If you are like me, a proud owner of an Android phone, you probably wonder why is this OS so bloated with apps that add nothing to the OS functionality.  I wish phone manufacturers would clean up their act and their operating systems. There is absolutely no reason to ship a phone with Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter and number of other apps.  I guess they want to be hip, but in the end, their OSes are slow and full of questionable apps. So how do you cleanup your phone? First thing, first. You need to download and install Android SDK.download adt-bundle-windows-x86_64:http://developer.... [More]

  I have played with cgminer bitcoin mining program for few months now.  My rig is running on Windows 7, it consists of 3x7970 graphics cards and 5 icarus development boards. Every time I tried to overclock or undervolt GPUs on any of the 7970 cards, I got crashes in AMD drivers.  I got tired of babysitting the rig constantly so I decided to write my own process watchdog for it. I wanted something that would restart cgminer everytime there is a crash, slowdown in mining activity, network outage, or unresponsive system.  My watchdog needed to have minimal impact on CPU pe... [More]

If you've ever worried about browser security, here is a really nice browser that runs from within Linux VM on Windows: http://www.chip.de/downloads/BitBox_48987303.html The page is in German, just click on "Zum Download".The actual browser is an English version. The browser in the box platform has been developed by Sirrix AG. The actual VM was packaged by Oracle. http://www.sirrix.com/content/pages/BitBox_en.htm The browser itself is just repackaged/rebranded Firefox version 9.0, but the nice thing about it is that it runs inside Linux VM. BitBox download contains Linux image+b... [More]

I never worried about Google and its privacy policies, but after actually reading their new version, I'm puzzled, to say the least.  I don't buy their argument that they want to "better understand your browsing habits to provide the right products for you". From the looks of it, they are basically spying on you.  It is plain and simple. Why would a company need to record every step you make on the Internet is beyond me. Other than to learn more about you as a person, your political, religious, social views etc. Where you from, where you sleep, who you sleep with, what you eat, read ... [More]

Older Reuters interfaces were quite simple.  Reuters SSL (Source Sink Library) is relatively easy to program.  Simple enough to integrate into any application in a matter of days.  Reuters library operates on a concept of callbacks.  Application should create one thread per Reuters channel or multiplex callbacks from various channels in the same thread.  Those are architectural and design questions. Here is an example of how a RIC (Reuters Instrument Code) query can be implemented quickly and efficiently.To initialize SSL library, one needs to know their triarch user ... [More]

Hopefully this article will save someone a little bit of time trying to get OCCI to work with CGI on Solaris. It is one of those things that is not documented (until now) anywhere, but can be "learned" the hard way. Recently, I had to use Oracle OCCI library in an Apache CGI program for one of my clients. Sounds like a simple task. I went out and hacked away a simple test driver to test the OCCI libraries: #include <sys/types.h>#include <unistd.h>#include <stdio.h>#include <time.h>#include <iostream>#include "fcgi_stdio.h"#include <occi.h>using namesp... [More]

Well, you can try to do this the hard way by converting the MP4 basedformats to mpeg 2 or vob and package/burn them into DVD discs.  This canbe very time consuming and you still have to use physical discs to beable to play them on your DVD player.There are tons of companies with templated websites :) that try to sell their video conversion software.  I'm surprised they are still in business.There is much easier and simpler solution to playback of Internet videofiles.  You have to get a Media Player hardware device.  You can use ebay to getno name one for $20-$30, or get a b... [More]

This exam was long, it covered a lot of material. The hardest .Net exam by far. 50 questions and 3 hours.I used Microsoft Self-Paced Training Kit book to study for this exam. It took me over 2 months to study, 2-4 hours every day. I went chapter by chapter, doing the end of chapter exercises. But I was not ready for this exam.One thing you should do before you start studying for this exam is review ASP programming. That is of course if you have not done much of ASP or ASP.NET programming. Concepts of web site setup, configuration, simple forms, database connectivity should be reviewed before d... [More]