Alexander Mikhailian

Не знаете? Съездите в Сингапур, полюбуйтесь.

Объясняю по порядку. Общего у обеих стран много. Формальная демократия, на деле — авторитарный режим. С 1959 по 1990 год страной правил Ли Куан Ю, теперь — его сын. Экономика цветёт на высокотехнологичных производствах. Повсюду понатыканы многоэтажные торговые центры, при том, что на улице не встретишь ни одного лоточника. По вечерам в центре гуляет много красиво одетого народа, подавляющее большинство — титульной нации. Покупают мало, но выглядят счастливо. Трезвость почти стопроцентная. Планировка улиц в общих чертах повторяет Минск, только дома повыше и покрасивше. Как и в Минске, пешеходные переходы устроены не там, где удобно переходить, а там, где запланировали, так что через дорогу местные бегают совсем как беларусы, несмотря на огромные штрафы.

Приспичило мне купить пару маек в Сингапуре. А тут лоток с майками по дороге. Беру размер М, иду оплачивать, а тётка на кассе на меня хитро смотрит и заворачивает: иди, мол, разверни и прикинь на тельце. Развернул, прикинул. Потом новую майку развернул и прикинул. В конце концов выбрал XL. Т.е., сингапурский XL.

Once in a time, I get to travel to places that make me worry about the data on my laptop. This time, it is not the US, but another openly democratic country where they kill you for a joint, let alone nude pictures. Enough politics, though.

I have a laptop with the /boot in a separate partition, followed by a /root partition and a /swap. Having a separate /boot is mandatory, as the BIOS has to load an unencrypted kernel and its initrd before being able to access the encrypted partition. Another option is to keep /boot on a USB stick, but its setup can take a whole other post.

First things first, let us install software for managing encrypted disks and updating the initrd image:

aptitude install cryptsetup initramfs-tools

We have to make sure that the encryption modules are present on the initrd, so I add the following three modules to the initrd config:

echo aes-i586 >>/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
echo dm-crypt >>/etc/initramfs-tools/modules
echo dm-mod >>/etc/initramfs-tools/modules

Next step is to inform cryptsetup and inittab of the partition mapping between /dev/hda2 (the physical device) and /dev/mapper/root (its encryption interface).

echo "root /dev/hda2 none luks" >>/etc/crypttab
sed -i 's#/dev/hda2#/dev/mapper/root#' /etc/fstab

We also have to change the root device for grub the same way we did it for inittab:

sed -i 's#/dev/hda2#/dev/mapper/root#' /boot/grub/menu.lst

Now, recreate the initrd image by issuing

Наихудший менеджер — это тот, кто считает себя технарём, но уже им не является.

© я

Here is a fictitious story of a business client that orders software for a mobile phone to an embedded developer.

Take such a trivial feature of a mobile phone as a the possibility to store last calls. What do you know about it besides that it allows to view last incoming and outgoing calls? This is the level of knowledge that a typical client has and he will express it as a requirement the same way:

— I want that my mobile phone software to store last incoming and outgoing calls.

The developer has two choices: either assault the client with question based on unconfirmed assumptions or tacitly do exactly what was asked. He writes code that keeps two lists ordered by the call time, one list for incoming calls, another one — for outgoing calls.

Soon after, the client finds out that a competing company uses a different design and demands the software to display:

• all calls together with their destination (incoming or outgoing)
• missed calls
• received calls
• outgoing calls
• rejected calls

Unfortunately, the previous code has already been written and is linked tightly to the UI code and to the rest of the mobile phone's OS.

So, instead of scapping the previous design and starting from scratch, the developer is now bound to implement new data structures that consists of one new list that combines incoming and outgoing calls in the right order to satisfy the first additional requirement, and three more lists for each of the 2nd, 3rd and 5th additional requirements.

This seems like nothing, but coupled to the synchronization code and error handling code, the result is likely to look cryptic for everyone, including its own developer.