Tag Archives: Technology

WiFi on WD TV Live Plus

It is a very rare occasion when I want to endorse a product in a public way. However, now I am just in such a mood. I bought a WD TV Live Plus box a couple of months ago to hold my videos and photos at home. Unfortunately, it did not come with a wireless network connection so it had to stay off-line until yesterday.

And yesterday I had a crazy idea to stick a nano-WiFi (whatever that means) USB stick into it. The box has two USB slots to connect two USB hard drives. So I just put the wireless network stick into the second slot. I expected nothing, I was sure it would check that it is not a disk and then I would just put the WiFi stick back to the desk drawer whence it came. Imagine my surprise…

I open the settings menu and I see the wireless network settings staring back at me. To say I was dumbfounded does not even begin to describe my state at that point. After recovering my thoughts and a cup of tea I went about setting it up and 30 seconds later the thing was happily connected to my home network.

This is brilliant. I sincerely congratulate WD engineers on this piece of hardware. Not only it works great as a video player and a photo viewer but it recognized and used a piece of obscure hardware thrown at it without so much as a backward glance. Way to go, guys!

P.S. If you go and use it, make sure you have the HDMI interface, the “normal” video quality sucks.… -->

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Traveling light

Some people take security seriously by traveling light to China and Russia. An excellent routine is to erase the devices when you travel somewhere at all. Why carry all the important things that can get stolen? Keep it at home and take only the necessary – that is not only for security but a common sense too.

But you can get too paranoid. When the article mentions that “a thermostat in one of its corporate apartments were still communicating with an Internet address in China” you cannot help going like “yeah, right!” A healthy amount of paranoia is, well, healthy but this is taking the fear levels too far. Not to worry, soon your refrigerator will be reporting to China what you ate for breakfast back in California. Be scared.… -->

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Object-Oriented … software world

Something is definitely wrong with the object-oriented software design. Did you notice? I forces the hierarchical view of, basically, anything onto the designer. This is equally a property of the languages and the design methods. If you make object-oriented design or you write object-oriented software you equally end up with a hierarchical system.

What’s wrong with it? Maybe nothing. It just severely limits the view of the problems that we attempt to resolve with our software. The world is not always hierarchical but we try always to drag it kicking and screaming into our unified model. Sometimes that will fail. Actually, given the variety of problems, probably even most of the time it will fail.

And the important thing is that we do not notice this anymore. We think in limiting ways. We are used to the model. We assume the model of object-oriented design will fit anything and everything without ever thinking about it. Unconsciously, we made the decision to narrow our choices. And that is definitely wrong.… -->

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Software Security Philosophy

What is “security”? Well, not in broad sense, that is, but in software security? What does it mean: to develop secure software? What do we understand to fall into the realm of software security?

I tell you what I mean when I say “software security”. For me, the software security means to bring the intent of the original designer to the customer.

This is very simple. The designer had some idea in mind when designing the software. He had some intention for the software to function in a particular way. That mental picture is translated into design, brought over into development, translated into source code, translated into binary, delivered, installed and configured at the csutomer’s site. And our task is to ensure that what operates now at the customer’s site reflects exactly what developer had in mind. If it does not – we have a breach of security.

I know that this is a very broad definition and it encompasses many areas traditionally thought to be … -->

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Restore Firefox default search engine

How to reset your Firefox default search engine back to Google:

  1. Open Firefox
  2. Type about:config in location bar and press enter
  3. Search for configuration key keyword.URL and select it
  4. Right click on the configuration key keyword.URL and choose Reset from the shortcut menu.
  5. If clicking on “reset” nothing happens just write this string:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&cp=4&gs_id=i&xhr=t&q=

That’s all, folks!… -->

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Ubuntu on X201i

Finally, I got the Ubuntu graphics properly work on my Lenovo X201i. It took quite a while and the problem was the graphics card. It would give me blank screen at start-up during the installation, so I gave the kernel the “i915.modeset=0” option according to the advice found after some searching high and low. It worked.

The problem is that it doe snot really quite work… First, the graphics mode is weird, it does not use the accelerator, it seems, so you can’t have the bells and whistles of the interface. That I could live with. The other problem was more serious, the screen would not come back from blank when going to the sleep mode (close the lid).

That second problem was sort of fixed with the option “SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=true” given to the ACPI (/etc/default/acpi-support). Unfortunately, this never worked reliably and sometimes the computer would freeze on suspend or on resume. Finally, that got me fed up.… -->

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Sri Lanka war crimes?.. Nay…

And on the subject of war again, UN apparently is not interested in the war crimes committed in Sri Lanka:

  • UN rejects calls for Sri Lanka war crimes inquiry

The keyword here is “committed by both sides”. And the rebel group was “condemned” and the government wasn’t, and this is where it will end, apparently.

You see, the winner takes it all. Did you expect anything else? Heh.… -->

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