opinion

As of PHP 5.3 web developers can use a wonderful feature of the language, the __invoke() magic method. This enables PHP to provide the Closure class and based on it the ability to define anonymous functions. Anonymous function is a powerful language construct, it can come handy in a number of ways. For example, it [...]

I had spent the holidays at home in the countryside with my family. My brother had gone back to his dormitory after Christmas, so the heating in his room was turned off allowing the outer panel of the window to cool enough for some nice frostwork to grow.

A következő cikkem jelent meg a Nonstop Üzlet-en: A korszerű tűzfalak képesek rejtjelezett csatornák ellenőrzésére is. Ez elsőre szentségtörésnek tűnik, mégsem az. Lássuk miért! A legelején fontos tisztázni, hogy miért is használunk rejtjelezett csatornákat? Azzal talán mindenki tisztában van, hogy az ilyen csatornák legfőbb feladata az átvitel bizalmasságának megőrzése, másként fogalmazva biztosítani azt, hogy valóban [...]

Last week I received a nice little package from Genesi: an EFIKA MX SmartTop ( https://www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika ), and an EFIKA MX SmartBook ( https://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook ). As I already wrote about a previous version of the SmartTop, which I use as my music server ( http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/2010/08/a-tiny-music-server/ ) I’d like to concentrate now on the SmartBook (SB). [...]

Not long ago, when the panic due to the appearance of viruses and hackers already started to fade, companies found out again that the most damage is caused by colleagues who work within the network. Simultaneously, focus is moved from logging network devices to logging critical applications such as databases and different ERP modules. This [...]

I have been received a very “interesting” offer regarding a great e-mail database for enlarging the area of our direct marketing. It was a quite good value offer. Only $99. Not per address, the whole database. It is a bulk discount. And the sender was a minor webmail service. Wow. Amazing.

For technical writers it is always difficult to get external feedback and comments on the manuals and other documentations. Therefore, it was a real pleasure to read how useful our system logging and regulatory compliance whitepaper was to Nico de Wet when he encountered a problem regarding trusted log collection and management.  Also, it was [...]

Did you ever try to boot an USB stick in a virtual machine under Virtualbox? Now I did. I am building my new PC from parts and as of now all the parts are ready I wanted to create a bootable USB stick to use it to install Gentoo Linux operating system on my shiny new [...]

Sometimes writing your own script is quicker than looking for the perfect software that fits to your needs.

Here is a quick summary on the Capture The Flag contest of the Hacktivity 2010 conference, held in Budapest last weekend.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a tiny music server:  http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/2010/08/a-tiny-music-server/ . Now I have a remote control too. It’s a nice little Android based phone. Music Player Daemon has many clients to command it, five of them run on Android, three of them are available on the Android Market. I use the Droid [...]

My old router / firewall machine in my home office started to fail. Almost every day one of the Ethernet interfaces were lost. When I was lucky, it was outer interface, so I could ssh in and reboot it. When not so lucky, then I had to use to serial console to access the machine. [...]

While we pay too much attention to network security and data security problems, we often forget that technology is no longer such a high risk as the users themselves. Even if we have successfully introduced the best security systems, we cannot stop there, since we also have to train users actively so that they become [...]

Those who know me are aware, that I’m a big fan of “alternative” music and computer architectures. I have hundreds of CDs and many PowerPC and ARM based machines and developers boards. Recently I was looking for a solution to have easy access to my CDs, without needing to walk to my HiFi to change [...]

On Friday we had a short debate in the room with the guys about the role of header and cpp files. I didn’t support to separate unit tests to header and implementation part, because I guess in this case it’s not necessary. Why? Data types (i.e. classes) have abstract and concrete aspects. We store the [...]