FVTer Moving and Being

Almost a Year In...

2010-09-10T11:26:00.001+02:00

Woah, it's been almost a year since I have posted an update on the blog. Most of my discussions and ideas have been pushed mostly through Twitter.

The simplest of reasons... Work has been eating my time up and when it wasn't work I was fighting uncontrollable pains in my legs. Well after 4 or 5 different tablets, finally found one that is controlling the pain and has minimal side effects.

I would tell you to watch this space once more, but to be honest, i am not sure at all when I will be able to post on a regular basis! Thanks for watching & reading, keep following me on Twitter.

Related Links:

FVT on Twitter

Once Again We Bid Farewell to a Beloved Cat! RIP Gwen

2009-10-27T17:52:00.002+01:00

Here we are again on a sad day for our beloved pets. Just shy of 19 years but going on a thousand (she aged with grace all the while being the grumpiest sod on earth), Gwendoline was bade a fond farewell today (2009-10-27) with great hesitation but compassion. Time had come to pass as Gwen's health had been seriously degrading over the past few days...

We had been hesistating for awhile as she kept pinging back to a pseudo state of well being. Our running joke was that she would outlive us all or at least her cat siblings out of pure jealousy and spite. But yesterday, her mother and I realised that her health had taken a big fat slap in the face, which was confirmed by the Vet this morning (very little to do and it would only help her for a couple of days) as with advanced age comes the slow detoriation of critical body functions like bowel, bladder & mind. So this morning around 10:00, Gwendoline drifted off to a better place!

There are fond memories of Gwen as she has always been very close to both of us despite her inate jealously of all over cats (except Mogwai)! At one point she was even jealous of our own relationships and was quickly renamed my second wife as she would force herself between us in bed.

Overall, however, she seriously preferred her mother and as she grew older became a permanent appendage on her arm. She did love us greatly and continuously demonstrated her affection toward us all.

Gwen will be remembered as the much loved jealous queen of the manor! ;-)

Farewell and R.I.P.

PS: don't worry, life goes on, the populus was augmented just last week with one female black entity (Beauty - the basement cat).

Thus Begineth a New Chapter in my Career

2009-09-30T13:56:00.001+02:00

Tomorrow [1 October 2009], I am embark on a new job and role. I am moving away from the general IT consultant & internal architect role in the big corporate environment to a more focused architect/consultant role for a security software company. I will be more focused on helping customers pull together IdM solutions using the company's product.

This will be an interesting change providing a much more focused activity on one specific subset of security but I hope to carry on exploring the vast and interesting subject that security is. My last position lasted almost 10years and in itself was quite interesting considering the variety of activities and projects I was involved in. This new position will be just as challenging if not more as I will be participating in the growth of this company as it evolves internationally (they are already a major player in the domain in this country and are planning to expand heavily in the rest of Europe, middle-east and the US).

On the other side and for my personal growth, I am still working on a few things including passing my GCIH (that happens next wednesday), doing the CISSP (end of October) and continuing to look at developing for the iPhone & Android platforms. Hopefully, I will also be able to finalize a couple of blog entries I am working on the subject of the real-time web, a micro-blogging feature request and some thoughts on Vanish.

Wish me luck!

A Fun Way to Understand AES!

2009-09-23T14:45:00.002+02:00

Constantly on the look out for information on encryption and better understanding of the mechanisms behind algorithms, I was amused to discover this morning the MoserWare's A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

The information presented is significantly accurate but presented in a humorous plain cartoon format. Quite enjoyable! What was interesting is that it goes back to the history of how AES came about and presents a basic overview of how block ciphers work...

Application Updates Tops Cyber Security Risk, Real World Fix is More Complex

2009-09-17T11:54:00.000+02:00

A few days ago, SANS released it's new Top Cyber Security Risks report with a new interesting twist to the usual well-explored risks (such as web server vulnerabilities). The new risk that is highlighted quite effectively is the problem of application vulnerabilities which have had an increase and become much more visible. A good example of this has been the ongoing reports of vulnerabilities in Adobe products such as Flash and Acrobat.

Part of the issue that is highlighted by the report is the slow turn-around to deploy application patches/updates to reduce the risks and fix certain vulnerabilities. This is in fact no surprise! Having spent a number of years in the corporate IT security environment the application update process is a bigger dilemma than one might think. There a number of factors that impede an effective and complete application patching process be it for a few thousand to 10's or 100's of thousands of an installed client base. Some of these issues can be highlighted by the three following concepts:

Online availability of clients to receive the updates, making it more difficult to get an effective deployment rate;
Patches for versions that are in-use might not exists and upgrading to new versions presents other challenges such as budgets, compatibility with other applications, continued functionality support for the business solutions;
Patches (or upgrades) can break or change features that are relied upon by business solutions or process effectively breaking the latter and presenting an impediment on business ability to work effectively.

For a corporate IT security team a balance has to be achieved between the need to carry out effective patching or upgrading versus the need to let the business continue to work as effectively and efficiently as possible. This is the hard truth, patching to mitigate vulnerabilities is not necessarily the best solution for a business if it breaks functionality or impedes the business process!

An effective IT security team will understand this and works towards an acceptable compromise that balances the risks versus the business' ability to carry on efficiently through policies and process that mitigate the risks or control/patch the vulnerabilities. Notably, the report section on best practices for mitigation and control provides a number of effective risk management techniques that start by understanding the applications that present risks and building an effective defense plan...

Related Links:

Firefox 3.5 Hates Google Searchs Rant

2009-07-07T19:08:00.001+02:00

After recently updating to Firefox 3.5, I have run into a seriously annoying and killer problem. Firefox 3.5 refuse to correctly load Google searches in a reasonable amount of time or even the Google main page (www.google.com). In a painstaking attempt to figure this out, I have tried everything from running Firefox in safe mode as well as turning off things like Norton Internet Security.

The problem doesn't lie in my computer or in my infrastructure. Firefox loads all other pages normally (including Bing.com) and even loads mail.google.com as well as reader. It's just the search that it doesn't want to do. BTW, IE, Safari & Chrome load the pages perfectly well!

Enough is Enough... Let me know if you've had similar issues?

To Reader or Not? Can we Really Do Without It?

2009-06-10T11:58:00.001+02:00

Yesterday being the 2nd Tuesday of the month, saw the usual slew of update notices from the regular culprits. However, a new actor came into play this month: Adobe! The first appearance of what has been nicknamed «Adobe Black Tuesday Updates». This actually represents Adobe's commitment to having a regular patching schedule to address security issues, bugs and whatever else needs to be fixed.

Adobe since late last year has been hard with a slew of vulnerabilities in their products but more so in their flagship Reader product. The root cause of the issue was the inclusion of JavaScript and related bugs in that provided a vector for exploit. The vulnerabilities have been covered to a great extent on the intrawebs and there isn't really much more to add. Adobe attempt to take a rational approach to the issue and sent out advisories on how to take palliative actions (by disabling JavaScript support in the product) until proper patching could be done.

The push that some security experts (including some prominent figures such as Mikko H. Hyppönen from F-Secure, Paul Asadoorian from Pauldotcom.com) to abandon or adopt alternate products and formats is just not realistic! The biggest criticism toAdobe has been why use JavaScript in what is essentially an electronic paper format. This attitude neglects the important factor that the technology is there for a reason. In most cases that reason is based on identified business/customer needs and those same customers have built solutions which need the scripting to continue to function effectively.

A number of business and government organizations have adopted the additional scripting capabilities to make the documents more interactive and to facilitate the content entry/usage for their users at a time when Web2.0 was far-away. A lot of interesting solutions have been explored and created using this dynamic document capability such as automated tax reporting forms, real-time report generation, ... There are and probably will be a continued need to support this type of scripting technology to give documents more interactivity and to breach the divide between static data and the ability to have near real-time solutions for reporting and information manipulation.

Could Adobe have handled this better? probably but they have embarked on a road to manage the risks more effectively! Could a solution other than JavaScript be used? from a technical point of view most likely but practically Java is a well-adopted programming language.

The underlying hard truth though is that calling for the dropping of one or another product is just not constructive and in most cases will go against the end-user's business goals! More constructiveness is needed to achieve solutions that help end-users minimize the risks but at the same time continue to allow them to streamline business process with the solutions at hand.

Related Links:

SANS Adobe Black Tuesday Updates
US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA09-133B -- Adobe Reader and Acrobat JavaScript Vulnerabilities (15 June 2009)
US-CERT Technical Cyber Security Alert TA09-051A -- Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerability (15 June 2009)
F-Secure says stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader | Security - CNET News (15 June 2009)
Two New Vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat Reader - F-Secure Weblog : News from the Lab (15 June 2009)
Mikko H. Hyppönen http://mikko.hypponen.com/
Paul Asadoorian http://pauldotcom.com/

Seesmic Desktop Revisited

2009-05-29T18:09:00.001+02:00

A few weeks ago, I posted an article about Seesmic Desktop in which I promised to continue to revisit the product. About a week ago Team Seesmic released a new version...

I have to say that the feature set on Seesmic Desktop continues to impress me and the integration they are doing with both the Twitter and Facebook API is amazing. But, yes there is a but and continues to big a But before I can fully adopt it as my staple client. Looking back at my main list of qualms from the previous post, some things have changed for the better and some things just haven't changed and plague IMHO the experience.

Most of the bugs that were itemized seem to be under control but I am still seeing some problems with CPU and still don't have my twitter avatar as well as the two window link click. I've also noticed some new quirks like right clicking on a link or other hypertext in an entry brings up either a copy/paste menu that is disabled or a weird menu with lots > symbols. Outside of that, I do believe that the stability of the solution has potential achieved a milestone.

The UI issues remain a sour point with me. Although the close box issue (at least on Windows) seems to be behaving as you would expect, I just don't understand the remaining UI and how people can actually live with them. The primary points that really need to be addressed remain: real-estate usage; the weird column/tab bar behavior; and strange column resizing layout in the scroll window when the window is resized. That last point is difficult to extrapolate but essentially I get the impression that some weird ration is being applied based on the size of the window to determine the width and number of detached columns that are displayed in the visible part.

Now don't get me wrong, I can easily live with new UI paradigms do it all the time. The problem is that this UI just does not seem intuitive and gives me the net impression that it's not convenient for ease of manipulation and interactivity.

Let me know you thoughts and/or comments through this article or via my Seesmic Profile or thru Twitter

Related Links

Twitter (Me: @FVT)
Seesmic Desktop & Team Seesmic (@Seesmic, @AskSeesmic on Twitter)

RAID!!! Running With the Guildies... or Why WoW Just Keeps Players Going

2009-05-23T16:07:00.000+02:00

So early this morning (around 02:00 23.05) or late evening server time, I hooked up to World of Warcraft (WoW) for a guild organized RAID of Blackwing Lair (BWL). One of my characters, Balaluze - Death Knight, is a member of the «Project Lore» guild. The premise behind this guild is that everyone is a fan in some form of the Project Lore Video/Blog/Guides getting together to play WoW and have a good time playing as a team. About 2hours in, it reminded me why I still invest my time and attention in WoW enjoying every moment.

After a small delay of getting everyone together, Executation lead us into Blackrock and up to the BWL entry point... We entered the instance with about 10 people (plus or minus - to be honest we lost a few because they had not been keyed which is a necessary step to open the door and been given access to the dungeon), which was a little more than 10 shy of the required number of players. We figured it might work since we had a few high levels... This was our mistake and despite a tough battle but victorious one against the 1st boss Razorgore the Untamed, we proceed to the 2nd area with Vaelastrasz the Corrupt. Here we hit what might in the end be construed as an epic fail in the Lore history books. We just did not have enough damage per second (DPS) capability with our combined strengths. In fact whenever Vaelastrasz hit 15% health, the dragon would launch its power attack and we would go down one-by-one in a matter of seconds. 3 tries down, we called it a night as there was just noway that the group would be able to down the dragon and let alone continue on.

So outside of a quick & dirty recount of the night, the reason this post came to be is that the RAID reminded me why WoW, & other MMORPGs, just keeps drawing me in. The RAID reminded me of some important aspects of an aspect of gaming playing in MMORPGs that defines its ability for continuous challenge and enjoyment. In most games be they RPG or RTS there is a level of certainty and consistency in the game by that I mean that the tasks, quest, combat or other game scenarios share a goal and that goal is always the same each time you play. In a standalone game, one can build a strategy and consistently repeat the strategy to win the trial leading to a play once only scenario. One might even say that this stays true in whatever game you play.

However, MMOs bring an external factor that changes the certainty and consistency in the game. That factor is a higher level of human interaction and game play style that quickly becomes apparent. Each human player brings his/her own way of directing his avatar's actions into the group and the combined different play methodologies actually changes the way the events happen & the outcome. Let me clarify using the BWL RAID that was run this morning in WoW, despite following a well-known strategy and having a leader to coordinate the RAID party our efforts did not achieve success. Not for a lack of willingness of the team but that's not the point nor was it the issue, the players each used there style and abilities giving different outcomes and thus changing the way the battle laid itself out... Essentially each try gave a different play experience and keeping the player on his/her toes trying to achieve the best possible set of actions! Turning every encounter into a new challenge and definitely not the same reptitive thing.

To sum it up, a continuously evolving and changing game play driven by the individuality of all the human players making the game and keeping it attractive as if it were day one...

Let me know you thoughts and/or comments through this article or via my Seesmic Profile or thru Twitter

Related Links

Why I'm Not Switching to Seesmic Desktop...

2009-05-06T10:40:00.000+02:00

For a long time now I've been on the quest for a better Twitter desktop client. The reason I use a desktop client is to facilitate the reading of the tweets but also to avoid having to have an additional browser window/tab open [rant: browsers give me headache between slow performance and memory usage at least on my systems, blah blah blah]. Plus the advantage of having a separate client is to be able to get OS level notifications of new tweets. My typical poison has been TweetDeck or Twhirl depending on my mood but overall TweetDeck has been the staple diet mostly because its features suit my needs.

A few months ago, Loic Le Meur and Team Seesmic began to embark on building the “next best” thing in desktop integration of Twitter feeds and more recently to include Facebook through the new Stream API under version 0.2-rc2. Now the purpose of this post is not to review the feature set (please the Seesmic Desktop web page) but to give a critical analysis on why Seesmic Desktop is not for me (just yet)! I ran the new version of the Seesmic Desktop client for the release til May 5th evening about 4 days. To be fair, there are some interesting concepts and innovations present in this new version of the Seesmic Desktop, this is why I continue to try it.

There are two categories of issues that brought me to take this decision: Bugs and UI Issues. The bugs will be covered first with a fine grain of salt as parts of the issues are not necessarily related to the client itself but can be partially attributed to the Adobe Air platform. Bugs are also transitive things and can in most cases be corrected overtime, although I must admit that some of these issues have been around since I first started to try out Seesmic Desktop (ed. I have tried the last 3 or 4 versions) and in theory I have reported them (I think - too much on my plate).

Bugs:

Refresh Issues :- I've had a number of screen refresh issues where-in either new tweets don't appear (as compared to what's on my web version) or tweets appear but no notification is issued which kind of defeats the purpose (and it's not an API call limit issue as a refresh loads the missing tweets). This is even more pronounced when using multiple columns...
Missing Avatars Including my Own :- I've had over the testing periods moments when the avatars of the different accounts that I follow don't get updated but more challenging is the fact that my own avatar that sits next to the input box under the twitter account has never been present (it is loading the one associated to my Facebook account);
Memory Usage :- there is debate among the developer community on the cause of memory usage in Air applications whether it is the application or the Air framework. So I will defer on this one although I am getting mixed results from different applications, a quick quit and relaunch usually fixes this issue. But in general, I continued to see memory usage increases after initial launch but controlled (over applications I have seem to be afflicted in the same way);
CPU Usage :- this one was quite disturbing for me, I got a consistent above 5% cpu usage while running Seesmic Desktop there never seemed to be any idle time. Worse though was that it seemed to be rising to 15% to 25% cpu use when it was loading tweets or Facebook items;
Link Click Opens 2 Web browser pages :- when clicking on a link, two browser windows are launched (instead of one). I know that some developers blame the Air framework for this and how it handles the default browser settings in Windows (yes, I check my browser settings).

UI:

Unable to Quickly Identify New Items :- new tweets or Facebook items appear in the Seesmic Desktop application in either the home column or one of the user defined columns, however, there is no distinguishing mark or highlight that shows which are new and which have already been viewed. This makes it difficult to keep track of where you are or have been;
Difficult to Differentiate Facebook vs. Twitter Items :- the main home column aggregates all incoming items which is useful, however, there is no in your face mark that distinguishes from which account the item comes. This is a minor issue but it would be nice (for us older folks with vision problems) to be able to apply some kind of background colour coding for the different accounts or just make it easier to see which account it comes from (instead of the small text at the bottom of the item);
Where are my Favorites (missing feature?) :- so I use Twitter favorites feature to «bookmark» tweets with interesting information I would like to revisit at a later time. For the life of me, I was unable to identify (outside of the Like menu item) who to visualize or manage these short of going back to the web page;
Column Always Selected in Menu :- Seesmic Desktop gives you the possibility to detach menu items so that you can have multiple columns open at the same time, giving you the ability to have multiple streams viewable at once. However, for the life of me, I don't understand why when you detach columns you must still have an item open in the menu. This is difficult to explain without a visual but essentially, once you detach the columns you want to see you are still forced to have one of the left side menu items open effectively covering up parts of the column scroll window. You would think that the purpose of detaching is to be able to manage the columns and menu items independently;
Clicking on the Window Bar [X] Doesn't Quit :- I hate when applications do this, I don't understand why some developers think that they can redefine the meaning of menu items or window bar items. The [X] is generally considered to be the close box but when you only have one window open it should also quit the application at least that is the common accepted protocol. Seesmic Desktop doesn't quit but just closes the window and there is no quit button. To quit you need to right-click the taskbar icon (but what if you hide these) and select quit, definitely unintuitive and inconvenient;
Real-Estate Hog! :- Seesmic Desktop is a screen real-estate hog and the UI structure is incredibly fixed in size (apart from window resizing) and has a lot of wasted space (large borders, fixed proportion columns & menus). I know that Team Seesmic has gotten a lot of flack on this issue and I am just adding my 0.02¢ worth. Comparatively with TweetDeck for example, I've calculated that for viewing the same amount of columns and tweets, Seesmic Desktop can take as much as an addition 20% to 30% space. This is a big issue for a user who spends a good portion of his time on a laptop or wants the window to sit on the side and take up minimal space but still provide enough information.
IMHO this type of issue can easily (as well as the performance bugs - CPU, ...) can easily be avoided by giving developers and UI designers the lowest-common denominator machines. That is to say give them a machine with a small screen (13"or 10"), low memory and a minimal CPU (maybe netbook). From what I've seen, this is probably not the case for Team Seesmic, having watched their demo videos - they all appear to have large 22" or bigger screens.

As a general comment, the UI issues is where Seesmic Desktop really looses in my book. I can eventually live with bugs and wait for fixes or try work-arounds but the UI leaves (at least in my book) much to be desired and makes it difficult to adopt the product for everyday use. I would have liked to graphically demonstrate some of these issues but for some unknown reason when you try to take a screen shot, the Seesmic Desktop window disappears...

My search continues, future release of Seesmic Desktop may get my attention, who knows!

Let me know you thoughts and/or comments through this article or via my Seesmic Profile or thru Twitter

Related Links

Twitter (Me: @FVT)
Seesmic Desktop & Team Seesmic (@Seesmic, @AskSeesmic on Twitter)
Loic Le Meur
Seesmic Desktop Reviews: Mashable, Twitter Chat
Facebook Stream API
Adobe Air

To Core i7 or Not? Just Go for a Core2 Quad Q9550

2009-04-29T15:27:00.000+02:00

Today, I started to notice some weird fan noises coming from my Home PC that we use for general all around work and also for playing PC based games. So it made me realize that my want to move to better hardware may just have to be done sooner rather than later. Now as much as I would prefer to move to something like a MacBook Pro, I don' t have the budget to undertake that kind of move.

Thus I started to investigate the possibilities of upgrading the Hardware to move to either a Core2 Quad platform or even a Core i7 platform. To be honest, the upgrade which ever way I go would require a motherboard and RAM upgrade on top of the CPU. Also I more interested in going the Quad way to be able to better multitask :- i want to be able to watch or even edit multimedai all the while playing World of Warcraft.

Visting my favorit parts supplier in France, I noticed that the price of the Core2 Quad vs. Core i7 was not that much different (around €50 to 75) but the killer price impact is the motherboard and the need to use DDR3 RAM. The comparison that was done involved trying to get the same basic hardware infrastructre with only the CPU changing. That means that whichever direction was taken, the number of ports, memory (going for 8Gb), I/O support, audio, etc would be an almost 1:1 comparison. References to the different parts are attached in the links section of this article.

Truth be told, I would much rather go with the Core i7 option as it would have a longer life span. Unfortunately it's still an expensive option to go for and for the same price or less even, I could essentially walk away with not only the CPU/motherboard upgrade but also a brand new ATI 4890 graphics card. There is a whopping €225 to €275 difference which is not negligible an can' t be ignored.

You got to hate having to make these kinds of decisions! Seriously, I wish that I had cash to spare...

Let me know you thoughts and/or comments through this article or via my Seesmic Profile

Related Links

«Sign-In with Twitter»: Should we be Scared?

2009-04-22T09:54:00.002+02:00

Last week, Twitter opened up it's «sign-in with Twitter» open authentication or OAuth service under the radar. To be fair to Twitter, the news last week was more focused on the one million follower story and the arrival of big media names onto the service. Now, I've always been an advocate of using OAuth type services (I personally use OpenID as much as possible) to both simplify a user's life and to avoid the problem of password re-use.

It also goes to Twitter's credit to move in this direction and to provide this type of service to ease the integration of external applications as well as make it easier for user's to provide their Twitter information.

Disclaimer: I have not had the time and that's not likely to change in the near future to fully investigate and examine the security of the Twitter OAuth service. The following rant is purely about Twitter's current public track record...

Twitter's public track record of securing and making a reliable service is less than top par. My top 3 frontal issues that have been discussed, re-discussed and overall made serious news for Twitter can be summed up with this list:

The service has a huge history of availability issues, well rather non-availability in times of high traffic although this hasn't occurred in a while it's bound to happen again seeing the growth patterns of late;
The security has a number of times criticized the continued use of basic-authentication (inc. accepting base64 password encoding) to use the service. The problem being that this is an easy way to grab the user's password which would break or poke serious holes in the OAuth service;
There have been a repeat number of XSS attacks and worms including the most recent mikkey work which last over two weeks in its different iterartions.

These three points push me to think on whether or not I would be able to really trust such a service. Will I be able to use it at all times? Am I sure the authentication might not lead to a password leak? Am I sure that the OAuth won't be replayable? Can I be sure that the OAuth session isn't being misdirected or stolen somehow in XSS or via a worm? Makes me wonder if the service will actually provide a decent and safe mechanism for authentication and whether or not my credentials are going to be safe :- scary......

Related Links:

hueniverse: Introducing 'Sign-in with Twitter', OAuth-Style "Connect"
TechCrunch: Did Twitter Just Quietly Start Twitter Connect? If Not, It Should.
Dave Winer: Twitter and OAuth, interesting brew
Twitter OAuth FAQ
Mashable mikkey worm coverage: http://mashable.com/2009/04/11/stalkdaily-twitter/; http://mashable.com/2009/04/12/mikeyy-another-twitter-worm-on-the-loose/

Old Posts Appearing in Feed...

2009-04-15T17:06:00.001+02:00

So you maybe seeing some old posts appearing that had not be published before. I finally got down to finalizing and editing the content of some older drafts that I think needed to be published just for the historical content.

I am hoping to avoid this situation in the future and should be able to keep a normal release schedule between draft status and published. Let's hope it works!

To Vista or Not? Need a 64bit OS but Linux not an Option - Your Thoughts

2009-04-07T15:16:00.000+02:00

So I am planning on moving my home PC to a 6Gb memory base (and also moving to a Core i7). Because of limitations in a 32bit system for supporting memory over 4Gb, I am going to have to move to a 64bit platform. So the question becomes which OS should I use on this new hardware configuration?
The machine in question is used extensively for gaming and other «productivity» usages by all the members of my family. Let's just say that Linux is not an option on this machine for many different reasons including the fact that a lot of games and apps that I use just don't work properly...

So I need advice on which way to take the platform:

Should I move to Vista Home Premium? or,
Should I stick with Windows XP 64bit?

Your thoughts and opinions very much appreciate, please don't hesitate to comment on this post or video replies to this Seesmic thread!

OnLive :- Thoughts and Ramblings

2009-04-04T10:20:00.001+02:00

During this weeks GDC'09, the OnLive service was announced and demoed. I can only really comment on this service based on the reviews and reports coming out of Joystiq, Gamespot, Engadget & others... The idea behind OnLive is to marry cloud computing with high end PC gaming. It is best described on the OnLive website How OnLive Works. Personally, I find this service intriguing and potentially a mini-revolution (might be a bit strong but that's why the mini prefix) in PC gaming. It also has the potential to open the availability and introduce gaming to a much globaller audience who don't have the buy-in power. It could also be a simple and interesting entry level platform for testing games before purchasing.

Much of the initial commentary coming out goes from amazement and how incredible a service like this would be to a yes but attitude and sceptism on the actually possibility and ability of the service to work. The main concern in current commentaries is the ability of the service to perform as stated due to a lack of network bandwidth and responsiveness. While I do agree that there a lot of challenges for this service to be able to get thinks working as smoothly as possible, my humble belief is that this service will get kicked off and have more than acceptable performance capabilities. One fo the reason I feel strongly is due to some of the minds behind OnLive. Steve Perlman, being on of those minds and one of the original technological minds behind Quicktime, has done a lot for streaming and has already provided some amazing solutions to optimize the interaction of the user and media across the Intranets [ed. note: I've had the chance to see Perlman talk in an Apple Dev. Conference and he knows what he is doing to be quite honest].

However, I need to disagree with the main focal points that a lot of commentary has taken. Much of the commentary has centered on the fact that they don't believe the service will work because of the network performance. My rant here has a lot to do with the fact that most of these reviewers are making assumptions based on their current network experience which is mostly USA, Canada or UK centric. These assumptions are based on areas where ISP performance is average and not fantastic or where there are known (or suspect) ISP network controls and restrictions. Nigel Cooke on his recent Monkyenuts podcast (episode 7) bought about similar comments but with a touch of his own experience on optimizing and managing corporate networks. While I respect his knowledge on the subject, you can't compare an Internet based service and network optimization approach to that of a corporation. Most coporate networks are based on a hub & spoke model which tends to lead to fixed route paths and a series of bottlenecks that hamper performance. The Internet being a much more meshed environment is constrained in this manner at least not until the last leg between the user and the ISP.

The problem with this overall line of thought is that it doesn't reflect a reality of what the network can actual do (where I live, my two ISPs provide me with amazing performance with average latency of @400ms, @1100 kb/s down & @350kb/s up) and the potential that a service like this can do with a proper network environment, network optimization and more importantly the optimization of the compression & handling software. The comments also don't take into account on the amount of advances that have been made in data center hardware and network advancements that have been made over the years especially by companies like Google that have learned how to make small footprint high-performance hardware and optimize the placement of that hardware to better serve the Internet.

Finally, some of my beliefs are founded on the fact that I have been involved over the years in projects where bringing distributed high-end pc computing over a network was successful. In a similar case, all graphics and manipulation was to be done on core centralized machines while the user would be provided with a web interface to manipulate the data and visualize the graphics models and displays.

So definitely a gaming technology to keep an eye on and potentially something bound for success. I for one would use this type of service to avoid the heart break of having to own multiple PCs or to continuously upgrade those machines!

Discuss this with me via my Seesmic Profile on this thread.

Article Links & References

A Friend's Blog Got p0wnd

2009-03-17T21:20:00.001+01:00

I spent a good part of today investigating a javascript injection that a friend of mine suffered on his personal blog site. It turned out that this is nothing more than a typical adbot/scriptjacking malware infection. The actual injection code is an obfuscated iframe that tries to download a HTTP browser attack tool. The code is inserted in the page build (usually via the wordpress function framework, the style-sheet or even maybe a rogue module) and looks something like this:

The obfuscation resolves to a call that pulls a source script from a website hosted at add-block-filter.info and by then tries to either retrieve stored passwords & cookies or hijack open webpages. More generally targeting e-mail services to send out spam ( your typical adbotnet behaviour).

Tracking back the domain name, it came back to a know malware pusher 7addition.info/8addition.org. So in most likelyhood a new variant of script injection attack whish is picked up & revealed a known trojan downloader javascript iframe infection (at least reported by a few AV vendors e.g: trojan-downloader.js.iframe.ah). In this case, the trojan goes on to contact 2 other malware sites at firstgate.ru & benyodil.cn whom in turn download 3 additional malware infections to continue the pownage:

a malicious flash file which is in fact a download exploit (e.g: Exploit.SWF.Downloader.ks);

another html based script which is fact a trojan download agent and also sends out spam asking you to visit a site or click on a video link(e.g: Trojan-Downloader.HTML.Agent.np);

and finally, a packer javascript html agent which installs a BHO (browser helper object) that turns off the firewall and other windows services (e.g: Packed.JS.Agent.ad).

That's as far as I went with the malicious activity...

Before investigating, my friend and I exchanged a few messages regarding him being p0wnd. He was trying to figure out what had been the root of his infection. Although he blames it on a combination of Twitter/Hotmail and a few other sites, seeing the root of the malicious software that gets pushed I would say that he original got hit from visiting an already infected site or from clicking on some weird website with flash videos (he does love to visit those). Interestingly enough, I think I can track back part of his problem to the 13th of march or a few days before. At that time I received an e-mail from him that was unusual:

I didn't really pay attention to it but maybe should have and warned him at that time of the possible hijacking of his info. He learnt a few things (like not using the same password for his different services). I learnt for myself that when I see a friend sending a weird message to me to get on the ball and warn him/her.
Some more advice I offered is to:

Update with regularity his personal blog framework;

Recommend also to be careful about using the remember me option on some of these websites as the stored cookies give these clickjack malware a fair bit of leverage.

In These Times, Can You Protect the Business From Insider Threat

2009-03-05T09:56:00.003+01:00

This post & thoughts are a reflection on my experience and years of dealing with the problem of identity management and how to relate a user versus his roles and responsibilities in the IT infrastructure and how this affects the departure processes (or exit procedures).

As the economic recession goes into it's darkest times, businesses are making the hard choice of letting people go. The IT organisation is typically an area were decision makers take the opportunity to trim the fat. However an important part of decision making process, that can be easily overlooked, needs to be a good understanding of the risk involved in letting go of certain categories of IT staff and how their roles and responsibilities can potentially create a serious exposure footprint.

Why would HR & the security officers need to establish this risk analysis? The simple answer is that businesses need to ensure that staff who potentially hold the keys to the kingdom are not irate when they leave. The risk here is that an irate ex-employee with key information to be able to access the infrastructure may be tempted to take action in frustration or revenge. This unfortunate (and let me be clear sometimes illegal) type of action potentially involves damage that can range anywhere from serious data leakage to denial of services hampering a company's ability to do business.
A few examples scenario of a departing IT staff's role versus what they can do could involve:

A network engineer (remember the San Francisco city network incident) who has extensive knowledge of the network configuration and holds some of the common super-user password could place back-doors allowing him to later bring down the network, redirect traffic out of the corporate network releasing sensitive information, or even using the network as a way-point for other types of illegal activities.

How about a server system administrator who has local administrator access to boxes and can place a backdoor allowing for remote acces and thus the ability to grab information or even stop critical business applications.

But even more critical (at least from my experience) is surely a security engineer, the knowledge of the security profile and accesses that have been made available to that profile makes this the highest risk footprint. To do the job, he/she has gained knowledge that renders the infrastructure critically vulnerable.

So the question that begs to be said out-loud is can a company avoid any issues?

The real protection that a company can achieve is to have a comprehensive identity management process and tool. Identity Management [IdM] is about a lot more than just being able to determine who works in the company which unfortunately is the baseline thinking or the minimal implementation that gets carried out. It's also about being able to link a person to his/her role and authorizations. A well implemented IdM process and infrastructure will ensure that a person in the organization has a well defined role. That well defined role will correctly identify his/her authorizations and access rights. The ability to correctly define those authorizations provides a safeguard and a well-defined means to not only properly implement an exit procedure but also help evaluate a risk profile based on that persons footprint in the organization. The well-defined profile will ensure that the user is correctly matched to the tools & resources required for the job: no more, no less. This same correlation can then be used in the exit procedure to quickly identify and revoke all accesses. There are of course many more benefits for day-to-day operations to a complete IdM environment but that may be the subject of an alternate post.

The simplistic answer or quick fix if a comprehensive IdM is not in place is to make sure that the person leaves on good terms. The important part is to evaluate the risk versus the cost versus the potential loss. Unfortunately that is a short term strategy and somewhat impractical.

Related Links

Protect Yourself from IT Staff Abuse: How to Manage Privileged Identities

Security Experts Weigh In on Insider Threats

Suspect In Hijacking Of San Francisco Computer Network 'Willing To Cooperate'

Identity management takes on new shape, importance

Drunken BOFH wreaks $1.2m in Oz damage

Risky Business #99 — H D Moore rang… 4500 times [during the podcast guest interview they also cover this subject]

Sony execs detained by workers over severance pay [not really related to the issue being discussed but reflecs on the current mode]

Using TweetDeck's Features

2009-03-02T17:50:00.002+01:00

Following a pleasant feature review (or how-to) of TweetDeck by Cali Lewis on GeekBrief.TV ep.517, I figured it was about time to actually sit down and fully investigate the different functions in the utility and did so this weekend.
I've been using TweetDeck for quite a few months now from time to time (I alternate with Twhirl) and was only really using it with some of the default columns :- all friends, replied, directs.

From time to time I also used twitscoop and in rare occasions would also run a search. For what it's worth that basic mode in itself is a very functional Twitter interface with the benefit of quickly allowing you to see the tweet feed plus tweets where you are mentioned. That's about it for the TweetDeck features :- this post is about some new features rather than a review.

The function that intrigued me during Cali's how-to was the groups ability. With it, you can group different Twitter accounts into one column. I follow a number of tech & general news magazines/webzines that use Twitter as a form of notification. The group functionality allows you to put these all together for quick identification and review. I set this up and a couple of others (tech products, security & close friends tweets).
After running TweetDeck for a few days like this, my conclusions are that it's useful and interesting but... (the buts are related to the following two points):

you need a really wide monitor (on my laptop this is inconvenient as you spend much time scrolling in all directions);
it hasn't given me and noticeable benefits in the way I look at tweets! The main reason for this is that I tend to speed read through most Internet chatter/info and focus on the points that catch my eye or raise a flag. I can do this quite easily and efficiently in the general all friends feed. This however could be a side effect of the lack is screen realestate.

I'll continue to use these features especially on my gaming rig with the big monitor where it will give me a better vision of things. On another note here, it would be nice to have a save/transfer settings feature.

I am still stuck on one point with TweetDeck and that is that I am unable to find and easily follow a new Twitter. I am sure it is there somewhere but just not that obvious (at least from my PoV). It will be interesting to watch it evolve.

Related Links:

Halo Wars Demo - Hits my Sweet Spot

2009-02-08T12:08:00.006+01:00

At the end of the week, the Halo Wars demo was released on the x-box live service. As soon as of hit the Europe servers, I jumped onboard.

I admit that I have always enjoyed a good RTS (real-time strategy). They tingle my logic neurons and I enjoy having to sit down plan and be tactical in order to achieve a goal unlike FPS type games which are more fast action pace & brute force.

Surprisingly, Halo Wars brings a good balance between the need to be tactical and the fast pace of an action game. Building and creating your force-de-frappe has a good feel to it as you can get things up and running quite quickly but you need to plan ahead to be able build more advanced units. Combat is fast paced and easy to jump into. The parts I played on the demo were very focused on achieving goals and the intermingling of the Halo Wars storyline (including some amazing cut scenes) made it attractive and enticing to move forward in the game. Now I did not get a chance to play the online team mode but I've heard that it is quite an experience as well.

All-in-all Halo Wars looks like it will hit a sweet spot :- a must buy!

Related Links

Halo Wars Demo (x-box live)
Halo Wars Site

200 days of Wii Fit

2009-01-30T17:20:00.002+01:00

So a few days ago, I hit 200 days of using the Wii Fit. I try to keep to a pretty regular schedule that is to say that I at least do the wii fit test every morning. Actual exercise is a bit different since, I am unable to do it on a very regular basis due to time constraints or just plain physical pain with my ankle but I try to get at least 3 to 4 days during the week of the aerobics and muscle mixed in with a bit of yoga (for the stretching).

Overall, I find the Wii Fit as a good motivator and a useful tool to be able to get some regular exercise. My only complaint might be that the presentation of exercise although good don't necessarily allow you to keep a good and proper posture to execute them yourself. This is especially true on the yoga parts...

Despite that, I am quite content and I have an average loss of about 5kgs since starting! Not bad hee!

Don't U H8!

2009-01-30T15:55:00.003+01:00

The first in a series of video-blogs (me thinks)! And I am opening it up with my favorite subject - a rant!
Yesterday I discovered that the company was pushing out a new security policy on mobile devices that are connecting to the corporate exchange environment! I don't have a problem with this security policy and am all for it! The problem was that a proper change management process was not carried out and thus those who would have preferred to opt-out couldn't!
So I spent the better half of today removing the security policies (by hand) on my devices. I even bricked my HTC in the process and was forced to reload from scratch... [PS: You can add to the discussion in this Seesmic thread]

Another Day, Another Year

2009-01-15T17:39:00.002+01:00

So the new year has come and gone, I've been queried a few times to see what kind of resolutions I was taking or if I wanted to join some challenges (like my friend Nigel is attempting).

Truthfully, for me the new year is potentially just SSDD (same s$#% different day). Resolutions are ok but tend to imply that you need to change something in your life for whatever reasons you might have. This is where it doesn't work for me for in general my life is what it is and I've accepted it as is. Granted things could much better and don't match where I saw myself at my age but I've spent too much of the past years trying to change things with no success - I seem to be plagued with bad vibes - and I'm not inclined to invest anymore energy in fighting it. Some might call it being comfortable with things as they are but at least I know what my crappy personal & work life entails...

Sure I know what needs changing and how to change them but that may mean spawning even more difficulties and issues. So this year, taking things as they go!

Aside from that shoddy rant, I expect that I'll try to do more of the same:

1 new video game a month;
achieve some form of regularity in my blogging (I foresee a move to video blogging);
and generally accepting my pains physical & moral alike.

And of course continuously complaining about it... Although I probably should try to stop sounding like a broken record!

Ian Curtis, in Joy Division's Heart & Soul, once wrote:

The past is now part of my Future
The present is well out of hand!

a motto I seem to be fully embedded in :-(

Games @ X-Mas

2009-01-04T18:15:00.000+01:00

So this X-Mas we had a good set of games as presents (of course most of them being for my son): 2 xbox360 and 1 Wii games.

The Wii game was a no brainer for this year - I carried on the Raving Rabbids series and got the latest one :- Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party. The nice part of this game is that it exploits the Wii Balance Board as a component for controlling your character. The game is still a riot and you can have some serious fun (in the stupidity sense) but with the Wii Balance Board it adds another dimension that makes the antics more physical ranging from space surf boarding to rhythm dancing. The kids (my cousin's & my son) played together and it was giggles all evening. Honestly these kinds of games, the Wii and the social interaction they bring is the platforms advantage. I keenly have to give this game a thumbs up just for the stupid fun.

For the xbox360, it was Star Wars Force Unleashed [SWFU] and Guitar Hero World Tour [GHWT] Band Pack. SWFU I find to be your typical FPS type of game where instead of being armed with a gun, you end up going around killing with a lightsaber & powers of the force... The twist here is that your on the dark side , w00t! Overall the game plays quite well and is fast paced. The ability to manipulate & throw things with the force is fun but I am bit disappointed in the lightsaber attack moves. The graphics are impressive and you get a wide range of open spaces to explore but it is still very directional based so the environment still seems stunted. Overall this turns out to be a neutral rating for me and to be honest my son has played this more than I have for the moment but I will get back to it someday...

Very much having enjoyed Guitar Hero 3 and having learnt a little about drumming when I was young, I'd been quite excited and impatient for the release of GHWT. Truth be told, I preferred to look at GHWT than Rock Band as, at least in France, the release dates were similar and I'd already had experience with Guitar Hero franchise and wanted to continue to support it. It was a good choice, GHWT turns out to be all around a good continuation of the franchise and, at least for me, continued to be a good multi-player experience on both a local and online level. If you're already familiar with the play still then you can quickly jump into the game. As previously said the experience and interface has a lot of similarity, however, I did find that game play was much faster as well as being some what easier in the sense more forgiving of mistakes. I find the new instruments well balanced but find the vocal part some what difficult (definitely not a singer) as hitting the right tone is hard. The new guitar feels much better than the default guitar in GH3 but the slide bar touch buttons I find difficult to move to (it' s locating the right colour that takes time and mess you up). Overall though, GHWT is a definite winnner and a great play solo or with others - definite thumbs up!

So that was a quick dirty review of my first days impression! If you want more details visit your usual game review online sources...

Links in this post:

Stuck in Houston

2008-11-15T23:35:00.000+01:00

So I was supposed to leave today and quite anxious to as well but I find myself stuck in Houston. The Air France pilots went on strike this weekend and it seems like there are no possibilities for me to reach home before Monday. Air France sent me an e-mail during the middle of the night with a changed reservation to Monday afternoon.

Oh! Well, this sucks but its just a cumulation of just bad events in the disaster that my life is right now. I wish I could say better things but with all the trouble I've been having these past years plus while I was a way a bunch of stuff went down at home that's going to be expensive.

Well gives me two more days to do some last minute shopping... Thinking I might just as well get that MacBook to give myself a nice pill.

Despite Best Effort

2008-11-15T02:28:00.001+01:00

The weeks have been long and tedious and despite best efforts, I was just not energetic enough to be able to do somethings I wanted to. Did not have time to do any serious tech stuff or do any gaming. I think the disappointing tech shopping, in ability to exchange some travelers checks and the hesitation to buy a MacBook has not helped.

I think things would actually be different if my job didn't depress me as much and if thinks for me were working better ( crap happened at home that's just hitting the pocket book even more now). I basically know what I need to do to get out of the rut but at the moment the mental energy required to achieve it is not there.

Anyway things are as they are...

Tech Shopping Disappointment

2008-11-09T21:16:00.000+01:00

So with this trip to Houston, I was hoping to get some much needed tech. I need a few upgrades for the home PC as well as some portable storage.Unfortunately the selection was not as good as I would have hoped. I did manage to get a few things at a good price including a 6 pack of 4gb thumb drives & a Seagate 750gb sata drive.
Did spend a few bucks on cheap HD-DVDs & large selection of DVDs. As well as managing to pre-order Warth of the Lich King (so I'll be able to jump to Northend as soon as I get home).
What's left, well I am still not sure about getting a motherboard and new CPU however the total would quickly rack up & it's not that much cheaper than buying back home besides think I would rather put the money into a MacBook.

Back to Houston...

2008-11-03T17:42:00.001+01:00

As I write this, the plane is somewhere over north america - gotta luv wordpress for the Touch. Yep, on the way back to Houston, TX. This should be am interesting but dull trip.
Interesting because I will be living live one of the potentially most drastic US presidential elections ( and I hate politics) personally hoping myself and for the world that the candidate for Change (Obama) win! Above that though because I will be able to connect up with a few friends and colleagues that I enjoy bantering and ranting with. And there is also the fact that I can do some good tech shopping including potentially a MacBook Pro.
On the other hand, I have dreaded the advent of this trip work wise since September (the original trip was cancelled 'cause of Ike). This has to be potentially the least productivity two week business trip I am on in quite awhile. I don't expect to gain or learn much in this hand-over activity I am doing for some of my new objectives & responsibilities.Unfortunately , the work is not & will not challenge me in anyway. Let's face it even the job description that was forwarded to me lists the position to require a person with an experience that's one third of mine.
One other thing I will try to achieve as well is to get a little better and more rhythm on the lifehacking stuff(back into blogging, kyteTV, etc). Let's see what happens...

Microsoft Days - Enterprise Management

2008-10-02T20:14:00.003+02:00

Spent the day at a special Microsoft [MS] presentation focused on enterprise management solutions. The following is an on-the fly thoughts and impressions post (got love my iPod touch)! Some stuff on my Brightkite stream.

Session 1: application virtualization (originally Gridsoft) called App-V is presented by Microsoft and Intel as a solution to make image deployment and support easier. The idea being that the virtual apps as well as virtual environments are deployed centrally and made available to the user via either streaming or local virtual image push. The idea being that the apps no longer need to be installed locally and versioning is controlled centrally. As the apps are deployed in a virtual configuration they are also no longer dependent in the underlying OS (eg. run windows XP apps over Vista or Windows 7) when you include MED-V (ex. KIDARO). Security is also in theory improved by the use of encryption as well as a form of sandboxing.

Session 2: Deploying and benefits of App-V. Key points include streaming key code packages and centralized updates; easy application maintenance; co-existence of multiple versions of applications and supporting different middleware & libraries versions; workstation independence (environment becomes virtual); new delivery mechanisms that includes a light infrastructure and an offline distribution.

Session 3: Hyper-V in depth. Intel optimized the VT-x technology to fully support Hyper-V both from CPU to Network. Based on a microkernel hypervisor (this is alot like VMWare GDx or ESx). Some versions of newer MS OS has code optimizations for when they are running in as a guest OS also requires you to install new drivers, etc. The network component now supports switch virtualisation for VLAN.q supp

Plenary Session with S.Ballmer focused extensively on what MS is doing for what is more generally known as ubiquitius & cloud computing. The vision is to bring an Internet rich user environment based on .Net, Silverlight, Browsers & Vista (as a base) in all forms of devices supported by Services+Software (SAAS) built on MS core platform Windows Server 2008,Hyper-V,SQL2008 & the collaboration suite. Oh! And did I mention MS will be offering it's platform on a host device (Live everything ;-)).
This was also the official launch of MS Hyper-V technology and their Virtualization-360 (i.e. virtualize everything if possible) which covers server, desktop OS and applications.

Why Can't the HDD Industry Publish True Size of Disk?

2008-09-22T14:16:00.001+02:00

Why can't the Hard Disk industry publish the true size of the disks they are selling? This is the big question! I recently purchased two drives from Seagate from their Momentus series of laptop 2.5 7200 rpm line. To be specific, I have the Momentus 7200.2 in 160Gb and the Momentus 7200.3 in 320Gb. From the product title you would expect to be getting 160Gb and 320Gb respectively from the drives.

However this isn't exactly true. I don't know what the number represents but it's not the size of the drive once you plug it into your machine. I only get 149Gb from the former and 298Gb from the latter, which on the latter is a significant loss of space (close to 10% but more like 8%). It goes to say that this is beyond annoying! When you buy a hard disk, you buy it based on advertised size (hoping to get that maximum space possible) at least that's the general idea. If you advertise the size of something it should be the real size you will see when you start to use it! Not the theoretical size based on platters and cluster sizes!! BTW this is true for almost every hard disk vendor not just the one mentioned here.

Don't get me wrong the drives are fantastic. I bought them for that reason, they perform extremely well and have some interesting laptop usage safe guards. I am just feed up of expecting something and getting a different value in return... For crying out loud! Change your attitude, the industry needs to change its methodology and start giving us the real sizes - didn't this happen with TV to!

So HDD Industry wake-up, smell the coffee and stop lying to us about the size of your products! Gives us the real size...

Change of Plans

2008-09-16T13:46:00.001+02:00

So, I was supposed to be in Houston right now but the damage caused by hurricane Ike has put a hold on that. Now the thing is I was hoping to get some tech shopping in ( before all my Euros are gobbled up by the tax collector) while over there giving me a significant savings. Maybe this will happen next month!

So in the mean time, I am thinking of passing the time by either getting a Dell Inspirion mini9 or upgrading my home PC a bit with the following components:

ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro - 45 CFM
ASUS P5Q Deluxe - Chipset Intel P45 / ICH10R
CRUCIAL Ballistix - 4 Go ( 2*2G ) - PC6400 - 800MHz
INTEL ® Core™2 Duo E8500 3.16GHz FSB 1333MHz 6Mo cache socket 775

This upgrade would give a nice all purpose machine good enough for some good gaming. Money wise, this would cost roughly the same.

What's your vote?

Update 20080921: Looks like if I buy the kit in the US I'd be saving anywhere between 20% to 30% - so going to wait.

Integrating Web2.0 Solutions in the Corporate Env. A Challenge for Innovation!

2008-09-04T18:25:00.000+02:00

I was in a very interesting discussion with a colleague responsible for the IT Innovation process in our company today.

The company, where I work, has for awhile now had a big focus on bringing Web 2.0 type solutions into the corporate infrastructure via the innovation process . Some current projects include looking at integrating internal social networking (ala facebook, dopplr and similar) or microblogging (ala twitter). There are many reasons behind these ideas and a lot them have to do with attracting young blood into the company & keeping them interested.

There are however a number of fundamental issues behind this logic, a primary one being that these types of solutions can be easily adopted into the user's daily business workflow to bring him/her added benefit and ease to complete their professional goals. Even more difficult in a company like ours which is not an IT focused company. Another important issue being that a majority of new recruits are indeed heavily involved in the use of such solutions! Let's face it there have not been that many studies that indicate that a majority of university graduates expect to see such tools in the work place. Yes! They want access to the solutions but at a more global and personal level - a primary goal being to be able to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances as well as continue to exist in the webosphere as they did before.

There is in fact a macro versus micro distinction that needs to be made in this domain. An internal corporate social network or microblog actually only serves a microcosm of users that already have the primary means to achieve essentially the same things with e-mail, corporate directory & IM. In a more than typical internal business environment you already communicate and share information with your colleagues and don't necessarily need to push or publish information via a web based application. Think about it what additional information is a social network going to allow you to serve more than a corporate directory or sending e-mails. One theory is to stay that in a large 50k employee company, it will allow you to discover or facilitate contacting people when you travel to a different site. I question this! As how is different than looking up the colleagues you need to visit or are based in the site you are visiting? Will a social network really bring additional benefit in that sense?

For me a lot of these Internet level solutions function and provide benefit as they permit disperse people the ability to keep in touch without requiring a formal linkage (such as sharing of e-mail or IM) as well as bringing a platform to meet new people outside of your usual domain of influence. I think the whole point here is the ability or drive to expand you domain of influence however in your work environment you already basically have the recognition and access to your domain of influence based on your experience and responsibilities. Microblogging is another good example of this and can be seen as the summum of this ability by allowing you to broadcast updates and thoughts to all your followers in a quick and dirty interface. But how does this fit into a typical business day workflow.

I am in IT and for the moment, I don't quite see it. To be honest, I already have trouble juggling my job responsibilities and keeping my Internet presence up-to-date. And this is for me and more importantly and as mentionned before the key factor: how do you fit these tools into your daily job workflow. Honestly, I don't have the answer and I still fail to see the business benefit. I am open to suggestion and hope this post will open the floor for discussion...

Why We Need Google Chrome

2008-09-02T19:51:00.000+02:00

On Sept. 1 2008, Google announced their plans to release a new intiative in the web browser market ( of course it will be free - sort of) called Chrome. Some of the technical reasoning behind the browser was laid out in a home brewed web-comic. I have no intention of re-commenting this as plenty before me have [Google it!].

My apropos on this subject has to do with the fundemental reasons I think that a new browser paradigm or technology is deeply required!

Browsers today are stagnating in the form of a monolithic giant that are required to perform too much in order to support everything from scripting to multimedia to web2.0 & beyond. The problem is that the main contenders today have been adding and adding features forgetting that to keep performance you also need to optimize! This holds true even for the more recent versions of FF3 & IE8. Unfortunately performance has not gotten significantly better and this is a fundamental quagmire...

Let's face it the web is getting slower and slower and I am not inclined to accept the blocked tubes excuse. A fair bit of the slowness is coming from the iffy responsiveness of the browsers. I've seen this too many times even when trying to load local web pages (i.e. on the same LAN). Now this is a core problem because the web applications are becoming more and more complex as providers start to bring services that encompass more features. I, personally, feel like I spend more time waiting for the pages to load and respond to my request than actually using the features provided by the application.

Believe or not, this situation has already been seen when mobile operators started pushing the mobile web and the WAP standard and simplified web pages had to be developed. Look at the iPhone, despite its «full featured» browser, it still prefers to have special formatted web pages. This is equivalent to a tacit recognition that current solutions are not responding in a user-acceptable manner to expectations and something needs to change - we need the features but with the performance that makes them useable.

Chrome wants to try and resolve this issue by bettering the performance of the browser, a good start! But is this really enough, is there a need to look at changing the way these applications are delivered? I think this will remain a very open question until someone re-invents the web2.0/web3.0 paradigm!

Update 2008-09-08: So I've been using Chrome for 6 days now! It's fast... brings back the punch on web sites! However I am going to stop using it until Google fixes a number of security flaws that have been discovered since launch [IMHO some of them are inexcusable considering they had already been identified in the webkit platform]

B'Day Equals Gamerific!

2008-08-30T16:05:00.000+02:00

Today, August 30th, is my son's birthday. Both he and I really look forward to this period as it's a damn good excuse for dad to go crazy on the new games (Christmas is also a good excuse).
This year it's: one PSP game - Naruto2; one xbox360 - Soul Caliber IV; three Wii - Ski, Boom Blox & Smash Bros Brawl.
I'm satisfied with the general game play and am quite enjoying the fast paced & quick to pick up action gaming that both SC4 & Smash Bros is providing. I was to a certain extent impressed with the graphics and overall customizablity of both games. These were games that were quick and easy to jump into and get a lot of fun out of
I still need to try out the other three fully but so far my son's has been having a good time and doesn't seem to want to put down Naruto. The Family Ski on Wii was especially fun with the Wii Board. Its a much more interesting ski simulation than the default one on Wii Fit. Boom Blox was fun as well, and remind me of long evening hours of playing jenga with friends while on vacation,
Maybe more on this crop of recently obtained games in future posts!

It's Been Awhile, Again

2008-08-28T19:10:00.000+02:00

Well it has been awhile since I took the time to blog anything! To be honest, I've had a few drafts in the works but never enough personal energy to complete them. I thought that migrating my iPod Touch to version 2.0 and using the wordpress applet would help but I've been having other issues with the iPod Touch (will have to be the subject of a different post).
Once again, I find myself torn between personal issues and work related emptiness which has driven me into a relunctant on effectiveness. Hence my inability to get my stuff together and try to do sensible things.
To be honest it's almost a form of depression and I don't think things will change until I hit The Deepest Rock Bottom possible...
Meanwhile I think that trying to get those drafts and new articles finished will be the only way to try and fight this effectively. Maybe even using my blog(s) as a venting ground might help.

Let's see what happens. ;-)

We Say Goodbye to Princess

2008-07-16T14:05:00.004+02:00

After 15 years of sweetness, we unfortunately had to say goodbye to our cat Princess. A number of months ago, she was diagnosed with cancer. The first time, we had the vets remove the cancer but it quickly came back and there was not much more we could do. Over the past few days, she had stop eating and was starting to have problem moving around. Her physical state was getting hard to bear and she was not herself.
Princess joined the family some 15 years ago when she grabbed my wife's hat through the cage as we walked passed her in the pet store. My wife knew at that time that the cat was «supposed» to come with us! Princess was a gentle and sweet little lady but was very shy. She will be missed. More picture of her on this Flickr page and in my Picasa web album (look for Princess the tri-colour persian)

Xoopit Enhancing Gmail's Media Capabilities

2008-07-11T15:28:00.001+02:00

Following an article on this blog about Xobni, I was recently invited to try out Xoopit. Xoopit provides a tool to quickly access the multimedia stored in your Google Mail (Gmail) account through a number of ways including either via a Firefox plug-in (it needs an equivalent on IE7 I tend to use both so it is helpful), in your iGoogle page or through their own web interface. Disclaimer: The contents of this post reflects my experience with Xoopit as it occured from May to end June. Therefore some of the information present here may have evolved over that time with fixes and improvements. Also, this post was reviewed by one of the Xoopit co-founders before publication!

Xoopit essentially indexes and copies your Gmail contents via an IMAP interface (for more information check-out this Xoopit blog post ) and it seems to target the e-mails containing pictures, videos and files. The service starts by indexing the context of your account and after a few hours started to present the indexed media it had found. After what seemed like 2 days worth of indexing (my impression based on the increasing count of media index), the power of Xoopit began to reveal itself and that was when I realized what Xoopit is in fact providing. Xoopit gives you a nice interface for quickly viewing, downloading or re-sharing all your media be it by what you have recently received, by association to whom sent it to you or from which platform (i.e. flickr, youTube, ...) or by file type. The index even pulls references to pictures and videos from URLs which was quite interesting: it for example highlighted a flickr picture and youTube video in the May 15th Bruce Schneier Crypto-Gram and if your are subscribed you know that he tends to use tinyurls and references to articles not directly to video or pictures.

Overall my impressions and thoughts on Xoopit are mixed. I really like the ability to quickly view, locate and manipulate media that has been sent to me or referenced to me via e-mail. I was even more appreciative as I am able to link my different Gmail addresses to it (I use one for personal comms and one for mailing-lists, etc). This made it even more useful as I can now quickly locate things from one place instead of having to check multiple accounts. It was also interesting to use for sharing pictures and videos with my different contacts but I admit that I tried the sharing feature to test/try it and I am not sure how often I would get to use it my day-to-day e-mail activity(I'll explain later). Here are some of my other remarks about the tool:

You can quickly share videos and pictures, files however are not shareable on their own. To share them you need still need to forward the whole e-mail. I didn't quite understand this part;
The ability to locate media sent by contacts is neat, however some of my closets contacts have multiple e-mail addresses and in the Xoopit interface this shows up as multiple contacts... I think that the system needs to try and be more intelligent and match multiple contacts by name as well as e-mail;
The plug-in interacts with the Gmail search and shows a search bar along side your search results. So for instance if you search for a contact, the Xoopit plug-in gives you asidebar with all the media relate to that search query;
The plug-in works quite well and gives you an easy instant access to the media directly from your Gmail inbox, however one thing that confuses me is that the plug-in pulls the Xoopit copy of the e-mail instead of accessing the Gmail version. My thoughts are that this could be done better if the Xoopit used some form of indexing/referencing instead of creating a copy of the e-mails;
There are some other things I would like to see like: statistics, threading or relationships between media/e-mails, and maybe versioning or similar on files.

However & overall, I don't think I am getting the most out of the tool. There is a simple reason for this, I usually don't manage my e-mail contact workflow associated to media. I rarely look for a piece of media that was sent to me by one person or another. When it comes to media, I usually view & process it but then I file it away by putting it in another location (photo album, file server, ...). When I re-share media I receive via e-mail, it is usually then and there so to speak - at the time I first read it. I then rarely come back to that e-mail. The exception to this might be file attachments which I might need to refer back to but again this is a rare occurrence. Xoopit will be a very useful tool for a person spending a lot of time dealing with multimedia e-mail processing which is just not my case.

I admit my e-mail workflow is very much focused on processing via subject, keyword (I use labeling or subject line tagging for this) or even sender. When I am referring to or searching for existing e-mail conversations I typical look for it via subject matter or via the original sender (this is in fact where Xobni is quite useful). Hence my low and in frequent need to access a tool like Xoopit whose primary focus is the media.

My other mixed impressions are due to my ingrained habit as an information security professional. When I look at the Xoopit service, a few things come to mind and they be NO means imply any weakness on the part of Xoopit:

HTTPS compatibility in the plug-in: I use Gmail web interface using https for various reasons. When I first tried the Xoopit plug-in, it had a few glitches running under the https instance of theGmail - it would en fact rest the page to normal http. This seems to be corrected now in the latest versions and the plug-in also respect the https protocol when it fetchs data. There is also a setting under your Xoopit account to enforce the HTTPs protocol (nice!);

Storage of the Gmail account and password information: this is tough and I realize that today and without a proper API or security key Xoopit really doesn't have much choice. This should not be an issue as long as the data is stored and used in a secure manner. Relatively though, it does want for concern as the Xoopit service uses an IMAP connection to pull the information fromGmail , if its implemented as IMAPS then things should be ok if not then your account information is being sent between both services in clear text;

Xoopit shadows the e-mail on its own servers: while this is not really worrisome it does raise my eyebrow concerning data residency and security issues. In the same way that I implicitly trust Google with my e-mail, I need to implicitly trust Xoopit to safely and securely store my e-mail information. The initial thought that I have is that now I need to be additionally concerned as my e-mail information is stored in two separate locations therefore increasing the possible footprint for potential data leakage. It also troubles me personally as I am not inclined to see multiple copies of my e-mail stored outside of my direct control. I need to have total control over my e-mail storage as there certain e-mails that by nature I won't leave even in Gmail and thus I need to be sure that all copies are removed from any online storage. Of course my assumption is that Xoopit have taken necessary precautions to secure the duplicated data like encryption based on an individual account key (I know I would).
<rant />My initial thoughts on the subject, was why store a copy? Would it not be more efficient and better to build an index of the messages instead, storing the index and references to the files then providing access back directly into Gmail. At least you would not have to duplicate and store the contents of the accounts.

I think that Xoopit however can only do a little more than what they are doing today in great part due to the limited API that is offered by Google for the Gmail service. Jonathan Katzman one of the co-founders of Xoopit confirmed this to me and indicated that they are working with Google to improve on the above:

on both those last points, we take security incredibly seriously and realize the trust users are explicitly or implicitly (depending on the user) putting on us. this is something we'll blog more about soon. suffice it to say we are taking every measure we can to keep data safe.

So despite my view of things, I appluad their solution and wish them the best of luck as they go on improving it. Let's also remember that this is still essentially a beta service (private invites only - I have some to give out). I'll continue to use the service as it is slowly proving to be worthy and useful and I might be a good extension into my e-mail workflow.

Jamais 2 sans 3

2008-07-03T12:25:00.002+02:00

«Jamais deux sans trois» is a french expression that basically means that things always come in threes and in most cases you are talking about unlucky things!
Well, today July 3rd aka my birthday, falls right into this expression. If you remember and refer back to last year's post, you may be aware that my home network got electrically fried on my birthday! Well this year it wasn't my home network but it would seem that it was my laptop's turn.
Yep, this year for my birthday, my laptop fried... dead motherboard!
Can't wait till next year I wonder what will happen next!

Yet Another HDD Bites the Bucket

2008-05-13T18:30:00.002+02:00

One of my drives (a 500gb USB WD Book less than 2 years old) just kicked the bucket! Unfortunately (or fortunately) it was the drive that only held videos and podcasts and open-source torrent downloads. So I am not losing much - except that I just lost a shit load of crap that took quite some time to download.
What gets me and continues to get me is that the drive in question was working very well until I rebooted the system it was on. This continues to be, IMHO, the plight of the HDD in today's day environment. Don't get me wrong I know why a working drive suddenly stops working on a reboot, but I just don't understand why we in the industry have not figured out how to combat this situation!
Why can't the drives detect they are failing and warn you before you reboot? Why should a stop/start command force the platters to stop and re-rev hence creating a die situation? Why? Why?
Oh, well! I know what the gadget purchase will be this month: new drive!

My Thoughts on Xobni

2008-05-09T09:19:00.004+02:00

I've been using Xobni for a few weeks now even before the public beta. I must admit that so far I've only activated on my personal accounts [I'm still on medical leave and can only run it on the remote connection if I choose to enable it on the company Exchange solution] and I am finding it a good helpful utility.

Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that claims to be able to help you organize, search and navigate your e-mail and other outlook content in an easier way; more info. I've even seen some commentaries calling it a next step in social networking.

After a few weeks of usage, I am starting to find the tool indeed very useful. Some of the features that I am starting to appreciate: is the ability to see the frequency of e-mailing as well as the time statistics [most of e-mail activity is between 10:00-11:30 & around18:00] as it gives me an idea when the best time to contact a person is versus when I might get a reply; the tracking of all conversations stored in the account giving me the ability to quickly locate previous e-mails. The feature that I am starting to find of some interest (but more likely will be better in the work environment) is the contact network feature which gives you a crossed list of other contacts; it is of course limited to what is in the e-mail addresses in your accounts but still interesting.

I would, however, like to see this directly inside gMail and also maybe a Thunderbird plug-in... then I will truly be happy!

Visited the Surgeon Today...

2008-05-07T16:12:00.002+02:00

I had an appointment with my surgeon today for a one month after check-up on my ankle area.

Although the swelling is still important everything is on track and mobility in my ankle is better. I must admit that in terms of pain the operation has helped to a certain extent. He has recommended a few more weeks of rest and keeping my ankle on ice (both metaphorically and literally).

I must admit however that I am still feeling a serious amount of discomfort especially if I am on my feet too much or sitting without the leg stretched. Don't even get me started on sleeping - my family Doctor has given me sleeping & anti-stress pills - yep its that troublesome!

So more time for some gaming, maybe I'll be able to get through CoD4 & Bioshock.

What Tech This Month?

2008-05-06T15:36:00.001+02:00

No tech purchases last month mostly cause we had to buy a new oven [you should see the oven, its got a full computer to control cooking!] and eye glasses for the kid & wife.

So time to do some catching up this month as if you remember, I decided this year to buy a tech gadget or game every month. The primary cause being the lack of commitment or want of my wife to quite smoking & I figure if she can «literally» burn @€150/month - I might as well give myself something.

So I have a dilemma this month between the following:

WiiFit: not sure it will do my diet any but I really like the concept and it looks like a good change of pace;
Mario Kart Wii;
A XiNCOM Twin WAN Router: I am looking at this to be able to aggregate/load-balance my two DSL links or I could do this with a cheap PC, 3 network cards and a good linux distro;
Logitech Squeezebox Duet: The interest here is to be able to stream all my digital music as well as access Internet Radio (French stations bore us, they talk too much and play the same songs every 2 hours). In theory the Squeezebox would allow me to do this directly to my stereo without having to use the computer.

Tough call. I could always but the money aside this month and prepare a small wad of cash to be able to buy some of the possible new Apple products to arrive around WWDC or summer. What do you think?

myPoV: Assassin's Creed

2008-04-27T14:58:00.001+02:00

Yesterday evening, I finally finished Assassin's Creed (AC)! Yeah it took me awhile since I got it back in Nov'07, well to be fair I only started playing it about 2 weeks ago (2 to 3 hours a day). I wanted to write up my point of view (PoV) on the game as it has had mixed reviews from the different gaming sites.

In all fairness, I find AC a good play... it's not madly challenging that is true [honestly, I play but I am not a pro] but the game plays really well and keeps you enthralled in the story; seriously I wanted to get through to know the outcome. I enjoyed the game as the difficulty slowly builds up as you progress through an interesting storyline... which I won't reveal for those how've not played. Here are some of the points I found good:

Storyline is simple but does keep you intrigued & I really want to know what's next; Ubisoft AC2 please ;-)
Graphics are amazing! I was really caught by the visual effects when climbing the minarets & some even gave me the chills
Combat is good and can be challenging but it never gets impossible [like some certain FPS on hard modes]

This game even allowed me to complete almost all the Xbox360 achievements. I am missing 2! the 1st because I didn't know you need to talk to the assistant between each memory slot; the 2nd because my dexterity ain't that great (timed sequence of button pressing).

Follow me on FriendFeed

2008-04-23T10:42:00.000+02:00

If you want to follow me on FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/fvter and subscribe.

I have been using this service for a month or so now and I am actually quite satisfied with it. The primary reason is that it provides me with a quick a dirty daily report of all my friend's posting as well as mine. A succinct timeline of what has been going on online...

if you are not aware, FriendFeed brings together about 35 different web sources such as Flickr, blogs, music sites and many other of the social networking stuff.

Ulla's Puppies

2008-04-22T10:04:00.003+02:00

My parents have a wired-hair dachshund dog, named Ulla, who gave birth to 6 little puppies last night. 3 males and 3 females, a full litter!

Congratulations Ulla and her parents... ;-)

Pictures here!

Finally Installed the QNAP TS209

2008-04-14T15:15:00.001+02:00

Back in February, I bough a QNAP TS209 NAS for my home network while in Houston. Since I came back, I have not had time to sit down buy drives for it (I got 2 1TB Samsung drives for >€400) and install it. I bought the QNAP because it gave me the most options! Seriously, you would be surprised; from backup software to web server to database server to download station to torrent client!

Installation at least for me was quite simple and reminded me to a certain extent of hooking up a small server. This may be a bit of a challenge for everyday user! The drives are hot-pluggable and install on drive bay trays loaded via the front and then covered up with a nice face plate; both drive trays & face plate are held on with thumb screws. This is good in case you need to open the sucker and replace a drive.

The system automatically picks up a DHCP address if you have available but you still need to do the first configuration with desktop client which auto-locates available devices and allows you to set the IP address and other minimal settings. Configuration [selection of pics and screen shots here] then switches to a web browser based interface. The set-up was quite easy and for your average joe there is a wizard type system.

The drives are configurable in RAID or as a whole set. I decided to go for a continuous 2TB drive format instead of RAID to get the most of storage space. I will get an external HD to do backups to; yes, the system supports a plug and backup option via an external drive.

As for the different server options, for the moment, I have only configured:

the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) with the Twonkyserver so that I can now play videos and music from things like my xBox360;
the iTunes server for access to all my digital music;
file server which is accessible from either the windows machines or the MacOS X machines on my network & there is a web version as well
media server for web sharing of pictures (this will be useful once I get a WiFi enabled digital picture frame)

The next steps will be to look into the web server options and backup options of which the first step will be to hook up to TimeMachine on the Mac.

The device is responding as I wanted, except for one or two important points of which the most important is the lack of a more intelligent BitTorrent client. The download station on the system is in fact quite simple. It is missing a number of things like an RSS reader or a monitor folder option. I now need to figure out a work around to be able to get the system to auto-download bittorrents! Might need to do some fancy scripting.

I posted some of my wish list on the qnap forum.

Tibet, China & the Olympics [fvter.Rant]

2008-04-11T10:10:00.002+02:00

I don't like to rant much on politics, but the recent world-wide noise about the upcoming Olympic games, Tibet and China has shaken my neurons a bit! Let's face it the issue is not that the athletes should boycott the games but more on how does the world protest strongly enough to make their disagreement known. Here are my thoughts! Let's get the audience to boycott watching the games and hit them where it hurts... the money through the publicity and sponsorships! The expected outcome is that hundreds of millions of viewers will watch the games and be attracted by the pitches from the sponsors; however and if only 10% of that viewership actually occurs than it will make the games a disaster and hurt both the CIO and China more!

Anti-fraude ou Fraude des Méthodes Peu Secure

2008-04-06T11:27:00.005+02:00

sorry this post is in French as it concerns something that happened to me here in France. I'll post a quick translation in the comments.
-------
J’ai récemment été identifié par le système de FAI-NET pour une vérification ou contrôle, on va dire, d’identité bancaire. La société FAI-Net fournit un service de tiers de confiance a fin de sécurisé les achats sur Internet à la fois pour le commerçant et pour l’acheteur.
Donc en effet suite à un achat sur le site grosbill.com, j’ai reçu un e-mail de la part de FIA-NET me demandant de valider mon achat. C’est à ce moment que je commence à avoir des problèmes ! En lisant le message la première fois, j’étais très sceptique et je pensais que c’était un e-mail de type «phishing scam». D’autant plus que le même message m’a été renvoyé à renvoyer à plusieurs reprise.
En effet, ma casquette d’architecte sécurité en informatique a pris le dessus ! Le problème ? Eh bien l’e-mail en question avait plein d’inconsistance et avait les éléments douteux suivant :

L’e-mail est émis par une adresse en fia-net.fr mais leur site et les conditions de vente sont tous attribuées à fia-net.com - dont on peut questionner la validité de l’émission de l’e-mail ;
L’e-mail n’est pas certifié, c.a.d il n’y a aucune sécurité associé à cet e-mail, ce qui est important pour un e-mail demandant vos informations bancaire – de nos jours il n’est pas difficile d’envoyer un e-mail au moins signé !
Ils disent avoir essayé de m’appeler par téléphone pour valider la commande – je n’ai jamais reçu d’appel téléphonique de leur part au moins pas sur les numéros inscrite dans ma commande sur grosbill.com ;
L’e-mail me demande d’envoyer une copie de ma carte d’identité et mon RIB – attention ! il n’y aucun garantie que l’e-mail va vraiment à FIA-NET ou que l’e-mail ne sera pas intercepté ! Vous imaginez ce qui pourrait ce passez si …

J’ai donc décidé de faire connaître ma pensé sur cet e-mail et ma désapprobation de la méthode à FIA-NET. J’ai donc visité leur site. À fin de pouvoir communiquer avec FIA-NET, il faut d’abord s’inscrire. Et paf encore un problème : Après inscription, FIA-NET vous renvoie par e-mail votre nom d’utilisateur et puis votre mot-de-passe en clair ! Je dits NON ! Ce ne sont pas des pratiques dignes de nos jours avec touts les problèmes de sécurité associé à des pratiques telles que celles-ci !
Pour une société qui agit en temps que tiers de confiance et qui lutte contre la fraude sur Internet, il y a un sérieux manque de protocole et de sécurisation de leur méthodologies ! C’est tous que j’ai à dire !
J’ai finalement envoyé mes informations en PDF sécurisé (non copiable et non imprimable) avec les informations (signature, etc) importantes sécurisé par des dégradations d’image et watermarking. Ce qui m'a valu de recevoir mon achat avec une semaine de retard! Quel bordel...

Most Interesting Operation Yet!

2008-04-04T10:44:00.003+02:00

Yesterday, Thursday 3rd April, was my operation day. I have been back in the hospital since Wednesday to have the hardware, that was put in Dec.06, removed from my left ankle area. The operation in itself turned out to be one of the coolest I have had in a long while. Note that this is my 10th or so operation on my left leg.

The operation started with a local anesthesia. I thought that like previous times, it would be an epidural too numb the lower half of my body. It was in fact a left leg nerve block. Nerve blocks are strange. They start by sticking an electrified needle into the main nerves in your backside and then upper calf. At that moment your leg starts to twitch and move by itself - a strange feeling- which is followed by the injection of the anesthetic. Your leg then slowly starts to become numb... you know that pins and needles feeling you get if you sit on your arm for a long time. They started operating when I could basically no longer move my leg as it felt like a ton of gold bars and I could no longer feel any sense of temperature (those where the tests they carried out to see if it was ready).

The surgeon then began to operate! I felt, smelt and heard everything that was going on! The nerve block in fact only kills the pain sensor...you still feel and touch, etc. I won't recount the whole operation as it was a long 2.5 hours but here are some of the highlights:

They used a laser scalp to cut through the flesh - smelt the searing meat

To remove the screws and plate, they had to chisel away and use a hammer to pry the screws loose

They scrapped away some set-in arthritis and irrigated my ankle

The advantage of having had the operation this way was less down time as you don't suffer the secondary effects of the anesthetics from a GA.

Off to the Hospital

2008-04-01T21:07:00.001+02:00

For those following my blog, you may remember that back in December 2006 I broke my left leg. Tomorrow I go back to the Hospital, to be precise the C.H.U Henri Mondor in Creteil.

My angle is still swollen and I am still in pain. The Doctor said that it might be a good idea to remove the screws and plate. He thinks that it will reduce my pain but it in most likelihood would not completely alleviate it. So as I said it is time to go back to the hospital and on thursday the doctor will take out the metal and wash out (irrigate) my angle (to reduce any arthritis that may be settling in).

I will keep you informed...

Moving to Geotagging & Auto-Publishing Flickr to Blog

2008-03-03T14:21:00.002+01:00

Being on vacation this week in a very nice part of France (Savoie and the Tarentaise to be precise), I decided to delve a little deeper into geotagging my moblog photos. This is in fact very simple with the HTC P3600(Trinity) as the built-in camera can link itself to the GPS module effectively putting the exact GPS location information in the EXIF data of the photo.
My initial problem was trying to figure out how to get Flickr to auto-process this information and map the photos directly (with-out it, you need to manually place them on the map and of course the Flickr map interface doesn't search GPS coordinates... bahhhhh). This is possible through an option in the «Privacy & Permissions» section of Your Account. The results are available on my Flickr page or through this geoTag Flickr feed.
I also decided to see what would happen with the direct to blog option that is provided in the extend Flickr options. So expect to see some moblog entries here soon.
So what's next! Well as I use Shozu for uploading my photos from the mobile device, I want to see if I can play with more intelligent tagging before it ends up in Flickr.
I am also considering joining Twitxr which seems to be some form of geotagged moblog network...

HD-DVD is dead, yeah so...

2008-02-21T16:26:00.001+01:00

So the news is out, Toshiba finally dropped out of the HD video disc format race... Of course the downfall which started at CES 2008, was exactly 2 days after I received my HD-DVD player for the X-Box360! [ed: just to add to my crappy year 2007...]
This is actually quite upsetting as IMHO the HD-DVD format was way more interesting than the Blu-Ray solution. Here are my 3 top rants regarding this subject:

For one thing, HD-DVD were not region encoded which is a big plus (while Blu-Ray is)! I am so tired of not being able to buy the version (especially considering language) of the movies I want to add to my library!
No competitors means that the technology rights will remain high & costly (Sony has to make back the money they spent buying the studios to jump onboard Blu-Ray somehow) which converts into a user expensive experience...
Blu-Ray will only be really good once 2.0 and greater players start to come-out for the online updates and content additions!

Will I buy a Blu-Ray player, maybe once the prices come down and 2.0 players are more readily available... By that time, I may not need to! I am also tending to see (especially in France where high-speed broadband is readily available) that more and more HD content will more likely come from direct downloads or IPTV solutions!
At the end of the day, I don't regret my purchase and I will try to collect as many good HD-DVDs I can before they disappear...

HTC UMPC

2008-02-13T10:20:00.001+01:00

The French distributor of HTC, Brightstore, was present at MS TechDays 2008. One of the devices presented was the UMPC. I won't discuss the UI as this is pretty standard as they are all based on Vista.
The hardware however is one of the best I have seen in this category. The overall frame is slightly bigger than the screen and has a nice rubbed plastic grip feel (easy to hold & feels right). The 7" screen is a good size, full tactil and good on the eyes. Keyboard is a slide under like the TyTN2 and it provides a full keyboard the length & width of the device. Best part however is the good tactile respons it provides.
This is definitely the best UMPC out there (I have tested the Samsung & Toshiba) so far!

gMail IMAP Weirdness

2008-02-05T17:39:00.001+01:00

The other day after logging onto one of my gMail accounts via the IMAPS protocol, I noticed something strange in the folder hierarchy. A bin directory has appeared in the [Google Mail] folder hierarchy. Why is this significant? Well it highlights the fact that the IMAP solution they are using is in most likelihood a unix based platform. And it potentially also highlights a configuration error.

If it is a configuration error, the worry will be that a potential hole exists in the security and the system could eventually be hacked...

Apple! Oh How Ye Doth Disappoint...

2008-02-03T17:58:00.000+01:00

The title says it all... I am currently in Houston, TX and as previously posted was thinking about buying a new MacBook even possibly the Air. The reason behind this is that one of my home laptops is dying its slow death!

Now, I visited the Apple store yesterday and decided to give the Air a rundown and I also took the opportunity to play some more with the iPod Touch and iPhone. Now I left the story disappointed and still hesitant (even more so when you see rumor articles like this) which is kind of a shame considering Apple's innovative approach and track history. Here is my problem, within a small 30minute period, I managed to find quirks and interface issues in all the new products.

First on the Air: I tried to use the multi-touch trackpad (which is only activated when you hold a key down) and found that in fact the applications don't respond very well. I couldn't even get it to work in iPhoto. When I did manage to get it to work, the zoom pinch function to reduce (after I had enlarged) was impossible to get working! I just could not reshrink the image. Could it be my fingers, maybe but...

Second on the Air: I heard some of the reports concerning the slow speeds but was thinking maybe it was just the reviewers. In the store, the Air was side by side with a pretty standard Macbook. I rebooted both at the same time... and the Macbook was up and running at the same-time if not faster than the Air! Ouch I was also very surprised that after only a few days of exposure, the unit was already showing signs of scratching and wear on the alu frame...

Third concerning the Touch & iPhone, I won't go back on some of previous comments regarding the missing features in some applications (like video, mms support, etc). To start, the display units are used by many people so they get quite dirty, believe it or not this makes it quite hard to get the multi-touch interface to respond properly. Your probably thinking, yeah so, a single person wouldn't dirt it up that much! But are you sure... my feeling on display units is that the passage of many people gives you a good impression of how resistant the device will be to prolonged usage and wear and tear.

Then I was playing with basic features like the music player and video player. During that time I also switched out to Home interface (tried to be a normal user). Then I ran into a problem, the audio got really loud (I think the following song was boosted)... It is there that I struggled, I couldn't for the world of me get a quick access to the audio controls and even in the player interface I struggled!

Believe it or not I left the store really stunned, in shock! Not the feeling I would have expected from visiting the Apple store hence my disappointment. I am still considering getting the iPod Touch though...

Kerviel/Societe Generale & Information Security & Insider Threat

2008-01-30T21:24:00.000+01:00

The story of Jerome Kerviel and the Société Générale bank has made a lot of news in the past couple of weeks. Outside of the €4.9billion in losses, I was wondering if you were aware that the story has an information security twist.
So Kerviel was official charge this weekend and you may or may not be aware but he was charged on one interesting point: «introduction dans un système de traitement automatisé de données» which very basically translates to «hacking into a computer system».
In the story there are different things going on including whether or not the boss were aware of the situation and whether or not he did this himself. What has been quickly passed over in this story because of the large sums, are the following facts that as IT/IS security professional make me shiver:

Kerviel was original hired in the back-office of the bank to do data process and in all probability was able to gain complete knowledge on how and what information is stored and processed concerning the validation of transactions
He progressed in his job profile to a trader but the question is was his privileges to the systems revoked or changed to reflect his new profile?
How did he hide all these transactions, the current assumption is that he used his knowledge of the systems to do this and seems to be corroborated with his statements to police!

What I find interesting is that this hacking charge reveals something that as security professionals, we all talk about but many business just do not know how to properly address from policies to procedures and how to protect the issue of Information Security as well as the Insider Threat.

There is a good article in the French newspaper "Le Monde" about the current situation from the 29th of January 2008 after his audience with the police - only in French (sorry). The article in fact quotes bits and pieces of the statement he made to the French police. One paragraph in particular relates to one of the methods that he used to obscure his fraudulent activities:

« J'ai alors fourni de faux justificatifs de saisie sur ces opérations, à savoir de faux mails. J'ai réalisé un faux mail en utilisant les possibilités qui me sont offertes par notre messagerie interne, à savoir une fonction qui me permet de réutiliser l'en-tête d'un mail qui m'est expédié en changeant le contenu du texte qui m'est envoyé. Il me suffisait alors de taper le texte que je souhaitais et le mail avait toute l'apparence d'un document original. »

Roughly translated, “At that point, I provided false reports and justifications on those financial operations, i.e. forged emails. I constructed a forged email by using features of our internal email system. It is indeed possible to re-use the header of an email I have received while changing the body. Then, I just had to type the body of the email I actually wanted and the email looked like a perfectly genuine one.”

Now as long as most e-mail correspondence between parties continues to remain in a non digitally signed manner, it is indeed trivial to alter its content before forwarding it - or even come up with a fake one from scratch.

This shows some of the flaws that continue to be present and visible in the lack of information security how many authentication and authorization processes are obviously flawed in their implementations and aren't necessarily used for information protection.

Business are still very much in the dark on what type of information security they need to implement. This situation proves that companies are still in the dark on how to ensure the basic Ws over their information: Who, What, Why and When! Essentially being able to understand the actions, manipulations and access of critical or important information! Kind of shows that the weakest link for indepth security continues to be the protection of the information!

Update 31-Jan: Another article on the hacking: French trader accused of hacking.

2Buy | !(2Buy)

2008-01-25T16:36:00.000+01:00

So, I am off to Houston(TX) next week and building a small shopping list. With the current Euro USD exchange rate might be worthwhile, but I will of course still compare before purchasing. The list of stuff right now stands at:

MacBook or MacBook Air or MacBook Pro - not sure which to get still under serious consideration...
DVR (digital video recorder) Camera, current suggestions are: ????
A new Canon Powershot SD950IS, SD870IS or SD1100IS - probably depending on price vs. features
There was something else but I forget...

So I am open to suggestions, hints and whatever your thoughts might be on this list... BTW, I already ordered a nice QNAP TS-209 NAS server!

Translation: To Buy or Not To Buy... ;-P

Now on IPv6...

2008-01-24T16:17:00.000+01:00

One of my two ISPs (Free to be precise), recently started deploying IPv6 on its ADSL network. They recently enabled it in my area and I quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
I am now an IPv6 enable network, LOL! My address if your interested:

IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 2a01:5d8:52e3:2b9d:e4ec:5a32:1c02:f9f2
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 2a01:5d8:52e3:2b9d:214:2aff:fe68:9181

And just to ensure you that these are real IPv6 address, this is the RIPE entry for the 2a01:5d8 subnet:

% Information related to '2a01:5d8::/32'

inet6num:        2a01:5d8::/32
netname:         FR-PROXAD-20071108
descr:           Proxad, Internet Service Provider in France
country:         FR
org:             ORG-PISP1-RIPE
admin-c:         ACP23-RIPE
tech-c:          TCP8-RIPE
status:          ALLOCATED-BY-RIR
mnt-by:          RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-lower:       PROXAD-MNT
mnt-routes:      PROXAD-MNT
source:          RIPE # Filtered

organisation:    ORG-PISP1-RIPE
org-name:        Proxad, Internet Service Provider in France
org-type:        LIR
address:         Free SAS

EeePC HSPDA Bundle for €199

2008-01-21T11:36:00.000+01:00

Well it seems that the mobile operator I use here in France (SFR) is having a special deal to purchase the EeePC with an inclusive unlimited 3G+ account, see this Register HW post.

As tempting as it might seem, I have a number of qualms:

It doesn't have integrated HSPDA (3G+), in fact the support for HSPDA is provided by an external USB key;
It's actually a rebate if you agree to sign-up for a one or two year contract (see next);
(see previous) I already have 3 SFR accounts in various forms... I would prefer to just upgrade one to the new contract;
Finally, It's still not clear what they mean by unlimited 3G+ access (the terms and conditions on data download are sketchy - at least IMHO).

Anyway its not really an issue, they apparently are already sold out!

IR DoS: Wake Up!

2008-01-13T17:14:00.000+01:00

A lot of virtual ink has flowed on the confession from Gizmodo regarding the stunt they pulled with TV-B-Gone utility with most of the articles appearing recently describing from unprofessional to a crime. Now before I continue, I would like to make a small disclaimer: «I don't condone what happened, don't approve it and certainly would not recommend this be done».

What Gizmodo pulled demonstrates a very basic DoS (denial of service) attack. The DoS is achievable because of the ease in which it is possible to obtain the right control codes. The prime issues are based on the fact that most of these systems work with «open» and well documented standards (e.g. many manufactures always use the same code for turning off their devices thus a controller from one manufacturer is able to turn off different devices from that same manufacturer) as well as a primal flaw in wireless communications protocols security. TV-B-Gone like a universal remote works on the premise that it is easy to learn, store and replay the remote controls IR sequences. These sequences are equal to the codes that control the target device.

So where is the problem: The receiving device does not validate the issuer... The receiver in fact is an open listen mode thus any IR sequence that is correctly formatted and contains the right code will active the associated command. There is in fact no handshaking or confirmation between the receiver and the emitter.

In their DoS Attack, Gizmodo demonstrated that this one way command issuance process is in fact a big security flaw and could be avoided by not using such an open unidirectional protocol. Manufacturer could in fact avoid openness through simple methods such as encrypting the protocol, using a handshake protocol, using a knocking protocol or some other form of authentication between the transmitter and the receiver.

Unfortunately this then becomes a debate between security, complexity, cost to produce and return on investment. This attack may actually wake manufacturers up and decide to actually address this flaw! To demonstrate how serious this can eventually get, it appears a kid in Poland managed to crash the trams with an IR hack.

Europe-Wide Online Content

2008-01-10T17:24:00.000+01:00

Apple recently announced that it had settled with the EU commission regarding the pricing difference between it's iTunes UK store and the rest of Europe (Yahoo News Article). The EU is now looking at trying to enforce a European wide online-content model. This is a good thing for the users/customers despite what some people seem to think and are writing about (see this TechDirt post). Alot of this discussion rants around what business is allowed to do or wants to do! I say horse-manure... Business is trying to protect its single local market business model, trying to avoid having to negotiate regional/global business models to make this possible. There is no financial reason/restriction stopping business in one EU country to sell to a customer in another (or the world for that matter). This is the premise of the common market model! [Note: ok I over simplify but you know what I mean...]

Despite what some have been saying it is my opinion that Europeans are in fact enlightened and want to be able to purchase and access content from their neighbors (i.e. other countries in the EU). People are interested in seeing/listening to content from their neighbors... I know of a lot of people from France, Spain, Germany and Sweden for example that want access to British music and TV shows and because it is not available through official means, they obtain them through less than correct ways.

Or take some one like me or some of my colleagues who are international and have worked/lived in and out of these different EU countries... We would like to be able to have access to the content we grew up with and love!

I really don't see why these business don't want to do this.. it would provide them with a much large market for the content!

Live MobVideo Streaming... Mobile Web2.0 Here?

2007-12-19T17:09:00.000+01:00

Yep it's all coming together, with more and more «relatively» in expensive multimedia mobile phones that do video, photo and much more (hint hint Apple) such as the Nokia N95 as well as a myriad of smartphones like the HTC P3600. We are starting to see some serious attempts to bring web 2.0 and make ubiquitous in the sense available anywhere and at anytime.

My mate monkeyleader is trying one of the latests solutions called Qik. Check out his blog post on the subject here. Unfortunately I can't join the party as the site currently only supports Nokia type phones... Can't wait till they open up to the HTCs!

This brings to mind that Nokia recently launched itself into the content arena as well with OVI.com. Nokia is announcing it as the «mobile social networking experience that encourages collaboration, creativity and communication»! Definitely something to keep a watchful eye on...

Localization Beyond GPS

2007-12-15T17:30:00.000+01:00

GPS is quite common now and is found more and more in mobile applications via the integration of a unit inside smartphones (such as the HTC P3600). GPS for the moment is seen as the better technology for localization for mobile phones versus its alternative which is to use signal noise ratios combined with the cell the phone is registered on (BTW this is how the My Location option works in Google Maps on mobile when no GPS is available).

A Utah based company, S5 Wireless aim to change this dependence on GPS by introducing what they call a new disruptive technology in the localization domain. Their technology is based on a set of proprietary wireless emitters and receivers that can be deployed anywhere (both indoors and outdoors). They claim that they will be able to achieve a 10m to 15m accuracy! Nice!

To be honest, there is nothing really new technology wise in what they are doing. It is still a type of triangulation (using multiple radios sources, time to receive and signal noise ratios) to determine the device location. However what seems to be innovative is that they will be distributing/releasing the radio components for very little or zero cost. Their business model is that they will provide and resale acess to the back-end database that controls and ensures data integrity for the location data! A sort of federate or trusted data model, or as the company says the equivalent of Lojack or Onstar.

More information in this CIO Today article.

Game Publishers Need to Treat Europe More Seriously

2007-12-12T16:06:00.000+01:00

The X-Mas Season is upon us and over the past few weeks, I have been looking at which games to purchase as gifts for my son and myself. Now outside a few good titles like Guitar Hero 3, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games and others, it would seem that most of the games that are of any real interest won't be coming out until mid January. In fact there doesn't seem to be any new good releases for December in Europe while in January we will see Rock Band, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3, Geometry Wars: Galaxies, ...

So I just don't get the marketing principal on that one! It's not like the games are not ready (most of these have been released in the USA already). As a consumer why would I want to spend any money now on crap or games that I am not interested in when I can wait two or three weeks and get what I really want!

So come one you game publishers... Wake UP! Europe is a serious market... give us the games!!!!

Why So Little Tech News...

2007-11-23T16:01:00.000+01:00

So postings have been sparse on my blog unfortunately. There are a number of reasons for this sparsity which includes just a complete lack of time. I have had too many things to do and issues to resolve both at home and work. Plus my son has been racking up the hours on World of Warcraft barring my access to the computer.

To be fair though, I am not convinced that me rewrite technology articles is really useful or relevant. I use Google Reader as an RSS aggregator and reader. It allows me to share articles that I am interested in or find relevant. I decided a few months ago to use that as my platform for sharing articles I feel merit highlighting in technology (and other) news. [OK I' m sorry forgot to mention this before...]

So If you want my hot items on technology either look at my Google Reader Share page or subscribe to the feed.

Are Facebook Apps the New Chain-Mail Syndrome?

2007-11-23T15:02:00.000+01:00

I have had a profile on Facebook now for quite a few months (lost track to be honest). At the beginning my activity was simple enough, it consisted of just friends and posting from wall to wall.

After a few weeks, I started getting Facebook App invitations from all over the place. Some even multiple times as different friends invited me to use the same applications. The natural thing to do is to accept those invitations and add the new App to your profile. Now here is the interesting part, and the rant.

The system is conceived in such a way that when you add a new App, it automatically asks you to share it with your friends. You can of course skip this but the natural tendency is to send the new found App to your friends on your list. Now it dawned on me, yesterday, while chatting with some colleagues in Cambridge that this is almost like viral marketing or messaging (or whatever you want to call it). I would even go as far as to say this is almost like the old chain-mail, and chain-email stuff from the 80's and 90's! Remember those things, where you would receive them and in the message it would say, please forward this to your friends and colleagues etc etc etc! I am sure that this was not the original intent of the Facebook creators when they created an API and there are some good things about the extensions that Facebook supports. But...

Think about it! Facebook Apps are doing exactly the same thing right now... Some are even monetary chain-mails (yes some Apps allow you to opt into giving the creator money)! So what, well:

My question is will this explode into the new viral marketing of the decade...
Are we as humans still not evolved enough to be gullible like that (I am guilty of this)...
Or do we just need to have this affirmation of our power to share new things and new information with our firends

One Lap or Two?

2007-10-09T07:10:00.000+02:00

This is one heck of a long swimming pool! I wonder how long it would take to swim one or two laps. Definitely a good work out!

Photo credit: Spluch

Also seen on Crave.

Thoughts on How to Improve Google Reader

2007-10-08T16:41:00.000+02:00

For those who track me on Twitter and know me a little bit, you may have heard me going on about how I would like to see some form of tool that aggregates the articles coming from different feeds. My problem is that there is too much information out there and the fact is that more and more sites are covering the same news or information in general.

So I have been doing some more thinking on my ideas regarding how to improve Google Reader.

My main wish is that it be more intelligent with the feed content. As I previously have pointed out here and on my twitter, many of my feeds carry the same or similar information. My idea is that there should be some form of aggregation of this information. What is required is something similar to this diagram:

That was a simple example where the articles present the same information. The idea is that this should be extrapolatable to information that presents itself differently but is still concerning the same information. Essentially something like this:

Now this not far fetched as Google already does this in News:

Notice how this article presents one story and multiple references to similar or linked stories. This is the kind of thing that needs to be done to the multitude of articles in RSS feeds. It would considerably reduce the amount of entries to read and also cut out the noise!

So Google are you up to the challenge.
Note: The graphics are presented in this attached signed PDF: Thoughts on Improvements to Google Reader Graphics

iPhone Not so Happy for Apple in France = unlocked

2007-10-05T17:05:00.000+02:00

It's started! The iPhone is not even officially released yet in Europe and more specifically France than Apple is already facing trouble with its selling methodology.

In fact Les Echos recently reported that Apple has forgotten one fundamental principal that stands in Europe and specifically France today: You can't screw the customer! Consumer law prohibits the sale of any good and service that are dependent on each other in France and some other EU countries. For mobile operators this translates into the fact that they can no longer tie a phone and mobile plan together.

Because of this law, Orange in France the official iPhone carrier, may in fact be forced to sell it without a data plan and carrier lock! Of course this is a big problem for Apple as the current price of the iPhone with «subsidies» is still very expensive and gives no real motivation to buy a locked version... Besides why would you want to buy such an expensive multimedia phone with no 3G+ and no video, when you can buy cheaper and better multimedia phones like the Nokias, Samsungs and others!

France may be the first place where Apple is in fact forced to sell the iPhone unlocked!

Cool New Feature in Google Spreadsheets

2007-10-02T09:35:00.000+02:00

This morning I was perusing and updating one of my Google Spreadsheets when I discovered two new functions that make Google Spreadsheets Internet smart!
The description on Google reads:

Two new functions bring the power of Google directly into your spreadsheet. The GoogleFinance function retrieves current price and volume for stocks, indices and ETF's. For example, GoogleFinance("GOOG") returns the latest Google stock price.

The GoogleLookup function attempts to answer your question using the web, with information about people, places and things, like the population of Japan, the mass of Jupiter, or the place of birth of Abraham Lincoln. It doesn't know everything, but it knows quite a bit. For example, GoogleLookup("T Rex","length") returns "40 feet".

And this was actually quite helpful as I have a spreadsheet tracking some of my stock options and I was able to use the GoogleFinance function to have it automatically insert the current stock price!
The only thing missing now is an extension to the function to allow it to read Currency exchange rate then it will be perfect (or almost)

Halo 3 Finally at my House

2007-10-01T21:28:00.000+02:00

Ok so I am probably jumping on the bandwagon as well! But...
I finally received my copy of Halo 3 today! w00t I didn't get it on the release date (despite my vendor putting it in the mail before) as I order from a store in the UK so I am sure I get an English version of the contents (ed. Long story and not relevant).
Yesterday after work, I fired up the game! My honest opinion its fantastic even though I have not even finished chapter one yet as I ran out of time. But the game play so far is fast paced and full of action! And its damn hard, even on Normal game play mode (ed: I always play the game at normal first and then proceed)...
More post late when I get further through the game ;-)

Full Web Browsing on Mobiles

2007-10-01T17:41:00.000+02:00

According to this interview with some HTC folks, we could be seeing better browser support coming up on mobile devices.
The new mobile browser would support a complete set of functionalities from AJAX to XML via touched based zoom-in and zoom-out.
For example, Peter Chou from HTC indicates that:

HTC will have very good browser for full web browsing next year.

Mobile Internet is getting better and better...

Yet Another Text Input Method

2007-09-24T20:01:00.000+02:00

During Demo Fall 2007, Kannuu presented what they claim is a new and more intelligent way of entering text on a mobile device (or other small footprint system).
The web site description as well as a review on Crave, presents the system as an input method that is unlike others as all it uses is the «joystick» or navigation pad of the device.
The idea is to that the solution will present initial letters and then word completions (like other such systems based on predictive text) that you select through the navigation pad (up,down,left,right). Their claim is that this will work better as they have built contextual predictive text based on the application or desired input goal. So for example in a GPS activated application (such as Google Maps), the input would be based on place or location names.
This may indeed be a better way to input text but it will have to rival with the existing knowledge and habits of people who are now quite use to using the traditional text input on a mobile device.
Definitely a technology to watch!

New gMail in the Works

2007-09-24T19:45:00.000+02:00

According to this CNet Article, there might be a new gMail in the works. Well at least a new (and improved?) interface that might support Gears.
Personally, I basically always liked the interface as is. It provides a simple and convenient way to access view and access the e-mail. Gears might be useful but if I usually want offline support, I'll use a standard e-mail client like Thunderbird.
Knowing Google though I am sure that it will be a considerably better version! I hope that they spend sometime putting in some improved mobility aspects. Some of things I would like to see include:

SMS push notifications
and or direct push of e-mail to mobile
Better mobile client

GuildCafé: Social Networking for Gamers

2007-09-21T15:49:00.001+02:00

Feel like the typical social networks (Facebook, mySpace, ...) do not meet your gaming addictions? Well thjs new site might actually be of interest to you.

GuildCafé is a dedicated gaming site to bring together players and/or guild members outside of their typical playgrounds. Jon Radoff created the social network to give MMORPG gamers a space outside the game so that they could continue socializing with one another while continuing to use their gaming handles (their alter-ego) instead of their names as profiles.

Look me up FVTer player member.

People Are Biggest Threat to IT Security

2007-09-20T11:52:00.001+02:00

It is a common body of knowledge in IT Security that the biggest threat are People. There is really nothing new here! However the interesting twist in this post on The Register is that a Deloitte report/survey has shown that in fact it is not only the employees of financial institutions that are at cause but also the customers. Interestingly enough this cause beyond the individual company-customer relationship but also the company-to-company relationship. The ability, or in fact lack of it, to set-up business partnerships that are not prone to People error on one side or the other.

This just demonstrates the importance of having a Security Policy that is in fact in-depth and cause to the core of what a company needs to protect: The Information! Protecting the perimeter is no longer enough more in-depth solutions must be sought out and applied!

Firefox Memory Problems Fixed?

2007-09-20T11:38:00.001+02:00

News on the MozillaBlog would seem to suggest that Firefox may finally fix some of its memory issues:

Many Mozilla community members, including both volunteers and Mozilla Corporation employees, have been helping to reduce Firefox's memory usage and fix memory leak bugs lately. Hopefully, the result of this effort will be that Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2 did, especially after it has been used for several hours.

This would be good news. I have been fighting with Firefox memory issues since I adopted it as a browser. For example, right now What's Running tells me it is using up to 46560K when it starts and hits close to 265000K when it is no longer usable and drives me nuts!
I just hope they do succeed in finally fixing this bug (cause it is a bug)!

Hacker-Proof System? Will Ectocryp Be It?

2007-09-17T12:55:00.000+02:00

The European Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS) recently announced a new encryption protocol called Ectocryp.
The system apparently, according to this Crave post, owes its success to lightning fast key changes that keeps the cryptographic base continuously changing and thus, in theory, not discoverable by a hacker. EADS claims that the system can do real-time encryption of voice, video and data (at least according to their commercial). Their pamphlet claims 1Gbps throughput for the encryption which is pretty good and would be able to sustain their claims.
Definitely a Security technology to follow...

Search Directions

2007-09-14T13:10:00.000+02:00

Om Malik's blog entry on the evolution of Search Engines presents an interesting idea or notion on how searching might be improved as we move on. He covers what I think are two important notions: the first being assisted searching like Mahalo and the second being aggregation or hyper-aggregation of results into a consistent information view.
I started trying Mahalo a few weeks ago. The premise is that searching is facilitate by real people who build compilations of results tagged to specific keywords. This in theory provides the user with a more interesting and relevant view of what they are looking for. The problem is that this is in theory! In most cases this will work as long as you are searching for common information that is relevant to a majority of people.
But how successful can this be? Isn't this search aggregation just limiting the results and potentially excluding what one person might think is relevant versus some other persons...

Interactive Bar in London

2007-09-14T12:34:00.000+02:00

Just saw this Crave post regarding a new bar in London called the TwentyFour. The bar looks cool with wall-to-wall high-techiness! The description points out that the place is filled with the latest technology for lighting and drink making. The pictures from both the Crave article and the Bar web site are definitely intriguing.
I think that this will be a place to visit on my next trip to London.

New Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard

2007-09-14T09:00:00.000+02:00

I've been thinking of getting the Logitech G15 for a number of years now. However, I have been hesitant due to the large size and potentially not sure what to do with all the Macro keys they put on the thing.
Apparently the new version addresses some of these issues according to this ExtremeTech article. The article discuss some of the applications that use the LCD screen and I have to admit I was drawn to the WoW interface as well as others...
Definitely worth some further investigation and potential addition to the home hardware.

A Memorium to Glouton

2007-08-24T20:45:00.000+02:00

Over the past week, one of our cats named Glouton has fallen deathly ill. He has renal failure. The last of couple of days it has been getting worse.
The cat is not doing very well... Its having trouble moving & keeping its head up. I suppose that's what happens with renal failure, well from experience (note: we have lost two other cats that way as well so we kind of were expecting this).So we took the decision to take him to the Vets this evening and end his suffering. He had not eaten for two or thee days now and was crying out in pain.
The cat has had a good life been with us for close to 17 years. He turned 16 last year. Kept us company over 2 continents and has been an overall pleasant cat apart from the times we need to bath him as he soiled himself with diarrhea. To see more of this cute Persian pedigree take a look at these photos.

R.I.P Glouton, 2007-08-24 19:40 we will miss you flat pirate face...

2007-07-04T08:19:00.000+02:00

Ok, so I have just spent total of about 3 hours last night trying to get to the support from Free. Of which I got through like 5 times except that 4 of times I was hung up on. I decided to write a letter to them about this (they replied almost a month afterwards saying they had no idea what I was talking about).

Anyway when I finally got through.. There only answer is they cant do anything until I take my box and try it on a neighbors installation. Use their power supply and line! Who the fuck! are they kidding... That's insane!

First off, none of my direct neighbors have Free and besides that is like a by definition unrealistic argument because it doesn't prove anything! It also is just a complete and total disrespect for the customers. There is also a moral objection or social argument that by definition would not allow me to actually visit people I don't necessarily know and on top of that I must ask them to let me play with their ADSL connection. I say NO! This is just not RIGHT!

This just goes to show how this company just does not care about its customers nor do the respect them!

Today's my B'Day.. and F'up Very Much

2007-07-03T23:59:00.000+02:00

So today turned out to be my birthday and like the rest of this year has turned to some what crap... Anyway this is the extent of my exciting day:

First off, car bill to fix it in order to be able to pass inspection = 2700€
Then to top it off while I was doing something in the kitchen, an loud bang and flash of light hit one of the telephone connection points up the street. I saw it from my window! This was about 19:00! So apparently the surge jumped wires, etc ( I am on a different connection box) and hit my house anyway which basically did the following:

1. Blew out the ADSL box. now I am fighting to get it fixed :- the little green lights on the left side of the led display are blinking... IMHO the box got fried.. Free, the adsl supplier, thinks its the power supply;
2. Blew out my Network gear;
3. Blew out one of my phone, which I purchased only 2 months previously;
4. Nuked my home PC (how you ask read below).

Interestingly enough, you'd be amazed at how easy a surge can jump across telephone wires and spread. The surge came through the line until it hit something that was either a termination point or grounded. In this case the grounded equipment happened to be my PC. So the surge went through the phone line, into the DSL box (fried it), jumped into the Ethernet network (fried the switch) and finally landed on the computer...

Doing that Kyte.TV Thing

2007-06-29T15:17:00.000+02:00

So today, I joined the Kyte.TV craze. I decided that it might be in fact useful to be able to publish my rants and raves in glorious color webcam video!

So come check out my rants and raves on the fvter.Rant channel...

Need an applet to update all my web presence sites...

2007-06-28T13:53:00.000+02:00

There are more and more what some (and myself include) call web presence services. These include nano-blogs (like twitter, pownce, jaiku, ...) as well as social networking sites (facebook, virb, ...). With all of these having some form of social and presence attribute that works through the individual posting what is going on in their life.
It dawned on me this morning that some-one really needs to come up with an integrated tool that allows you to essentially replicate or post what you are doing to all these web presence sites. The application should in fact have these types of characteristics:

Allow the person to specify the current location
Allow the person to specify the current activity
Allow the person to nanoblog something
Allow the person to associate the activity, location and nanoblog entry together
Post the information to the different web presence services with more or less information based on the target environment
It should happen ALL at ONCE - one entry many updates

Over time I think that I could probably think of some other things for the app to do but for the moment this would be just fine!

Oh! And it should be mobile enabled as well!!!! ;)

PS: Greatly appreciate a nice person could invite me to Pownce...

Google Docs Upgrade... Are They a Collaboration Leader?

2007-06-27T16:05:00.000+02:00

Loading my regular tabs in Firefox today, I noticed that Google Docs had received a new update. I am not sure when they released the update but it caught my attention.

The main change that is noticeable is the new user interface. This new UI actually makes it IMHO more user friendly and presents the user's doc collection in a more familiar layout.

It provides a user with a view of his documents and has converted the document tags into folders. This is definitely an update that is useful for the overall functionality.

I am actually still impressed by the ease of use of Google Docs and the ability to collaborate in it with other people. It impress me because they have basically succeeded in creating a easy to use collaboration environment. Something that corporations, including the one I work for, are having an enormous trouble implementing... Makes you wonder why a company who has no vested interest in providing these types of services achieves it better than a corporate IT department whose users are crying out for it!

Why no news...

2007-06-19T14:19:00.001+02:00

I have to admit my Blogging has been kind of slow of late. To be truthful I am spending way too much of my free time on WoW. What to do... You spend so much time on medical leave you loose track of the real world and immerse yourself.

But there are some more concrete reasons as well. To be truthful, I have not come across anything really worth writing about in great detail (a ping on Twitter is enough). I also don't want to add to the blah-blah about the good and bads of some of the important tech news lately like why the iPhone needs to be better for Europe, etc...

No worries... I'll blog when the time is good and right and when the Rhum flows.

Steve Jobs Calls AppleTV a Hobby

2007-05-31T14:56:00.000+02:00

This video of Steve Jobs was taken during at the All Things Digital 2007 conference. The extracts from the complete discussion are quite interesting. What amused me the most is how he describes the Apple business being 3 things; one of them being a hobby :- the AppleTV ;-)

But the best part is Steve Jobs talking about iTunes on Windows and describing it as «giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell»! LOL...

Microsoft Surface Announced

2007-05-30T16:42:00.000+02:00

Microsoft yesterday evening announced its new human interface environment named Surface. The solution is quite impressive and provides a coffee table type screen with multi-touch input, something like what has been included in the Apple iPhone but in a bigger format. Check out the Popular Mechanics Video on Surface.

Interestingly enough this is not a «brand new» idea or technology. Microsoft, Apple and Synaptic are just commercializing an innovate solution developed by the Jeff Han at the New York University called Multi-Touch Interaction Research. I had, for my current job, helped identify this solution as a new and more intuitive mechanism for user to data interaction. I still believe it will be an incredible advance in the way we visualize and interact with data! ;-) What is good is that both Microsoft and Apple are really bringing this to the forefront and into the mainstream...

Definitely something to watch!

Whoa! StarCraft II Finally Announced

2007-05-21T10:03:00.000+02:00

I was no great fan of the original StarCraft. I was more of a Emperor - Battle for Dune or Dark Reign fan. This weekend Blizzard finally made the long awaited announcement that StarCraft II was in production and slated for release sometime in the near future [does that mean this year or next or ??? :- I wonder ;(]

The new version promises quick a fair bit of upgrades to the previous incarnation, including:

More distinctive race attributes meaning that the different playable races will have specific gaming elements;
Upgraded abilities for the original units that were present in the original
Uses a 3D engine that "realistic physics and the ability to render several large, highly detailed units and massive armies on-screen simultaneously."
Map editing to make your own battle grounds
Provides multiplayer support but only through battle.net if what has been currently written is true.

The hype intrigued me to check out the initial coverage from the usual places 1Up.com, GameSpot, IGN, etc. The game itself looks pretty impressive. IMHO when you see images like these and play footage like this you hard pressed to wonder if you will be able to resist not getting the game. My primary worry is what kind of processing power this is going to require.

I do have one regret though, why is it not MMORPG like? With World of Warcraft, Blizzard is leader of the pack in this domain so why not apply some of these learned techniques to new games... maybe for the 3rd iteration!

For more coverage check-out this 1Up story.

Revisiting Ruby on Rails

2007-05-03T20:54:00.000+02:00

While perusing digg.com today, I came across this interesting web page on Ruby on Rails tutorials. I had been following the developments of Ruby for awhile now but this page actually provided something useful: a set of tutorial links.

I was certainly intrigued by the flavor and depth of the list of help and tutorial sites. One link was especially useful and it includes an interactive tutorial: TryRuby!. Very nice...

Digging deeper, I found a really interesting video (it almost impressed me and that's no mean feat!): Creating a Weblog in 15 mins.

Conclusion: Going to invest some more time in a deeper understanding of Ruby on Rails.

Job Hunting Madness

2007-05-01T09:51:00.000+02:00

So during my convalescence, I realized that it was definitely time to start exploring new job opportunities. There are many reasons for this decisions but primarily because I realized that my current job is not going anywhere and has little or zero growth potential.

I have had contacts with some of the major players in the IT world but with no luck for the moment.

However this is where I have fallen into a catch-22 type situation. Why? As it would seem that the IT/IS industry is much more interested in looking for young cheap staff (and I suppose more dynamic)! But what happened to the need for experienced professionals to be give guidance and strength to those IT projects...

My search continues, I have my CV and search engines posted on most of the major online job sites (monster, stepstone, ...)

Electro-Luminescent Technology or Printed Segmented Electroluminescence

2007-04-26T17:11:00.000+02:00

I was recently reading some tech and sci-fi blogs when I came across this post aboutPixel Watches from O.D.M. The interesting thing with these watches is that they use electro-luminescent technology instead of standard LED displays or other. This technology is actually quite interesting it is more commonly known as Printed Segmented Electroluminescence or pSEL.

pSEL, according to WikiPedia, is a new technology (developed by UK company Pelikon) that builds on the phenomenon of electroluminescence and has uses in creating flexible displays and interface technologies. The technology essentially uses a printing method to encapture phosphorous materials that have different capacitive, insulation and conducting layers to create iconic and segmented lit areas. The company boasts that the displays are cheaper to produce, lightweight, brighter and can provide touch based input. Here is a demo from YouTube:

Can Playing the Wii Help You Exercise Correctly

2007-04-12T14:57:00.000+02:00

While reading my RSS feeds today, I ran across this article: Personal trainer turns to the Wii | Crave : The gadget blog.

Interestingly enough, it discuss how a personal trainer in Glasgow (UK for you non-geography types) has devised a fitness program using the Wii. I am assuming that this is achieved through an extensive physical use of the controller. That means getting off the couch and jumping around with the Wii mote in hand.

Well people, I am trying to do that exactly (althought this week will be hard as my son ran off with the Wii for his vacation). I have been diligently playing Wii Sports doing both the Training and Practice activities and some events like tennis, bowling and boxing.

To be fair my Wii Training Age has varied anywhere between 28 (achieved 2 days ago) versus 50 (that one was done about 4 days ago). The problem is that for some of the sports I have not quite gotten the nack of them.

Going to keep on practicing... Cause this is finally a fitness program I can live with! ;-)

Is Internet invading all in France...

2007-04-03T10:38:00.001+02:00

Ok, so the title is kind of lame for one of my first rants on this blog. Its all about how much the Internet is becoming a daily tool for every tom, dick & harry here in France.

This all started when we went to purchase a new stove top for the kitchen. The unit was purchased from the biggest home appliance chain :- Darty. This is a store that has in the last couple of years complete adopted the Internet as an extension/tool for their physical commercial presence and IMHO are doing it quite successfully. Their site not only provides online purchasing but also can tell you in which store near your location has the item you are interested in. They have even become one of the newest kids on the bloc for providing triple-play DSL services. More recently they have moved to provide a customer interface.

During the purchase, the sales rep gave us an Internet account pamphlet. The card inside the pamphlet provides you with a client account number and a temporary password (which you then need to change). The card basically ties your purchasing and support information to a web profile that you create. Giving you the facility to track your purchasing history, on-going deliveries and customer care issues.

The Future of Twitter, Dave Winer's Thoughts

2007-03-28T16:12:00.000+02:00

I have been a long time follower of Dave Winer and an early adopter and scripter on Dave's product UserLand. However that was back in the day when I had time, money and much more...

Recently, I came across his handle on Twitter and have been following him since.

Today he posted on his blog at scripting.com some interesting thoughts on what the future of Twitter might be! The article itself presents some of Dave's ideas such as:

A world-wide command line
Twitter OpenSource Clones
External connectors

Over the past few years, I have been working on a lot of mobility projects. I think that a stronger direction in the mobility domain maybe a way to go for Twitter:

A more integrated location attachment to the Twitter (beyond TwitterVision), the idea being that when you are Twitting while moving around, a mobility tag automatically gets added somehow. This could be achieved through GPS location tools on PDAs or GSM/Cell Tower location detection.

In that same respect and as a follow through:

Maybe a close integration with Twitter and mobile displays or electronic displays to be able to display twitters based on the location where you are. That is to say and for example, when you walk into a certain area you get notified of other twitters in the area and what they are up-to.

So that's may basic thoughts on what may be some evolutions for Twitter...

TGV 150 - Another Speed Record for the French Train System

2007-03-27T13:35:00.000+02:00

With the recent inauguration of the new railway tracks for the TGV going from Paris towards the east, the SNCF (French railway company) and Alsthom expect to set a new world speed record for the train travel.

Operation TGV 150, where 150 again refers to a target speed in metres per second, is a series of high speed trials currently underway on the LGV Est, prior to its June 2007 opening. Operation TGV 150 is conducted jointly by SNCF, TGV builder Alstom, and LGV Est owner Réseau Ferré de France. The highest speeds are expected to be reached near kilometer post 190 on the LGV Est, between the Meuse and Champagne-Ardenne TGV stations, where the most favorable profile exists. Following a series of increasingly high speed runs, the official speed record attempt will take place on April 5 2007, with a target speed of 570 km/h. (Thanks WikiPedia)

The TGV is just an amazing overall feet of technology. As we say in french :- «incroyable»!

Time to Buy an XBox360? Elite!

2007-03-27T13:15:00.000+02:00

So the rumor mill has been going on about a new version (xbox360v2) for awhile now, since December 2006 or there abouts.

More recently, both Engadget and Xbox360Fanboy have been reporting on recent information, «officially» or not, leaked from Microsoft. Engadget actually reports on what could be official specs from Microsoft that include a black profile, HDMi output and 120gb HD but unfortunately still no built-in WiFi or HD-DVD. While Fanboy has gotten its hands on some spy photos from the production line.

I just pray they keep the price to a nice number and that it is made quickly available in the EU so that I can finally check one of these out of the store! Huahhh...

MonkeyLeader VidCasts on PS3

2007-03-27T12:18:00.001+02:00

My mate MonkeyLeader posted a couple of video-casts on his impressions of the PS3.

However, I am still not convinced about it yet. Maybe I just need to go and play some games on it (do I hear an invite Nige?). All but the great technology it includes (inc. the cell processor) and the cool integration of Folding@Home [ed. I think that using idle CPU time to better the world is a fantastic idea], I find it to be an expensive overkill - or possibly dude - but that is just my impression.

Laptop Coolers!

2007-03-26T13:43:00.000+02:00

I have unfortunately for the past 3 months been house and couch ridden. Luckily I have a laptop! I have however been feeling the crunch of the overheated CPU (even though it is supposed to be a Centrino Duo). No burn marks on my lap yet but it makes me wonder...

This led me to an article on the Crave Blog from last week. The article talks about some the different laptop cooling devices that fit underneath the laptop and protect both it and your lap or desk. I was actually surprised to see that the non-powered ones are just as effective or even maybe more effective than those that are powered by a USB port (downside of that being the additional drain on the battery).

Hmmm... May need to invest in one of these, something to look into on my next trip to the U.S.