- Published:
- February 19, 2010 – 10:55 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
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- Comments:
HBO GO has been in the works for a while now, and is an indication of what some networks are trying to do to add value to their subscription rate. Offering video for streaming online is definitely a benefit to a premium channel like HBO. And it is a glimpse as to what the future of online video will hold.
I recently got rid of my cable box and implemented a do-it-yourself solution. Since HBO is a premium channel and encrypted, they force you to either buy a cable box via subscription or also a cable-card (which they also charge for). This actually gives me a unique perspective on the service: would I pay for HBO to receive the HBO GO online only offering? Read More »
Tagged: newmedia, review, Television
- Published:
- February 13, 2010 – 1:12 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
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- Comments:
The Bash command environment, which is the namesake of this blog, is very flexible in that it allows you to manipulate the filesystem in many ways. Awk and sed are very powerful tools that allow you to do this rename with a simple one line command. This post will walk you through doing this with a Comma Separated Value (CSV) file and also using a simple regular expression to rename many files.
Read More »
Tagged: awk, bash, csv
- Published:
- February 8, 2010 – 9:05 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
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- Comments:
This is my admittedly minor but I hope useful contribution to the TinyOS development community. TinyOS is an Operating System and development framework for Wireless Sensor Networks and other platforms which has a small footprint and is very energy conscious.
The TinyOS source code is available for free online for many operating systems, however it takes a long time to get the environment set up and it is not portable at all. I came across XubunTOS but it did not seem to be in active development anymore, so I endeavored to install TinyOS 2.1 and 2.x from source into a regular Ubuntu image. The most help came from Matt Keally’s Blog. While doing this, I thought it might be useful to many others who wish to develop in the TinyOS framework but might not have the skills necessary to install it. Therefore, I developed this VirtualBox image so that you can install it on any system for which VirtualBox is available and supports USB passthrough for the programming of the motes. I’ve tested on Windows 7, Windows XP and it should work on any other host OS, but I would love to hear your feedback. All funny business aside, I present to the world UbunTOS: Read More »
Tagged: tinyos, ubuntos, Ubuntu, virtualbox
- Published:
- February 2, 2010 – 8:03 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
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- Comments:
Currently I am in the Computer Science Master’s Program at West Chester University and I am focusing my research on Location Based Updates in Social Media and their societal and security implications. So you can say I think about this topic more than most normal people do.
FourSquare is a growing service that allows you to “Check in” to restaurants, grocery stores, museums and just about any place you can imagine. However, I have seen several of my friends checking in to locations which, I must say as a security research student, set off warning bells. Although I am calling out FourSquare specifically, these also apply to just about any other location based software where you broadcast your location to other folks, whether they are your friends or the general public. GoWalla and BrightKite are in the same boat.
As with any list, there are exceptions to the rule. So although I would say that you should generally avoid checking in at these locations and you can use it as a rough guide, things might be different for you personally.
Without further ado… here is my list of top FourSquare Check-in Locations To Avoid Read More »
Tagged: geotagging, Security, Social Media, society, tips
- Published:
- January 31, 2010 – 9:53 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
- Categories:
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- Comments:
It is very easy to create a random file using the linux command line. Much like the command to fill a file with all zeros, for example a 1 Meg file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.filename bs=1024 count=1000
You do the same using /dev/urandom:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=random.filename bs=1024 count=1000
Resulting in a 1MB file:
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.0294247 s, 34.8 MB/s
This is transferring random data from the virtual device urandom to the output file. We use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random because the /dev/random source generates random data very slowly. urandom is much faster at this but remains very random, if not quite a random as /dev/random. This should work with any system with dd and /dev/urandom.
Tagged: command line, Linux, tips
