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Luminous CD envelopes
While reading the Luminous band-aids post over at the Universe of Disclosure blog, I was reminded of a similar event with a CD envelope a couple of years ago (the kind CD’s attached in magazines, with a round plastic window in the middle). I was opening it in the semi-dark (the kind of don’t wake…
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Advanced MySQL features
I think usually of MySQL as a simpler alternative to more feature rich RDBMS’s like Postgres. However recently I listened to an interview with Brian Moon, the author of Phorum which is the oldest PHP and MySQL based forum software. The interview was very cool and demonstrated that you can do a lot if you…
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An inspirational song
I don’t like baseball all that much (it isn’t played very often on this part of the ocean), but I find the song by Kenny Rogers very inspiring. The story behind the song seems to be (according to Wikipedia) that a baseball player named Kenny Rogers (not to be confused with the country singer –…
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A (not so new) technique for breaking databases
There is joke which goes something like: those who know how to do it, do it. Those who don’t, teach it. Those who don’t even know how to teach it, supervise it. Sadly this is true for many tech journalists who make up sensationalized titles both because of lack of comprehension and because they have…
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You must be ye high to play
I would be for my readers indulgence, but here is an other philosophical post. Recently I had the chance to try to teach somebody make dynamic websites and I realized that you must know an awful lot to do this. Just to enumerate a couple of things: (X)HTML CSS – which is by no means…
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All the perl documentation
A quick note: When I talked earlier about turning off warnings in Perl, I referenced the perldiag page. If you wish to see a list of all the perl… documentation available, you can look at the language reference at perldoc.perl.org (there is also a 5.8.8 version if you haven’t upgraded yet, although the differences should…
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Visualization techniques for networking data
This is the HTML version of a paper I’ve written for school. Sorry for the poor formatting, but it was generated (semi-)automatically with Google Docs from an ODT document. You can download a nicer, PDF version of it here. Introduction Humans have a natural ability to correlate patterns from multiple sources to become aware of…
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Who are behind the RaceToZero contest?
The RaceToZero has captured the publics imagination (or shall I say the medias) as the latest member of the AntiVirus is dead movement. As I tried to explain in my previous post, the results of the game are rather predictable (no detection after 5 minutes) unless the organizers are really mean (giving the contestants a…
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Avoiding the dogpile effect
When using caching to speed up webpages (or other request-response oriented protocols), it is very common to tie the update of the cache to a new request, meaning that every request checks if the cache is too old first. If not, it returns the value from the cache. If it is, it tries to recompute…
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Why prevention (rather than cure) is a must for the malware problem?
Lately I have seen a movement towards the idea that you can’t prevent security problems, so you should do your best to detect and eliminate them. While I agree with this in the general sense, it is clear that a very strong tendency in malware evolution nowdays is to make it both as stealth as…