vendredi, juin 08, 2012

Change your LinkedIn password immediately!

Yesterday evening, I was reading a blog post from Zdnet regarding the LinkedIn potential password threat and stupidly just tweeted about it... but I should have taken contingency action by immediately changing mine!

This morning, I logged into LinkedIn and the following message was displayed on my LinkedIn homepage... thanks guys for screwing up my password.... anyway, thanks for reminding me that when I read a security threat about a service I use, I should immediately react and take appropriate steps to secure my data privacy.


One thing I have been doing for a long time and recommend to all of you, is using different passwords for all, yes, I mean all, the services you use. Nevertheless, the risk is that you start to write down all different passwords and if one day, someone get access to it, he will get access to all at the same time. Of course, you can use several solutions which should encrypt and keep secure your passwords in one  place, but my approach is slightly different!

I have prepare some kind of rule/algorithm (not written anywhere, except in my mind), which I use every time and every where I need a new password. Providing me all the time different passwords easy to remember, but difficult to guess. Last but least, if I forget it, I can get back to my rule/algorithm and regenerate it without any problem!

Of course, I am not going to explain how I have prepared my rule/algorithm, so think about yours, try to be creative and chose something you can easily remember to generate/calculate your passwords in case you have a bad memory. Be careful, not only letters or numbers, but rather a combination of letters, numbers and symbols!

Call me schizophrenic if you want, but today, I know that even if I have been a bit lazy not to change my LinkedIn password yesterday, hackers wouldn't get much more out of it by now!

More about this security threat at LinkedIn.




vendredi, juin 01, 2012

WE CAN LIVE on mars, remember everything's possible!


June 1st, 2012, “WE CAN LIVE on mars” is launching! I have finally took the decision to start my own business and to accelerate my own innovation path! Taking the opportunity to help others to become more innovative, by leveraging my 17 years of experiences within the digital space!
I am launching an innovation agency, specialized in Agile project management, process improvement and new technologies. No… not being an IT services company, but an innovation agency helping you to understand the value of new technologies and rather addressing your processes.
Helping you to become much more agile and fast. Coaching you to split your vision into achievable and valuable steps to deliver smaller components of your products, or services, on a much more regular basis. Making it possible to implement a continuous improvement based on the feedback of your customers. Overall, accelerating your innovation lifecycle and launching more and better new products or services!
At WE CAN LIVE on mars, I want our work being driven by a strong belief that any team with a vision, a plan, a willingness to deliver step by step and a lot of fun, can deliver merely the impossible. Therefore, we can live on mars… because we believe that everything’s possible!
Jérôme Perakis
Please find more information about us and more about our services in our web site: http://wecanliveonmars.com

mardi, mai 15, 2012

Solving Gmail IMAP empty inbox in Apple Mail 5

Man! Took me a long evening and finally a portion of this morning to solve the following issue between my Google Apps Gmail Account synchronized with the Apple Mail 5 client over IMAP...

When creating the account, I had briefly seen my messages in my Google Apps account's inbox, but then the rest of the account folders were displaying the messages, I couldn't see the messages anymore neither in the account's inbox folder nor in the All accounts' combined inbox...

I had found several instructions how to setup the Gmail account and also others complaining about this issue, but nothing to solve it. Of course, start with the following instructions to setup Apple Mail 4, they are the same for the version 5. Nevertheless, if you cannot see the messages in the inbox, despite showing in your gmail account through your favorite browser, check this:


  1. Check in Apple Mail whether you have sub-folders below the inbox (you will have a small little triangle on the left of the inbox icon).
  2. If you have those sub-folders, go to gmail directly and check whether you have label's names which start with inbox/something.
  3. If that's the case, in many cases, they have been created out of previous migration from another client e.g. Outlook migrated to Gmail... they are considered as sub-folders in IMAP and it seems that Apple Mail is lost and cannot retrieve the inbox content in the such case.
  4. So from Gmail, select all related messages tagged with this label and move them to another folder.
  5. Once done, get back to Apple Mail, and select the menu Mailbox - Rebuild
  6. Your inbox should start displaying your messages and same for the combined inboxes
  7. Enjoy!

dimanche, mai 13, 2012

Switching for Apple

Last Friday, I have took the decision to move to Apple... instead of buying my traditional PC laptop to run Windows and Ubuntu Linux, I have acquired a MacBook pro 17"! What a change...

Of course, it will better synchronize with my iPhone, might make me a bit nervous with my Asus tf201 tablet (yes, still on android), but overall, should be a good decision.

- powerful laptop and most likely longer life than my previous PCs...
- nice and big screen to work on many apps, such as spreadsheets and project plans.
- didn't need an ultrabook, given that I have my tablet when being on the road.
- should play nicely within my cloud services and devices
- nicer than all the other PCs design that I have seen ever, while asus might step by step come in the right direction.

So now, I need to get the software I need to run my business...
- a project management application
- a scrum project management application
- a visio-like application
- a small CRM
- an accounting and business management application suite (applicable to the Swiss legislation and best practices)

And of course, the CRM solution should sync with my contacts on Google apps. Best will be to have both PM and Scrum apps working on my Android tablet....

Stay tuned and of course if anyone has any feedback or recommendations, will be greatly appreciated!

mercredi, février 22, 2012

Have you screw-up your display on Ubuntu after installing NVidia driver?

I am running Ubuntu 11.10 on a Lenovo T410, and tried to install the Nvidia driver without success! Worst, after the reboot, I was getting a blank screen... tried to fix the Nvidia driver through the console without success to date.

At least I have been able to recover the old config by renaming the xorg.conf file and rebooting.

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.nvidia

and removed the driver

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-settings nvidia-current

and rebooted

Fixed! :-)

Now that I know how to get my screen back in order, will try to install the Nvidia driver later on when I have some spare time.