The Kernel’s Business

April 2nd, 2008 • General • 1 comment

The Kernel’s going to focus mainly on enterprise security and communication. You won’t be hearing news about it on this blog, but you can bookmark The Kernel’s site and get back to it in a couple of weeks.

Here’s what I’m so excited about: Even though security companies are growing like fungi in the Gulf, there isn’t much serious focus on enterprise security. The knowhow is largely imported, most of the available solutions are developed elsewhere, and it costs ridiculous amounts of money to simply close your front doors.

We’re not going into the saturated firewall, IPS/IDS market; these products cannot protect you by themselves without understanding how they work and their pros and cons. We want to make sure that data is never compromised, no matter how aggressive an attack is.

You might have heard of steganography, which is the science behind hiding information. There are many applications that can hide documents inside other documents on the computer (Steganos comes to mind), and they do a great job at it, but they are limited to digital steganography.

Here’s a simplification of how these applications work:

• Pick a binary file.
• Pick another binary file.
• Scramble second file’s bits and store among.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

Here’s how we’re doing it:

• Pick a media file, an image for example.
• Pick a file to hide or a message to store.
• Hide file inside image.
• Print image on a $100 printer.
• Scan the image on the other receiver’s side.
• Restore hidden file with password or key.

So instead of manipulating the the bits of the media file itself, we’re manipulating the signals it sends and making them carry data inconceivable to the human senses, and sometimes even machine’s. The very same principle can work on other media files, the bigger and noisier, the better. Now we’ll be able to hide PDF files over traditional FM radio stations, or broadcast Picture-in-Picture TV channels quite literally.

1st of April, Q2 2008

April 1st, 2008 • General • 2 comments

It’s been a whole quarter since the melancholic goodbye post.

I’m going to refrain from dropping some lousy April’s fool’s joke, I’ve never been a fan of “not” jokes; and unless yours is at least as good as finding water on mars, my advice is to refrain to.

The last three months, my Q1/2008, were dedicated to founding a start up. We’ve just got this little space in Dubai Airport Free Zone, a.k.a. DAFZA, and we’re going to deal mostly with IT security. We called it “The Kernel”, wish us luck.

Speaking of Dubai and IT, I’ve recently had a chance with a bunch of geeks at DemoCamp Dubai, an informal conference where four or five presenters show off their skills and projects for 15 minutes each. I believe the only other place where you’d find such a friendly crowd is at a rehab support group.

Now, to explain why Scatterism looks so plain: I’m still running WordPress 2.1, while 2.5 has been release just a few days ago. I’ve customized the database structure a little, especially that it needed to accommodate Ultimate Tag Warrior. I’m using Jotdown, which is a combination of Markdown, GeSHi, some footnote parsing code, and a bunch of preprocessing macros, all of which need some work to make sure they don’t break WordPress 2.5. In addition to all of this, my eyes are sore from looking at my current lights off/lights on theme, so I’ll stick to Simplr (thank you Scott) for a while until I redesign.

I wish I could speed things up a little bit, but Dubai is a time-eating monster, with long roads and traffic jams, and unlike every other full-time blogger, I’m neither full-time, nor am I working from home.

Thanks Q1 for helping me out. Thanks Q2, the funniest intro award goes to you. Thank you those who still have Scatterism on their feed readers.

Goodbye 2007

December 31st, 2007 • General • 2 comments

You’ve been full of interruptions, full of strange decisions.

You’ve set two of my friends free of their Dilbert’ese jobs.

You’ve made me cut down my feeds, my reads, and my emails.

You’ve been teaching me a lesson, and showing me new visions.

Goodbye 2007.

Reading RSS Smartly

December 10th, 2007 • General • No comments

Since the early days of FeedDemon, I heard Nick gripe about information overflow, and how he wasted time sifting through irrelevant stories.

I bumped into AideRSS, a feed reader that ranks posts and stories by the number of conversations. The idea is simple: count the number of links from Technorati, del.icio.us and the likes, and convert it to a rank relative to the rest of the posts from the same blog.

It might not sound very exciting, until you hit that spot of 100+ posts a day, then you’ll appreciate having a tiny robot filtering your news and giving you the relevant stories.

Rails 2.0 Released

December 8th, 2007 • General • 1 comment

I can’t believe it’s been that long. It feels like yesterday, but four and half years have past by.

I don’t think there’s a better time to learn, or relearn, Rails. It’s a 2.0 release, which should give you some peace of mind. It’s overhauled, so it feels less “hacky”. And it’s not as hyped anymore, so you can see it for what it is, a tool not a myth.

Take a look at David’s notes on the new release. Tell me if it’s too quite for a 2.0.