C-Lion1, Oscobo, HaLow, Electric Cars, PDP Poly, PHC, Argon2, Phased Array LIDAR

Post date: Feb 13, 2016 5:31:32 AM

Sea Lion by Cinia (C-Lion) laying has been finished. 7.1.2016 the Ile De Brehat cable laying ship moored at Rostock, Germany. Yay! Now we're just waiting for the cable to be tested and activated for operational daily Internet use. - Cool, literally. It's -25°C outside.
Oscobo is Intresting Privacy Search Engine. Yet, it uses same data as Yahoo, and probably also forwards queries to Yahoo. Oops, not so private after all. I'm still waiting for official clarification what information they do leak, even if they claim they don't leak information. Leaking the query it self is already serious info leak. Another quite similar search service is Hulbee, they also use Yahoo data for searches. There are still many 'meta search engines' out there, which do not run their own indexers. Yet if you check logs for bots, it's not hard to find dozens of bots crawling your site daily. I especially dislike mostly useless backlink checkers.
Checked out Wi-Fi Alliance Wi-Fi HaLow IEEE 8.0211ah technology. Which operates under 1GHz to provide better coverage. Don't forget 802.11ah, 802.11ad, 802.11ax and 802.11ay.
In Finland and Sweden it seems there's high demand for ERP & Integration consults and people with good technical skills. Yep, I know it. Like Microsoft Dynamics AX. I've just noticed in many cases that many consults seem to lack the deep technical understanding. In some cases that has been very entertaining. When you're doing requirements specification you might overlook many extremely important factors if you don't understand the underlying tech well enough. Also long experience about business processes, generic process management understanding and technical information management skills are very nice base for ERP consultation. Not forgetting retail system, accounting and generic business experience. Making almost perfect skill set match.
Watched a documentary about materials used in electric car body construction. I didn't actually know that fiber glass is so good material, it's as strong as carbon fiber just more flexible and much cheaper. Also PDP Poly(diallyl phthalate) was quite interesting find. Yet it doesn't seem to be yet commonly used material as well as the phthalate's seem to pose possible health risks especially in case of indoors use. Different volatile organic compounds are also problematic. When I bought PVC shower curtain, it literally gassed my bath room for weeks. I didn't do it back then, but now if I would by something as poisonous as PVC I would keep it out in sunlight for a week or two, just to get rid of the poisons. When you took a shower, you would literally get drunk (dizziness) from the chemicals it released. Right word seems to be outgassing, and that's really what it is. You're gassing your own home.
Checked out Password Hash Competition (PHC). And the winner algorithm Argon2. It was nice to see correct units in their documentation like kibibytes and mebibytes. Yes, I should also pay additional attention to units. If you take any random magazine and look if they use units correctly, they most likely don't. It's also very unfortunately common to see bits and bytes mixed up, which is awful. It also comes with existing ready Python bindings [1, 2]. Nice.
Optical Phased Array LIDAR from Quanergy. - That's some quite neat tech. Yet it was expected. I've been also waiting that LIDAR from top of car to disappear and get so cheap it can be integrated with lights / bumpers etc and there might be several LIDARs at back and front. But this tech will allow just that, when it matures.
Mobile Authentication site (Mobiilivarmenne) says that you'll agree to terms and the terms are nowhere to be found. Great. Buggy software is everywhere. They claim you have to agree that data is being sent to 'service provider', but they don't tell what service provider they're talking about. Just so typical. This is actually the scam I was talking about earlier. Authentication is strong, but the user doesn't know what they're actually going to authenticate for. It's just like signing blank paper or check. You don't need to worry about it, we'll take care of it later. Just sign here, thank you.