Dao Hoang Son

Ngày xửa ngày xưa, mua tivi xong chỉ cần cắm  ăngten râu vào cái lỗ tròn tròn là xem được Tây du ký. Sau đấy sờ râu với cắm lại đủ kiểu mà xem Cảnh sát hình sự vẫn nhiễu nên từ đó mặc định có tivi là lắp luôn truyền hình cáp (hồi đầu là 45k/tivi/tháng, toàn trả tiền một cái nhưng cho thêm anh lắp đặt ít tiền để ảnh làm giùm bộ tách, xem thêm ở hai ba tivi nữa). Ngày nảy ngày nay, cáp rồi nhưng còn quẩy thêm bộ giải mã để xem các kênh  hát đê  (cái cục thì có thể tặng nhưng tiền gói thì thêm 50k/tivi/tháng). Đến khổ, càng hiện đại thì càng ăn tiền 😭 Năm ngoái, đứng trước quyết định vô cùng lớn lao khi... lắp tivi, vợ chồng mình đã dấn thân vào con đường khá mới mẻ và (có lẽ) trở thành một trong những cord cutters tiên phong ở Sài Gòn! Hiểu theo nghĩa đen thì cord cutting là việc cầm kéo cắt cái dây truyền hình cáp cái bụp. Sở dĩ không xài truyền hình cáp vì bọn mình thấy bỏ ra một khoản tiền vài trăm ngàn một tháng cho cáp là không hề cần thiết. Mang tiếng là có ...

It's Friday night and the wife TM wanted to watch Games of Thrones on the TV (via Chromecast). Should be easy right? We have lots of apps installed for exactly this purpose: Netflix, HBO Now, Flix , etc. None of them worked though... Netflix just doesn't have HBO contents like GoT. HBO Now works but it requires a US proxy to watch and there is no way to tell the Chromecast to go through a proxy. Flix, a promising local app, good with TV streaming but not series. So we had to settle to use HBO Now and Google Chrome's cast tab feature to have it on the big screen. A complicated setup, and slow. The casting was broken a few times during the episode, probably because of wifi interferences. This problem needs some engineering! Proxy Those Apps First order of business would be proxy their apps to catch all network requests. I used Charles  with their iOS app. At first I thought it would be tricky if they use https or certificate pinning but it turned out everything ...

Starting with my frustration while building the scroll  website: the social buttons are freaking slow to load. Especially on pages that has a lot of scripts (like mine) it is way worse. The buttons usually take minutes to show up and when they do, each of them render differently from the rest. Thanks Facebook, Twitter and Google for that. So I went in and found a few options. It looks like people made a few scripts that will collect the counters via AJAX (on user browser) and render the buttons with images. Some use data URI to avoid triggering more requests, brilliant! Since I wanted to make something super simple and fast to use, I decided to have one script that does all of those. The server will keep track of the counters and put them in the script so everything needed is one and only one request. I needed 3 social networks and each of them has different ways to retrieve the counters so I figured the server has to make the requests asynchronously, cache the values for ...

I'm too lazy to spend 1 minute every time I have to change DNS so I spent 10 minutes to wrote this script to do it quick. It currently supports Google, Open DNS and uFlix but it can support unlimited number of configurations. Get the script here:  https://gist.github.com/daohoangson/60ce8e0317213bc45c30 Use it like switch-dns-to.sh google You will need to enter the user password.

It's such a good feeling to get a new phone and within minutes you have it running exactly as you like, thanks to the Cloud. The Cloud has its up and down ( "Nobody understands the Cloud. It's a fucking mystery!" ), yes but what else doesn't? Even people have their freaking mood swings. All major players are improving their offering to tie users to their Clouds because that strategy pulls in customers for them and also helps with competing in the market. And it works. The Cloud comes in many shapes and forms but in general, user experience is way better. Everyone can do whatever they want fast, securely and conveniently (given that they have a decent internet connection of course). I really think the Cloud will be the future. Everything we are going to do will be on the Cloud. The pieces of hardware we have in the house, at our workplaces or in our pockets are just terminals. They could be broken, water damaged or stolen, who cares! Insurance would just replace ...

Many people asked me to use OTT solutions like WhatsApp, Viber, LINE but I quickly uninstall those apps after a while because of two reasons. Firstly, there is no one-thing-fits-all solutions which means you will need to install a bunch of similar apps because different group of people use different service. God, that's tiresome and kills battery. There are decentralized protocols to fix this very issue but they are too good to be true I guess, even Google backed out from supporting XMPP by dropping their Google Talk service. I believe there are companies working on this front right now (or maybe I should?). They should make a solid server implementation AND clients using established standards, big plus if they stick some open source license in their code and publish them all. Provide good user experiences while allow user to control their data and federate between different system as needed. The second reason is backup. No services that I know of provide a way to conveni...

Finally! Will see if my subscription can be renewed after the trial period. So far so good. The streaming is fast and in good quality (at least it's good enough for my ears). The app is easy to use, especially the radio thingy. Recommendations are great, suit me well.

Real close I guess...

Yep.

Today, I was a bit surprised to see this post in my Facebook feed: The post is from the official Google Facebook page . Amazing right? Blah blah Vietnam ICT scene is becoming larger and larger blah blah. However, I quickly saw the Sponsored tag and figured they must have post multiple posts in different languages then use the sponsor thingy  to promote post to specific audience. I came to the Facebook page but only saw 2 posts (one in Vietnamese and the other in English). Strange. There are much larger market and this sounds just wrong... Turned out, they used another nice feature for Facebook page:   Page admin can guard their posts by user location and language. Pretty useful feature from Facebook and nice touch from Google! If you haven't signed it yet, go here and sign for #freeandopen web.

Today Blogger in Draft released Google Scribe so I tried it... Only the first word is written by me... Today I am going to be a part of the products name and address of the person who is not a valid stream resource in D minor for two violins and a cello player and a great deal of time and money to the poor and the rich and famous and the most important thing is to get the best of the best in the world of the living room and dining room with a view to the sea and the mountains of the world and the world of the living room and dining room with blah blah It looks like we ran into some kind of recursion right there. LOL. I will try again. It is a very good job of it than I Ooops, the suggestion stopped this time after just a few words above. The technology and idea are interesting and impressive but I have not idea how this can graduate from Labs. Will keep an eye on this.

According to Official Google Blog ( this entry ) Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. Well, it's not a big deal when a product is put in the dead pool, especially nowadays. But there is one thing which is interesting here: Google is really fast in terms of their search engine response time and in terms of the corporation's actions. Google Wave, when it was announced in May 2009 it was believed to be the "email killer" and even the "Facebook killer". The Google Team were very excited about Google Wave (and clearly, Google Wave has a lot of innovative technologies). But then the buzz decreased day by day because users don't find it useful. Then... Boom! Google decided to stop developing the product and move on to the next big thing. Well, with...

This is sick! Just a few days ago, I ran into OAuth as I want to get my GMail feed based on Google Data API . I succeeded. With a little help of an OAuth open source ( here , available in several programming languages). Then I remember that I once heard that Twitter also uses OAuth as an authentication option so I turned into Twitter and had a good read. Finally, I found out that they are basically the same (hehe, it's obvious since OAuth 1.0 is a worldwide standard). I had an idea of writing a universal class which can handle both Google and Twitter OAuth functionalities. It's not too hard. I took most of the idea from the PHP example ( here , PHP only). I also made a small script which accepts URI to send and intercept response from Google & Twitter servers. At that moment, I was so excited with all the ideas but actually it has no real world benefit so I just left it there... Until today, in the F8 (says "fate") conference of Facebook, I was stunned fin...