CBA, Opus, GCE, Books: Getting Real, SSL/TLS, Start-up, Business Economy Guide, New TLDs, IT projects

Post date: Jul 25, 2012 5:14:13 AM

If you're wondering how much stuff I have been doing in short time interval, there are two reasons. I'm on summer vacation, bad weather and finally I have been extracting my blogging backlog.

  • Studied Opus Audio format, which should be better than other options (MP3, AAC, OGG, etc.) At least Firefox and Opera already support it.
  • Studied different Wind Turbine designs, pros and cons. - Laughed at some funny futuristic visions, which aren't practical at all.
  • Studied Cold Boot Attacks, how hard it's to create really secure systems. I have known basic principles for a along time, but learning more details is nice. Remember guys, if they can get physical access to a running system, even TrueCrypt won't protect your data, if volumes are mounted. I guess if you're pro in this sector, you simply chill down memory chips, turn of the host computer and place chips to system which starts copies all memory content from chips for permanent storage.
  • Studied Google Compute Engine - It seems that they provide much more powerful services than what I or we need currently. Many smaller IaaS service providers fill my/our needs much better. My Amazon EC2 micro instance trial expired, well, I didn't use it for anything else than testing and playing anyway.
  • Added to Kindle: Getting Real by 37signals, Securing the Cloud: Cloud Computer Security Techniques and Tactics by Vic (J.R.) Winkler.
  • Finished reading books: Money and Happiness (Finnish) and SSL/TLS deployment best practices manual. I also recapped Start-up Guide 2011 (Finnish) and Small Business Economy Guide (Finnish), which I have read earlier.
  • New TLDs: Wondered how many systems will break after new TLD are being used. Does http://server refer to local server named server or .server TLD? Who's actually using server.local or FQDNs? - As we should! Why site .ac doesn't work if referred as http://.ac but it does if it's http://ac or http://ac. (tested with latest Firefox & Ubuntu Linux) and why they then got that leading . in their logo? Well, there wil be some issues to be resolved and I'm sure that all systems won't handle those situations similarly. Time will tell.
  • Read nice article about how hard it can be to download a file regularly. Simple things can turn out to be not so simple when analyzed in real world detail.
  • Health care IT systems: Read long article about Finnish health care information systems from medical journal. It was about system integration, organizational processes, software development, supplier agreements, system interoperability, project risks etc. And how to fail to interoperate. Finnish e-prescription has been under development for more than 10 years. Let's see when those are actully being used. Article stated that there have been one million e-prescriptions written already. But that's still very small percentage of all prescriptions being issued.

Uh oh, now my blogging backlog is only 12 kilobytes anymore. There are some longer topics which I would like to write whole posting about one topic. Let's see when I got right mood for that.