... and there is always one more thing

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 - Stuck on Boot (link to article)

2012-01-27T23:30:00.001-05:00

My Samsung Tablet "has died" today. It got stuck on boot for some reason.

I hooked it up to the computer and checked the logcat (adb logcat).

It was trying to open the account database on the device, that for some reason got corrupted and after the failing to do so (unable to open database file, db=/data/system/accounts.db) it rebooted over and over again. The database can be easily fixed on the rooted device, but mine was not rooted yet.

After a bit of googling I found this useful article that describes exactly the same problem on exactly the same device and provides the solution:

http://mrkn.co/forums/android/general/364.html

Essentially, the solution comes down to deleting all the user data (aka factory reset), here are the steps from the article:

"In case you are wondering how to hard-reset your tab, you can follow these steps:

1) Power off the device by holding the power key for about 8 seconds
2) Press the volume down key (the one to the left, as I always confuse them) and then the power key
3) Within a couple of seconds, you'll see two logos on the device, one for USB and another, that looks like a Android dude shoveling earth
4) Press the the volume down button to select the the USB icon, and then press the volume up button to make the actual selection
5) Your device is now in the "fastboot" mode
6) Finally, open up your terminal/shell and type fastboot -w, which will completely erase your userdata and cache partitions (took about 12.5 seconds for me). I got the fastboot by building it from source, but you can download pre-built binaries from various sources on the web
7) Restart your device
8) You should now be prompted to set it up... all over again"

Many thanks to the author of that article Aleksandar Gargenta.

Javascript from command-line on Mac OS X

2012-01-27T00:35:00.002-05:00

Here is a "trick" to get the javascript command-line tool "jsc" available on Mac OS X, just add a link, for example like this:
sudo ln /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/jsc ~/bin/jsc
then just run "jsc".

YAML parser for Android

2012-01-13T22:25:00.002-05:00

I needed YAML parser for Android this week and after a bit of research I found that SnakeYAML might work: http://code.google.com/p/snakeyaml
The only problem was if you try to use the latest code the application would fail with exception that looks something like this in the logcat:

VFY: unable to resolve exception class 21 (Ljava/beans/IntrospectionException;)

This happens due to the dependency on java.bean package APIs that is used to parse getters/setters types of properties (methods).

There is a prebuilt library already available in the download section for version 1.8 adjusted for Android: http://snakeyaml.googlecode.com/files/snakeyaml-android-1.8-SNAPSHOT.jar (thanks to Alexander Maslov), but I wanted to use the latest code.

The adjustment for Android is quite straight forward:

* Remove all the imports of java.bean package components

* Remove the throws IntrospectionException from methods declarations in few files (grep, there are only 4 .java files to change

* In the introspector/PropertyUtils.java adjust the getPropertiesMap method implementation, throw away the use of Introspector. Yep, the library will not support java getters/setters methods serialization after that, only fields, but that worked fine for me.

* Remove introspector/MethodProperty.java file

* If you want to save some time and don't care building and running tests (I know it's wrong, but still), then you can build the .jar library with mvn package -DskipTests=true command.

* Add the final .jar file into your Android project and enjoy YAML on Android

PipedInputStream default size on Android

2012-01-13T13:57:00.000-05:00

The PipedInputStream on Android is 1024 bytes by default.

protected static final int PIPE_SIZE = 1024;

In many cases this value is too small, so the constructor with the size parameter should be used instead.

Android application signing with PKCS12 (.p12) certificate

2012-01-12T16:57:00.002-05:00

Here are few useful commands to sign the Android application with PKCS12 certificate.

* Import PKCS12 cert into keystore file:

keytool -importkeystore -srckeystore mycert.p12 -destkeystore mycert.keystore -srcstoretype pkcs12

* Change the certificate alias in the keystore if you like:

keytool -changealias -keystore mycert.keystore -destalias new_cert_alias -alias original_cert_alias

* List the keystore certificates (-v for verbose)

keytool -list -v -keystore mycert.keystore

* Sign the Android APK

jarsigner -verbose -keystore mycert.keystore myapp.apk cert_alias

* Verify that the APK is signed

jarsigner -verify -verbose -certs myapp.apk

OAuth2 with Google C2DM (push)

2012-01-12T11:49:00.002-05:00

I had to implement the server prototype for Google C2DM (push) the other day.

The easiest option to get the auth token is to use ClientLogin API: http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/AuthForInstalledApps.html that returns the auth token in one call. One of the problems with this approach was that I either had to store the credentials on the server in order to refresh the auth token if it expires or notify the system administrator to go ahead and re-authenticate through the dedicated web page on the server.

The better approach is to use OAuth2 API instead: http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth2WebServer.html.

There are couple of things are not well documented:

* When you register the app on the https://code.google.com/apis/console/ there is no C2DM service API to choose. That's fine for now, though it might change later probably.

* One of the parameters "scope" for the https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth call needs to be set to

scope=https%3A%2F%2Fandroid.apis.google.com%2Fc2dm (https://android.apis.google.com/c2dm url-encoded)

* Set parameter access_type=offline.This will provide you with the refresh_token in the authentication response, that you can use to renew the auth token when it expires.

Hope this will save somebody few minutes.

UPDATE (January 19, 2012):
If you stumble upon the MismatchSenderID error, make sure that when you start authentication (https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth) that you are not already signed in under your personal google account (hint: the browser cookies) . You should be signed under the google account that you created and that got approved for C2DM.

Stumbled upon this cool dive video today

2012-01-04T01:16:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year! С Новым 2012 годом!

2012-01-01T11:03:00.001-05:00

Missing pthread_mutex_timedlock on Android

2011-12-30T00:07:00.000-05:00

I stumbled upon a problem today that the pthread_mutex_timedlock function definition is missing on Android, though it's declared in the pthread.h.
The first thought was to implement it as a loop with a call to pthread_mutex_trylock and some sleep until we are able to get the lock or until the timeout happens, felt a bit awkward.

I took a look a the Mono for Android source code and that's exactly what they do there (./mono/io-layer/mono-mutex.c), so go figure, looks like this solution might not be that bad after all.

Here is how it's implemented in Mono for example:

int
pthread_mutex_timedlock (pthread_mutex_t *mutex, CONST_NEEDED struct timespec *timeout)
{
 struct timeval timenow;
 struct timespec sleepytime;
 int retcode;
 
 /* This is just to avoid a completely busy wait */
 sleepytime.tv_sec = 0;
 sleepytime.tv_nsec = 10000000; /* 10ms */
 
 while ((retcode = pthread_mutex_trylock (mutex)) == EBUSY) {
  gettimeofday (&timenow, NULL);
  
  if (timenow.tv_sec >= timeout->tv_sec &&
      (timenow.tv_usec * 1000) >= timeout->tv_nsec) {
   return ETIMEDOUT;
  }
  
  nanosleep (&sleepytime, NULL);
 }
 
 return retcode;
}

... из жизни

2011-12-28T22:33:00.002-05:00

Сегодня на обеде видел одного папашу с маленьким ребёнком (меньше года). Дядька это болтал с двумя тётками которые сидели с ним за столом, пил большую банку Monster Energy Drink и тряс коленкой на которой сидел ребёнок ну наверное с частотой не меньше 300 ударов в минуту, так что казалось что у ребёнка либо голова отвалится, либо будет обширное сотрясение мозга.
"Энергетики" это вам не игрушка....

Nouns vs Verbs

2011-12-28T00:01:00.004-05:00

Stumbled upon this post today, it's almost 6 years old, but I haven't seen it before and enjoyed reading it quite a bit:

Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns

Hope you like it too.

Говорят дети

2011-12-26T08:31:00.000-05:00

Саша просит поиграться на таблете:
- Хочу игру где убивают злых поросят ...

(Angry Birds)

How to setup Eclipse for debugging with Android NDK

2011-12-23T22:33:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to bookmark couple of useful links on how to setup Eclipse IDE for debugging with NDK. Sometimes it might be more convenient than doing ndk-gdb from terminal, that I still didn't quite get used to yet. It took a bit of time and few tries to get things going. I had some problems with symbols loading and matching, and finally succeeded. Anyways if stuck check comments to these articles.

Setup your project to be a mixed Java, C, and C++ project:
http://mhandroid.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/using-eclipse-for-android-cc-development/
Setup your project to enable debugging:
http://mhandroid.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/using-eclipse-for-android-cc-debugging/#more-23

Хочу как у мусорщика

2011-12-08T22:08:00.001-05:00

По дороге в детский садик, Саша позади в детском сиденье возится с кепкой.
Я: -Саша ты что там с кепкой делаешь.
Саша: -Хочу как у мусорщика.....

... и одевает кепку набок ...

... а ведь было же время когда завораживали мусорные машины с автоматическими подъёмниками, строительная техника и т.д. ... поменялись с возрастом интересы и приоритеты как-то ....

Android NDK logging

2011-12-02T22:51:00.001-05:00

Just wanted to share the snipped that often used in the different Android native projects.

The following are some useful macros for logging with NDK.

#include<android/log.h>

#define LOGD(LOG_TAG, ...) __android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_DEBUG, LOG_TAG, __VA_ARGS__)

#define LOGV(LOG_TAG, ...) __android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_VERBOSE, LOG_TAG, __VA_ARGS__)

#define LOGE(LOG_TAG, ...) __android_log_print(ANDROID_LOG_ERROR, LOG_TAG, __VA_ARGS__)

You can define more as needed just take a look at the android/log.h header file for all available priority values.

Then I would usually define log TAG:

#define LOG_TAG "MyModule"

and use the macros like this:

LOGD(LOG_TAG, "my val: %s", val);

fopen with native library on Android

2011-12-02T22:14:00.001-05:00

If you develop an Android application with some native C/C++ layer (NDK) and

try to open the file from it by doing FILE *pFile = fopen ("myfile.txt" ,"w");

the fopen call will fail.

The reason is that the current working directory for you application is the root of file system '/' and naturally your application doesn't have access to it.

In order to fix this problem you have to pass the full path for the file to fopen call.

One way to do this is to pass the base path to your application data folder where your application has read/write permissions. For example you can use the Context API getFilesDir().getAbsolutePath()

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Context.html#getFilesDir()

and pass the result to the native function call.

This particular API resolves currently into something like: "/data/data/[app package]/files/"

In your native code then the fopen call should succeed with

FILE *pFile = fopen ("/data/data/[app package]/files/myfile.txt" ,"w");

Hope this was helpful.

Improved Git development model

2011-11-18T12:50:00.001-05:00

If you are just starting to utilize Git in your team I would highly recommend to take a look at the git-flow https://github.com/nvie/gitflow and read the following article:
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Enjoy!

More fun with Android NDK7

2011-11-17T20:09:00.001-05:00

I tried to compile cURL library Android NDK7 for x86 architecture and it looks like though the bug was reported in NDK6b: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=19851, the libc is still missing few functions sigsetjmp and siglongjmp.
The easiest solution for me was to get the libc from the latest ICS source tree (built for x86 arch).

Looking forward to get this fixed in NDK8, hopefully before Christmas.

if you are using sem_timedwait on iOS or Mac OS X ....

2011-11-17T09:36:00.001-05:00

While porting some C/C++ code to iOS found out that sem_timedwait is not implemented on iOS or Mac OS X and seems like on many BSD systems. Here is the discussion on the topic:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/641126/posix-semaphores-on-mac-os-x-sem-timedwait-alternative
The discussion a bit old but it seems like it is still a valid one.

For now I conditionally compiled the code with the call sem_wait, will look into a better cross-platform solution later.

Native libraries porting to iOS

2011-11-16T10:28:00.001-05:00

Recently I spent a bit of time working on porting (getting built) some native libraries with Android NDK and iOS. The port to Android NDK deserves it's own post, that I might write down later.

As for iOS, I primarily needed openssl, curl, zlib and found nice little script, that helps you with the build:
http://code.google.com/p/ios-static-libraries. Just comment out what you don't need and you should be good to go. It's quite easy to repurpose the script to pull the source from your local repos if needed.

One of the problem I had was that I have only iOS SDK 5.0 on the machine and the libcurl build for iPhone device was breaking because "cpp" compiler (export CXXCPP=${DEVROOT}/usr/bin/cpp
) was not found . Apple provided "cpp" compiler for the emulator, but conveniently left it out from the iPhone device toolchain. The easy fix for that is to create the symbolic link in the /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin directory:
ln -s llvm-cpp-4.2 cpp

Hope this saves you a bit of time.

Android NDK no love for wchar_t

2011-10-23T23:59:00.001-04:00

I had to port some existing C/C++ code to Android (NDK) recently.
The code was using wchar_t and wstring quite often.
After a bit of research found out that it might not be as easy as I initially thought.

Basically, the wchar_t support is broken and most of the w* functions are not implemented as far as I can tell.
The wchar_t was essentially defined as one byte char before Android Froyo (2.2) and only starting from 2.3 it is 4 bytes long.

Here is the quite entertaining comment from their wchar.h file:

/* IMPORTANT: Any code that relies on wide character support is essentially
* non-portable and/or broken. the only reason this header exist
* is because I'm really a nice guy. However, I'm not nice enough
* to provide you with a real implementation. instead wchar_t == char
* and all wc functions are stubs to their "normal" equivalent...
*/

Is seems like there are at least couple of possible ways to solve this problem:
1. Fix the existing code, and remove the dependency on wchar_t (wstring etc).
2. Try to use the CrystaX android development toolkit instead, that seems to have a better support for wchar_t and other w* APIs: http://www.crystax.net/en/android/ndk/6

Will continue digging into this tomorrow.

MIRcon 2011

2011-10-12T01:25:00.000-04:00

I'm attending the MIRcon 2011 conference - the second annual conference on information security that my company organizes:

http://www.mandiant.com/news_events/article/mircon_event_page

The conference is open to everybody and it is free.

Here is the couple of thoughts after the first day:
1. It's amazing how much is going on in the area of cyber security, cyber attacks prevention and instant response. Some of the stories can really make you paranoid about security of your personal data and especially (oh so popular) the cloud security.
2. Ditch Windows. I haven't been using Windows OS actively recently. I'm doing fine with Mac OS X as my primary development platform and different distros of Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, etc.). Windows is not doing good against the cyber attacks in part because of the properties of OS itself and in part of how popular it is. The more I get familiar with different flavors of *nix (Linux, BSD, etc), the more I get impression that it's kind of more difficult to make some consistent low level type of malware or find some common security vulnerability that can be scaled well, because the *nix distros are different, with possibly different vulnerabilities and differently broken APIs.

Looking forward to the second day of the conference.

printf ("Goodbye Dennis Ritchie");

2011-10-08T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rest in peace Dennis Ritchie

Rest in Peace Steve Jobs

2011-10-05T21:07:00.002-04:00

Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and former CEO, has died at the age of 56. So sad :(

Rest in peace Steve ....
http://www.apple.com/stevejobs

Android HttpURLConnection improvements

2011-09-29T20:31:00.001-04:00

This is awesome news , the Android team is finally fixing and improving the HttpURLConnection.

"Apache HTTP client has fewer bugs on Eclair and Froyo. It is the best choice for these releases.
For Gingerbread and better, HttpURLConnection is the best choice. Its simple API and small size makes it great fit for Android. Transparent compression and response caching reduce network use, improve speed and save battery. New applications should use HttpURLConnection; it is where we will be spending our energy going forward."
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/09/androids-http-clients.html?m=1

MacBook, the battery status check

2011-09-28T22:26:00.000-04:00

Pick up this useful bit today. If you need to check the battery status on the MacBook you can use the command:
ioreg -w0 -l | grep -i capacity

On my MacBook I got:

| | "MaxCapacity" = 5936

| | "CurrentCapacity" = 1106

| | "LegacyBatteryInfo" = {"Amperage"=18446744073709549771,"Flags"=4,"Capacity"=5936,"Current"=1106,"Voltage"=10837,"Cycle Count"=356}

| | "DesignCapacity" = 6900

The 6900 is the designed capacity of the battery and 5936 is the max I can get at this point. This kind of gives some info how much the battery degraded over time.

Chrome on Mac OS X with Android User Agent

2011-09-14T11:07:00.002-04:00

open /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app --args -user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; de-de; HTC Desire 1.19.161.5 Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17"

Michael Arrington interview with Arianna Huffington

2011-09-07T21:13:00.000-04:00

I found this interview quite entertaining.

The key to life is running and reading

2011-07-02T11:24:00.001-04:00

Very well said

Ref: Android UI: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

2011-06-30T23:17:00.003-04:00

Just saving the pointer to this post here:
Android UI: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques

This presentation video is worth watching if you are looking for the few tips on the Android code optimization and UI optimization in particular from the couple of the "founding fathers" so to speak :)
The guys do not go deeper on the subject but give a pretty good overview on things to be aware of. The more detailed articles are available on android developers web site.

Android - libs-for-android

2011-06-30T11:45:00.002-04:00

Couple of days ago I started to list few quite useful Android open source projects to learn from.

Here is another one I forgot to mention:

libs-for-android

Slightly different approach to ImageLoader implementation, with the public API that binds image view the the url. Also it uses http API from java.net instead of org.apache, that I would probably change, cause I remember having few issues with java.net connections before.

Enjoy!

Odd Day

2011-06-29T23:12:00.003-04:00

Today one colleague of mine and just a very good guy, that I really enjoyed working with, had his last day at the company after 12.5 years of service.
It's kind of sad to go back to work tomorrow and not to see him again, but I'm glad to see him happy about the new opportunities for him.
12 years at the same company is a long time.....

....And the things get "better" when you find out that there is another great guy that I learned a lot from is most likely to leave in 3 months from now.

Certainly today was not the most productive day.
So, the plan for tomorrow: regroup and try to get my mojo back.

Chromebook - first impression

2011-06-27T19:30:00.008-04:00

Just got Chromebook today that was sent to every Google IO attendee this year and wanted to share my first impression.

Pros:

1. The start up and shutdown time is pretty fast.

2. The battery time is very good so far

3. It doesn't get as hot as MacBook Pro

Cons:

1. The Chromebook device feels flimsy. It's all plastic and it gets kind of annoying when the screen vibrates when I type on the keyboard. Might need to get used to the keyboard, missing some keys when I type fast and navigation keys layout is a bit strange.

2. The Wifi is the "corner stone" of this device is very mediocre. In the house where I have full strengh Wifi reception on my MacBook laptop the Chromebook shows just a half (two bars). It shows 3 bars out of 4 when I sit in just 4 meters from the wifi router. It said on the box that the device comes with 100MB/month 3G data allowance, and this is very limiting for the device where network presence is everything.

3. Touchpad does not feel like too responsive, probably I just might need to get used to it.

4. I do't know if it's a quality of the screen or the fonts, but the text doesn't look that pleasant for reading , especially the small fonts. Some fonts seem to be off from the fonts I got used to see in the browser on Mac or Windows.

5. Gtalk feels more limited since I can not resize the chat window or I can't pop it out, cause there is nowhere to pop it out to.

6. I still kind doubt that the browser-only OS will be sufficient for me and that I would like to keep everything I do in the cloud.

It feels like Android OS at this point has some advantages, cause one can still run web applications on it as well as the native apps.

Finally, I understand that I got the Chromebook for free and really should thank Google for this instead, but I kind of hope that my feedback would help to make the next devices and Crome OS better.

I will keep playing with Chromebook some more and maybe, who knows, will change my opinion or even find some positive aspects of this device.

So far I'm not impressed.

Update: One thing the full screen browser experience kind of lack is ability to see both browser windows side by side, it pretty much invaluable in situation when our small kid wants to watch some cartoons on youtube and I would like to read emails or news at the same time.

Android - some best practices with source code

2011-06-27T13:12:00.005-04:00

Android applications development although seems to be quite simple, has few things that can be described as a best application design practices. I personally learned many things from my own trials and mistakes, but nowadays you can make few shortcuts and learn from experts.

There are some good code samples that show some good practices shipped with Android SDK. You can always get the Android source code (expect the latest Honeycomb 3.0) and explore how everything is done there.

Also I'm going to list few projects that one can use as a reference for some good practices or inspiration:

1. The Google IO schedule application: http://code.google.com/p/iosched/
2. The Romain Guy's application that he created for Google IO 2011, that has some tips on animation and images handling (LruCache): http://code.google.com/p/xlarge-demos/
3. The application created by Reto Meier that shows some best practices for location aware applications: http://code.google.com/p/android-protips-location/. The post about this can be found here: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/06/deep-dive-into-location.html
4. The Droid-fu library that contains some useful ideas and patterns: https://github.com/kaeppler/droid-fu . I found ImageLoader to be pretty useful.

These are just few recent ones (except droid-fu) .... more is coming.

Android devices stats

2011-06-23T11:22:00.003-04:00

One of the projects I'm working here on is the framework of collecting applications metrics for Android, IOS and RIM applications. There is a bit of client code involved as well as the "big data" processing (Hadoop, Vertica) on the server side.

Recently I was asked if it's possible to get the applications usage report on Phone vs Tablet devices for the different platforms.
Don't ask me why, I don't know the answer to it, it's just needs to be done, period :)

The situation with IOS devices is pretty simple, cause you are pretty much limited to 3 devices:
iPod touch
iPhone
iPad

For android the situation is more complicated, especially since many early tablets are still running Android 2.1 and 2.2 and virtually indistinguishable from the phone with slightly bigger screen.

Currently we use Build.PRODUCT as the main device identifier, that, for example, has "htc_supersonic" value for HTC EVO phones. Now the problem is that we have more than 2000 different android "products" values reported, and every day the new devices are getting announced. So somebody would have to maintain manually the mapping between the device product name and some commercial product name and the type in order to get the kind of report we are being asked for, something like htc_supersonic <=> HTC EVO, Phone.

I wonder if there is such mapping is readily available and also it might be convenient if Google could open the API for that, since the kind of do the final certification for Android devices as far as understand.

Anyways, if you stumbled upon similar problem and have a solution to it, please share.

How to leave the running process on Linux after SSH session is disconnected

2011-06-23T11:01:00.006-04:00

.... I had to use this pretty often recently, to kick off the script on the remote machine and exit SSH session while leaving the process running.

Here is how to start the process:
nohup ./myscript.sh > /dev/null 2>&1 &

This post is mostly for myself so I don't forget ....

Richard Feynman: "Fun to Imagine"

2011-06-05T00:12:00.003-04:00

Stumbled upon quite interesting and entertaining videos by Richard Feynman:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?p=PLC351CC566C21C884

Google IO 2011, here I come!

2011-05-06T11:39:00.003-04:00

Having early flight tomorrow morning to San Francisco, will stay in Palo Alto for the weekend, meet friends, drive around, visit few places (Napa Valley? ;) ).
Then off to the city for Google IO conference, can't wait. Should be very interesting :)

50 years of space exploration

2011-04-12T22:36:00.002-04:00

It's been 50 years since the first human journey to outer space.

I can't say that I'm completely happy with the pace of the space exploration.
There is no doubt that a lot was done there, but it feels like there is more that could have been accomplished during these years.

It's amazing to remember how much enthusiasm towards the space we had when we were young. I pictured future to be a bit different back then after all the sci-fi books I've read after all the sci-fi movies I watched.

It's amazing that after 1972 we never visited the moon anymore or any other planet.

Nowadays it looks like the next generation of young people is more interested in all kind of gadgets/gizmos (iPods/iPads). They either want to be some kind of celebrity and/or own bunch of "stuff" or/and be rich.

I hope that I'm all wrong about this, we will see.

One more day till vacation ...

2011-04-12T22:32:00.002-04:00

... looking forward to enjoy this weekend and the next week in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
Just went through all my scuba gear, packed it all up and ready to go.
...one more day, yeah! :)

Running Man

2011-02-11T23:11:00.002-05:00

About 5 month ago I started running.

Our company built one mile trail around the campus at that time and I had to try it. Also my daughter signed up for "Girls on the Run" 5K (km) marathon for December, so I really needed to get in shape in about three months.

I'm quite fit person, but never was a good runner. The most I even run before was when I was at school and we did 3km (a bit less than 2 miles) timed runs in the physical education classes. My work days are full of sitting behind the desk, working on the computer type of "activities", and this doesn't really promote healthy well-being.

My first run I barely made 1 mile, the pace was very moderate, but my heart was racing fast (165bpm+) and I felt really out of breath at the end of the run. This was quite motivating experience. After this, I was even more determined to run 5k marathon by December and I knew that I would have to push harder to reach that goal.

So I kept running about 3-4 times a week and slowly increase the distance. I started to notice that it becomes easier and easier to run once I find the rhythm. By December I reached 5 km (3.2 miles) distance. The first time I run 5K I was like, WOW(!!!), I did it, I never run more than 3K in my whole life and now I did it. There were few other positive changes that I noticed: my running heart rate dropped from (160bpm+) to 130bpm range, the stairs do not cause such a spike in the blood pressure anymore, I forgot when I had a headache last time and I started to feel better overall.

I've read many discussions online where people are complaining on all kinds of running injures they start getting once they start running more. Initially my knees started to bother me sometimes as well. Don't make it stop you from running. You have to listen to your body of course, and if your body starts to "complain" you are maybe pushing it a bit too hard, especially in the beginning, give it more time to heal and recover, but do not stop running, just push a bit less. Instead of increasing distance or time by a mile a week/month, try half a mile or quarter of a mile or maybe even less than that. Try to change the technique how you run to avoid unnecessary injures, try to land softer on the balls of your feet, right under your body center, open up your posture, relax more.

I've heard many people who run actually say how much they enjoy running. For me running is continuous struggle with myself and my laziness. But I found one interesting thing for myself: I really like the feeling after the good run (has something to do with natural biochemistry and metabolism), and the feeling of "victory" over myself (no matter how much I want to stop and rest on the last mile I just have to keep going).

This week I run four days so far, two of them were 4 miles (6.4km) run, the best time was around 32 minutes, maybe it's not that fast, but I'm pretty happy about this accomplishments. If I keep up the pace I hope to be able to run 10K marathon (10km ~ 6.2 miles) in around 50 minutes.

Hope this short post will spread some motivation around.

Keep running, keep pushing! :)

Android "Gingerbread" SDK - first issues

2010-12-11T17:46:00.004-05:00

I downloaded Android "Gingerbread" 2.3 SDK with the new tools the same day it came out, and started to get nuch of errors with the string resources that were using formatting flags: SDK 2.3: Get "Multiple substitutions specified in non-positional format" error.

So the issue was that with the latest SDK tools the absence of positional identifiers in the resource string ends up flagged as errors. Here is a little bit more discussion on this problem:
http://groups.google.com

The solution is to change the resource strings to look like this:
Hello, %1$s! You have %2$d new messages.

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo

2010-10-06T18:45:00.002-04:00

One word: WOW !!!!

Jeb Corliss wing-suit demo from Jeb Corliss on Vimeo.

tips on working with disk images

2010-10-01T22:38:00.004-04:00

Just wanted to share a useful tip for working with disk images on Mac OS X.
I had to work with custom android builds recently and as you might know it requires case-sensitive partition or disk image to be able to compile it.

The following couple of functions added to .bash_profile make the mounting and unmounting the disk images easier from the command line:

function mountFroyo { hdiutil attach ~/froyo.dmg -mountpoint /Volumes/froyo; }
function unmountFroyo { hdiutil detach /Volumes/froyo; }

Now you can just type mountFroyo or unmountFroyo, for example, to mount/unmount your custom disk image.

How to compile Android 2.2 (Froyo) on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

2010-09-08T00:11:00.001-04:00

How to compile Android 2.2 (Froyo) on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

Once upon a time I needed to do a custom build of Android OS with some changes to the core components for some custom devices.
The instructions how do get the source and do the build can be found on the Android Developers web site:
http://source.android.com/source/download.html
Everything went smooth, I took the latest code and compiled just fine, but.....
.... later I found out that I needed to have my build done based on Android 2.2 (Froyo) branch instead.

The "Froyo" build is not officially supported on the Snow Leopard and it didn't work right out of the box.
So, I had to spend a little bit of time to figure out how to make it work.

Here are the steps I had to go through:
* Follow the steps on http://source.android.com/source/download.html to get the source code and setup your build environment.
* Make sure you have XCode installed with support for Mac OS X 10.4(!) development.
* Install Java 1.5. This one a little bit tricky, since Java for Mac OS maintained by Apple and the older versions are pretty much not available to download. You have to download Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 7 http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac_OS_X_10_5_Update_7. Then use for example something like unpgk tool (http://www.timdoug.com/unpkg/) to exract the Java 1.5 from there. Replace the 1.5 and 1.5.0 symbolic links in
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions with the Java 1.5 from the package.
* I checked the Application->Utilities->Java Preferences as well to make sure the Java 1.5 is the first one in the list, although I'm not sure if it is necessarily. It worked and I didn't bother to try different settings.
* In order to start the build you would go to the root folder of the android source code tree and call "make".
* The first problem I stumbled upon was the problem with /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h file it could not be found, while it existed in that directory. I found the solution that worked here: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=5000
Basically just coping the file : cp /Developer/usr/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin10/4.0.1/include/stdarg.h /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk/usr/include/stdarg.h
allowed me to proceed further.

* The next problem was a error during compilation of google V8 javascript engine. I went ahead deleted the external/v8 folder and took the latest stable version from google repository: "svn checkout http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ v8". As long as V8 compiled and run I was fine with this change in my tree.

* The next error that you would get is
host C++: libacc <= system/core/libacc/acc.cpp
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp: In member function ‘bool acc::Compiler::acceptStringLiteral()’:
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp:4611: error: cast from ‘char*’ to ‘int’ loses precision
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp: In member function ‘void acc::Compiler::unary()’:
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp:4691: error: cast from ‘char*’ to ‘int’ loses precision
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp:4697: error: cast from ‘char*’ to ‘int’ loses precision
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp:4785: error: cast from ‘void*’ to ‘int’ loses precision
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp: In member function ‘void acc::Compiler::globalDeclarations()’:
system/core/libacc/acc.cpp:5904: error: cast from ‘void*’ to ‘int’ loses precision
make: *** [out/host/darwin-x86/obj/STATIC_LIBRARIES/libacc_intermediates/acc.o] Error 1

replace cast from int to size_t in these lines

* After all these steps I was able to built the whole tree fine.

The fix for the last problem I found on:
http://wisevishvesh.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/building-eclair-on-snow-leopard/

* And here is some more of useful information I found on that blog:
Creating and Extracting files from System Image
There are two executable that are needed for creating system image and for extracting the files from the system image. mkyaffs2image is for creating and unyaffs is for extracting files. mkyaffs2image is created when Android is built, We have to build unyaffs separately.
The source unyaffs for is available here
Compile the file
gcc -o unyaffs unyaffs.c”

Hope you find this post helpful.

Good Luck!

What different sorting algorithms sound like

2010-08-19T01:16:00.000-04:00

This very nerdy :)

Guillaume Nery base jumping at Dean's Blue Hole, filmed on breath hold by Julie Gautier

2010-06-08T20:56:00.004-04:00

Very cool video:

and here is his blog:
http://guillaumenery.over-blog.com/

Play

2010-03-22T22:04:00.000-04:00

2-3 USA-Canada hockey final at Vancouver Olympics 2010

2010-03-03T23:21:00.003-05:00

Last Sunday I was watching the hockey final game of Olympics between US and Canada. It was pretty emotional. When the US team scored a goal on the last minute of the 3rd period making the score 2-2, I yelled: "Goooaaal !!!".
The funniest part was when my little boy, seeing all this excitement around, yelled after me: "Goooaaal!"

Intersting TED talk: Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

2010-02-14T12:03:00.005-05:00

Stumbled upon interesting TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

"...natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted
and the synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted

In our society we have a strong believe that a synthetic happiness is one of the inferior kind... why do we have that belief?....well it is very simple
.... what kind of economic engine would keep turning
if we believed that not getting what we want could make us
just as happy as getting it ....
a shopping mall full of zen monks is not going to be particularly
profitable because they don't want stuff enough to make it profitable ...."

"...our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we
have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity (happiness) we are
constantly chasing when we choose experience"

"Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling."
~Margaret Lee Runbeck

Enjoyed being at the meeting with Saul Hansell

2010-01-09T10:18:00.003-05:00

He recently came over from NYT to work for our company.
I really enjoyed the energy and passion that he has as well as the vision for the future of our product. Hope he will not get burned out too soon and will have enough leverage to implement his vision.

Following him now here http://saulhansell.blogspot.com.

Enabling PHP and SQLite on Mac OS X Leopard

2009-12-13T00:01:00.002-05:00

just a bookmark for myself

PHP the Easy Way: Enabling PHP and SQLite on Mac OS X Leopard

Florida Trip - passing Georgia

2009-11-26T14:08:00.003-05:00

On a way to Florida while driving through Georgia there are some places where the sulfur smell from swamps is quite strong. My daughter quickly learned this and on the way back, after 6+ hours driving through Florida, she started to ask me if we are in Georgia now or not. I answered, No.
While driving around Jacksonville, FL we hit the spot on the road where the sulfur smell from the swamps got pretty strong and I hear her voice from the back: "I told you, this is Georgia".

I was LOL :)

Android fun :)

2009-11-06T20:43:00.003-05:00

Today was playing with all kinds of UI controls customizations. One thing I needed to do is to be able to draw the background shape around image where only right top and bottom corners are rounded.
After some research and trying different things (because that part of APIs pretty much missing any documentation), I found out that it looks like the left and right is messed up in the API. Here is what works :

<corners android:bottomRightRadius="0.1dp" android:topRightRadius="8dp"
android:bottomLeftRadius="8dp"
android:topLeftRadius="0.1dp" />

As you can see I had to use the bottom left radius to make the right corner round and for the rest of the corners I had to use 0.1dp , because 0dp just didn't work and made all corners not rounded.

Good luck ! :)

Busybox

2009-11-04T22:22:00.001-05:00

Busybox is pretty useful set of tools for Android development as well:
http://www.busybox.net

Running Android tools on Windows 7 x64

2009-11-04T00:22:00.001-05:00

Here is a link how to make it happen
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3917

Simple Things

2009-10-30T23:34:00.005-04:00

Today I went to Halloween swim meet with my daughter. She participated in three different kinds of competitions. It was her first time of any kind of the "competitive" swimming.

The funny thing was that I was worrying, how she would do, and that she might get disappointed with results. etc., while she was just having fun swimming with her friends and not caring too much about results. She was excited and smiling after every race, no matter how she did.

I saw the happy human being today.

Happy weekend ! :)

Firefox strikes back

2009-10-17T21:11:00.004-04:00

no comments :)

The power of positive reinforcement

2009-10-14T20:53:00.003-04:00

...and the rest is here :
http://www.rolighetsteorin.se/en

Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

2009-10-13T18:07:00.003-04:00

Recently I needed to migrate the database from MS SQL 2005 to MS SQL 2005. By the way, it's not as straight forward as it might look like.

After a little be of searching for solution I stumbled upon the
Microsoft SQL Server Database Publishing Wizard

This tool is pretty good at scripting the whole database structure with data. The name of the tool is not really intuitive. So, I'm saving this link for myself as well on this blog.

How to get the list of installed Android root certificates ?

2009-10-13T17:02:00.012-04:00

Today, needed to get the list of trusted root certificates on Android phone to verify which ones are available out of the box.

Here are the easy steps how to do this :

1. get the certificates file
adb pull /system/etc/security/cacerts.bks cacerts.bks

2. download http://bouncycastle.org/download/bcprov-jdk16-141.jar and place it on $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/ext/

3. run the keytool utility
keytool -storetype BKS -provider org.bouncycastle.jce.provider.BouncyCastleProvider -storepass -keystore cacerts.bks -list -v

Enjoy !

Incredible, amazing, awesome Apple

2009-09-18T22:49:00.002-04:00

After watching the original Apple presentation I was left with the same feeling of audience being programmed with constant repetition of thee words : "Incredible, amazing, awesome" ....
Today I found this video:

Enjoy !

Gourse

2009-09-16T22:12:00.001-04:00

Stubled upon:

Gource
software version control visualization

Pretty cool stuff :)

Snoop - WPF Spy

2009-09-15T22:51:00.002-04:00

Today found pretty useful utility for the WPF development:
Snoop - the WPF Spy.

The best part that it comes with the source code.

Enjoy !

Nokia N900 on Maemo Linux

2009-08-28T21:56:00.004-04:00

Nokia announced their new N900 smart phone that run Maemo Linux. The specs are pretty good. Looks like more mobile devices run the different flavors on Unix/Linux : iPhone, Android, Nokia ....

Here is a link to developers pages for Maemo platform :
http://www.forum.nokia.com/Technology_Topics/Device_Platforms/Maemo.xhtml

Wedding & Divorce :)

2009-08-01T00:53:00.002-04:00

Wedding :)

... and 6 months later

Social Networks

2009-07-24T19:24:00.013-04:00

The text under picture says:
"Social Networks
We all are so different here"

North Carolina Buoys - Weather

2009-07-24T18:51:00.003-04:00

Stumbled upon the pretty useful web site, that shows all the date from buoys in the water off the North Carolina shore:

http://www.pdfamily.com/weather/buoy/SEbuoy.php

and the one I'm interested in particular the Oregon Inlet Buoy:
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=ORIN7&unit=E

Currently it shows:
Air Temperature (ATMP): 80.1 °F
Water Temperature (WTMP): 77.4 °F

Memory leak detection for WinCE

2009-07-23T15:26:00.003-04:00

Good write up on the Memory leak detection for WinCE:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/mobile/ce_crtdbg.aspx

Since the standard crtdbg.h is not available on the Windows Mobile, the author provided his implementation of _CrtSetDbgFlag to track the memory leaks.

Snooker: 14 year old boy makes a 147

2009-07-02T01:32:00.000-04:00

Stumbled upon BMW video

2009-06-30T00:35:00.003-04:00

BMW definitely knows how to get customers to become emotionally attached to their products.

Тенис и Бильярд

2009-06-23T23:46:00.000-04:00

Сегодня играл немного в тенис и собирая мячики поймал себя на чёткой визуальной ассоциации между катящимся по зеленому покрытию корта тенисным шариком и билярдным шаром на зелёном покрытии стола. Наверное переиграл в бильярд.

36 мне 36, у меня всё впереди :)

2009-06-19T06:48:00.000-04:00

No Vegas for You ...

2009-06-13T21:32:00.001-04:00

Today we played Las Vegas Qualifiers 8-ball pool matches and our team lost.
So, no Las Vegas this year.

Google I/O 2009 - The Myth of the Genius Programmer

2009-06-05T22:29:00.001-04:00

A must see video in my opinion:

The Myth of the Genius Programmer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ

and the year old presentation:
Google I/O 2008 - Open Source Projects and Poisonous People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo

Lewis Carroll once said

2009-06-01T21:23:00.001-04:00

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop."

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Pool/Billiard Spring 2009 Season

2009-05-31T20:04:00.006-04:00

The Spring 2009 season ended with pretty good results for our team. We won first place in 9-ball and the second place in 8-ball in our league and going to play 9-ball Tri-annuals matches next weekend for the right to play in LVQ (Las Vegas Qualifiers) matches.
I got MVP (most valuable player) recognition in 8-ball among SL1-SL4 levels in our league and will play MVP matches in July.

Today I played the 9-ball singles qualifiers match and won, thus I will get another chance to go to Las Vegas in the singles competitions category after I win regionals in October.

Play pool, have fun :)

Google I/O

2009-05-29T20:22:00.006-04:00

I didn't get a chance to attend Google I/O conference ... I sure tried .....

It was nice to be able to watch the
Google I/O 2009 Keynote on youtube:

I like the introduction video and music :)

The other amazing thing was Google Wave, here is the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009:

Couple of my friends went to Google I/O, got free unlocked Android phone, the dev access to the Google Wave and lots of positive excitement :)

Всегда побеждает тот волк, которого ты кормишь.

2009-05-28T22:02:00.001-04:00

Когда-то давно старый индеец рассказал своему внуку одну жизненную
истину.
- Внутри каждого человека идет борьба, очень похожая на борьбу двух
волков. Один волк представляет зло – зависть, ревность, сожаление,
эгоизм, амбиции, ложь… Другой волк представляет добро – мир, любовь,
надежду, любезность, истину, доброту, верность…
Маленький индеец, тронутый до глубины души словами деда, на несколько
мгновений задумался, а потом спросил:
- А какой волк в конце побеждает?
Лицо старого индейца тронула едва заметная улыбка и он ответил:
- Всегда побеждает тот волк, которого ты кормишь.

Drysuit scuba certificaton

2009-05-25T22:12:00.002-04:00

This long Memorial Day weekend I spent with Sterling Silver Scuba friends at the Dutch Springs, PA.
I finished my drysuit certification and did some fun dives after that. Total of 7 dives in two days, 37 logged dives total.

Really appreciate the drysuit now. The water was 48F (~9C) at the 30ft (~10m) depth and I felt pretty comfortable and warm. Many thanks to my instructor Kevin Davenport, I highly recommend him as instructor and as a dive buddy.

Next step is Rescue Diver: more safety awareness and being able to help other divers in emergency situations. Looking forward to dive on Independence Day weekend of 4th of July.

Underwater clean up, SUDS fundraiser.

2009-05-16T19:20:00.007-04:00

Today I did couple of dives with Sterling Silver Scuba as a part of Project AWARE beach and underwater clean up and a Soldiers Undertaking Scuba Diving (www.SUDSdiving.org) fundraiser. We did underwater clean up in the Mountclair lake and all the proceeds from the dive were donated to SUDS.

I was diving in the dry suit and was very comfortable temperature wise.

The first dive was quite a surprise, the new experience for me. The visibility was 1 feet (~30) at most, I could barely see my hands, and once I got to the bottom at around 15 feet (~5m) it became completely dark and murky, could not see anything. It was like trying to find things in the dark closet.

I tried to use the underwater light but it didn't help much and after about 20 minutes of frustration and not being able to find anything I surfaced, gave up the light and talked to our instructor Kevin. He said that in such conditions the only way to find anything was just to sink to the bottom, pick direction and sweep the bottom with hands. You can not see anything, but at least you can recognize things by touch.
It was fun, like the game where you pick up stuff from bag without looking inside, first you have to recognize thing before taking it from the bag.
Kevin's advice helped tremendously, I found a watch, a lighter, swimming goggles, couple of masks and bunch of other stuff that was not as interesting as these items.
Kevin was bringing bag after bag from the bottom: at least 5 pairs of swimming goggles, bunch of sun glasses, another watch and many more.

Overall it was great experience, diving in practically zero visibility, trying to navigate, keep the direction and recover things that people lost or left at the bottom of the lake.

Happy Diving!

Понаприходила молодежь ... :)

2009-05-12T19:53:00.002-04:00

- Понаприходила молодежь со своих институтов, ни черта не умеют
- Да уж, раньше специалисты поматерее были
- Ага, Николай Палыч, например. Играл в тетрис на 9 скорости, пользовался клавишой "вниз", и постоянно орал "падай реще уже"

Google Chromium experience

2009-05-08T21:25:00.007-04:00

I was researching the Google Chromium project (the source code for the Google Chrome browser).
I checked out the latest source code from Google's repository. It was packaged nicely with Visual Studio solution file with 173(!) projects under it. The build took around 1.5 hours, lots of stuff, lots of 3rd party libraries source code including WebKit.
The thing that I was pleasantly surprised with, that it just built right out of the box, I didn't have to do any configuration, I didn't have to figure out dependencies and etc, everything that is needed for the project under one source tree. Think about it, when was the last time you checkout out the open source projects as complex as this one and didn't have to spend some time first to figure out how to build it and then fight all the build and dependency errors down the road ?

The source code is all lovely familiar C/C++ with STL/ATL/WTL, love it. Now I'm running the debug build of Chrome on my machine, and with full access to source code I can change it as much as I like and even contribute my changes to Chrome project.

Google Chrome rocks! :)

Chromium Tech Talks

2009-05-07T13:17:00.001-04:00

Interesting Google talks videos on Chromium and WebKit browser engines here:
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/04/chromium-tech-talks.html

Would you eat a stack of 16 sugar cubes?

2009-05-05T22:12:00.004-04:00

A label can tell you there are 39 grams of sugar in your soda, but what does that much sugar look like?
http://sugarstacks.com

Ultimate iPhone App

2009-05-05T09:16:00.001-04:00

"The Perfect Drug" :)

The mind tricks

2009-05-02T00:38:00.004-04:00

The Teller, one of the guys from "Penn & Teller: Bullshit" show delivers quite interesting presentation. It's quite a lesson on awareness.

Интересная закономерность:

2009-04-27T21:49:00.002-04:00

тот же самый отрезок пути проезжаю за меньшее количество времени, если времени много и никуда спешить не надо. А когда же времени в обрез, то как правило, либо пробка которую приходится объезжать по мелким дорожкам, либо во все красные светофоры попадаешь, либо какое-то чудило перед тобой плетётся 25 миль/час, там где лимит 35 а все едут как правило 45. В результе время из точки А в точку В уходит раза в полтора больше и если не делать поправку на подобные "неожиданности" то непременно можно опоздать.

What would it cost to heat Dutch Springs ? :)

2009-04-24T12:53:00.012-04:00

The Dutch Springs, PA is the closest local quarry where we dive, with pretty good visibility (usually 50ft+). The only down side there is the pretty cold water, especially in the beginning of the season, and if you really want to "get wet" early in the season prepare the double layered wetsuit insulation or the dry suit if you have one.

Here is a quite interesting post on what would it cost to heat the Dutch Springs:

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/dive-ny/281104-new-plan-heat-dutch-springs.html

Enjoy ! :)

Social Networks - beware !

2009-04-23T10:02:00.004-04:00

Stumbled upon pretty old article on social networks:
http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/09/11/ved-background-checks-on-social-networks/

Couple of interesting points from there:

* Another question raised is whether or not the profile would even be an accurate representation of the candidate. Morris said, “One can’t guarantee that the profile they are looking at even belongs to their applicant. I can create a Facebook profile on anyone and use their picture.”

* Our courts are already faced with making some big decisions, including one in this case in which a person sued a “friend” on their social networking site for posting an incriminating picture of him that allegedly cost him a promiment job on Wall Street when the company researched his name on the Internet. Although a reader did point out that this was intended to be a spoof, it still foreshadows what could happen (and will happen) if information culled from the Internet is misused.

* So if you are applying for a job and are concerned about a company judging you based on your slide-show of last night’s debauchery, it’s better to play it safe and keep your pictures private. Do not give your friends access to your unflattering photos, keep your profile private if necessary, and delete any explicit comments made on your “wall” - at least until companies realize that many of us don’t sit around at night sipping apple cider and reading a Bronte book by firelight.

...and here is some more:
http://crabbyolbastard.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/the-seven-deadliest-social-networking-hacks/

Here’s a look at the seven most lethal social networks hacks:

* 1) Impersonation and targeted personal attacks
* 2) Spam and bot infections
* 3) Weaponized OpenSocial and other social networking applications
* 4) Crossover of personal to professional online presence
* 5) XSS, CSRF attacks
* 6) Identity theft
* 7) Corporate espionage

I agree with author: "Gotta love the “social” engineering!" :)

Ещё про Апрель

2009-04-21T16:26:00.000-04:00

Жена только что позвонила на работу, сообщила что Сашка (наш пацан, 6ти месяцев отроду) сам встал. Сидел рядом с диваном, ухватился за него и встал и сам порадовался своим способностям.

Как то быстро время летит прямо таки.

Что меня радовало в Апреле.

2009-04-19T17:34:00.004-04:00

Апрель оказался весьма насыщенный событиями.

* Приезжал Роман с супругой в гости в конце Марта, настроение улучил до самого Апреля, поэтому записываю в Апрельский отчёт.

* Съездили отдохнуть с семьёй на Кайманские острова (Grand Cayman).
Порадовало практически всё: расслабленные аборигены, солце, море, песок, фирмернные кексы с ромом, ныряние с маской, обилие подводной жизни, ныряние с аквалангом, рыбы, черепахи, омары , скаты под водой, просто сказка, можно перечислять очень долго. Скорее всего напишу отдельный отчет по поездке, если дойдут руки, может кому пригодится.
* Там же на Кайманах установил личный рекорд погружения с аквалангом, опустился до 104 фута (31.6 метра). Опускался вдоль стены на встречу черепахе которая поднималась с глубины наверное 130 фут. Удивительно как глубоко эти существа ныряют фактически на одном вдохе.
31м в глубину может показаться и не так много, но для примера на такой глубине на тело человека действует давление уже 4 атмосферы и на этой же глубине начинается эффект азотного опьянения.

* Отпраздновали годовщину свадьбы: 9 лет. На следуюший год будет уже десять, летит времечко.

* Пацану моему Сашке исполнилось пол года. Вылезли первые зубы, сразу два. Начали потихоньку давать пробовать кашу. Пока плюётся.

* Отпраздновали День Рождение супруги в семейном кругу а так же после с друзьями.Благо погодка на улице стала налаживаться, было +25С, посидели на заднем дворике.

* Отвёз велосипед после зимовки на обслуживание и регулировку, надо будет открыть сезон.

* Нашёл кучу старых знакомых через linkedin.com, прикольно, мир тесен.

Водителям на заметку :)

2009-04-16T21:16:00.002-04:00

По дороге на работу навеяло.
Перестраиваться в плотном движении в соседнюю полосу проще без сигнала поворота, сразу, как только появилось место для перестроения. Если показываешь сигнал, то водитель позади в полосе куда перестраиваиваешся, как правило, придавит на газ и закроет место. Есть в этом что то территориальное.

Удачи на дорогах!

SSL Diagnostics

2009-04-13T23:03:00.003-04:00

Today I was updating the SSL certificate on one of the web sites. I don't do this very often and this time got into problem. After I deleted the old certificate and installed the new one I could not get the HTTPS URLs to work on the client machine. The Firefox just could not connect to the secured https pages without giving too much specifics why. I checked and double checked the certificates installation and it all seems to be installed fine including the whole chain to the root certificates.

I spent some time searching online and found quite useful tool SSL Diagnostics. This tool gave me a little bit more useful information on the problem. In the output there was a warning: "#WARNING: You DON'T have a private key that corresponds to this certificate". It looked like the either the problem with the supplied certificate or the association between the newly installed certificate and the private key.

Here is the final piece that helped to solve the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=889651 .

"When you delete a certificate on a computer that is running any one of the following versions of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), the corresponding private key is not deleted..."
"To assign the existing private key to a new certificate, you must use the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 version of Certutil.exe"

"
# In the Certificate dialog box, click the Details tab.
# Click Serial Number in the Field column of the Details tab, highlight the serial number, and then write down the serial number.
# Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
# At the command prompt, type the following:
certutil -repairstore my "SerialNumber"

SerialNumber is the serial number that you wrote down in step 17.
# In the Certificates snap-in, right-click Certificates, and then click Refresh.

The certificate now has an associated private key."

Installing IIS on WinXP SP3

2009-04-13T15:44:00.005-04:00

I run into a problem today: for some reason could not install IIS on my machine with Windows XP Pro SP3. I was pointing installer to the correct i386 files location and was getting error saying that the files where not Windows XP Pro SP3 files and they sure were.

I searched online for the solution and one of the suggestions was to rebuild one of the system databases with the following command:

esentutl /p c:\windows\security\database\secedit.sdb

The IIS installed just fine after this.

Good Luck!

Mini Trick Shots

2009-03-18T21:43:00.003-04:00

I found this video kind of fun to watch. The guy manages to make pretty amazing shots including jump and masse shots.

Enjoy!

Про Бильярд

2009-03-17T08:43:00.000-04:00

Приходит мужик в бильярдную. Подбегает к нему мальчишка:
- Дяденька, давайте на деньги в бильярд сыграем.
- Ну давай.
- Только можно я разобью.
Мужик соглашается. Мальчик тут же 8 шаров кладет, не давая ему опомнится и предлагает еще партию. Мужик соглашается. Мальчик разбивает и опять партию с кия заканчивает. Мужик охреневает и говорит:
- Парень, ты мне хоть какую-нибудь фору дай, что ли.
- Дяденька, как же я вам фору дам, я же не знаю как вы играете.

Alex Pagulayan vs. Steve Davis

2009-03-14T23:39:00.004-04:00

Interesting game: very strong pool player Alex Pagulayan against snooker professional from England Steve Davis. I still have some pretty vivid memories of watching Steve Davis playing snooker on Eurosport channel almost 15 years ago.

In this game Steve Davis was not in a good shape in my opinion. Although they both made mistakes, Steve Davis was a little bit less fortunate with positions and made a little bit more mistakes.

Enjoy!

The Job :)

2009-03-12T16:01:00.003-04:00

Here is some fun video :)

Увольнения в АОЛ

2009-03-10T21:49:00.009-04:00

Сегодня у нас прошли увольнения. Поэтому этот пост не совсем соотвествует общей теме блога. Хотя опять же как смотря как к этому относиться. Для кого-то это трагедия, а для кого-то новые возможности самореализоваться.

Сама практика увольнений для АОЛ не нова. Каждый год с того момента как я начал работать в АОЛ проходили увольнения, сокрашения и реорганизация. Можно представить как это деморализует личный состав. Много хороших специалистов которых я знал и знаю лично, были уволены и много ушли впоследствии сами.
Пожалуй самый неприятный момент что сокрашения проводят зачастую люди не отягощенные знанием и пониманием того кто чем занимается, поэтому не раз уже получалось так что команда или проект лишалась каких-то ключевый людей или полного состава и впоследствии чтобы продолжать равзвитие АОЛу приходилось нанимать этих людей обратно.

В этот раз было объявленно заранее о сокрашении состава компании на 10% или около 700 человек, в "целях сокрашения расходов". Нашу команду уволнения затронули особенно сильно в этот раз. Уволили порядка 40%+ состава команды вместе с моим прямым менеджером и его менеджером. Похоже что, то чем ме занимаемся , мы уже не сможем поддерживать в том составе который остался на данный момент, какие-то проекты прийдется закрывать, а оставшихся людей расформировывать по другим командам.
Уволили одного моего русского коллегу с которым я работал до этого в предыдушей компании. Там он тоже был при мне сокращен.

Сам процесс увольнения не отличался оригинальностью. Вчера поздно вечером выслали емайлы тем людям которых уволили, сообщаюшие о том что им надо прийдти на обязательное собрание в 11:30 АМ. В 11:30АМ уволенных собрали в отдельной аудитории обяснили ситуацию и дали 2 часа чтобы собрать свои вещи и покинуть территорию компании. Большинство людей получило выходное пособие в размере 2х месячной зарплаты ( у некоторых это после более 10ти лет работы в компании), некоторые менеджеры высшего звена (по слухам) получили 4х месячную зарплату.

Не может не расстраивать тот факт что политика экономии компании имеет какую-то выборочную, зачастую необъяснимую, природу. Например в этом году компания купила социалную сеть Бибо. Многие даже не знают от такой. После общения с одним человеком из нашей компании из отдела занимаюшегося статистикой и репортами я узнал что перед покупкой никто похоже не делал никакого исследования бизнесса Бибо, просто покупка социальных сетей была популярна, и то что клиентами Бибо являются дети от 5ти до 12ти лет и им просто нельзя продавать тот контент который продает АОЛ похоже никого не заинтересовало. В результате на этой сделке компания потеряла столько денег (и это опубликованный факт) что вполне могла бы выплачивать зарплаты в 5 раз большему количеству специалистов (чем были уволены) в течении 2х лет. Это значит что не только не нужно былоб сокрашать людей сейчас, но можно было бы ещё инвестировать неплохую сумму в действительно грамотное развитие бизнесса. Одним словом логику тут понять трудно, если она вообще есть.

В общем денёк был сегодня невеселый. Завтра на работу в ещё более опустевший оффис.