Author Archives: George Valentin Voina

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 »

Learning GO: Obtaining a unique sequence from #PostgresSQL with #golang

By | May 21, 2018

At some point I discovered GO trying to do very simple and fast code for specific tasks without having to load lots of libraries, deploy application servers or set up complicated frameworks. If you want to build fast very small native micro-services that can be deployed in a docker instance < 10MB Go is the… Read More »

Investigate #Oracle #deadlocks

By | May 10, 2018

Sometimes we may end up having some application resources competing for the same resource on our Oracle database. This is usually the case when some exclusive resource must be allocated or updated as in the case of database based locking mechanisms. If there are code issues we may end up in a deadlock situation when… Read More »

Activate the old style #Windows 10 Uninstall to remove old applications

By | May 25, 2018

Windows 10 has the stupid habit specific to Microsoft to consider that users are stupid and hide features that seems too complicated. As a side effect some important features are hidden from users. One of the most annoying one is the possibility of removing old applications that have an old style installer. In the new… Read More »

Measure speed with Paul Garnier #vintage #chronograph

By | March 17, 2021

In the old times when smartphones and smart watches we’re not invented yet people had to rely on beautiful machines to aid them in making quick computations that are not ready and natural to do. I am fascinated by watches from the same reason I like modern technology. It enhances humans, making them better, gives… Read More »

Elevate guest/standard #Windows 10 user to administrator from safe mode

By | April 22, 2018

There is a known issue that when you upgrade from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro directly you may end up with your only user changed from administrator to guest. This is what happened to me on one of the family laptops. Of course you end up with a stupid useless machine on which… Read More »

Vodafone #Romania and #GDPR, or how to trick customers to circumvent #GDPR

By | April 22, 2018

Yesterday I received two weird SMS messages from Vodafone. They are basically trying to trick me in accepting a contract that is invalidating some of my rights that I will get due to the new European GDPR regulation. First message: Buna! Iti oferim cadou 5 GB trafic national,valabil 30 de zile; pentru aceasta te invitam… Read More »

#Facebook clean-up check-list for people who cannot #deletefacebook

By | April 22, 2018

Due to the fuck-up of Facebook I decided to drastically remove my contact with it. I am not from the pack that just now discovers “amazed” that on Facebook you are the product. My upbringing as an East-European kid in a communist dictatorship made me aware early in life that there is no free meal.… Read More »

AP-AC-Pro with #Unifi as a taxi monitoring tool

By | April 22, 2018

It is always fun to find new usage to UBNT devices. I just discovered that my UniFi AP-AC-Pro is a powerful monitoring tool for the Wi-FI enabled taxis. In a city that considers itself as one of the “Silicon Valleys” of Eastern Europe Internet is a must. Obviously in such an environment having a Hot-Spot… Read More »