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Software

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Human override is needed in Software controlled systems

Aircraft landing

//Boeing’s 737 Next Generation airliners have been struck by a peculiar software flaw that blanks the airliners’ cockpit screens if pilots dare attempt a westwards landing at specific airports.// The Register, 8 Jan 2020 Reading the above news made me ponder on the topic of building software for critical systems and the result was this brief post-Overconfidence in one’s ability (software) is dangerous. Writing software for operating aircraft is extremely complex, and, difficult to do. Those who do are brilliant engineers. At the same time, software engineers will do good to humanity if they remember that any software will (always)…

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Coding

A trip down memory lane to assembly and hex

Binary code

Glancing through the FREE book “Reverse Engineering for Beginners”, brought a lot of fun memories that I had with assembly language and doing Hex dump of executables. Sharing two examples below: 1. My first freeware (downloaded by thousands) around 1996-97 was EasyPass. It removed (!) the password from a #Microsoft #Access Jet 95 MDB database files. It helped those who had forgotten password, or, that’s what I naively believed then. Believe it or not – it was just a matter of flipping (XOR encryption) a few bytes of hex values, you needed to know which bytes, that’s all. A whole…

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Events

Tools & Applications available for Tamil

செயல் விளக்கம்

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-JDKQDCe4 I was invited to present a guest talk for the annual Tamil Internet Conference 2019, that is underway at Anna University, organized by INFITT along with Tamil Virtual Academy and others. I presented a talk with demos titled aptly as “செயல் விளக்கம்” – Demonstration of tools for Tamil for writing and coding. I demonstrated the following: Google Voice Typing in Tamil on your PC – கூகுளின் குரல்வழித் தமிழில் உள்ளிடல் வசதி. How to use Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine to convert scanned pages in Tamil to PDF with Embedded Text (in Tamil) feature enabled, so that search in Tamil and…

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Gadgets

The podcasts I listen to, and the best app for playing them is now free!

The podcasts I listen to, and the best app for playing them is now free!

What’s a Podcast? A podcast is an episodic series of audio or video files which a user can download in order to listen. Next, to messaging & listening to music, I use my Smartphone for listening to Podcasts. For nearly a decade now, they are my companion during my evening walks and commute – helping me to relax, learn and catch up on the happenings effortlessly. Earlier I have written about the podcast episodes I have listened: Listening to the (late) Sci-Fi author Jerry Pournelle, and reading his classic “The Mote in God’s Eye” Listening to Rob Reid and then reading…

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