurprisingly slower but allowed for much more robust equation evaluation. Order of operations is respected with the ScriptControl strategy, and opens the way to using using parenthesis.

   The other idea for a strategy which I have not implemented but would like to, would be a left-recursive Linq.Expression builder. Also, maybe I could somehow use Microsoft Solver Foundation for a wiser equation generation strategy than at random.

Limitations

   Today, however, there are better architectures. A concurrent system like this would benefit greatly from the Actor model. If you wanted to write complex queries against the stream of equations being generated or selected or solved, maybe reactive extensions would be a slam dunk.

   Although this project certainly is no Z3, it does provide an example of an interface... perhaps even a good one.

Running on Raspberry Pi 2

   Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) might be a good thing here, but I also wrote a console client that is designed to be ran with Mono on the Raspberry Pi 2. MEF is a proprietary Microsoft .NET technology that is not supported in Mono. The extra meta data in the assembly shouldn't be a problem, but having a dependency on the MEF assembly will be. Probing of the runtime environment and dynamically loading of assemblies is required here, which I have not had time to do, so at this time, there is no MEF.

   The reason the mono client is a console application is because mono and winforms on the Raspberry Pi 2 fails for some people. The problem has something to do with a hardware floating point vs a software float, and it happens to manifest itself when using a TextBox control. The only thing that I haven't tried, and that should presumably fix it, is to re-build mono from the latest source.

Certificate Enumerator

     Recently, my windows quit updating. Just prior to that, I had been messing around with my certificate store, so I suspected that to be the cause. Running Microsoft's troubleshooter reset the download, which I had a lot of hope of fixing the issue, but the download still continued to to fail. I decided to check the Windows Event Logs, and that's where I found an error message about a certificate in the chain failing. I knew it! However, I did not know whether a trusted certificate accidentally got put in the untrusted store, or whether an untrusted certificate was accidentally put in the trusted store. I needed a way to search all of my certificates' thumbprints or serial numbers against a know repository of trusted or untrusted certificates.
    Microsoft's certificate snap-in for MMC does not allow you to view certificates in an efficient way. Opening them one at a time, manually, and then scrolling all the way down to where the thumbprint is displayed to compare it to a webpage is painful. Also, I was not satisfied with the way that Microsoft allows you to search the certificate store. The search is not very effective and you cant even search for thumbprints! Also I do not believe the search feature allows you anyway to copy any of that information to clipboard.
Most of what I needed to accomplish could simply be done if I could just export all of my computers certificates thumbprint or serial numbers to a text file, csv file, or other simple and searchable format. Then I thought to myself, I know how to do that! It was the great the lack of features of the MMC certificate snap-in, and the inability to search for certificate thumbprints that inspired me to write my own certificate utility, known simply as Certificate Enumerator.




     CertificateEnumerator can list every certificate in your various certificate stores for your local machine and currently logged in user. It can then display that information to you either in a DataGridView or TextBox (as columnarized text), and provides the ability to persist that information to file as text, comma separated values (CSV), excel format or HTML table.


     The Certificate Enumerator also has the ability to 'validate' each certificate against its CRL (certificate revocation list), if it supplied one.


     The GUI could really use some love. In case you missed it, the project is on my GitHub, so feel free to download the source and play with it. If you come up with useful, submit a pull request.

Resize form to match the contents of DataGridView

Sometimes the sole purpose of a Form is to display a DataGridView. In that case, you probably want the Form to automatically resize to the size of the contents in the DataGridView. I've seen solutions that loop through all the rows and add up the height, but this is ugly, and usually does not take into account margins, padding, DividerHeight and row header padding. There must be a better way...

My strategy is to temporarily undock the DataGridView, set AutoSize to true, then capture the DataGridView's Size at that point, then restore the Dock and AutoSize property. Then use the captured size to resize the Winform:

// Within the Form class
private void AutoSizeFormToDataGridView()
{
 Size contentsSize = GetDataGridViewContentsSize();
 this.ClientSize = contentsSize;
}

protected Size GetDataGridViewContentsSize()
{
 DockStyle dockStyleSave = dataGridView1.Dock;
 dataGridView1.Dock = DockStyle.None;
 dataGridView1.AutoSize = true;
 
 Size dataContentsSize = dataGridView1.Size;
 
 dataGridView1.AutoSize = false;
 dataGridView1.Dock = dockStyleSave;
 return dataContentsSize;
}

Or alternatively you can define this as an extension method:

public static Size GetContentsSize(this DataGridView dataGrid) { //...

Enjoy!

DataTable or DataGridView to CSV or HTML file using Clipboard

It turns out that DataGridView.GetClipboardContent() returns all the selected cells of a DataGridView as a type DataObject, which is conveniently consumed by the Windows.Forms.Clipboard class, as well as other WYSIWYG editors from Microsoft. From this you can set the Clipboard, then get the clipboard various data formats, including:
- Comma separated value
- Tab separated value
- HTML

So instead of looping though columns and then rows, you can output the entire DataGridView as a CSV file in just 3 lines of code! (4 if you count setting the ClipboardCopyMode, which can be set in the Form Builder.

Here is the code:

void DataGridViewToCSV(string Filename)
{
   bool allowAddRows = dataGridView1.AllowUserToAddRows;
   bool rowHeadersVisible = dataGridView1.RowHeadersVisible;
   dataGridView1.AllowUserToAddRows = false;
   dataGridView1.RowHeadersVisible = false;

   // Choose whether to write header. You will want to do this for a CSV file.
   dataGridView1.ClipboardCopyMode = DataGridViewClipboardCopyMode.EnableAlwaysIncludeHeaderText;
   // Select the cells we want to serialize.
   dataGridView1.SelectAll(); // One could also use DataGridView.Rows[RowIndex].Selected = true;

   // Save the current state of the clipboard so we can restore it after we are done
   IDataObject objectSave = Clipboard.GetDataObject();
   // Copy (set clipboard)
   Clipboard.SetDataObject(dataGridView1.GetClipboardContent());
   // Paste (get the clipboard and serialize it to a file)
   File.WriteAllText(Filename,Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.CommaSeparatedValue));
   // Restore the current state of the clipboard so the effect is seamless
   if(objectSave != null)
   {
      Clipboard.SetDataObject(objectSave);
   }
   dataGridView1.AllowUserToAddRows = allowAddRows;
   dataGridView1.RowHeadersVisible = rowHeadersVisible;
}

Some improvements

For a tab-delimited file, use the TextDataFormat.Text enum in your call to Clipboard.GetText(). You can also output your DataGridView as HTML by using TextDataFormat.Html instead of TextDataFormat.CommaSeparatedValue, but there is extra header data you have to parse out:

   string result = Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.CommaSeparatedValue);
   result = result.Substring( result.IndexOf("") );

Notes:
- An object must be serializable for it to be put on the Clipboard.

Convert a Class or List of Class to a DataTable, using reflection.

Note by author:

   Since writing this, I have expanded on this idea quite a bit. I have written a lightweight ORM class library that I call EntityJustWorks.
   The full project can be found on GitHub or CodePlex.


   EntityJustWorks not only goes from a class to DataTable (below), but also provides:

• Populate the public properties of a class from a DataTable

• DataTable to class as a C# code file (using CodeDOM)

• DataTable to class Assembly (using Reflection.Emit)

• C# class to a SQL 'CREATE TABLE' or 'INSERT INTO' script

• SQL 'SELECT' statement to a List<T> of populated classes, each one resembling a row

Security Warning:
This library generates dynamic SQL, and has functions that generate SQL and then immediately executes it. While it its true that all strings funnel through the function Helper.EscapeSingleQuotes, this can be defeated in various ways and only parameterized SQL should be considered SAFE. If you have no need for them, I recommend stripping semicolons ; and dashes --. Also there are some Unicode characters that can be interpreted as a single quote or may be converted to one when changing encodings. Additionally, there are Unicode characters that can crash .NET code, but mainly controls (think TextBox). You almost certainly should impose a white list:
string clean = new string(dirty.Where(c => "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789.,\"_ !@".Contains(c)).ToArray());

PLEASE USE the SQLScript.StoredProcedure and DatabaseQuery.StoredProcedure classes to generate SQL for you, as the scripts it produces is parameterized. All of the functions can be altered to generate parameterized instead of sanitized scripts. Ever since people have started using this, I have been maintaining backwards compatibility. However, I may break this in the future, as I do not wish to teach one who is learning dangerous/bad habits. This project is a few years old, and its already showing its age. What is probably needed here is a total re-write, deprecating this version while keep it available for legacy users after slapping big warnings all over the place. This project was designed to generate the SQL scripts for standing up a database for a project, using only MY input as data. This project was never designed to process a USER'S input.! Even if the data isn't coming from an adversary, client/user/manually entered data is notoriously inconsistent. Please do not use this code on any input that did not come from you, without first implementing parameterization. Again, please see the SQLScript.StoredProcedure class for inspiration on how to do that.

    This class uses generics to accepts a class type, and uses reflection to determine the name and type of the class's public properties. With that, a new DataTable is made and the DataColumnCollection is fleshed out. Then you can add rows to the DataTable by passing instances of the class with it's property fields containing values.

    Finally, we serialize the DataTable to an XML file, save it's Schema, then load it all back in again as a proof of concept.


Usage example:

List<Order> orders = new List<Order>();

// Fill in orders here ...
// orders.Add(new Order());

// Convert class to DataTable
DataTable ordersTable = ClassListToDataTable(orders);

// Set DataGrid's DataSource to DataTable
dataGrid1.DataSource = ordersTable;

Here is the Code:

public static DataTable ClassToDataTable<T>() where T : class
{
    Type classType = typeof(T);

    List<PropertyInfo> propertyList = classType.GetProperties().ToList();
    if (propertyList.Count < 1)
    {
        return new DataTable();
    }

    string className = classType.UnderlyingSystemType.Name;
    DataTable result = new DataTable(className);

    foreach (PropertyInfo property in propertyList)
    {
        DataColumn col = new DataColumn();
        col.ColumnName = property.Name;

        Type dataType = property.PropertyType;

        if (IsNullable(dataType))
        {
            if(dataType.IsGenericType)
            {
                dataType = dataType.GenericTypeArguments.FirstOrDefault();
            }
        }
        else
        {   // True by default
            col.AllowDBNull = false;
        }

        col.DataType = dataType;

        result.Columns.Add(col);
    }

    return result;
}

public static DataTable ClassListToDataTable<T>(List<T> ClassList) where T : class
{
   DataTable result = ClassToDataTable<T>();
   
   if(result.Columns.Count < 1)
   {
      return new DataTable();
   }
   if(ClassList.Count < 1)
   {
      return result;
   }
   
   foreach(T item in ClassList)
   {
      ClassToDataRow(ref result, item);
   }
   
   return result;
}

public static void ClassToDataRow<T>(ref DataTable Table, T Data) where T : class
{
    Type classType = typeof(T);
    string className = classType.UnderlyingSystemType.Name;

    // Checks that the table name matches the name of the class. 
    // There is not required, and it may be desirable to disable this check.
    // Comment this out or add a boolean to the parameters to disable this check.
    if (!Table.TableName.Equals(className))
    {
        return;
    }

    DataRow row = Table.NewRow();
    List<PropertyInfo> propertyList = classType.GetProperties().ToList();

    foreach (PropertyInfo prop in propertyList)
    {
        if (Table.Columns.Contains(prop.Name))
        {
            if (Table.Columns[prop.Name] != null)
            {
                row[prop.Name] = prop.GetValue(Data, null);
            }
        }
    }
    Table.Rows.Add(row);
}

public static bool IsNullable(Type Input)
{
    if (!Input.IsValueType) return true; // Is a ref-type, such as a class
    if (Nullable.GetUnderlyingType(Input) != null) return true; // Nullable
    return false; // Must be a value-type
}

Here is an example of how to serialize a DataTable to XML, and load it back again

string filePath = "order1.xml";
string schemaPath = Path.ChangeExtension(filePath,".xsd");

ordersTable.WriteXml(filePath);
ordersTable.WriteXmlSchema(schemaPath);

// Load
DataTable loadedTable = new DataTable();
loadedTable.ReadXmlSchema(schemaPath);
loadedTable.ReadXml(filePath);

// Set DataGrid's DataSource
dataGrid1.DataSource = dataTable;

The full project and source code for EntityJustWorks can be found on GitHub and CodePlex.

Fake/Random Identity Generator

Inspiration

During my research on RSA cryptography and the importance of a truly random number for having a large key-space, I stumbled on to FakeNameGenerator.com. I thought the concept could be really useful for certain applications and could easily envision how to implement it in C#, and make it extensible/customizable.

Take a look at these:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<DocumentElement>
  <Order>
    <Date>3/18/2005</Date>
    <TrackingNumber>1Z 8A8 238 01 9398 182 1</TrackingNumber>
    <FirstName>Keaton </FirstName>
    <LastName>Day</LastName>
    <StreetAddress>4828 Cherry St.</StreetAddress>
    <City>Nanticoke</City>
    <State>SC</State>
    <Zip>89130</Zip>
    <Email>HaleHale8026@mail.com</Email>
    <Phone>425-765-4520</Phone>
  </Order>

  <Payroll>
    <PhoneNumber>971-258-5703</PhoneNumber>
    <AltPhoneNumber>501-769-1331</AltPhoneNumber>
    <FirstName>Xyla </FirstName>
    <LastName>Hoover</LastName>
    <EmployeeID>499</EmployeeID>
    <HireDate>5/28/2011</HireDate>
    <Birthdate>5/28/1990</Birthdate>
    <SSN>520-52-4275</SSN>
    <AccountNumber>5696618825</AccountNumber>
    <RoutingNumber>575159859</RoutingNumber>
    <Address>8348 Court Ave.</Address>
    <City>Pittsburgh,</City>
    <State>PA.</State>
    <Zip>15201</Zip>
  </Payroll>

 CREATE TABLE ReservationData (
  `id` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `UniqueID` MEDIUMINT default NULL,
  `TripDate` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `FirstName` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `LastName` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `Phone` varchar(100) default NULL,
  `AltPhone` varchar(100) default NULL,
  `Email` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `StreetAddress` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `City` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `State` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `Zip` varchar(10) default NULL,
  `Country` varchar(255) default NULL,
  `DayOfYear` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `TotalCost` varchar(50) default NULL,
  `Balance` varchar(10) default NULL,
  `CCard` varchar(18) default NULL,
  `Expires` varchar(5) default NULL,
  `CVC2` varchar(3) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) TYPE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1;

This would make great honey for a honey pot; just fill an SQL database with this random, realistic looking data, serve and log any and all attempts to access, query or dump the database. This can be done on a VM and you have a easily deployed, high interaction honeypot!

Aside from being able to see their IP address, I think the most useful data that can be attained is their behavior; what injection attacks are they using to drop the database? Write rules to prevent your honey against trivial attempts such as the ' AND 1=(SELECT attacks and see what they come up with next. Rule writing is inherently a cat-and-mouse game, honeypots like this clearly give the white-hats the upper hand.

Implementation

A quick, fast and dirty solution is to simply read a random line from a text file (i.e. Name_First.txt and Address_Street.txt).

This way, you can choose from names that are common, or customize your list to for different nationalities.

One could read the whole file in to a string, Parse() it into an array of strings, then randomly select an index, but this would be unacceptable for very large files. Instead, we can set the file pointer to a random position that is less than its size, roll back to the last new line and call ReadLine.

public string ReturnRandomLine(string FileName)
{
 string sReturn = string.Empty;
 
 using(FileStream myFile = new FileStream(FileName,FileMode.Open,FileAccess.Read))
 {
  using(StreamReader myStream = new StreamReader(myFile))
  {
   // Seek file stream pointer to a rand position...
   myStream.BaseStream.Seek(rand.Next(1,myFile.Length),SeekOrigin.Begin);
   
   // Read the rest of that line.
   myStream.ReadLine();
   
   // Return the next, full line...
   sReturn = myStream.ReadLine();
  }
 }
 
 // If our random file position was too close to the end of the file, it will return an empty string
 // I avoided a while loop in the case that the file is empty or contains only one line
 if(System.String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(sReturn)) {
  sReturn = ReturnRandomLine(FileName);
 }
 
 return sReturn;
}

Example use:

public string GenerateFistName()
{
 return ReturnRandomLine("Name_First.txt") + " ";
}

public string GenerateLastName()
{
 return ReturnRandomLine("Name_Last.txt");
}

public string GenerateFullName()
{
 return GenerateFistName() + GenerateLastName();
}

public string GenerateGender()
{
 if(ReturnPercent(84)) {
  return "Male";
 } else {
  return "Female";
 }
}

public string GenerateStreetNumber()
{
 return rand.Next(1,9999).ToString();
}

public string GenerateStreetName()
{
 return ReturnRandomLine("Address_Street.txt");
}

One limitation is where the data is relational, such as in the case of generating a random zip code along with the city and state that it exists in.

A quick work-around would be CityZipState.txt



Other types of data that can be generated that would not make sense to put in a text file:

public bool ReturnPercent(int Percent) // Return true Percent times out of 100, randomly
{
 int iTemp = rand.Next(1,101);
 
 if(iTemp<=Percent) {
  return true;
 } else {
  return false;
 }
}

public string GenerateDate(int YearFrom,int YearTo)
{
 int Month = rand.Next(1,13);
 int Day  = rand.Next(1,32);
 int Year = GenerateYear(YearFrom,YearTo);
 
 return Month.ToString() + "/" + Day.ToString() + "/" + Year.ToString();
}

public string GenerateYear(int YearFrom,int YearTo)
{
 return rand.Next(YearFrom,YearTo+1).ToString();
}

public string GeneratePhoneNumber()
{
 return GeneratePhoneNumber(ReturnRandomLine("PhoneNumber_Prefix.txt"));
}

public string GeneratePhoneNumber(string Prefix)
{
 int iThree = rand.Next(192,999);
 int iFour = rand.Next(1000,9999);
 
 return Prefix + iThree.ToString() + "-" + iFour.ToString();
}

public string GenerateSSN()
{
 int iThree = rand.Next(132,921);
 int iTwo = rand.Next(12,83);
 int iFour = rand.Next(1423,9211);
 return iThree.ToString() + "-" + iTwo.ToString() + "-" + iFour.ToString();
}

Obviously, these methods can be improved to conform to the standards of a real social security number, national identification number, credit card number, ect...

public string GenerateCCNum()
{
 string sCCNum = string.Empty;
 
 byte[] bCCNum = {0};
 rand.NextBytes(bCCNum);
 
 // generate random 16 digit number
 int iTemp1 = rand.Next(10000000,99999999);
 int iTemp2 = rand.Next(10000000,99999999);
 string sTemp = iTemp1.ToString() + iTemp2.ToString();
 
 // while loop?
 while(!IsValidNumber(sTemp))
 {
  iTemp1 = rand.Next(10000000,99999999);
  iTemp2 = rand.Next(10000000,99999999);
  sTemp = iTemp1.ToString() + iTemp2.ToString();
 }
 
 sCCNum = sTemp;
 
 return sCCNum;
}

The implementation of IsValidNumber() is left as an exercise for the reader.

The serialization of your data is a trivial matter. Please see my post on a XML Serializable Dictionary, Tuple, and Object for the code to serialize an object (such as a list, or a class).