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Thursday, June 25, 2009
June 25th, around 2am: So, my trip is starting and I'm going to update my records in this post. Now I'm sitting in Kurumoch International Airport waiting for check in. Obviously KUF couldn't change radically since my last flight last October. It's still a kind of country shop or farm, but now they have really fast and FREE wireless internet ...that is absolutely oposite to Frankfurt International! Shame on them!
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Friday, June 5, 2009
Well, last Saturday (30th May) I had a chance to visit city day fireworks with some of my friends. Basically I didn't use to visit this type of street festivities as the common sense says me that it always has regrettable results in Samara. But... Ok... I've gone as there are some folks I want to hang out with.
So, the beginning was quite inspirational: nice dinner in a sushi place, walk to embankment and even beautiful firework. We were on embankment near Polevaya and people there were relatively calm (except for one drunk freak who were constantly yelling: "Hooray! Samara-Samara! Glory to Russia! CSKA(??????!) champion!"). Also we didn't see the laser show, but it might be our fault as it promoted to be near Ladya, so we might stay to far away.
But real comedy started after we caught a tram to back home. So, we have a really mucky tram with a unconscious guy with bleeding broken head accompanied by his stupid girlfriend (she just stroked his shoulder, kissed him instead of getting him to the hospital which is just opposite the tram stop!) as a background. Me and Katie fortunately took our seats, Tom was standing... sorry Tom.
What's next? In the next 20 minutes I fully realized who made Russian revolution - the masses. So the masses - the crowd of drank freaks (who were totally drunk long before the fireworks - thanks to the soccer match :))) quickly filled the entire car. With the fabulous aroma of beer and urine they also bring total chaos in the tram: they block the exits, constantly press the emergency brake button, knock at the door... windows... roof, yelling, etc.
All this situation seems to be pathetic and funny but only until the moment when they turned off electricity and engine, saying that the tram is broken because of frequent emergency brake button usage... well, my travel companion seems not to be very happy... but in a few minutes the engine started work fine! It was just a psychological trick to make that clowns in the car more calm! After that point things went much better - "the masses" start leaving the tram, it goes without the accidents. We safely came to our homes.
But, I have a few conclusion:
1) crowded events are evil;
2) crowded events in Russia are doubly evil as a lot of drunk idiots want to show their boldness;
3) crowded events in Russia on the day of soccer match and two days after the frontier guard forces day are triple evil;
4) using municipal transport in such situation is an awful idea;
5) and the last thing - never believe tram drivers, they always ready for kidding!!!
And as a soundtrack for that event:
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Thursday, May 21, 2009
Several high-profile break-ins have resulted from hackers guessing the answers to secret questions (the hijacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was one). This week, research from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University, presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, will show how woefully insecure secret questions actually are. As reported in Technology Review: 'In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.
Schneier pointed out years ago how weird it is to have a password-recovery mechanism that is less secure than the password.
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009
It's so much for a calm morning. I'm dying of laughter because of this guy :)
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Monday, May 18, 2009
Yesterday I had a chance to meet with a Sony VAIO vgn-cs110e laptop. OS on this laptop was killed either by a virus or poor windows update, however the solution was to do a fresh install of Vista Home Premium. But after installation the other problem appears: after downloading all the drivers, I installed the Sony Notebook Utilities. Then ever since that, this pop up would keep showing up and force me to hibernate. 
No matter if it's a kind of collusion between Sony and Microsoft to prevent installation of any non-OEM copies of Windows or just a bug, but the only way to fix this problem was to uninstall Sony Notebook Utilities. This is a really bad idea as it disable laptop's web-camera...
So, after the long googling and exploring system processes I found out that you need to disable "ISB Utility" service (using Starter software or msconfig) to prevent that noisy popup to appear.
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Tuesday, May 5, 2009
A few days ago my boss has stopped using ZTE626 3G modem (which is sold by Beeline – Russian mobile provider). The reason why he's made this decision is that the amount of data traffic, his specific software produce, increased dramatically, so it's a bad idea to use such an expansive 3G internet for his applications.
BUT.... For my daily use (e-mail, IM, facebook, etc.) it's good enough. As I have wireless internet connection at home and office the only device to add internet is my laptop running on Ubuntu 9.04 :)
Well, lets start:
our modem has some freaken habits – it launchs virtual CD with windows' drivers and software just after USB connect, preventing it from working properly on any operation system except Windows. And it CAN'T work with any other ISP except Beeline.
To fix both these problems we should upgrade modem's firmware:
1)download this stuff http://www.zte.com.au/downloads/software/MF626_M02_Uptool.zip from Australian ZTE website;
2)backup windows software in case you want to use the modem on windows systems;
3)run it ON WINDOWS, remove SIM-card beforehand
4)click YES on all requests and DON'T remove modem from USB slot
5)now get SIM back
After all these operations you can use your modem with any ISP, not only Beeline. The blue light should indicate EDGE\GPRS signal, the green light for 3G and the red one for unreachable signal instead of original green\red beeline's combination.
To prevent virtual CD start we need QPST software:
1)download it http://forum.allsiemens.com/viewtopic.php?p=539784
2)run Beeline's software on Windows;
3)run Device Manager (My Computer->Properties) and look for modem's COM-port number there;
4)install QPST and configure port number in QPST Configuration;
5)run QPST->EFS explorer and delete CD_STARTUP_FLAG file from modem's filesystem
Actually now your Ubuntu 9.04 is able to find and automatically configure ZTE modem. To ensure you did all these things right type ls /dev/ttyUSB* in terminal, it should list one to three devices.
This how-to should works on all linux distributions with 2.6.27.9 or later kernel. If your kernel is older you may try to add ONDA module, download it here http://narod.ru/disk/5376885000/linuxdriveronda.tar.gz.html, compile and install it... should work.
I hope it's helpful for anybody.
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