Author Archives: George Valentin Voina

#SQL to find dependency between tables in #Oracle database

By | August 26, 2018

There are times when we need to find which are the tables that depend on a given table. This is useful when cleanup or archiving jobs have to pe performed and the interconnection of constraints is becoming a nuisance. Lucky for us in the case of Oracle database is quite simple to search through all… Read More »

Recover an #Oracle installation from a full disk backup in #Linux

By | August 26, 2018

Reinstalling things like Oracle is always a hassle and takes about one day to make it work. Lucky for me I made a full back-up of my old disk when I upgraded to a new laptop. On the new laptop I did a fresh install of Fedora 28. The idea is to migrate my old… Read More »

Technology fail: When #Lidl asks you to login to a #Linux terminal to find the price of an item :)

By | June 29, 2018

This was spotted in the wild by a coworker 🙂 After some research you can easily find that the device is a Scantech SG15c price scanner. See here the manual User’s Manual SG-15Plus . Interesting extract from the manual: “The login password is default blank.” Manual even gives instructions on how to modify prices 🙂… Read More »

Kaspersky Lab banned all across Europe #infosec

By | June 14, 2018

I am a long time evangelist of not using software that is linked to abusive governments. This applies sadly to a lot of software products and software environments linked to Russia and China. Regarding this, Kaspersky was one of my main “do not use” advice I was giving to people I know and to job… Read More »

Banking 2.0 or the online revolution #Transferwise

By | February 17, 2019

Yes, now is the turn for Transferwise. My second online bank after #Revolut. As I already mentioned in a previous post , banking 2.0 is here. I just received my Transferwise card, waited for it for 2 weeks 🙁 , but oh boy it was worth it. The envelope containing the card (inside the post… Read More »

Best of #GDPRDay memes as mailboxes clogged today from all the #GDPR opt-in mails

By | May 25, 2018

Seeing the sheer panic and huge traffic from random sites I never remember visiting asking me for opt-in to their spam makes this a special day. Even Vodafone the big offender from my previous post Follow-up to “Vodafone #Romania and #GDPR, or how to trick customers to circumvent #GDPR”, first GDPR related fine, finally sent… Read More »

Learning GO: Limit #concurrency in #golang

By | August 26, 2018

Concurrency is easy to implement and fun in go, but as we know all things that are easy and fun can end up doing a lot of dammage if we are not careful. The way the concurrency was implemented in my previous post is prone to abuse. What if the for loop iterates over a… Read More »

Follow-up to “Vodafone #Romania and #GDPR, or how to trick customers to circumvent #GDPR”, first GDPR related fine

By | May 24, 2018

Follow-up to the Vodafone case, they got owned. Vodafone was fined because of the dishonest campaign, which tried to circumvent the new GDPR regulations. See the article in romanian: Vodafone ia amendă de la ANSPDCP pentru o campanie de obținere a consimțământului pentru utilizarea datelor cu caracter personal. Basically, several people and news outlets contacted… Read More »

Learning GO: Concurrently execute expensive validations on several items and return the list of validation errors with #golang

By | May 24, 2018

Most of the time software for real use cases from financial industry is just validating inputs. When I say validating inputs I refer to business validation that actually checks against standard formats or generates complex validation against business rule sets. Usually this step is very important because it is the step that gets hammered with… Read More »