All posts by kobaan

Archive

Hot Icecubes ?

I don’t know if it’s big news for you,
but it was for me.Ice doesn’t have to be cold as one might think.

We’re talking about water-ice, right. According to Sandia Labs I just learned
that, water can have a lot more than only one iced aggregate
state. In our everyday live we only know 3 states for most
substances: liquid, hard, gas respectively in case of H2O=water:
water, ice, steam.
In fact there are 11 states of different ice states known for
water, yet.
firecubes
Using the Z machine at Sandia Labs, scientists managed to
compress water to ice within the record time of only 100
nanoseconds by using a pressure of 50.000 to 120.000 atmospheres.
In this state, water becomes hard as ice, but it is also extremely
hot.
z-machine
The Z machine itself is intended to create extremely high
temperatures, like in the interior of stars, by heating a plasma
with 20 million amperes of electric power.

What do we need this for ? Winking

…melting diamonds…
…creating the ultimate cocktail on the rocks…
…you know there was this discussion about global warming and
stuff…
…yeah maybe we just all need to open the door of our fridges, or
a z machine….
…I’m gonna order one.

Archive, Japan

Natto Storage Devices ?

For the ones of you not knowing what
“Natto” is: Natto are fermented (fouling) soy beans, and
are quite favourite as food all over asia. In my opinion, it smells
horibble, so stay away.
The bacteria used to get the beans so sticky fouling is called
Bacillus subtilis and only rarely causes food poisoning.
Winking
250px-Natto_mixed
Now back to storage devices…
…well that’s the news, – it – is the new storage devices, not the
Natto itself, but the DNA of the bacteria.Scientists (Natto lovers ?) from Keio University in Japan, of the
Institute for Advanced Biosciences, managed to “store” a short
message “E=mc^2 1905!” inside the genome of this bacillus subtilis.
Since DNA copying over generations and other environmental
influences, always leads to mutations (that’s evolution baby…),
the scientists decided NOT to use a cryptic and complex algorithm,
but instead used 4 different positions inside of the genome chain
to place the message information data multiple times. Thus
providing redundancy against damage and a possible error correction
when the message is read back from the DNA sequence.
bp060261yf00001
Although this method already works quite well, there still is the
problem of the slow process (about 24 hours) of DNA construction
and sequence analysis, to actually write and read data.
But once these problems are solved, It might be that your harddisk
or DVD is not any longer your biggest data storage, instead you
could explore the billions of secret contents of your “Natto”
storage device.

Uhh.., smelly computer… Natto drive ?
Kobaan.

Archive, Operating System

Mac Mail application speedup,cleanup

For those of you experiencing
slowdowns on Mac OS’s Mail application over some time, this might
be a cheap trick for you to get back speed and disk-space.
Mail, is keeping track of mail message subjects in a database, to
quickly scan, search and organize threading in your
mailboxes.The good thing is: once you delete a mail, it is also gets deleted
in the database…
The bad thing is: a database needs to be maintained, and this is
not done automatically…

What does this mean now….
…your database deletes items by reference, but it does not free
up the allocated disk-space, thus blowing up your overall database
size which leads to longer access times as more (empty) data needs
to be parsed through.

The solution:

While your Mail application is NOT running…
…use a terminal and go into “cd ~/Library/Mail”…
…open the database with: “sqlite3 Envelope Index”…
…and free up the already deleted database disk-space using:
“vacuum subjects;”…
…et voila, quit sqlite3 and you’re done.

Mail will be quite fast again, and your disk capacity should show a
few more free blocks.

Archive

PayPal transaction token keyoffer

Today I got my PayPal trasaction
token.
DSC02850Using a token generator is much more safe than using traditional
passwords, as they generate a time based one-time valid
token-number which is then used to sign a transaction.
Phishing of useraccounts and passwords might still be possible, but
of less use, as the token code is only valid for a short time, and
one-time only.
DSC02857

Compared to the token of my bank account, PayPals token is a little
bit smaller, and uses a button to activate itself other than
pulling the left side on the other token.
The number of digits is equal, but usually a secondary secret PIN
is used to complete the code.
For example you may need to enter: tokencode+PIN or PIN+tokencode,
or even PIN1+tokencode+PIN2(or a displayed session number)
DSC02856

Finally PayPal also delivers a nice laminated note with a top ten
of essential security behaviour rules, as well as a shart manual on
usage of the token, and helpdesk information.
DSC02853DSC02851

All in one: I really appreciate PayPal going this direction, what a
great idea, I just hope lots of banks will follow PayPals example
on how security can be increased efficiently, as there is a big
demand for this on the customer side, but only a few banks or
transaction providers offering such a service.

Get your token now from PayPal’s special offer: “Der PayPal
Sicherheitsschlüssel.” (search on PayPal.com for offerings in
your language/country)

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