When I recently stumbled across the (already old) Stuxnet article on Wired I was just amazed. This article describes how the Stuxnet worm was discovered and disassembled, the target it tried to attack and it shows how advanced this work is. The article reads like a novel from Dan Brown and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the latest news about the cyberwar….
wired.com: How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History
Beeindruckend wie “Santa Claus” funktioniert…. er:
… beschäftigt 290.000 Menschen, unterhält eine Flotte aus 75.000 Lkws und besitzt und operiert 684 Jets…
… In den Nächten jedes Werktages starten und landen hier 150 bis 200 Jets – alle 90 Sekunden einer. Selbst der Superjumbo 777 ist in einer halben Stunde entladen…
…. Es gibt Beobachter, die halten den FedEx-SuperHub für eines der sieben industriellen Weltwunder – neben Toyotas Autofabriken oder Googles Rechenzentren. So falsch liegen sie wohl nicht…
Der ganze Artikel auf Technology Review ist sehr lesenswert!
Unser Shifu:
Extra im Advent zum Stehlen angereist, geriet eine Verbrecher-Bande im Starbucks-Café an der Wiener Invalidengasse an den Falschen: Auf frischer Tat von Kriminalisten entdeckt, wollten die Profi-Diebe flüchten – doch der Kung-Fu-Kampfsportler Wolfgang Gall (41) half sofort der Kripo und überwältigte die Rumänen.
Just to make it clear – we are talking about Powerpoint presentations here, not about war. Although the US Army talks a lot about Powerpoint.
Anyhow, Seth Godin summarizes the idea behind good presentations very well:
Communication is the transfer of emotion.
Slides should help you to sell the idea by bringing emotions along, later on people can look the talk up in a written document. You do have a written document, don’t you?
Read the full article called “Really Bad Powerpoint” and make sure to avoid the usage of bullets as they kill people.
(Image from dilbert.com)
Heute habe ich versucht AON.at ADSL von der Telekom auf meinem Mac OSX Leopard Rechner einzurichten. Effektiv habe ich ziemlich lange “versucht” und auch Google hat nicht wirklich weitergeholfen, daher hier die Anleitung um via AON.at ins Internet zu kommen:
Ich gehe davon aus, dass alles richtig verkabelt ist und man durch Eingabe von http://10.0.0.138/ im Browser auf die Modem-Konfiguration gelangt. Falls nicht, hier hilft Google noch weiter 
Noch viel wichtiger ist die richtige Auswahl unter “Advanced” – hier muss “Send all traffic over VPN connection” ausgewählt sein. Sonst verbindet sich das VPN zwar aber alle Anfragen gehen ins Nirvana, nicht mal DNS Auflösung funktioniert.Das war’s auch schon.
Spannend wird dann noch die Verbindung der Airport Extreme mit dem ADSL… mal schauen ob das klappt.
… Oftmals handele es sich bei den Betreibern nicht um besonders ausgebildete oder befähigte Personen.
Na davon gehe ich bei Kriminellen aus – “Gewissen” scheint da ja niemand eines zu haben…
(via Heise)
Vienna has passed Zurich to take the top spot as the world’s city with the best quality of living, according to the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living Survey. Geneva retains its position in third place, while Vancouver and Auckland are now joint fourth in the rankings.
While I’m happy to live in Vienna I also would not mind living in Auckland for some time…
The full report can be found here.
While the follow up article of “Must-have tools for HTML, JavaScript and AJAX development and debugging” (which has also been translated to Chinese, Japanese and Korean) is not written yet I want to share a useful trick that helps debugging live Web applications by injecting custom files into them.
The problem is how to test a new version of a JavaScript library on a production system without even touching the system itself in any way. Testing with local copies of the HTML pages work fine for a few files but does not scale very well, and staging systems might not be properly configured or really tell you if something works on the production system (bugs always just happen in production, right?).
Another problem with debugging JavaScript on production system is that the files might be compressed, which makes debugging in Firebug almost impossible – variable names are shortenend and line numbers don’t make sense any more – would be great to have the uncompressed version instead…
The solution is using a local proxy and replacing certain requests with local files. That way custom files can be injected based on regular expressions and tests can be performed on the production site or even on sites without access to the system itself.
While Fiddler works great on Windows and Charles Proxy does the same on OSX I want to present the poor man’s solution which makes use of any local Apache installation (i.e. MAMP).
The required changes in the httpd.conf are:
# Enable proxy requests
ProxyRequests On
ProxyVia On
<Proxy *>
# Secure the proxy to allow localhost requests only
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
Allow from ::1# replace some files with local copies
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule myfile.js http://localhost:8888/test/myfile.source.js [P]# Disable caching
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault “now”
</Proxy>
Lets go through the changes line by line:
The first two lines enable the Apache Proxy support (ProxyRequests On); the <Proxy *> block then configures the proxy further. As stated in the documentation multiple times it is a good thing to secure the server, that’s why only access from localhost is permitted. The important part are now the RewriteRules – they proxy certain requests to the local server instead of the remote server, in the sample above all requests that contain myfile.js will be replaced by the version served from the local server. This could as well be any other remote machine serving the file, as the request is proxied again ([P] flag). Finally caching is avoided by setting all files to expire right now (while this adds more load to the proxy it is not that bad to do during testing).
Now the proxy has to be used in the browser or application of choice; once the proxy settings are changed within the networks settings the access log of Apache should become quite busy when browsing around and, depending on your mod_rewrite settings above, some requests should be replaced with the local copy of a file, making debugging way easier.
Of course the drawbacks of the poor man’s solution are that Apache has to be reloaded in case the RewriteRules change and changing the configuration is not as comfortable as with the dedicated proxy solutions mentioned above. Nevertheless this solution works, is fast and very reliable… and free
As a GTD advocate I already tested Things vs. Todo and also compared it to Remember The Milk. Now a new (star?) application is under development by the PotionFactory – named “The Hit List“.
What makes the new application (which is in beta mode right now) a real hit is its focus on the keyboard – adding tasks, moving them around, starting timers, editing, tagging, all can be done with a few simple keystrokes. Simple – just f, x, space, enter. No Cmd+Command+Shift+# kind of “short”cuts. This makes handling tasks the GTD way a lot faster than using the mouse to manage hundreds of tasks in various projects.
Also the developer really listens to the Google Group to get early feedback of the users – a really agile way of developing such an application!
What would be reasons for me to switch over from Todo/Toodledo? Well, while Toodledo is a Web application and therefore platform independent it is not as efficient to use as the optimized THL application (I’m Mac only now, so who cares about other platforms?). On the other side I fear that THL only does Wireless syncing and cannot sync via a server (MobileMe?) which would be a show stopper – I want to sync any time, independend of the network and not be restricted by a running computer or network issues*. Also the iPhone part of THL was not released yet, it has to be at least as efficient and fast as Todo (which does a pretty good job on the iPhone!).
But hey, The Hit List is in beta mode right now and PotionFactory is working hard on finishing the implementation, lets see how the final product looks like…. if syncing works, the iPhone app is useable and the whole package is not too pricy I’ll consider switching over…
(Image source)
*) I wonder why various apps (1Password, Things, …) do not just sync their data on any https protected WebDAV location, like the iDisk or others. This would work between any PC, Mac and iPhone, not require any additional server component, be secure and free the user from having a desktop application running on the same network. Firewalls would not be a problem as well…
Die Vereinigten Staaten sind ja nicht ganz unwichtig für den Rest der Welt – und trotzdem verstehen wir Europäer die Amerikaner nicht immer und nicht wirklich. Zum Glück gibt es einen sehr lesenswerten Blog names “USA Erklärt” in welchem Scot W. Stevenson auf unterhaltsame Weise über Amerika aufklärt. Das klingt dann ungefähr so:
Auf die Frage an die beste Freundin, wie einem ein Kleid steht, wird eine Deutsche vielleicht das Gesicht verziehen und “Du, nicht wirklich” sagen oder “Ich weiß nicht, ob es dir so gut steht”, eine Amerikanerin aber eher etwas wie “Würde blau nicht besser zu deinen Augen passen?”. Für eine Amerikanerin heißt das, du siehst aus wie eine magersüchtige Vogelscheuche mit einem Heroin-Problem, während eine Deutsche das Gefühl hat, man redet aneinander vorbei. Augen? Was faselt die von meinen Augen? Ich will wissen, ob mein Arsch fett aussieht!
Sehr lesenswert das ganze, und da es schon einige Einträge gibt fangt man am Besten mit der Top-5-Liste an.
(Bild von flickr)