Life: Recovery

by Ricky Melgares on July 1, 2010

It’s been almost a year now since my last post. Despite what the post title might imply at first glance (especially if you are an Eminem fan), I did not come back from rehab. I have, however, come back from a crazy and eventful school year. The last semester was particularly interesting because I took CS78: Computer Networks, during which we did a number things ranging from coding a simple IM client/server, developing our own transport and network protocols over an overlay, and finally, a BitTorrent client in C using the official BT specification.

Needless to say, CS78 took up most of my time and a toll on my health, hence the post-recovery. I am now waiting to go back to school for the summer, where I will be pursuing a full-time job oppurtunity with the Dartmouth Cyber Security Initiative. I will also be doing some Zigbee security research on the side, and that coupled with the awesome New England weather and cycling, it’s lining up to be an awesome summer.

Meanwhile, in my recovery time, I’ve taken some time to spruce up my site design. There still remains a lot of work to be done but I am happy with the direction this website is starting to take. Expect to see new posts more frequently over the next couple of months. Cheers!

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Review: Backblaze and Jungle Disk

by Ricky Melgares on October 27, 2009

I have toyed with the idea of storing my data backups in the cloud for a while. Pricing and ease of uploading all of my data into the cloud have kept me from taking online data backups seriously until recently. Nowadays you can store all of your most important documents and data online for only a couple of dollars a month.

in_the_cloudWhy store your data in the cloud?


Storing your data online brings an onslaught of security and privacy concerns along with it, but I’ll save that discussion for a later time. Redundancy, ability to access your files anywhere from the web, and limited disk space are all reasons for storing your data online. Read More

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Playing FLAC files using iTunes in SL

October 15, 2009

With the new version of OS X, previous methods of getting iTunes to recognize FLAC-encoded audio files no longer work. Fortunately Dmitry Kichenko, the brains behind Fluke, has been working on a new beta version of his software that installs the necessary components and workarounds to get the finder and iTunes to recognize FLAC files [...]

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Security Services in the Cloud

September 30, 2009

As part of my job with CSI (Cyber Security Initiative) at Dartmouth, one of the things that we’ve been researching is the performance of security services in the cloud. The upkeep and maintenance of servers used for security services such as penetration testing and forensic analysis is costly, especially when these servers are used only [...]

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Top of Google Search

September 30, 2009

I recently discovered that doing a google image search for “college dorm room space” yields two of my Flickr images as the top 2 results. The pictured dorm room is the residence I lived in during my sophomore year of college (The Lodge). Granted, the search was somewhat specialized. For example, a google image search [...]

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Review: Facebook Notifications Desktop App

September 9, 2009

Facebook’s new desktop application for the Mac is pretty slick. Rather than receiving any Facebook notifications via email, the new Facebook app displays new notifications via a Facebook icon in your menu bar. This avoids the polling approach that most people take when it comes to checking their Facebook page or email for any new [...]

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Review: Dell SX2210 HD Monitor

June 15, 2009

I recently purchased a new display for use with my laptop as an external monitor. After doing quite a bit of research online, I opted for Dell’s newly released SX2210 monitor. To get right to the point, Dell’s SX2210 is the best monitor I have owned to date, not to mention much cheaper ($219) and [...]

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Facebook Stalkers

June 2, 2009

For the past three weeks I have been receiving random Facebook friend requests from people I have never met, live half-way around the world (or so says their profile), and have no mutual friends in common with me. In particular, I received a friend request today from a girl who supposedly lives in Indonesia. The [...]

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Nightmares

March 23, 2009

This happens to me all too often.

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Disable OS X’s Icon ‘Bounce Alert’

January 22, 2009

The one (and probably only) thing that has annoyed me when using OS X for the last couple of years is the icon ‘bounce alert’ feature. Everytime some application wants to get your attention for one reason or the other, it will perpetually bounce the application icon up and down. Notice that I said “perpetually.” [...]

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