Sorry for the offtopic, this post has nothing to do with startups, web-development or entrepreneurship, but I felt I should still write thisI've just discovered a built-in rootkit in my wife's brand new Toshiba laptop. A non-removable malicious software application right from the manufacturer. That even captured and sent-out screenshots of my wife's work... But first things first.
Rootkit on a brand new Toshiba Laptop Apr 30, 2011
Why I hate IE6. And why I miss IE6 Apr 17, 2011
I'm getting kinda tired of cross-browser development. Yes, I know... The more the better, competition rocks, rendering standards are great, FireFox is cool, Chrome is awesome, and the evil MSIE monopoly is sacrilege.
Lessons learned from The Traffic Spike Apr 12, 2011
My recent blog post about the Chinese hard drive has attracted HUGE amounts of traffic. It's been featured at TechCrunch, Slashdot, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others. Of course, after being upvoted at HackerNews - my long-time personal favorite.
It was "liked" by 14K (forteen thousand) people on Facebook and retweeted more than 2.5K times. My blog has received about 450 000 visits (and still counting) - thank God I host it at blogger.com, otherwise my server would be dead by now.
But what's in it for me and my startup? Let's have a look at the ups and downs:
It was "liked" by 14K (forteen thousand) people on Facebook and retweeted more than 2.5K times. My blog has received about 450 000 visits (and still counting) - thank God I host it at blogger.com, otherwise my server would be dead by now.
But what's in it for me and my startup? Let's have a look at the ups and downs:
Electronic Reader Running Doom 2 Apr 8, 2011
Being a huge fan of electronic readers, I could not pass this up. This is a leaked video of Doom 2 running on "PocketBook 360 Plus" prototype, recorded by a PocketBook employee. To be precise, it's running PrBoom - a Linux port of the original game from id Software.
This looks pretty amazing - the FPS seems really nice for an e-ink screen.
UPDATE: I've just dug up that the e-Ink screen model being used on this device is "e-Ink Vizplex V110". Full device specs:
This looks pretty amazing - the FPS seems really nice for an e-ink screen.
UPDATE: I've just dug up that the e-Ink screen model being used on this device is "e-Ink Vizplex V110". Full device specs:
Screen - 5″ V110
CPU - FreeScale i.MX35 ARM11 533MHz
RAM - 128mb RAM
Chinese Magical Hard-Drive Apr 7, 2011
A Russian friend of mine has posted this absolutely amazing story.
He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town right next to the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.
The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China... They opened up the drive right in front of the astonished customer. This is what they saw:
It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive.
The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.
He works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town right next to the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer has brought a broken 500Gb USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.
The whole service center was rolling on the floor laughing. This was not the first time someone has brought a disk like that. And the previous drives were also bought in China... They opened up the drive right in front of the astonished customer. This is what they saw:
It's a 128-MB flash-drive. Working in a "looped" mode - when it runs out of space, it starts overwriting from the beginning. My friend said they're still trying to figure out how did the Chinese do that. Because the drive reports "correct" file sizes and disk-capacity. And the "looped-overwriting" does not touch the other files present on the drive.
The device looks pretty convincing - lots of tech labels and stuff... The Chinese salesman even saved something to the drive to demonstrate that it "works" in the store.
Happy Webmasters Day Apr 4, 2011
While deploying a new build of our hosted help-desk I ran into a bunch of "not found" service pages... And then realized that it's the 4th of April!
I think we should make the 4th of April the official webmaster's day.
Happy holiday to all the webmasters and web-developers out there!
PS. Actually, if you google for "webmaster day" you'll find that GoDaddy's customer support has declared it April 29. But that's just marketing. I guess "4/04" fits much better. Let's declare this day our holiday and celebrate de-facto!
I think we should make the 4th of April the official webmaster's day.
4.04
Happy holiday to all the webmasters and web-developers out there!
PS. Actually, if you google for "webmaster day" you'll find that GoDaddy's customer support has declared it April 29. But that's just marketing. I guess "4/04" fits much better. Let's declare this day our holiday and celebrate de-facto!
ASP.NET Session: Caching Expiring Values Apr 1, 2011
Another post for ASP.NET/C# developers reading this blog. If you think these posts do not belong here, please leave a comment, and I'll consider moving my development articles to a separate blog.Pretty often I need to cache something in the Session object, and expire the stored value after, say, 5 minutes. Just like it would in the ASP.NET Cache storage.
But the session state has no expiration concept. And the Cache object - well, cache is not specific to a user-session, it's application-wide. So I created this tiny useful extension class for this. Hope the code explains itself: