Just The Wei I Am

This is something that I just thought about when signing up for an account at some shady Russian CounterStrike website. I think the thought has occured to me before, but I think I'll put it up to benefit whoever might be reading this.

Okay, basically it's this: When you sign up for things online, they always ask you for email address right? And if it's an account on some website, they will ask you to choose a password also right?

Now, if you are the type who habitually change your password or come up with a new one each time, then all's fine. But if you are like me, who hates having to change passwords, and always use one out of just a handful of different ones, then there is cause for worry.

Because if you choose a password that is the same as that for the email account you supplied, then nothing stands between a rogue webmaster and commandeering your email account. The password will be in plain sight to him, since it is his website and database. Of course, if it's just email, then it's not too bad. What if your account provides other services than email? eg, knowing your NUS email password, I can then take over your entire account.

At least I have one extra line of defense, by creating dedicated/semidedicated mail forwarders for subscriptions. In English, it means that I provide a different email address for each thing I sign up with online. I told Apple my email is apple@m1.lookingabove.com; I told Microsoft it's msn@wei.lookingabove.com; I told the shady Russian website that it's russ@m1.lookingabove.com. Why? Because those aren't real accounts. Emails sent to them get forwarded to my real email. I did this to protect my email from spam (I can delete and bounce mail to any of the addresses if it gets spammed) but now I realise that it protects me from more!

Okay, not everyone has his/her own hosted domain and unlimited forwarders ... though I think everyone should get one!

So what can you do? Like I said, if you are always changing your password or coming up with new ones, you're fine. But if you are a creature of habit, let me propose this: devise a simple system of coming up with unique passwords for each thing you sign up with. For example, the system can be this: add the number 90 to a shortened form of the website's name. So for apple.com, your password is apple90, for yahoo, it's yahoo90, for shady russian websites, it's russ90.

Intuitively, yahoo90 feels unsafe. It feels ... obvious. Okay, for those really important accounts with trustworthy websites, you jolly well use a really really unique password (even if it's one you use over and over). It's perfectly safe to do so especially if they don't ask you for your email address. Like Yahoo! since it gives you one.

Don't like that method? Well, to make the passwords more complicated but still habitual enough, you can alternate between the website name and a fixed number ... For example, the website is Apple and the fixed number is 15, so the password chosen will be a1p5p1l5e. Shady Russian website? r1u5s1s. Let me just tell you: passwords like this are completely unguessable. But i'll tell you, for those unimportant signups, don't bother ... like I said, the webmaster can see your password if he wants to anyway. You are protecting your email from him!! So, it will be russ90 for me ....

The highlight of the day so far today is .... finding out that I still intiutively know how to derive the length of the hypotenuse using Pythagoras Thereom.

Why did I need to do that? Because I know that ISO A4 sheets are 210x297mm in dimensions, and I wanted to find the length of its diagonal.

So why did I need to do that? Because I do not have a long ruler, and I wanted to see how long 15.4 inches is. The diagonal turned out to be 14.3 inches and it wasn't hard to imagine an extra 1.1 inches.

Uh huh, so why did I need to do that? Because the Acer Aspire 2012 (and many other notebooks, in fact) has a 15.4" TFT with a native resolution of 1280x800. I created an image with those dimensions in Photoshop, copy-and-paste a screenshot of my current display, and then zoomed the image so that it was 15.4 inches along its diagonal. Voila! Mockup of 15.4" 1280x800 display!

Sadly, though, I found myself rather put off by the prospects of eventually having to do my daily computing oo-eh-bo-eh on such a *small* display. I won't be able to surf with two IE windows side-by-side, both in portrait orientation! Bleak... Then again, James assured me that I'll get used to it. Oh, he should know, what with his new baby ... All my geek friends are switching, when will it be my turn?

In the meantime, I think I will put up with Wintel. I have few complaints lah - it's just that Apple really is better. Hey, I've just gone to an Apple Technology Update and I've watched Steve Jobs's keynote unveiling Panther. It's cool. Tiger's coming soon. Watch this space. So really, if I want to switch, it's more of a pull than a push.

So now I'm dreaming about getting a notebook. About time, I guess. Third year's coming. Having my PC on 24/7 in a hostel room is cool but it's kinda irritating that I always have to borrow laptops from people to run RDC when I'm in school. So, it's time to get one myself. Was thinking of getting a 2nd-hand one. It's not too bad, and I can't find a current model with better all-round specs for the price asked. Yet, getting a second opinion from James - who is the proud owner of his third notebook - set me straight. It's not bad, but it's old technology. Besides, and also more importantly, after looking around more, I found that for just a few hundred dollars more, I can get stuff way better.

Moral of the story, do your homework before buying geek stuff. And don't forget your geometry.

The Browsers War happened a few years back, when Netscape and Microsoft were fighting for market share during the height of the Internet boom. After various court battles and what-nots, that war is pretty much over. Today, the insurgent browsers seem to be fighting more of an underground war. Lots of alternative browsers popping up here and there.

I just tried Mozilla. It's a tight package that includes a browser, email client, newsreader, IRC client and a composer tool - all in a 12MB installer. From my brief encounter with it, it feels a little rough at the edges. I can see some nice features like Tabs, but hey, Opera has those too and better implemented. I don't really have that good a first impression of Mozilla, so will its users pray tell me what are its good points?

IE works really fine for me, although I've heard so many people complain about it. It hardly - really hardly - ever crashes on me, and this is the main grouse that people have. And if there's one thing that will make me reluctant to shift from IE, it gotta be the Google Toolbar. It's not part of IE, you have to get it from Google and I think all IE users should get it!

Opera's another browser that I'm impressed by (although I will still use IE). It just gets things right. Mouse Gestures is a really good idea. Once mastered, prepare to get RSI in your right wrist. ;) One word to describe the Opera experience might be 'intuitive' - if you can think of it, they've probably implemented it. If you can't think of it, they've also implemented it.

Anyway, I'll think to IE just because it is simple. No frills. It works. Period.

Okay, maybe not that much.

After all that talk, here's a screenshot of my IE experience for fellow geeks to scrutinise.

Portrait orientation. Google toolbar. No MyWebSearch! No spy/adware!

Google

If you are not l33t, in fact if you don't even know what l33t is, don't click on the link!!

Haha, click it anyway lah ...

They're doing renovation works next door, I think. All that drilling and stuff. It's horribly noisy! It's not exactly white noise although it's pretty repetitive. Want to get out as soon as I can.

But while I'm still stuck here, I shall attempt to make it more bearable by playing my music real loud. And guess what?! My very strategically placed subwoofer (on the table, next to the monitor, for easy reach) generates such a strong magnetic field that my display is shuddering. Not the monitor, mind you. The display. That's to say, the subwoofer's magnetic field is further diverting the electrons in the CRT, periodically, so I get wave-like effects on my display that corresponds to the bass of the music.

Thought of putting the big metal cover of the CPU in between them for extra shielding. Then thought better of it. I'll just shift the subwoofer to the floor, where it belongs anyway, later tonight. For now, degauss degauss degauss ...

(Stop sniggering, all you flat panel users!)
(actually, I believe that a grand total of 2, maybe 3, readers of this blog actually understand what I'm talking about.. haha)

Movable Type kena saboed by cPanel's automatic driver updates. Buggy Perl MySQL driver proves a bane to MT. Blog spammers contributes to mayhem by increasing database traffic, causing my disk quota to jam up!! Couldn't blog even when I wanted to.

My Thinkpad's LCD backlight conked out! :_(
now I need to send it for repair ... waaaah ...

Should I hack my DVD drive's regioncheck?

i got my laptop back on Saturday!! Yay!! Yippee! Fully fixed - thanks Dunyong!! The invertor card thingy was spoilt and was replaced. Turned out that even the LCD panel was spoilt and got replaced too. All under warranty - phew! Blessing in disguise man.. cos the LCD actually had 2 dead pixels ... now it's brand new!!

Been using Ubuntu Linux for awhile now. It's touted as Linux for Human Beings, i.e. it is simple for 'normal' people to use, considering that Linux/Unix has always been considered the domain of geeks. And I must say, it was indeed easy to install and to use. Of course, I couldn't help customising it to my liking as much as I could. After all, that is the whole spirit of Linux - modify, modify, modify.

So tada, here's a pic of my desktop. Very gentle green and earth tones overall. Ubuntu comes with the latest Gnome desktop environment and that's cool. But I went further as swapped out the default Metacity window manager which is simple and minimalist, putting in its place the cutting-edge Enlightenment. To quote, I now have an "Enlightened Gnome". *roll eyes* lol.

Was helping my father fix up my uncle's old PC just now. Helping him to connect to mySingtel, the dialup service. My old 56k modem was commissioned for the job. New lease of life for that little black box :)

As I hooked it up to the wall outlet, I couldn't help but reminisce a little about the old days. Ah.. the days when computer networking didn't mean the Internet. It meant BBS'es - Bulletin Board Service. Somebody runs a program on his computer and leaves it on 24hrs (or fixed periods, like opening hours), and other people get to connect to his computer through the phone lines (with a modem, of course). Most were small affairs where only one person could connect at a time. Then there were the juggernauts that could take 30+, even 100+, people.

What did we do on BBS'es? Back in those days when there was no residential Internet access, BBS'es were where you downloaded files, email (most of the time restricted to people using the same BBS), played games, and chatted (if that BBS had multiple users).

I can't even begin to describe the experience in today's context. If your first experience with a computer is Windows, then it's difficult for you to imagine life without a graphical user interface. That's how it was with BBS'es (of course, everything else in DOS too). Everything was text-based. Ah, but there was ANSI art! Here's a sample. So even on a 80x25 screen, things could still look nice and colorful. The subtlety of it.

Well, of course, I'm happy with today's broadband Internet, but I just think there was so much charm on those old VGA screens. Haha, hearing the modem sing its tune when it was connecting brought a little warmth to me. What a geek.

Adobe Production Studio

What a wonderful day.

Today all the creative cells in my body celebrated. After so many long years, I am suddenly a bona fide owner of Adobe software. Not just the venerable Photoshop. But the whole lot - Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator and Audition. It's amazing. Thankfully there is such a thing as Education edition - the full Premium edition without the $3000+ price tag. Still it cost the princely sum of $920. Thank you, Singapore Government, and Ma and Pa!

Wonderful.

Must make full use of this investment - must be faithful with it! Wow, I can imagine all the great multimedia, graphics and videos that I can do to bless the kingdom of God!

Two new softwares I've installed, to my satisfaction:

1. Internet Explorer 7 Beta
   The interface is a huge improvement from the previous versions. Notably, the toolbars are trimmer and more compact. They must have some pretty accurate user feedback. Tabbed browsing comes a little late, when Opera has been doing it for years. Well, it's still a welcome improvement since I do like using IE.


2. Google Desktop
   The linux world has many more interesting desktop enhancements, but since I predominantly use Windows now, Google Desktop is pretty cool. One good thing about being a Google app is that settings can be linked to your Google account, so that they can be retrieved when you use Desktop on another computer. I wish it is more customisable though.

You have to understand Star Wars, and also have watched Cops, in order to get this parody. It's genius. Even presents an plausible explanation for the deaths of Owen and Beru Lars. Gosh.

My old PCs are tucked away collecting dust. They were not dead when I retired them, so they were just there to grow old.

I took one out just now - it's a Pentium III. I'm hoping to be able to install Ubuntu on it and maybe use it as a server. So I plug everything in, and .... nothing. Oh oh, I think it died quietly one day. Shucks. Scratch head.

I shall ask my father - think he might be able to come up with something. I just hope it's nothing major like a dead motherboard, cos if need to spend money then no point liao. Hopefully just a loose connector, or no battery, or something like that.

Web 2.0 is not just a social and technological revolution, it's a linguistic one too!!

Can't find something? Google for it.
Like a page so much? Digg it!
Or you can spurl it for future reference..
What a del.icio.us page, full of flickring photos!

Last.fm is really cool, btw, but erm.. it's a noun, so it's part of speech is pretty fixed =/
Good Web 2.0 names should be usable as verbs and adjectives!

btw, my PIII is alive! After the prev entry, I asked my father, and it turned out that it was "dead" cos he cannibalised it for parts a while back. And well, erm.. there's no RAM left inside. I looked in, and oh oops, I didn't notice the first time round.. no RAM.. hmmm

Anyway, couple of days ago he put some RAM in, so yesh, it's alive and kicking.. booted it up and felt nostalgic seeing the windows 98 startup .. there's an 8GB harddisk, not too bad .. well, when i'm free, i shall get down to installing ubuntu and see if i can have a personal networked jukebox (see Jinzora).. heehee..

Just saw a virtual Ipod - basically a website that lets you search for and play tracks, and create playlists, and with a mock Ipod interface. Better than last.fm in the sense that you play exactly which track you want. It has been described as the Web2.0 version of Napster. Hmm..

However it's legality is still in doubt, and it remains to be seen if it will be pulled off the net. Partly why I'm not posting a link. *shrug*

Introducing SearchMash.com

The ever-popular Google, but with an experimental user interface. So far, I like it. The results are displayed cleanly and with a sleeker look. Innovations include not having to click "Next" - more results can be revealed on the current page by pressing spacebar.

Because it's experimental... 1) expect changes. Don't get too used to features. 2) sometimes the site might be down, but I think it's rare. 3) it can be rough at some edges. 4) There are no ads. Yet.

I made it my default browser start page, since it was originally Google.

I feel so geeky.. A snapshot of the last week or so at work:

• I've been looking at databases and programming custom PHP scripts.


• Our webhosting contract is ending, and I'm looking into reliable dedicated hosting providers.


• My current reading list include books on running linux web servers, and programming database-driven websites.

As for myself, I'm getting ready to migrate my personal site (what you're reading now) as well. Found a super deal at InMotionHosting.com and signed up. I'll be getting more for lesser. So you should be seeing this blog get a new look soon.

I'm switching to WordPress as well. MovableType has been great, but I guess I've picked up an inclination towards open source and PHP along the way. I suppose there is some attachment to MT as well, seeing that I've used it for two years or so. I think I might miss the familiar light blue backend. Oh well, I know I will like WordPress more and more. Besides, my new webhosting account has Fantastico, which makes upgrading a breeze. (Update: I upgraded to MT 3.33 and will stick to it for now. WP might be fun, but MT is a solid product which is getting better.)

Went to the library during lunchtime and got myself the following:

• Test-Driven Development by example


• Agile Software Development Ecosystems


• Ruby on Rails for dummies


• UML - A Beginner's Guide

Got this on Saturday. Will enthuse about its quality later. Was fun bargaining. The earphones (in-ear monitors, to be exact) are the pair I got some time ago - the Crossroads Mylarone X3.

"Marvin The Album" (Yes, all 3 words are the name of the album) by Frente! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name of the band) is one of my favourite CDs. It's one of the first CDs I bought in my life, when I was 14, and I have loved it since.

Angie Hart's beautiful voice and the band's wonderful acoustic playing has always made this an uplifting album. Much more than their next album, the darker "Shape", which I also have but listen to much much less.

Today, I listened to "Marvin The Album" again after a long time of not doing so. I wanted to hear how it would sound on my Meizu M6 and Crossroads MylarOne X3 combination. The M6 is lauded as a portable player with high quality internal components, making its output sound better. The X3 is an in-ear monitor (earphone that goes into the ear canal) that is lauded for its clarity in music reproduction, with good instrument separation (the ability to listen and focus on individual instruments in a musical recording). Both are excellent value for money. If interested, check out Jaben (blog, forums and online shopping) for information on the X3 and MeizuMe for the M6. Of course, if you're my friend, just ask me lah!

Back to Frente!... I had already encoded the CD in lossless FLAC format so that I can play it on a portable player. Deciding that I would do The Listen tonight, I plugged in the X3, and switched on the M6 with anticipation. I knew it would sound good, but I wonder how good?

The result: Very very good! This is my favourite CD for the most part of the last 12 years, and I've honestly never heard it sound so good. I had shivers down my spine by the time of merely the 4th bar of the first track. Angie's voice sounded so.... poignant. The piano was so.... musical. On the next track, one of their best, "Labour Of Love", the folk guitar was introduced to the album, and it sounded great! The choke-strum was solid, and I could hear the impact as flesh met string strings. The harmonics sounded as the closing notes sounded brilliantly bell-like, just as they should. On "Lonely", I heard a percussion instrument I cannot identify that I've never notice for there on the track.

The bass playing on all the tracks was clear and not muddied, with distinct notes. And it is a very excellent arrangement, a very melodious and inventive bassist. I have to admit that I've never been able to listen to the bass on this album properly. I think this is the one biggest improvement the M6/X3 has made to my appreciation of this album.

"Marvin The Album" is still one of my top favourites, and now I get to listen to it with a new-found appreciation.