zain's posterous

Everyone's getting married

My entire circle of friends appear to be getting hitched en masse. I
certainly don't want to make it obvious but I guess I'm the only one
remaining who hasn't signed a pre-nup yet. (I meant the marriage
certificate). ;)

I know a couple of guys who found their soul mates at Georgia Tech.
Then there are friends from school and college who've been busy
e-mailing wedding invitations to all and sundry. Best friend Lalit got
married last year, old friend Karthik's getting married this weekend,
an ex flame from college got married to a Brit on New Years Eve,
ex-school mate Omar was in such a rush to get married that he almost
forgot to inform everyone while I got the news about another friend's
marriage after she'd had a baby LOL! And it's not just friends, my
cousins appear to be getting all lovey dooey as well. My best cousin
in the world just got married last week while another one's busy with
pre-wedding bashes.

I'm not trying to make this sound like a tirade and while it's certainly quite
nice that they've found someone they'd want to spend the rest of their
life with, I must confess to finding it a little strange. I mean I'm
only 25 and most of the guys and gals I mentioned are in the same age
bracket. The mid 20s is a time to enjoy life and do stuff that one
would probably have to refrain from after marriage. Since I'm a true
blue Gemini, I will admit that I haven't been the best guy for girls
to commit to as I find it incredibly satisfying to flirt around with
other lasses. However, deep down in my heart, I'm a hopeless romantic.
All these years I've grown up like any other normal human with the
dream of a romantic proposal, slipping a huge ring on her finger, a
gigantic bash and the memory of a lifetime etc. although for that to
happen, I'd still have to get myself down to committing to someone. I
guess I'm far from the point where I could consider settling down for
such a committed relationship, especially with all the super exciting
things happening on the work front.

Sometimes I feel I could be missing out on some of the simple
pleasures of life but then my phone rings and all is forgotten. Now
that I'm the eldest guy in my immediate family who hasn't gotten
married yet, am I to expect an avalanche of ear bashings about the
state of my singledom?

MeeGo: What it means to us N900 owners

I'm pretty sure anyone who is even remotely connected to the mobile industry has heard of Nokia and Intel pooling their resources together to create MeeGo (Maemo + Moblin). (Wouldn't Maelin or Mobmo be the logical choice?)

The plus side is that it will most likely make future MeeGo apps compatible with a broad range of devices since Qt is now the platform of choice. If enterprising N900 hackers can port the new platform to the phone, it could very well herald a new beginning for the (admittedly) small band of faithful owners and fans of this excellent device.

However, the average Joe on high street will probably see the N900 as an obsolete device running on an obsolete OS. Anyone who bought a Sony Ericsson P1i in late '08/early '09 should know what I'm on about.

I was kinda hoping Nokia would release a couple of high end Maemo devices in '10 (maybe one sans a slide out QWERTY) but with this announcement, I'm not very sure what the future holds for us N900 owners. With Symbian^3 looking quite tasty in this preview video, I might just do the unthinkable and migrate back to the smartphone OS for the masses,

My notebook died

I've been awol from my blog. My personal laptop, a Thinkpad T42 died a
couple of days ago. It was a sad and eventful death (and probably
painful too). It was more than four years old, which is almost like
40 in human years (or 70 dog years or infinite turtle years). To make
things worse, it was actually the first laptop that I bought with my
own money.

 The first time it died back in May turned out to be a false alarm
since the display GPU had de-soldered itself. After spending $45 on a
2 hour repair job, it continued running like a champ for a couple of
months. Unfortunately though, this had to come sooner or later. I was
kinda hoping that she would hold out until Christmas to earn a formal
retirement and formally induct it's younger brother, the upcoming
T410.

 Where do we go from here? As of now, I have a Samsung NC10 SE as my
travel book, a blazingly quick T400 as my new primary notebook and a
T60 corporate book that's slower than my old Athlon XP desktop test
bed. Come Christmas, the Sammy and T400 shall be put on the fleabay
market to raise cash for a T410 (Arrandale! mmmm) and another
Sammy/Asus/Lenovo/MSI Pinetrail-based netbook.

 In other things, we've been working behind the scenes on this
uber-cool idea for Twitter. It's scheduled to go live sometime during
the fall and I'm pretty excited about it.

 R.I.P. dear T42, you've been an amazing companion over the past 4 years.

 Alright, back to work!

RIM software update enables Etisalat spyware removal

"Recently an update may have been provided to you by Etisalat for
your BlackBerry Handheld via a WAP push. The Etisalat update is not a
RIM-authorized update and was not developed by RIM. Independent
sources have concluded that the Etisalat update is not designed to
improve performance of your BlackBerry Handheld, but rather to send
received messages back to a central server. RIM has developed this
software (“Software”) that will enable you to remove the Etisalat
update."

 Do get the word out to everyone you know that an 'official' fix is now
available to roll back the botched update.

 Link to the RIM statement.

Source Code Analysis of the Etisalat Blackberry spyware (SS8 Interceptor)

Sheran G. from Zensay Labs analyzed the source code and posted the following inference:

***
(1)Checks to see if it is listed as visible in the BlackBerry installed applications
(2) If it is visible, it hides itself from view of the subscriber.
This prevents a user from finding it and deleting it.
(3)It sets iterates over all the ServiceBooks¹ on the handheld and attaches itself to each of them, looking for received email messages and PIN messages.
(4)It intercepts and monitors the state of the handheld for network events that occur. It notifies the service-provider’s server when these events occur.
(5)It listens for messages received from specific addresses either through email or BlackBerry PIN. These are control messages that can enable or disable the interception of the subscribers’ messages.
(6)It reports back to the predefined service-provider server regularly.
(7)If enabled, the application will forward a copy of emails sent out by the subscriber to the service-provider server.
***

This might actually turn out to be a watershed moment in the nascent world of BB hacking. It shouldn't take a lot of time and effort for a novice programmer to alter the widely available the source code of this malware to create havoc in other parts of the world. 'bout time RIM started plugging these holes with more security checks, eh?

Links:

[1]: Service Books and BlackBerry Service book types

 

Opportunities abound in SIN, ADH & DOH

I've been looking at some really cool strategic opps across Asia.
These are like manna in the desert and should really help me out in my
quest to leave off on a high note before heading off to an MBA program
in '11.

This is pretty darn interesting!

Right, time to do a go-live check.