When droid doesn’t
I’ve been comparing V’s iPhone to my G1 for a while now. If you are wondering who wins, its my old Sony Ericsson dumbphone. If you need a phone that does everything that a phone should do, it does it better than these smarter guys.
The iPhone looks great. You can’t beat how even the worst apps look so good. However, if you want a smart computer in your hands, this isn’t it. Sure you can check email and browse but you can’t background apps, everything is tightly controlled by Apple making it very frustrating for a tech buff like me to appreciate.
The G1 shine in these areas. However, it’s also its pitfall. I’m running cyanogen’s modified ROM. It gives me the latest and greatest in Android releases which I cannot get officially. But I also get random crashes, extreme slowness at times and other quirks that make the phone unusable at times. You could argue I could stick with the standard Google ROM. But then I’m running software that is a year old. Also, by running the official ROM, it does resolve all my issues. I can still run multiple apps in the background. This still makes the 500Mhz processor crawl to a halt at times. Since Android cannot control what apps are good or bad, or how much processing times each app takes up, it ends up making the phone unusable. If I stop all backgrounding apps, the phone is useful again but then, its just the iPhone.
So does iPhone have it right then. Yes and no. The ‘closed’ Apple policy has advantages. It can control things like user experience by blocking on not providing certain features (ie backgrounding, full bluetooth control etc). Users end up with a phone that works well under most circumstances and with ample battery life.
Android provides users with the platform ‘openness’. However, this leads users frustrated with a phone that could potentially run terribly slow or drain the battery within hours of use.
I think Android has the right approach. A lot of the problems are limitations of hardware. A faster processor, better battery can go a long way to alleviate the current issues. The openness is a more important aspect to maintain. Early adopters will feel the pain.
In the meantime, if someone has an old SE phone, I’d love to have it.
Reproductive biology: Girls on top
Fascinating post about how evolution is beyond us.
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15125173
Reopen Sesame
The open sesame post describes a way for password management that is quite effective. However, there are some shortcomings. One, you need software which means when you don’t have it, you don’t have your password. While this isn’t a problem for most of us who are always online, it’s hard when I’m traveling in India and the concept is free wifi isn’t as common. Another problem is security. Supergenpass, it seems, can get access to your root password if executed on malicious sites. Lastpass stores all your passwords online (encrypted using a root password of your choice) making the prospect uncomfortable for some.
Here is an alternate solution to strong passwords. Come up with a small strong password that is easy to remember. Let say your root password phrase is ‘camelot’. Now come up with a consistent ciphering algorithm.
For example, replace all A’s with @ or all O’s with zeros etc. Capitalize every third letter.
Now, your root password becomes something like ‘c@Mel0t’. Now for each site either prefix or suffix the site name and apply the same ciphering algorithm.
So, if you visit www.google.com, you end up with a password like ‘g00glEc@Mel0t’.
Use this approach to create more replacements or change to rules so you come up with your own. One thing a lot of people might point out though is someone who has access to one password now knows your root password and hence can guess the passwords to all sites. This isn’t entirely true. A lot depends on your scheme. For example, if I need a yahoo password using the scheme above, it becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. Since the rule was to capitalize every third letter, the root password differs from the google one. Also, since you come up with the rules, you can make them as complicated as you need. For example, capitalize the 3rd letter, if the 3rd letter matches your cipher don’t go the cipher. Using this rule. Your google password becomes ‘g0OglEc@MelOt’ and yahoo becomes ‘y@H00C@mEl0T’. The your google password now starts with ‘g-zero-caps o’ as opposed to ‘g-zero-zero’.
Lets hear your innovate ways to password management sans software.
Directions please
Online maps and directions are great. However, how does something like this work in India where most streets don’t have names (they probably do) but more importantly most people haven’t the faintest idea what they are.
Well, here is the solution. And it is of course from Google.
Why Are Europeans White?
Anisha is here
Anisha was born Dec 6th 17:50pm. Check out her pics. Hopefully, I’ll have time to keep it updated.
Open Sesame
Having different passwords for different sites is impossible to remember. One password for all site is a security nightmare. Here is my solution to this.
I use SuperGenPass. This cool little javascript is a bookmarklet that can be run on any site you visit to generate a unique password. It uses a combination of a user provided password and the site domain name to generate a strong unique password.
One advantage is that I only need to remember one password to generate unique passwords for any site. Also, the unique password is the same throughout the domain. Another advantage is that I don’t need internet access to generate the password since the javascript is run locally rather than remotely. So I have access to my passwords even if I am not online.
There are some shortcomings as well. One quite serious issue is that it currently does not use special characters to generate passwords. Special characters in passwords make it exponentially harder to break rather than just using letters and numbers. Another problem is that certain sites have limitation on passwords; ie. no longer than 8 characters or disallow certain characters etc. This means that the generated password will need to be modified to work for the site which makes it harder for you the remember it when you revisit. This really is a site issue and not a supergenpass issue. Sites should not restrict passwords, especially strong passwords. It also seems like it is possible for a site to get access to your private password even though the javascript is run locally. You can read about that particular issue here
A combination of SuperGenPass and Lastpass is possibly the ideal solution. Run supergenpass on a site you trust to generate your password. Enter the password on the desired site and sign up. Let lastpass remember that password for future use.
Time for some history bashing
Here is a great way to preserve bash history between sessions and reboots so you have access to them for a fair amount of time.
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups export HISTSIZE=10000 shopt -s histappend
The first one will remove duplicates from the history (when a new item is added). For example imagine the number of history spots taken up by ls. Not very useful.
The second one increase the history size. With duplicates erased, the history already holds a lot more actual information, but I still like to increase it from the default.
The third line ensures that when you exit a shell, the history from that session is appended to ~/.bash_history. Without this, you might very well lose the history of entire sessions (rather weird that this is not enabled by default).
Excuse Me, But Where Did Google’s Organic Search Results Go?
Here is a good read about Google advertising results overwhelming organic results in vertical local spaces.
http://www.seobook.com/excuse-me-where-did-googles-organic-search-results-go
Planned migration
I’ve been planning to migrate to my new server for months now and it had been pending forever for several odd reasons. I finally have it up and running and the blog has been migrated so its almost fully functional. Some bits are still missing however this will get time as and when I find time.
Highlights of the migration
- New RAID 6 server so my data is secure.
- Centralized LDAP Authentication system. No duplicate/multiple registration.
- Email. Yay! I finally I have own email and don’t need to rely on Google or anyone else.
- Space. This is relative to my old server. Currently This is at 2TB after RAID but there is provisioning for a lot more.