Author Archives: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

The Certificate Authority model does not work for LAN devices

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
18

HTTPS is the future and the future is (finally) here. Secure HTTP requests that provide end-to-end encryption between the client making the request and the server providing it with the requested content is finally making some headway, with almost a third of the top one million sites on the internet serving content over SSL, as of August 2017:1

But what this chart doesn’t show is an important subsection of HTTP traffic that is unfortunately infamous for a general lack of security: IoT. The “internet of things,” as it is called, is famous for fiascoes that have allowed hackers to break into the privacy of homes, spying on consumers via internet-enabled nanny cams, gaining access to so-called “smart locks” to break into houses, obtaining sensitive information, and exposing private content and data thanks to insecurely designed consumer products and services that live on the local network.

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  1. Source: BuiltWith SSL trends ↩

A high-performance, cross-platform tac rewrite

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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If you haven’t heard of tac, it’s a pretty nifty command-line utility that ships with the GNU utils and it’s used to print a file backwards, line-by-line. It’s especially useful when analyzing things like log files, and judicious use of tac can speed up commands considerably.

Take the example of a 30GiB webserver access log and you want to see the last request to a certain resource or that triggered a particular HTTP status code. You could run the following to get the last such request… which would take quite awhile on anything larger than a few hundred MiB:

> egrep "GET /path/to/resource " access.log | tail -n1

Or you could be smart about it and use tac instead, and not even have time to blink before the result comes back:

> tac access.log | egrep "GET /path/to/resource " | head -n1

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Stuck on .NET 2.0 – 3.5? Copy streams easily with this NuGet extension!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
1

If you’re still stuck on .NET 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5 for any reason and don’t have access to the .CopyTo method for System.IO.Stream objects, the Stream.CopyTo extension method, available as a small NuGet package will make manually allocating buffers and other boilerplate associated with copying a buffer from one stream to another a thing of the past.

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Will AMD’s Ryzen finally bring SHA extensions to Intel’s CPUs?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
1

If you have any skin invested in the high-performance computing game, you’ve almost certainly heard of the likes of MMX and SSE, the original “extensions” to the x86 assembly instruction set that provided task-specific performance-optimized instructions that let developers take advantage of specific hardware extensions to quickly perform tasks that previously required extra steps in software to compute. If you haven’t, here’s a quick briefer.

The “basic” instructions supported by PCs are known as the “x86 assembly language” and is the lowest level of code available for writing software that runs on a “regular PC,” originally developed by Intel and adopted by other players in the CPU game (including AMD and the now-defunct Via CPUs). All PCs from the original Intel 8086 way back in 1978 to modern, multi-core behemoths support this language, and code written in or compiled for x86 can (in theory) run on any machine from 1978 onwards.

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Easy Window Switcher 1.1.0 with international keyboard support

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
24

Hello international users of EWS! We’re really happy to announce the immediate availability of Easy Window Switcher 1.1.0, which brings support for internationalized keyboards to EWS users worldwide!

For those that haven’t been keeping in touch, Easy Window Switcher is a nifty, tiny utility that boosts your productivity by adding the ability to “alt-tab” between windows of the same application only, with the keyboard combination alt` (on US keyboards), a shortcut that should be intimately familiar to anyone that’s used OS X for any length of time.

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Which carry-on electronics are bigger than a cell phone?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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From the “they clearly didn’t think this one through” department,1 comes news of the federal government’s new ban on “electronic devices larger than a cellphone” from eight Muslim-majority countries, ostensibly to defend against in-air terror attacks that could somehow come via a device that’s been x-rayed and powered on to ensure it works. But what’s a cell phone and how big is too big?

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  1. The poor fellas in this department have been so overworked these past 60 days. They’ve really never put in this much overtime since, well, ever. ↩

Easy Window Switcher 1.0.1

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
9

We’ve just released the inevitable bugfix build for any product launch with Easy Window Switcher 1.0.1, which adds the ability to cycle between maximized windows. Hat-tip to Chris Bollman for reporting this bug.

Upgrading EWS is very straight-forward, as soon as you download and run the new version of EWS, you’ll see a dialog like the following:

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What happens when Imgur goes out of business?

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
1


Today, while browsing the internet and looking at some “old” guides from 2012 I came across a familiar sight: a forum thread with hundreds of inline images, all of them once hosted with ImageShack, now permanently inaccessible. For those of you too green to remember, ImageShack and PhotoBucket were the Imgurs of yesteryear. Free photo/image hosting/sharing services that stepped in to fill the void when users needed to share pics on sites that didn’t offer image uploading/hosting themselves.

Today, it is far more likely that users recognize the names of once-behemoths PhotoBucket or ImageShack not from their years of glory but from coming across images like this, the fossils that remain from the time when these two beasts ruled the image hosting world and roamed the interwebs unopposed:1

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  1. If the images below give you pause or perhaps make your heart skip a beat – know that you’re not alone. It brings us much pain and no comic relief to un-ironically embed these “image not found” images in this post. ↩

Full range of Lenovo T570 options revealed

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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Lenovo’s ThinkPad T570, the much-awaited, supposed MacBook killer that was first announced at CES in January, is now available for pre-order via Lenovo Hong Kong – meaning users can finally see what specs are available and (roughly) how much it’s going to cost them.

Let’s get this out of the way: disappointingly, once again, Lenovo doesn’t seem to have made available configuration options that feature Intel’s fastest mobile chips; the most powerful option available is the Kaby Lake-powered i7-7600U. This is almost certainly a conscious and thought-out decision, as 7600U is the highest you can go without a massive jump in TDP – the higher-spec’d 7700HQ and above all weigh in at 45W TDP, compared to the 7600U’s thrifty 25W TDP. Dell’s Precision (and possibly XPS15?) and HP’s ZBook lineups will likely be the only way to get more raw processing power for your next purchase – at the cost of greatly-reduced battery life, no doubt.

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