Top Web Store Bugs

Couple of sofware bugs I have faced:

Worst: In some web stores there is a software bug that they process credit card number as integer number not as character string. Because first number in my credit card is zero it gets dropped out and I am not able to buy from those stores.

Best: In one web shop (I am not going to tell which) there is a bug that after payment the order is placed as many times as you press refresh page button in browser. So you pay just once but get as many products shipped as you want. It is nice and I am pretty sure this is not the only store that has this same bug.

Open Letter to Acer

I recently bought Acer Aspire 7250 laptop. My purpose was to install Ubuntu alongside with Windows 7 and carefull man as I am I created Acer recovery disks (took 4 DVDs) to be able to restore device to factory default state if something goes wrong. And something did go wrong and boot loader got corrupted somehow and device did not boot anymore. Luckily I had created recovery disks - I thought. But it appeared that "lighter" recovery only restores contents of C: drive and it did not fix boot sector and when I tried "harder" total restore I got this:

WTF?! How am I supposed to clear disk when device does not boot and even if it boots what am I supposed to do? Why the hell recovery does not do cleanup itself? Recovery disks appeared to be totally unusable. There must be somewhere in Acer some braindead individual who is actually responsible for this total crap recovery system. I hope - and I believe I speak on behalf of many who have rendered their brand new laptops unusable - that this idiot will be executed. Thank you.

p.s. Luckily I was able to install Grub from Ubuntu cd and then boot to Windows and create Windows recovery CD and then use that to rewrite MBR.

p.p.s. I did not succeed to make WLAN work from Ubuntu on this laptop (and that was reason I wanted to get rid of it). Good hints are welcomed.

hezMobile Launched

I started another blog where I am going to collect links to interesting mobile world news and trends. You may want to take a look it. Hint, hint.

Interesting statistics

StatCounter site provides interesting global web usage statistics over many years. E.g. different browser and operating system trends are visualized as nice and clear diagrams. It is interesting e.g. to see that Symbian is still clearly dominating smartphone operating system globally having circa 32% share of all web usage in last month.

Samsung's tab beats Apple 1-0

I am happy Samsung Galaxy 10.1" owner and have been very happy with it. Unfortunately Apple is so well aware of how superior Galaxy is compared to iPad that it is trying to prevent Samsung selling its product. And actually have succeeded to ban it in some countries. Samsung has offered to remove some features to make it less iPad look a like.

Alien Dalvik

Emulator named “Alien Dalvik” will run Android applications on MeeGo smarphones (like Nokia N9). This is awesome. I wonder if all apps work in practice.

Secret Agenda

Stephen "Trojan" Elop has been leading Nokia about one year now. His brave decision to change worlds most popular smart phone operating system (at that time) Symbian to the least popular (Window Phone) has dropped company's stock value by 12 milliard euros to the half and made market share dropping like a stone. I wonder if Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer's primary mission given for Stephen within Nokia was to make Nokia succeed with Windows or just to make sure to ruin Symbian and MeeGo ecosystems. Microsoft can succeed with other mobile handset manufacturers as well when these are vanished.. but that was just another conspiracy theory. Nokia has good opportunity to succeed with Microsoft.

Kindle for Android and more

Just tried Amazon's free Kindle reading application for Android (from Android Market). Otherwise nice but screen of my Samsung Galaxy S II is too small for comfortable book reading experience. Tried also browser version "Cloud reader" and it was quite ok on laptop. Amazon Kindle reader device would surely be nice but I think it is a bit expensive as it can't be used to anything else (many may see this as a good thing as well). Maybe I should consider buying some (Android?) tablet for e-book reading and couch surfing.

Brain Computer Interface for Smarphone

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark made Nokia N900 smartphone equipped with Emotiv EPOC EEG headset to monitor neural EEG signals on the go. This is the first time a phone has provided the power for an EEG headset, which monitors the electrical activity of the brain.
The headset would normally connect wirelessly to a USB receiver plugged into a PC as e.g. in this experiment where N900 music player is controlled with pure thought.

Bright Future of MeeGo

Android ecosystem is fragmentin i.e. there is so many versions from different manufacturers each having their own extensions that for customers it is getting hard to know if certain application will work in their device or not. Google bought Motorola phones and said they will give new Android version for other manufacturers later than for Motorola. Also Android phone and tablet manufacturers are forced to pay high royalties to Microsoft due to some patent issues. This all makes Android less attractive and will make MeeGo more and more tempting alternative. It is true open source project whereas Android is "open source" but completely controller by one player.
See interesting Android vs. MeeGo comparison here.

Yet another reason to drink a can of beer

Check out these instructions to hand craft directional WLAN antenna adjuster of beer can. You need to drink it empty first of course. Better make many many of them just in case.

t2'11 Challenge

This year's hacking contest is over. The first person to send the solution was given a free ticket to the T2 Information Security conference. Ludvig Strigeus from Sweden was the first one. Congratulations! The competition was fierce and there was only a four minute margin between first and second

Windows 8 has antivirus included

In Windows 8 the improvements to Windows Defender will help protect you from all types of malware, including viruses, worms, bots and rootkits. Is this going to kill traditional antivirus software providers? Well, Internet Explorer did not completely kill alternative web browsers so they still may have some hope to survive.

Voddler movies on the road

Voddler online film service has launched their free movie application also for Symbian 3 (Anna) phones. I have used Android version (that was available already) and must say that this is incredibly cool service.

Tor Hidden Services

I have been running TOR relay for some time already but just recently discovered the world of TOR hidden services and I was kind of shocked. There is services like BlackMarket and Silk Road where drugs and guns and whatever is sold (and paid with anonymous, untrackable Bitcoins). Also child porn and other sick and illegal material is easily available. I am advocate of privacy and anonymous web use but this is something I was not hoping to see. For sure authorities will intervene at some point and actually I wonder why they have not done that already. Is it so that they don't have technical means to interfere or what? In the mean time there is wild west going on in the dark underground of the internet and it is quite exciting I must admit.

Welcome to my corner

I am starting this blog to puke out all the shit out of my head. Or actually I will not waste your time but will write shortly (or maybe I am just lazy). Anyway plan is to write about miscellaneous interesting stuff that means computer and web related things mostly as I am nerd of worst kind.