June 2010 - Too many bits, too little Bytes

Top Applications for Android

Tiago Ferreira June 17, 2010 June 17, 2010 MobileLeave a comment

For all purposes, I’m a proud owner of an HTC Magic, obviously running Android. Out of the box, the Hero offers little: browser, email client (although Exchange support is included, thanks to HTC), and little more. Compared from my old Nokia E61e, it was a world appart: the browser really works! The internet is finally on the subway (private joke, sorry) and not exclusively limited to very basic less than ok mobile sites. This was already OK by me, but a brand new world appeared as soon as I got into Android Market, where there’s always an App that fits …

Generating random files

Tiago Ferreira June 13, 2010 June 13, 2010 sysadminLeave a comment

Why on earth would someone want to generate files of random content (not files with random name) ? Well, there is one big reason to do it: generate incompressible files. This seems a small reason, but there are a number os usage scenarios (apart from proving that random content is incompressible), most focus on transmitting files. Although is transparent to most people, but some tools do background compression namely, https, IPSEC and SSL VPNs, etc, and as such, trying to measure real world performance on those require incompressible content. First, how to generate it (assuming you can talk *NIX) ? …