I am naturally reviewing and following many blogs and news sites related to Linux. There are two themes that keep strong presence in the Linux related media. This are of course:

1. Is Linux ready for being Desktop operating system?
2. Bitching Microsoft.

I must say that I am myself is guilty of expressing my point of view on the first issue.

As for the second issue, I must say that I am truly overwhelmed with amount of dirt that being consistently spilled on Microsoft. I am not a great fun of the Redmond giant, but this blind hate has never did any good to anyone.

At last, there is one sane voice in the crowd. Have a look: http://www.pcmech.com/article/good-linux-users-dont-talk-about-microsoft/

I am wondering what it takes to be a QA engineer, testing software. As a software engineer I am looking for ways to solve problems. I’m usually being told where the problem is and there I am looking for a solution. It takes me hours and sometimes days. I am trying various configurations. I am hacking the code looking for the problem.

Things are pretty simple on our end. Finding what causes the problem is 90% of the solution. The rest 10% can be difficult sometimes, but only because there may be many different solutions and it takes a little effort to find the best thing to do.

Not so with QA engineers.

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This is a first out of several articles describing Bazaar, the distributed version control system. This series is intended for Subversion users, who may decide that they need a little more from their version control system.

Read the article here

This is really amazing stuff. It appears that modern memory chips don’t loose their content immediately after power loss. Apparently, it takes two minutes to the loose their content completely. Moreover, you can cool the memory chip using regular dust remover spray. This will keep the memory content intact for at least 10 minutes.

This is more than enough time to plug the memory stick into another laptop, boot it and dump the memory content to hard-disk.

The operating system cannot be Linux or any other modern OS because it will immediately overwrite the content of the memory stick. DOS or any of its clones is probably the perfect OS for this task.

Anyway, as video below shows, this can be used to crack encrypted hard drive. Encryption for encrypted hard drives done in software. The software (probably all kinds of it) keeps the key it uses to encrypt the data in memory. So, to crack encrypted hard drive, all you have to do is to grab its RAM, dump RAM contents to a file and find the key in the file. The later part can be tricky, but this is doable, given enough time.

Based on research from Princeton University, via twitter @jithin1987.

My guest post on Daily Blog Tips!
Don’t give up and keep cool.

When git appeared for the first time, I was convinced that I don’t need it. It seemed that git is good for large and distributed projects, like kernel. While my own needs where much more modest – manage a project with couple of dozen files and perhaps a couple of contributors at most.

Couple of years passed and I am now looking into Bazaar. This is a relatively new distributed version control system. I think I’ll write more about Bazaar, but in the meantime, I’d like to share some thoughts that crossed my mind while I was playing with it.

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What is the most frequently used piece of software on your computer? Here’s one program that holds one of the highest place in my list of most frequently used programs. I am talking about… bash.

In case you don’t know, this is the program behind large portion of the Linux command line. It is the program that actually makes majority of work turning Linux command line into such a magnificent tool it is.

As for use frequency, on my computer the only program that beats it is perhaps a web browser. I use it more often than mail client, text processor or just any other program.

Now, one thing that entertains me is that there is absolutely no hype around bash. I mean, you probably know that next version of Firefox coming tomorrow (I am writing this on June 9th, 2009). But do you know when next version of bash is coming? Do you even know what is the version of bash that you currently use? Well, you are not alone – I have no clue either

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This post starts a new category of posts called Code library. In this category I will post useful code snippets. I hope you’ll find them as useful as I do.

I use two functions below quiet often. Both functions do hexadecimal dump of given buffer. First function is in C. Second function is in Python. Enjoy.

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This article explains how to implement performance critical reference counting in C/C++ program, using atomic variables and gcc. Enjoy it.

Read the article here.

There were a couple of things actually, but most of them were solvable one way or another. There was one problem that I could not solve.

I have a N95 cell. phone. There are couple of applications I use on it, but one of them I use the most. It is called Handy Safe Pro. It is an encrypted database of personal information.

I have all my life in this database. All my credit card numbers with their PINs, bank account access information, passwords for various passwords, passwords for this blog, etc.

I am not really afraid to loose it, because this particular program comes with a version for Windows. I actively work with two different computers and both the computers and a cell. phone, all have the updated database. Oh and because the database is encrypted with Blowfish 448 bit long key, I am not really afraid that someone may steal it.

I rarely change the database using the cellular phone itself. Instead, Windows version allows you to modify the database and sync it.

I use this application more often than Word, or SlickEdit or any other program on my life. Well, perhaps web browser is a program that I use more often, but it is the only one. Because it is so important for me, I went searching for an alternative for Linux. Unfortunately I didn’t find one.

There are personal information managers for Linux of course, but I didn’t find one the syncs with a cell. phone. Very unfortunate occasion. Then I thought perhaps I should write one myself