Technorama
An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on
software development primarily.
Friday, 31 March 2017
What will google throw their weight behind next?
Financial trading?
Bitcoin?
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
How to scoup up corporate wifi logins
I'm sure all my readers will have at some point, put their wifi password, into the wrong wifi access point. Say your office wifi is called "Julian Tech", and there is another called "Julian Tech 5Ghz" - you might try it right?
But what if that impostor wifi, was actually just someone locally, trying to scoup up the login for the real wifi!?
Monday, 27 March 2017
TP-LINK USB WiFi malware?
Bought a TP-LINK WN722N USB WiFi, High-Gain, should improve my WiFi connection while travelling.
But has any malware developer cracked it? Imagine if the production line even put a modified firmware on them, out of the box it could be bad for consumers!
ENOENT No such File or Directory
Often an unclear message is output, eg
ssh -i "me.pem" ubuntu@myserver33.net
Warning: Identity file me.pem not accessible: No such file or directory.
Other tools do handle correctly this situation:
$ objdump -d missing_file
objdump: 'missing_file': No such file
$ objdump -d my_dir
objdump: Warning: 'my_dir' is not an ordinary file
https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2700
Sunday, 26 March 2017
Afghanistan shouldn't come first on country list
I know Afghanistan comes first in English alphabet, but please, not many of them fly!
Maybe put most populous nations for flights first? ie China, India, USA, France, UK, Germany.
The secondary list of other nations.
Final list, is all the rare flyers.. Afghanistan!
ps. Please keep UK as UK, don't start calling it Great Britain, or England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland etc
Android Play Store needs a proper neat retry
In a world with unreliable internet, Play Store is surprisingly not resilient. If an app update fails, because 20 sec of no signal, WiFi, why display an error? Just list it as "will retry in few seconds" leave it polling.
Instead in status bar i get 15 alerts, and 15 app popups
MsgBox popups considered harmful
Don't you just hate it, when an app developer hasn't considered if a particular faulure could ever occur (out of memory, out of disc space, network down) and so instead, they put up a big MsgBox. Often which keeps recurring!
Android's latest Play Store has this fault at the moment. In a world with unreliable internet, Play Store is surprisingly not resilient. If an app update fails, because 20 sec of no data signal, WiFi, why display an error? Just list it as "will retry in few seconds" leave it polling. (or even a data connection, but no data credit left on SIM card)
Instead in status bar i get 15 alerts, and 15 app popups!
Monday, 20 March 2017
Cure for spam?
Authenticated emails. With verified SMTP servers. Any that don't have authentication are considered spam.
Any that get reported as sending spam, without compliance to laws and legislation get their email address and mail servers blacklisted.
To have an email account, need to put $10 on file with mail-server ISP. In the case where spam is identified, the guy loses his $10, and is banned from sending further email.
Any email considered spam, can be rejected until the from address completes a captcha to confirm it is legit.
Friday, 3 March 2017
Relying upon a single cloud host like AWS
The recent AWS outage shows that if we consolidate on one vendor, for all servers, we could be left without service until they get it back up.
Is that down-time worth the economies? Probably, but alternatively better to go with two different providers, and regularly test that it can be scaled and replaced with servers in another state, country, or continent.
Take myself, I've got a server in Asia, and one in Europe. If my main server is down, I'll just start using the other one. Of cause, this redundancy costs me 2x as much, unless I am paying by the CPU cycles for a virtual server.
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