There's always a first time for everything and for me it was trying out Citi Bike. During a recent stay in downtown Miami, I wanted a fast way to get to Miami Beach and take a dive into the ocean. My options were to run, take a taxi, take public transport, or rent a bike, — Continue reading »
Peru Hikes - Marcahuasi, Machu Picchu
📆 May 8, 2015
On a recent trip to Peru with a friend we did 2 hikes, one near Lima and the other near Cusco. Near Lima, Marcahuasi is one of those open secrets that you hope it'll never become too popular. It's a stone forest filled with rocks that resemble human, animal, and alien faces and shapes. Some — Continue reading »
Live Long And Prosper Spock
📆 March 1, 2015
In my native country of Iran during the pre-Islamic-revolution times, the television, rife with American films, was a window into the western culture, specially the American culture, for most people. But Star Trek was something else. It wasn't so much a glimpse of the western culture than it was the promise of what humanity could — Continue reading »
The SSL Safety Myth
📆 February 26, 2015
The past week the security universe has been pounded by a whirlwind of bad press and bad actors. It all started with the news of Lenovo pre-installing adware (better yet, crapware) on new machines that would allow ads from a company with the ironic and unfortunate name, Superfish, to display context ads even when users — Continue reading »
What The Linux Ghost Bug Teaches
📆 February 17, 2015
A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that a known Linux bug, Ghost (short-ish for the gethostbyname() function in the older glibc library versions) is riskier than previously thought. So the internet became abuzz with warnings to those who might not have updated their Linux distros. I have several versions of Fedora running on — Continue reading »
Windows 10 Disappearing Start Menu Mystery
📆 February 10, 2015
I have Windows 10 Pro Technical Review installed on a virtual machine at work and all was going swimmingly until the updates came along a while back and pushed it to Build 9926. That was the end of the Start menu, it just vanished. I made a bunch settings and config changes as advised by — Continue reading »
PHP - echo'ing String Fragments Using Periods Vs. Commas
📆 January 24, 2015
One of the mysteries of PHP's echo function is the supposed equal treatment of multiple strings separated by periods (.) vs. those separated by commas (,). Actually echo is a language construct, but I digress. In both cases echo appears to concatenate the string fragments and output the resulting string. In actuality, the period is — Continue reading »
Give a few Sats