Cafeaua cu sare

In the last year or so since Covid-19 came into the picture, a lot of things have been said, talked and written about it, most of them negative.  This is to bring a bit of hope, and start looking at the positives as well, if any.. Here is a list of them, as they came into my mind during past few months: Humanity has a more time to think and reflect about different problems, ideas. Previously everybody was chasing for something, everyone was running, life was a constant running race. I might be saying this in ignorance, since I am fortunate for not having to chase for food and shelter every day in order to survive. My thought on this is that C-19 gave us time to reflect about our future in this world and what do we trully want to do next. We came to know, understand, collaborate and talk more with our local community, something that was still happening in the past, but not in the way it is happening now. People seem to genuinly ask you about what you do, even though they might just be i

I decided to add this post today, after a long time of innactivity, in the hope that other people in my situation would benefit from what I am about to share. Nowadays we live in a global word, and despite Covid-19, things are not starting to become local again, but rather more global, online focused. There is no exception when it comes to banking. Although I still understand the reason to use a bank, I don't fully embrace the idea of making profits from administration fees. This has been a common practice in Romania in the last decade, and it seems at the time of this writing that is still the case.  So what's changed today is the fact that I discovered TransferWise (one of the many online banking companies out there) offers a way to open an online  account for free. It took 5 min for an operator to check my ID and approve the account online. That gave me an actual IBAN for a RON (Romanian currency), as if I was based in Romania.  The moment I had it operational (which took ma

Different requirements demand different setups, the one I am going to show you now is meant for office or when people work around you. I am also giving you a variation of it, which it worth taking  into consideration as well. Apogee Groove (AMP/DAC) + Sennheiser CX 300II (budget) or Sennheiser IE80 (best) When alone at home: Apogee + Sennheiser HD 650. While travelling a Noise Cancelling option would be perfect, considering it's a lot of noise on a plan/train,  any decent NC head pair above £200 should be fine. Once you're back to your desk you can plug it in to Apogee (an AMP I strongly recommend while travelling). Have you ever wondered why Sennheiser chose this particular amp to pair it their HP650 despite all the other amps/dacs out there? Well it is for a good reason, they work nicely together. That's all, test it for yourself and post a comment if you agree or disagree with my recommendations.

Have you ever used a contactless card to pay for goods up to 20 gbp at a local store? Well, this is very convenient, let's face it, that's because you're simply touching the screen and make the payment, is that easy. But because you're not using a PIN (in a form of biometrics) or similar, there's a big security risk involved. And you know what several banks have done to avoid any dispute on that, they don't issue any receipt for the transaction, therefore no proof. In my opinion this is BAD, really BAD, I've heard they are going to lift this limit as soon as it will become generally available. Since banks are now sending contactless cards by default, the risk is there, and rather than update the security on the system or come up with other ways of securing the POS's and the cards (like fingerprint in Apple Pay), they would rather prefer current approach which is not great, I don't even understand how it got approved by Government or Financial Con

If you ever decide to open an account with these guys think twice before you do it. The only way to delete/cancel an account you've previously created is to actually phone them and ask to be removed. They give you no reference number or anything, just a promise that you will be contacted within 3 days (via email) to confirm the actual deletion. I promise I will come back with an update of the status, because I just phoned them today, spoke with a guy named Tyler, hope I'll get a confirmation back soon. If not, apart from removing all my personal details from their account, I will also change address and name to something like John Doe to make things straight. And stay away from them in the future, I'm sure there are other similar service providers out there offering same service in a more transparent way, giving you the option to cancel the account and delete date whenever you want to, with no spam emails sent every couple of days even if you've un-checked all the box

Have you ever wondered why ArcSight put those little buttons in rule actions?! This is not accidental and they have a subtle purpose. Only a real-time example can clarify why they are needed and how much they matter. Let's say we have events coming in the ESM at a high rate, and we have a Use Case that basically uses 2 rules and 2 active lists to get what we needed. R1 evaluates base events and if NotInAL2 then actions by adding an entry in AL1 R2 evaluates against conditons DeviceEventClassID=activelist:103 & DCN1>=10 and if they match, then actions by removing from first list and add in second one. And this is where the order counts. Picture above displays the right order. Let's think for a second what would be the implications if it was the the other way around. If we were to first choose to add to AL2 then to remove from AL1, what happens is in matter of miliseconds in the Correlation Engine although it may seem the entry was added to AL2 and that won&#