All new, never seen before security mechanism: NINE factor authentication!

The first factor merely requests your ID.
The second factor requests your password.
The third factor requires you to answer three personal questions.
The fourth factor requires you to solve a simple mathematical question.
The fifth factor requires you to use a token-authentication.
The sixth factor merely asks you to wait for 4 seconds.
The seventh factor asks you for your birthday.
The eight factor asks you to type a specific letter 10 times in 5 seconds.
The ninth factor asks you to identify the kitty in fourteen images…

Reminds me of Ockhams Razor(!): (paraphrasing) the simplest solution tends to be the right one, until proven wrong. So perhaps we should really try to find a solution without passwords… I think SQRL is a nice option to explore…

categorie(s): security, work | 5 Comments

Fixed Conexant Driver Audio Problem

My Lenovo Laptop T500 had no problems until this week. Somehow the audio driver got replaced by a Conexant HD Audio Driver. After the reboot I noticed that the internal speakers stopped working and only gave a little crackling sound.

As it worked minutes before I was quite sure it was the driver. I removed it, updated it, played with it, but it would not recover. And Lenovo insisted on reinstalling the latest version.

A lot of people said it was hardware related or a loose wire or so. I just did not believe this. Then I found some people who had been playing with the ‘Night Switch’ which seem to fix it for them. Unfortunately not for me.

I noticed, however, that I could not select the speaker output in the crazy setup screen from Conexant. It was just headphones and SP/DIF.

Then I noticed something else: on the Audio Director page I could choose between Classic and Multi-stream. And voila, the blue testbutton played audio through the speakers, the red played through the jack and headphones.

So Multistream it is.

Now I could choose speakers as well on the homescreen (Volume Mixer). It seems this did the trick.

The setup is wrong, the problem rediculous but I hope it helps someone else to solve this, until a fix is presented. It is still buggy, does not detect a headset is plugged in anymore, but at least I can choose to have speakers again with a work around.

 

categorie(s): technology | 2 Comments

Comfort Zone

A substantial part of my job is to train people to work as an IT specialist and as a company we have done a pretty good job. We do not train many people, but we seem to train them properly. I really enjoy training people and try to prepare them for a challenging and fun career.

Over time the training improves with every session and you need new insights along the way to keep on improving. So my ‘explanation of the Complete Route and Workings of showing an application through a browser’ has grown to a state which I am quite proud of.

Other parts of the traineeship can still improve and my latest ‘revelation’ is something about comfort zones. Mine seems to be different then the ones of the trainees, which explains some behaviour.

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categorie(s): websphere, work | 1 Comment

Scripting for OSX: repeating job

I collect little quotes and funny thoughts and have them randomly shown below my mail, one at a time. Over the years I have done this in a number of ways, but never found a really practical solution other than running a dedicated program, when I was on Windows. I was never able to find a proper solution for OSX.

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categorie(s): technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

Unstash in Python

I once wrote a Java version of the infamous unstash script, written in Perl.

As I am picking up Python (so refreshing, so little clutter) I thought it would be nice as a little practice to rewrite it in Python as well. And it is really compact.

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categorie(s): security, technology, work | 1 Comment

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