Navigation
-
Recent Posts
Archives
- September 2018
- November 2017
- August 2017
- May 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- October 2016
- September 2016
- August 2016
- July 2016
- June 2016
- May 2016
- March 2016
- January 2016
- December 2015
- November 2015
- September 2015
- March 2015
- December 2014
- November 2014
- March 2014
- January 2014
- March 2013
- February 2013
- October 2012
- July 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- January 2011
- July 2010
- April 2010
- December 2009
- July 2009
- December 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- February 2008
- September 2007
- June 2007
- March 2007
- December 2006
- July 2006
- April 2006
- February 2006
- November 2005
- October 2005
- July 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
Categories
Meta
Author Archives: George
Breaking the Vigenere cipher
s
I have signed up for the excellent Cryptography course by Prof. Jonathan Katz at Coursera, and took the first programming assignment which was about breaking the Vigenere cipher. The instructor explained one of the ways to do it, and recommended to rely on letter distribution in English. But while the suggested approach was interesting, I […]
Android: an easy splash screen implementation using ImageView
s
I’ve seen a number of suggestions of how to implement a splash screen properly. Most typical implementation is through activities. To show it, you need to make it the first activity in your application, which has a few disadvantages: It is an activity, so it will use the Android-specific effect (typically sliding) to switch from […]
android Comments Off on Android: an easy splash screen implementation using ImageView
OpenSuSE 13.2: do not use BTRFS as rootfs
s
OpenSuSE 13.2 comes with BTRFS chosen as your default rootfs, replacing the old trusted ext4. Unfortunately the kernel version it ships with contains a known flaw which breaks some software using preallocated files and mmap() on them. Known issues have been reported for rtorrent (failed synchronization) and KDE (plasma-desktop crashes and could not be restarted […]
Running Mac OS X under qemu/KVM on AMD CPU
s
Due to the excellent work of Gabriel L.Somlo it is possible to run the emulated Mac OS X on Linux under Qemu/KVM. The changes seem to be minimal, and the operating system emulation works well – as long as you have the Intel CPU, that’s it. If you have only the AMD CPU, the emulation […]
Practical difference between epoll and Windows IO Completion Ports (IOCP)
s
Introduction This article compares the difference between the use of epoll and Windows I/O Completion Port (hereby IOCP). It may be of interest to system architects who need to create a high-performance cross-platform networking servers, and to software engineers porting such code from Windows to Linux or vice versa. It may also be of interest […]
select / poll / epoll: practical difference for system architects
s
When designing a high performance networking application with non-blocking socket I/O, the architect needs to decide which polling method to use to monitor the events generated by those sockets. There are several such methods, and the use cases for each of them are different. Choosing the correct method may be critical to satisfy the application […]
Failed to load steamui.so ?
s
Recent Steam update switched it to SDL2, so unless you have the very latest libSDL2 installed, you’ll get an error while trying to load Steam: Fatal error: Failed to load steamui.so The short test will quickly tell you the problem: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32 ld $HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so which will print a bunch of lines starting from: ld: warning: libSDL2-2.0.so.0, […]
Installing Steam at the unsupported Linux which is not Ubuntu
s
Today at Feb 14th Valve released Steam for Linux. At this moment it officially only supports Ubuntu. However it is easy to run it on any other Linux distribution, in my case at OpenSuSE 12.2.
Preventing WordPress comments spam
s
There seem to be an easy way to prevent a significant number of WordPress comment spam. The majority of spam comments nowadays come with either a bunch of URLs, or with a generic message such as: Hi there! Just discovered your site while i was browsing and i must say that i found it quite […]
Uncategorized Comments Off on Preventing WordPress comments spam
Reverse-engineering the KaraFun file format. Part 4, the encryption
s
So far all the files we have seen were not encrypted. However some users pointed out there are KFN files which are encrypted. While the encrypted files were still analysed and dumped properly, the output files were encrypted and hence unusable. But the users also confirmed that KaraFun player plays those files just fine, and does […]