Area51, here be raliens

După o pauză de o lună am revenit în Seattle. În acest timp am fost în Houston, oraș despre care voi scrie câte ceva în viitorul apropiat. Acum însă am o istorioară care nu e legată nici de geografie nici de cultura americană. Tema de astăzi este preluarea obiceiurilor [proaste periculoase].

Read more »

A homoglyph is a character that looks like another character. For example, if you look at this letter: P, you would say it is a 'P'; whereas I say it is the Cyrillic equivalent of 'R'. Which one of us is right?

Regardless of the answer, there are ways in which this information can be applied for noble and evil purposes.

Read more »

User interfaces make me think of fundamental questions about life and its meaning, or lack thereof.

Sometimes they emphasize my optimism.

Sometimes they hit me really hard with a dose of realism.

Once upon a time, the planets aligned in such a way that a MySQL cluster had to be set up, on top of a Debian server. A colleague had to handle the matter and I was there to provide a second opinion.

The story you are about to read is my account of an epic struggle and the immediate aftermath thereof.

Read more »

It was a regular day, like any other... Until I received an email from the person who controls an upstream VoIP server I use in my company: "We see a lot of failed connection attempts from your IP address. If this goes on, you'll end up in our blacklist and you'll have a hard time getting out of it".

This did not sound right, so I had a look at the system log:

[2012-12-21 20:34:39] NOTICE[1875] chan_sip.c: -- Registration for 'number@anotherserver.sip' timed out, trying again (Attempt #18)
...
[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] NOTICE[1875] chan_sip.c: -- Registration for 'number@anotherserver.sip' timed out, trying again (Attempt #BIGNUMBER)

It was filled with a bazillion of such entries, yet calls could be placed and received, the voice quality was excellent: no delays, gaps, echoes or "I hear them, but they don't hear me" effects.

"What the hell is going on?", the cat asked me with a puzzled face. I had no idea. This was a new shiny server built from scratch for the sole purpose of VoIP, to offload the old server (which provided a lot of other services too).

Read more »

Programmers often talk about "stupid users" and there is a lot of humour revolving around this matter:

Every time someone declares their system fool-proof, nature retaliates by creating people who are more stupid.

People are the weakest link in any security system, airplane crashes are often the cause of pilot error, and nuclear disasters are often a consequence of the human factor. This is very well documented by Donald Norman in Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles.

It is often true, but not all the time; and when it is true - you're probably blaming the wrong person. The "credit" should be given to the creators of the system, for they are the ones who made the problem possible in the first place.

Read more »

As a person with Tinnitus, I've been trying various things to deal with this condition. One of the upsetting aspects is that falling asleep is very difficult, because of the constant noise. At times it feels that falling asleep can take more than an hour, I keep twisting in my bed until my body is completely exhausted - then I have no choice but to do an "emergency shutdown".

This implies that even though I'm in bed for over 8 hours, I still feel tired in the morning; going to bed early doesn't seem to help me get more sleep.

I once made an interesting observation - when I go to sleep playing an audiobook (no headphones), next morning I resume playback and can't remember what the book is about. I rewind the story a little bit, until I reach a moment that sounds familiar.

Thus I have empirically established that when I fall asleep listening to an audiobook or a podcast - I doze off in 20 to 30 minutes.

Without audio - all I 'hear' is the tinnitus, and this is a completely different experience.

So here's a trick you could try:

• go to bed playing an audiobook
• next morning check how much of it you remember, then compute how long it took to fall asleep
• then compare this with the normal time to fall asleep

If this works for you, then you'll observe that this method lets you fall asleep faster. As a side effect, you get to dive into an interesting story (-:

I use MortPlayer for Android, as it has an "off timer" feature.

Good luck, and please share your experience with me.

Reperele geografice joacă un rol important în viața unui american de rând. Aceasta se manifestă peste tot în infrastructură - la scară mică și mare, cât și în conștiința oamenilor.

Voi oferi exemple și ilustrații, ca să-ți fie clar cât de adânc e infiltrată chestia asta în societate.

Read more »

Săptămâna trecută am fost invitat la un eveniment universitar - un fel de deschidere oficială a ”sezonului de vânătoare”. Vor fi câteva discursuri - decanul facultății, câțiva profi, studenți, etc. Mâncare și băuturi gratuite. În email se spunea că pentru a facilita interacțiunile dintre oameni - fiecare va primi câte un sticker cu inscripția ”ask me about ______” și va completa câmpul cu ceva interesant despre sine.

Am avut câteva idei în această privință, prima idee era ”ask me about anything”, pentru că asta descrie destul de bine spectrul intereselor mele. Apoi mi-am zis că totuși merg la o întâlnire organizată de un departament tehnic, așa că trebuie să scriu ”ask me about *”. Mai departe voi acționa în funcție de situație și îmi voi da seama cu cine vorbesc. Vor întreba despre expresii regulate? Despre servere Asterisk? Tabla înmulțirii? Sau despre orice altceva?

Apoi mi-am zis că niciodată nu știi de cine dai, poate voi contacta cu cineva care mă va întreba despre ”humanoid xenomorphs” și voi fi nevoit să le dezvălui toate secretele mele. De asta am ales să scriu ”ask me about * or about my T-shirt”, fie ce-o fi.

Read more »

Pages: 1· 2

Ediția a doua, revăzută și completată. Ceva timp în urmă am expediat un email unui grup de prieteni dar se pare că mulți dintre voi nu l-ați primit. Din acest motiv am hotărât să-l public pe site, ca să evit lupta cu spamul. Aici am inclus mai multe descrieri și am atașat câteva fotografii.

Read more »