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 »
DNS Verification Error
📆 December 22, 2014
Recently it was brought to my attention that the domain name hashemian.com has a DNS error associated with it. The domain's DNS is hosted with its registrar as many registrars provide basic DNS service for free. This service generally consists of two name servers with varying degrees of restrictions to configure zones and records. Concerned, — Continue reading »
YouTube Sleep Aid
📆 December 14, 2014
I was reading about interesting winter apps in a magazine and one mentioned was a fireplace app, so I wondered if there was a fireplace video on YouTube. That was the proverbial Pandora's box. The search led to dozens of fireplace videos of varying lengths but then it further expanded to thousands of videos of other — Continue reading »
Amazon Diapers To The Rescue
📆 December 7, 2014
When I opened my inbox last friday, an email from Amazon greeted me with the title: "Announcing Price Reductions for AWS Data Transfer and Amazon CloudFront" I wondered how Amazon was going to make up the difference in the face of stiff competition from other cloud vendors. Then I saw Amazon diapers in the news and — Continue reading »
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