http://blog.sig9.net Snippets and Bits... Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:05:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Disclaimer / Motivation First of all, it is important to note that this isn't supposed to be a benchmark. The results of this test are worth what they are, it only means that PHP performed better than perl for ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/10/17/php-vs-perl/ As promised in my 1st semester retrospective, here is a retrospective of the 2nd semester (Spring Semester). The second semester was consisted of three courses, two core courses and one free elective. I picked the following courses: Distributed Systems Network Security Secure Software Systems You can take a look at the syllabus for each ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/06/29/msit-is-2nd-semester-retrospective/ As most of my readers know, I am temporarily living in Pittsburgh, PA, to write my thesis. I created a blog where I will be posting my experience of living in Pittsburgh. You can read it at http://pittsburgh.sig9.net/. http://blog.sig9.net/2009/06/28/pittsburgh/ In Erlang, single assignment is like algebra... When I went to school, my math teacher said, "If there's an X in several different parts in the same equation, then all the Xs mean the same thing." That's how we can solve equations: if we know that X+Y=10 and X-Y=2, then X ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/03/13/quick-curiosity-2/ In regards to real time... By convention, this function increases at a rate equal to 9192631770 times the period of the radiation emitted by the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state atomic cesium 133, a time unit which people have agreed to call second, In "Veríssimo P, Rodrigues ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/02/10/quick-curiosity/ Despite what some people (including RapidSSL) said about the recent MD5 collision attack on SSL, the truth is that just because RapidSSL stopped using MD5 for issuing certificates it doesn't mean the world is safe again. The researchers were able to create a rogue Certification Authority certificate. That means they ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/02/07/tips-for-safer-ssling/ If you want *all* the Portuguese holidays in your calendar, subscribe the following ics: http://cals.sig9.net/ptHolidays/ Here's a list of optional parameters: ey = <end year YYYY> (defaults to <current year> + 3) sy = <start year YYYY> (defaults to <current year> - 2) ct = <city> ({lisboa, porto} are the only cities currently ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/01/17/portuguese-holidays-ical/ While there's people out there working for 1 cent an hour, CAPTCHA will never be bullet proof... just because it's not supposed to be Human proof. Check out http://www.anti-captcha.com/ or the google translation here since the original site is in Russian. Impressive that they even offer SLAs. http://blog.sig9.net/2009/01/16/human-power-to-break-captcha/ A lot of people have been asking me for a retrospective of the Lisbon MSIT-IS (Masters in Information Technology - Information Security) program from Carnegie Mellon, so I decided to post here a review of the previous semester. First of all, this is a Dual Program (MSIT-IS from CMU and Mestrado ... http://blog.sig9.net/2009/01/11/msit-is-1st-semester-retrospective/ As some of you have noticed, I haven't had much time to post on my blog lately because of this. But today I made an exception just because I spent the last couple of hours trying to figure out why the heck iTunes stopped recognizing my iPhone. While surfing ... http://blog.sig9.net/2008/11/02/itunes-stopped-recognizing-iphone/