Road to Andalusia

I and my other two friends, Fatih and Mehmet, went for a road trip from Austria to Spain. Our main destination was Andalusia however we met in Germany and drove all the way down to France, Switzerland and finally to Spain. We witnessed the remaining of the Muslim heritage in the province. Although we’d wanted to see more places in the region we only managed to visit cities include Lyon, Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, Cordoba and Seville in six days. Our intension was to find the places as well as the people who were the leads of the magnificent civilization and I am glad we just managed to do that.

PS: Click on the photo above to see the rest of the pictures

BackTrack 4 Beta on Sony Vaio Z21WN

I tried BackTack beta 4 on my laptop Sony Z21WN yesterday. I was very surprised that it worked out-of-box without any modifications. I didn’t have to build a new kernel nor install any device drivers. I was delighted to see the wireless adaptor Intel Wifi Link 5100 can go to monitoring mode and inject packages without any problem. That makes this laptop a very good security tool that you can perform penetration testing on your networks. If you are using WEP protocol to encrypt your wireless network then you can be sure that it will take less than 10-15 minutes to capture and crack the password.

By the way, if you are interested in the subject and would like to know more about penetration testing then please let me know.

My next aim is to install BackTrack beta 4 into a USB Flash disk. Lets see how it goes.

Review: Sony Vaio VGN-Z21WN/B

I have recently bought a Sony Viao VGN-Z21WN laptop. I should say, hardware wise, it is a very impressive machine. It is light (1.5kg), solid (carbon fibre) and fast (Intel Core2 Duo P9500 @ 2.53 GHz). Although the style of the keyboard was new to me but I got used to it pretty quickly and I really like typing on this laptop now.

Screen quality is absolutely spot-on. It is bright, crisp and with a 1600 X 900 resolution, 13ich screen is providing a full HD experience. When it comes to graphics, it has a neat trick. There are two video card on the laptop and you can flick the button above the keyboard’s top edge from Stamina to Speed, and Intel’s onboard graphics are displaced by a more capable Nvidia GeForce 9300M GS. Flick back to stamina mode and it offers you about six-seven hours of computing. Almost forgot to mention, it has a built-in web cam, DVD Writer, and Wireless WAN 7.2Mbps (HSDPA, UMTS, EDGE, GPRS) modem.

I should admit that it is a pricey gadget. However, I bought it from a duty free shop at the Manchester Airport with some extra discount.

New address

I decided to move my website from the University of Manchester Compsoc server. It was too unreliable and my blog suddenly stopped working. So, I had to do some recovery work to get my older posts back.
Anyway, huseyin.org is now hosted on one of my friends’ web server. So, very special thanks to Halil Ibrahim, the man who ended this misery and accepted to host my website.

Back to blogging

I have been away from blogging for a while due to various reasons and some commitments, but I am back now.

Future is Web!

It’s been more than a half decade since our mobile phones started to come with a digital camera and an mp3 player. However, so far they have all looked like a mobile phone. There were some PDA-looking phones which offered better office and web capabilities. However, if you weren’t a businessman or businesswomen then there was no way that you would carry one of these. Even if you had one, there was no way that you would expose them. But why not? Simply because you were cool!

Well, I think we are all about to start to redefine both the meaning and the look of being cool. Recently, Apple announced their long-waited phone iPhone. It is not just a phone; it is an iPod, a digital camera, an organiser, a web browser, a googleMap, an email client and more. Ohh, I almost forgot: of course, it is really “cool”.

When I look at it, it becomes so obvious to me that the future is going to be the Web. Goodbye to all PCs, digital cameras, mp3 players, mobile phones, PDAs etc. Whatever the names of the devices are going to be, they will all serve for one purpose: connecting us to Web. They will all connect us to our friends, favourite music, emails, photos, diaries, etc.

We will be all connected to the “Web”.

Sorry Neighbours

Last week in Globalisation and IS lecture we looked at the digital divide in the world. There was an interesting article from Financial Times which focuses on how efforts to spread IT’s reach is progressing. More interestingly, a comment made by the president of Cisco Systems’ emerging markets group made me rethink about the role of ICT in connecting people. The comment was:
“For people in emerging countries to be members of a connected society will ultimately make the world a more stable and safer place.”

After we read the article, a question was asked to the class: why would a “connected society” make the world a “more stable and safer place?” The first question I had to ask myself was whether ICT really creates connected societies or not. I think it is beyond doubt that ICT connects us to people in distant and remote locations. However, I think at the same time it implicitly separates us from neighbouring people. As being social existences, we all need some sort of connection to and interaction with others. I think today, this need is mostly addressed by ICT. Therefore, we do not know about our neighbours and neighbourhood as we know about celebrities, political characters, actors, football players, friends on Facebook etc.

Don’t you think it is much easier to find a connected society in a remote little village in the countryside – most likely also that place would also be a more stable and safe place to live- rather than in a global world?