An American architect Bryan Berg has created a replica of the Venetian Macau using 218,792 playing cards from 4,051 decks of cards. It took him 44 days to create the model which measures 33 feet by just under 10 feet.
All I can say when I see this is: Wow! It takes skill to do something like this and its just wow. If you are in Macau then do check it out. Its located in the Macau’s Cotai Strip.
– Suramya
After 3 years of wait and constant nagging from my part mom’s new car has finally arrived. This car was supposed to be bought the same time as the Honda City three years ago. Basically the Honda was my gift to Dad and this my gift to Mom. Anyways after all the delays we have finally purchased a Chevrolet Beat LT and I drove it home from the showroom a few mins ago.
I had just about given up that this car would ever be purchased because everytime we would start deciding on a model a new model was announced and we just kept postponing the buy waiting for the next one. We Went from Zen Estillo to Spark to Honda Jazz to a couple of others.
Here are some pics to give you an idea of what the car looks like:
Dad, Mom and Me with the car
View of the car’s Dashboard.
One thing I can say after driving the car… Its a smooth drive, the steering is very sensitive and the engine is quite powerful so the car will be fun to drive once I get used to the controls. 🙂
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya
The crew at How It Should Have Ended is quite well known for its re-imagining’s of how famous movies should have ended. In their latest installment they tackle how the latest Star Trek by J. J. Abrams’ should have ended
Check it out. BTW, keep in mind that the video is NSFF (Not Safe For Fanboys).
– Suramya
I was reading the latest post on the Flipkart Blog where they talked about how they lost a customer because they addressed him informally in their correspondence with him and it started me thinking about how important it is to make sure that you address a person correctly. The problem is that the ‘correct’ mode of address changes depending on where you are and who you are addressing.
Till I went to college (before 1999) mode of address was easy, anyone in the same generation as you but older was called Bhaiya/Didi (elder brother/sister), anyone younger than you was called by their name. Any person from the older generation was either called Uncle/Aunty or by their relationship to you. Oh and teachers were called Sir or Mam. Over all quite easy to remember.
When I went to college in the US everything changed and it was a shock. Suddenly I was supposed to call my professors by their name which I felt was rude and when I started working I kept calling my bosses Sir/Mam. It wasn’t me being formal but just showing respect which thankfully they understood. Still I was told to stop doing that and call them by their names. For a person coming from a background where you never call your elders by name it was a big deal and took me quite a while to get used to it.
Then I came back to India and was lost again, because by then I was used to calling everyone by name even when they had kids older than me. In personal interactions it wasn’t that big a problem but professionally it was an issue. If you called someone by their name they felt that you weren’t giving them the appropriate respect. So I ended up calling everyone senior to me Mr xyz or Ms Xmy.
Luckily for me all the companies I have worked for had people who dealt with Americans or had studied in the US so if I accidentally called someone by their first name it wasn’t an issue.
Now I have a simple policy in this regard, if you are my age or 5-10 years older I will call you by your name unless corrected and if you are older then that I will call you by your last name. This is for in-person meetings, for conversations over the phone I take my cue from whoever introduces me to them; if they called the person by their first name I do the same otherwise its was back to formality. (Though I have stopped calling anyone sir or mam and I tell all my juniors to not call me sir.)
The mode of address is a small part of dealing with a customer/co-worker but is quite important. You want to come across as an approachable person but not get too familiar which some people might find offensive and its quite a balancing act.
I sympathize with Flipkart that they lost a customer but in the customer’s defense he told them that he wanted to be addressed formally but they still addressed him informally so its understandable that the person got ticked…
Another way to annoy a person is to get the gender wrong when addressing them. I have made that mistake but thankfully the person I was corresponding with had a sense of humor and corrected me without getting upset. Since then I try to be extra careful when using gender based vocabulary in an email but to my dismay the name doesn’t always tell if a person is a male or female especially when you are dealing with names from another culture. So I rarely use gender specific words when I don’t know the sex of the person I am emailing/chatting with.
The funny part is that my name has been mistaken for a girls name a couple of times so I know what it feels to be on the other side. But still, I think most issues can be overcome if both parties are willing to work for it and have a sense of humor (Yes, I know sometimes humor doesn’t translate well across cultures but that’s for another post)
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya
A lot of times when you connect to a wireless hotspot or a network there are restrictions in place which prevent you from accessing the web without some sort of authentication or restrict the kind of connections allowed. Usually that’s not a problem but at times you need to be able to bypass the restrictions.
In normal cases the firewalls in place usually allow outgoing connections to pass through but in some cases even outbound connections are blocked or you need to pay for access. In such cases you can use UDP Tunneling to bypass any restrictions.
Keep in mind that using such methods on a network will not endear you to your network administrator and if caught might cause you trouble. You might even end up in Jail. So don’t try to use this for anything illegal or to browse porn at work.
The way it works is that when you try to browse to a website your system sends a request to a name server on UDP Port 53. On a lot of hotspots/firewalls/proxies the system waits for the Name server to respond and when it gets a response it redirects you to a login page or redirects you to a web proxy. What allows us to do a UDP tunnel is the fact that all port 53 UDP traffic is allowed out to anywhere on the web, without any kind of authentication.
So if you have a VPN configured to connect over UDP port 53 instead of the default port 1194 then you should be able to bypass the restrictions.
Basically what you have to do is setup a OpenVPN server on a public server and then configure it to use port 53 instead of the default 1194. Once you do that you can configure your VPN client on a laptop to connect to the server on port 53. Once connected all new connections will go over the VPN connection and you should be able to browser the web without issues or blocks.
Thanks to Adam Palmer for the tip.
[Update 11/26/2014] Please use the updated link iodigitalsec.com as the original one is broken.
I think I am going to set up a VPN server on my desktop so when I am away from home and need web access I can use this technique to get access.
– Suramya
When we talk about Big Brother most people worry about government’s having the power to monitor what people are doing. Some worry about companies monitoring their staff but that too in the office. No one really thinks about how certain schools have decided to monitor their student bodies.
Recently one of the students at Harriton High , Rosemont Pennsylvania filed a class action lawsuite against the school alleging that Matsko (The Assistant Vice Principal) “informed minor plaintiff that the school district was of the belief that minor plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home and cited as evidence a photograph from the Webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.”
School teachers/board have absolute power over their student body, not in a physical or legal sense but the power and control is still there. They control the grades and they decide how the education is being imparted to students thus controlling the student’s future. In most cases this is not an issue but sometimes the school goes over-board. In Harriton High they decided that they had the right to watch over their student body even when they were not at school and used the Laptops that the school provided to enable them to do so.
Basically they used a remote-management product called LANrev, which enabled staff members to activate Webcams built into the MacBook laptops to take snapshots of the students without their knowledge. Officially the software was put in to track stolen laptops but as with all surveillance tools it was misused by the school staff.
On most laptops there is a light that comes on when the webcam is in use so that the users know when the webcam is activated. A lot of students noticed that the light came on intermittently and when they complained they were told that this was a ‘glitch’ and the webcams were not actually in use.
The best part is that the Laptop’s were firmware locked to prevent the students from verifying the official story. In-fact if a student jail-broke the laptop it was grounds for immediate suspension. This in itself makes me believe that the laptops were used to spy on the students. In addition it was mandatory for students to use the laptops provided by school for classes instead of using their personal laptops.
Stryde Hax: The Spy at Harriton High has a very nice technical writeup of how the school was spying on students and using the laptop’s webcams to take photos without the student’s knowledge.
Although the school has denied that they were spying on students not a lot of people believe them (including me). Oh I agree that it’s not an official policy but I am 100% sure that one or more staff members used the opportunity to spy on the students.
When I read the story the first thing that came to my mind was that the easiest way to prevent the school from watching would have been to put a piece of opaque tape on the webcam. That’s what I would have done…
Now that the story is out in public the FBI is investigating the case. This is a very scary scenario and if its not stopped immediately and the people responsible are not punished then it will set a dangerous precedent for other school’s and companies. What is to stop companies from using the laptops that they issue to spy on their users? Most users keep their laptops in their bedroom and I am sure they don’t want their company/office/school knowing what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom.
Source: SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 15.
– Suramya
Augmented reality, the words bring to mind a science fiction world where people wear glasses hooked up to computers that give additional information on the item being looked at. I have read scores of novels where this technology is in use by humans (both in a positive and negative sense) but till date this technology was still in the realm of Science Fiction.
Now this has changed. ThinkAnApp studio based in Buenos Aries has developed specialized software that allows them to create a tattoo that when viewed through a camera gets transformed into a flying dragon. Or anything else you want. Pretty cool eh?
Here’s what the Tattoo looks like when viewed through a camera:
Check out the video demoing the tattoo in action here.
This is just a prototype and isn’t released for public use yet. But it is a step in the right direction and slowly but surely we are moving closer to the day when the virtual world will overlay the real world and open up all the awesome possibilities that entails.
Source: ThinkAnApp – Augmented Reality (tattoo).
– Suramya
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