Skeinforce

Well it all started with iMac. Hypnotised with its beauty we bought one in May last year. One problem we had was our password management program Zippylock was Windows only and required .NET. I know this because I know who wrote it (bloggerboy)!

Earlier my mate Ricardo showed me a wrapper he wrote around Skein hash functions which grabbed my attention. Skein is a piece of beauty. Well it is small, coded in C, portable, very fast, and very powerful. You can go up to 1024-bit encryption with Skein. Behind Skein there is a good-looking team of security gurus and my security idol Bruce Schneier.

So I said OK. How about I write a little utility like Zippylock, this time x-platform though. So I wanted a x-platform GUI and x-platform compatible binary serialisation with locale support. What this means in short, I wanted to be able to transform my database file across Windows and Mac. Say I come to work, and enrol to a new professional forum. Then I add my user credentials into the database, save the database file in my USB drive, and use it on my iMac at home.

I also wanted to have a much simpler user interface. So the idea of designing something like Google suggest popped up. Google suggest has been introduced by Google recently, you know the thing, as you type you see a list of most popular options and the list narrows down with your typing.

Miraculously the x-platform development kit Qt from Nokia had a sample code of a widget on Google suggest metaphor.

I kicked off project Skeinforce here in Negative Matter on the 18 November 2009. Luckily all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle joined well and I've just finished the project earlier than I anticipated. It was great fun despite my wife’s fair protests of me neglecting house work and not communicating (as always she was right.)

Along the way I learned Qt (what a brilliant toolkit!), kept my programming mojo alive (I can’t live without coding), learned a few Unix and Mac tricks and in the end I had a nice little utility that I dreamed for. I guess the best part of being a developer (who doesn’t have kids;) you can design your own thing.

Anyway this is a free tool, and could be useful to many. You can download it from the following location (I'll also make the source code available soon.) Feedbacks are welcome.

http://members.iinet.net.au/~coruh/skeinforce/

#nocleanfeed

I've joined the Great Australian Internet Blackout this Australia Day, because we believe in every Aussie's right to responsible freedom of speech.

The Rudd Government has said it will introduce a new law requiring Internet service providers to filter all Internet connections - including yours.

Follow this link and stand united against Internet censorship

Bravo Google

In this blog I have criticised Google's earlier decision made in 2006 to censor itself in China.

In mid-December 2009 Google and at least twenty other large companies faced massive cyber attacks originated from China. Unexpectedly Google shared the information with broad audience and issued a statement on their official blog.

Google stated:

"We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.
...
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
...
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences."

This is the Google we want to see, walking their talk don't be evil. This is what makes an organisation a giant. And this is how you make a difference in the history of humanity. Bravo Google.

The Year 2010

We all know the year 2010 is a random section across the eternal arrow of time, yet we think this is going to be a special episode to rewind our lives, start a healthy diet, quit smoking etc.

The year started with the news of a mass murder in Finland by an Albanian migrant, this is followed by routine suicide bombings in Pakistan and Iraq. Then cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and his granddaughter were attacked by a Somalian jihadist with an axe in his hand in Denmark, as usual dozens of people were killed in road accidents, even the legendary Sydney fireworks were not less boring than last year's.

The only spectacular exception to these depressive chain of events was of course the movie "Avatar". Avatar was the only human achievement worth to talk if you are obsessed with yearly summaries.

It is interesting that I started the year by reducing entropy that I have been responsible for. Stuff grew in my wardrobe drawer on their own in the last ten years or so. I have been able to find memorabilia such as a train ticket from year 2001, a never used hair brush that massages your scalp, various coins from different parts of the world, obsolete medicine prescriptions, obsolete medicine, business cards that I forgot where they came from, truckloads of dust mites and so on. It took me two hours to clean up the drawer. Then I went down to our garage and with a manic expression on my face I crushed and tore off dozens of empty card-boards that were saved in case they would be needed.

I am now beginning to understand desperate house wives and why they are so obsessed with cleaning. It gives you a false sense of achievement by re-ordering stuff. In fact all you have done is to reduce disorderliness accumulated in your environment because of you.

Where does this lead us? Well nowhere really. The earth is going to be warmer, more living species will become extinct due to us, there will be more suicide bombings, we will interpret return of 'the greed' as 'economic recovery' until we have another economic downturn in a decade or so, in nearly one in three of my age group some form of cancer time bomb will expire in the next decade or so, more misfortunes everywhere.

Or are these events really misfortunes? Like Seneca perhaps we should learn to accept misfortunes as being unavoidable parts of our lives rather than mere exceptions.

Wikipedia Forever

I have just made a small contribution to Wikipedia.

Long time ago, when hand held calculators first came out I was a high school student. We had a physics teacher whose name was Şükrü Kapucu (*). He was a forward thinking charismatic man, a sharp intellectual, an unpretentious revolutionary, an unconventional thinker, an outspoken atheist, a gentleman and above all 'a man of enlightenment'. He played a grand role in shaping my identity, may he rest in peace.

Everyday Şükrü Kapucu used to engrave his trademark motto upon us, over and over again: "knowledge is universal". These words never came out of my mind. Today at this moment I still vividly recall with his own voice the very words of his "knowledge is universal".

'Knowledge is universal' means knowledge should be accessible to all. Yet we take it for granted. Providing universal knowledge is not entirely free. It takes a handful of men's determination and volunteer work to make it happen.

Today there is only one non-profit organisation that did the most to spread the knowledge universally, fulfilling my teacher's dream, and that is Wikipedia. There is not a day in my life passes that I don't use Wikipedia at least once a day.

Demand for free universal knowledge steadily grows. Spread of universal knowledge is essential for fighting against poverty, diseases, injustice and poverty. More African villages will connect to Internet than last year. As a non-profit organisation Wikipedia needs our contribution to run its services reliably and effectively.

So please consider donating by clicking the below picture.



(*) I came across this sweet poem (in Turkish) written by Aydın Kahraman for Şükrü Kapucu: http://www.siirdemeti.com/siir_a.asp?siirno=95508