A Cypriot parody of the Heineken Logo: Hestiken!
Hestiken (or “Χέστηκεν” [Chéstiken] in Cypriot) is a slight variation of the Greek word “Χέστηκε” [Chéstike] which means that the person mentioned pooped!
Yearly Archives: 2019
Some comments / a review on Huawei Color Band A2
Recently we got a Huawei Colot Band A2 as a gift from CyTA. Since it was free, we decided to give it a go. Below are our initial comments on it:
Pros
- It is very light and easy to use.
- The screen is very big and easy to read.
- It is fairly good looking.
- The brightness is strong enough to be used even in sunny conditions.
- It seems that it supports Unicode as we saw non-ANSI characters on the display.
Cons
- Despite the name, the screen is not a multi-colored screen and it only shows one color.
- It was designed to be worn on the left hand only as the message preview functionality does not allow you to rotate the text on the other side and make it usable on the right hand as well.
- Date on the screen uses the US style even if the rest of the settings were set to metric system.
- You cannot view the time unless you dismiss all notifications. This applies to notifications already dismissed on the phone as well. So when driving it is kind of annoying as you have to long press the screen to dismiss the messages before you can view the time.
- Communication range between the band and the Mi Band 2 is much shorter.
- When displaying a message it does not display the application icon. It uses generic bubble icon.
- Sometimes, when receiving a call even after answering the phone the vibration on the watch it does not stop, if you accidentally swipe up to make the vibration stop, it hangs up the phone while you talk..
- When receiving a call it does not show the name nor the number of the caller.
Compiling the latest version of YubiKey Personalization Tool on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Recently, we were got our hands on some YubiKeys, and we decided to use them to create a Two Factor Authentication System (2FA) for the fun of it! We had at our disposal an updated Ubuntu 18.04 LTS so we installed the personalization tools from the official repositories in order to modify the behavior and configure the YubiKeys.
To our disappointment, when we used ykpersonalize and yubikey-personalization-gui we would get an error that the firmware of the YubiKey was unknown…
At the time, the installation packages from the official Ubuntu repositories had version 3.1.24 for the application version and 1.18.0 for the library version.
We noticed that on the YubiKey Personalization Tools page there were newer versions of both the application and the library. Specifically at the time the Application version was 3.1.26 and the Library Version was 1.19.0. Since both were newer than the versions in the repositories we decided to build them and see if they work right with our YubiKeys.
The instructions in the respective installers, were not 100% complete and the installations failed by blindly following them. To actually make the installations work, we installed the following dependencies and tools before compiling:
sudo apt update -y;
sudo apt upgrade -y;
sudo apt install build-essential -y;
sudo apt-get install pkg-config git autoconf libtool asciidoc-base -y;
After installing the above packages the rest of the installation went smoothly.
Installing the command line tools and the library
cd ~; # or any other folder of your choice
sudo apt-get install libykpers-1-dev libyubikey-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev libjson-c-dev -y;
git clone https://github.com/Yubico/yubikey-personalization.git;
cd yubikey-personalization;
autoreconf --install;
./configure;
sudo make check install;
Installing the Qt based Cross-Platform YubiKey Personalization Tool
cd ~; # or any other folder of your choice
sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev -y;
git clone https://github.com/Yubico/yubikey-personalization-gui.git;
cd yubikey-personalization-gui;
qmake && make;
ACM ICPC – Cyprus National Competition 2019
(Cyprus Collegiate Programming Contest)
On the 8th of June, the Cyprus National ACM ICPC programming competition was held at the premises of the University of Central Lancashire – Cyprus in Pyla.
The competition was co-organized by all major academic institutions in Cyprus under the auspices of the Cyprus Computer Society. The participating Universities (in alphabetic order) were the following:
- Cyprus University of Technology
- European University Cyprus
- Frederick University
- Open University of Cyprus
- UCLan, Cyprus
- University of Cyprus
- University of Nicosia
The technical aspects of the competition were held up to the standards of the International Olympiad in Informatics using an automated grading environment with live feedback for the contestants.
In total, the competition hosted 8 teams of 4 members (3 contestants and one mentor). 5 algorithmic problems were given to the contestants to solve programmatically in 3 hours. By the end of the competition all 5 problems were 100% solved by at least one team.
Thanks to the work of the Organizing Committee and especially the efforts by Dr. Josephina Antoniou the competition was successfully completed without any issues.
The first two teams with the highest overall score will represent Cyprus to the South-Eastern European Regional Contest. Specifically the two teams are the following (ordered by overall rank, members ordered alphabetically):
Adamos Ttofari, Andronikos Charalambous, Rafail Loizou
Washing Machines
Coach: Chryssis Georgiou
Christodoulos Constantinides, Chryssis Eftychiou, Constantinos Demetriou
Multi-Threat
Coach: Dimitrios Kouzapas
Ranking
| Rank | Academic Institution | Team Name |
| 1 | University of Cyprus | WashingMachines |
| 2 | University of Cyprus | Multi-Threat |
| 3 | University of Cyprus | insert_catchy_name_here |
| 4 | University of Cyprus | Coding_Warriors |
| 5 | University of Cyprus | Trifecta |
| 6 | University of Cyprus | Paphos |
| 7 | Cyprus University of Technology | cutOverflow |
| 8 | University of Central Lancashire Cyprus | MAF-Lab |
