Don't bother like my brother

Books April 20, 2008

I’m constantly reading books. Several books simultaneously. One at home in the evening one hour before going to sleep, one during the breakfast, one in the transport while going to work or back home. Partly this is because sometimes when the books is two technical, it becomes a little boring to read it all the time, especially when it is big like my CISSP guide (>1100 pages) I am reading now, and partly because I have different types of books: paper books, pdf books, chm and plain text books. Some are more comfortable to read on my PDA, some from the laptop and some holding them in your hands.

I am not very good in advertising something or writing a review. If something attracted me, I will say “I loved it” and tell my friends to read it. Today I have finished reading a book called “Hacker Cracker” by Ejovi Nuwere and David Chanoff about the life of a hacker who lived in very hard conditions with drug addicts and killers near him.

Unfortunately I don’t know the author personally, but I have been reading his blog for about a year or so (I have the link on my page). He is a guy from whom I learn something and reading this book was a real pleasure. You can see the procces from the beginning how he went to school, how different things happened to him, how his views then changed. The process “I read” from my livejournal when I read my old post, the same processes I have read from this book. It is really great when you see how something is changing. Definitely a must read!

While the first book was about a one person from the computer underground, the second one is about the underground in the whole. It is about the biggest names in early hacking scene, it is about the hacking scene itself, how the things begun and continued to develop. I don’t really love history, I always had problems in school with this subject, but reading about the history of computer security industry, about the hacking and phreaking was intriguing. I have read the whole book in three days. So I recommend it to you to read. Even if you are not a technical person you will find something interesting there.

Feedreader April 13, 2008

While watching some cartoons on the youtube.com I found out that it now supports rss. What a wonderful thing it is. I began using rss only half a year ago or so. Before I had bookmarked all the pages I wanted to visit and every morning while having a cup of tea at work, I checked every page for an update. The thing didn’t change a lot when I first began using feeds. I used firefox to get the headlines and then read it if there were any updates. While the number of links grew steadily it became more and more complex to check and read them, so I looked for a piece of software to make this process more comfortable and found the feedreader.com.

The program suited me perfectly. This is the first estonian (country that I currently live in) software that is really great and worth using.

Planning your time

I always have problems planning my time. There are a lot of things I want to do, I want to read and want to explore but due to my laziness I usually end up sitting in the Internet and chatting with friends. Though I do understand that such time-consuming activity doesn’t make me smarter, I cannot make myself do things I want to.

I searched the net in order to find any programs that would organize my time, make a nice schedule which I would follow, but found nothing. Then I decided to write my own but again without any luck. After a little struggling with the time problem I finally decided to uninstall all the IM clients from my computer. It helped. A little. The second thing I did was to buy A1 sheets of paper, write my evening schedule on it and post in front of my PC, so I could see it all the time.

I cannot say that the efficiency I began using my computer grew 100% but now I spend much less time chatting and surfing the network.

By the way, I have uploaded the code of pff to SF.NET and created a small page: http://pff.sourceforge.net