Types of Editors

Posted on March 12, 2014 by bcat

Types of Editors

Source: xkcd

Map of The Internet

Posted on February 2, 2014 by bcat

JPEG, over 9mb

Author: Martin Vargic via io9.

CryptoKids by NSA

Posted on January 26, 2014 by bcat

NSA’s privacy and cryptology related project for children – welcome to the dark & creepy side of the web…

via io9

Git Commit

Posted on November 27, 2013 by bcat

Git Commit

Sad truth from xkcd.

Anonymous Ukraine

Posted on November 24, 2013 by bcat

Anonymous Ukraine claim to reveal “the true face of the Ukrainian government and politicians” by leaking their private emails as a way to point the country in European direction.

Ukrainian State Customs was also cracked few days ago and Ukrainian Foreign Ministry before that.

Cyberpunk poster from good old times

Posted on September 1, 2013 by bcat

So we have retro-cyberpunk already? Time flies indeed… This one is from early 90’s:

Via io9.com and omnireboot.com.

Brain-to-brain Internet

Posted on August 30, 2013 by bcat

“The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains” said Research Assistant Professor Andrea Stocco, after receiving a signal that made him involuntarily hit fire in a computer game. The signal was transmitted via Internet.

I wonder if brain-to-brain-web development would be awesome, definitely sounds like it.

More details in this article and on the research website.

Tor is not as safe as it used to be

Posted on August 5, 2013 by bcat

Well at least Tor Browser bundle (Firefox with enabled Tor) for Windows. It seems to be infected with JavaScript malware supposedly originated with with FBI.

One solution would be to disable JavaScript but there is not much to do on the web without JS these days.

More info at boingboing.

How To Fix a Broken NetBeans under Linux

Posted on July 26, 2013 by bcat

Yesterday something awful happened to my NetBeans IDE (version 7.3 PHP Linux x64 under Ubuntu 12.4 LTS) – it started to do all kinds of weird stuff, along with few visual bugs it also froze on code completion and hanged while preparing an SVN commit. All of a sudden it wasn’t possible to work any more and of course there were quite a few urgent things that I had to do with it.

So I quickly tried to fix it:

Killed all processes, restarted NetBeans few times, logged out/in, restarted the system
Reinstalled NetBeans, reinstalled it without saving any settings, installed newer version (7.3.1), tried latest beta
Started it with all the smart parameters that I could google
Installed few alternatives, didn’t have much time to play with these though

None of the things above fixed the problem which is somewhat strange – it’s not every day that you find cross-version bugs that just come out of the blue and wouldn’t go away. So after installing PHPStorm and seeing its warning about Java I got another idea about the root of the problem – NetBeans as well as other IDEs uses Java, that under Linux comes in two flavors: OpenJDK and Oracle Java (well, there are other options but these are not that relevant).

At the moment I had OpenJDK and I think it was just updated (yeah I might have clicked “update” button) causing all the weird bugs. Since the problem had little to do with the software itself, it could not be fixed by fixing the software. Download and install of NetBeans with Oracle Java solved the problem for me so if you have similar problems you might want to give it a try.