Software utilities

It may seem a joke but it’s real! The Jura F90 coffee maker suffers from a vulnerability that allows for remote access to the system (windows XP based), to control the settings of the coffee machine, such as chaging the preset coffee settings (making it weaker or stronger), changing the amout of water or even breaking it. This is going to open a complete new scenary for the network hackers, denial-of-coffee!

I found out the first incompatibility with Firefox 3, it does not seem to work with Liberomail, an Italian provider webmail…

I just installed Firefox 3, and found out the nice new look of the location bar! It shows the title and address you can choose, and highlights it, so to bring more attention to the url. I just found out a problem: which order is used for the url??

While trying to transfer an application created using VS2005 to an embedded PC (VIA C3 M 10000 embedded PC), I run into this very annoying problem. First, I got a slightly different exception, which was due to the msvcr80.dll file missing. So, I used the VS20005 redistributable to deploy the application. But my journey through the DLL hell was only at the beginning, because I got this very strange error. I got this only in the release version of the application, while the debug one worked fine. Using dependency walker, I could check that all the necessary DLLs were there, so I didn’t know what was this. After a couple of days of googling, and an incredible number of rebuild and solution clean, I finally found out that it was due to a DLL (created by me) being compiled in release mode with support for SSE2 istruction set, which was not available in the VIA CPU (it seems that it only supports 3DNow! ones). After removing the SSE/SSE2 optimization, everything worked fine!

While listening t music on your iPhone you suddently discover that the right spekear does not work. Before going to the nearest Apple Store, you should know that the right speker does not produce sounds becaus it’s not a sepeaker! It’s the microphone! If you look carefully, you won’t see any other opening which could work as mic!