Launch of Body Combat 29

I attended the BC 29 launch class last evening. Again, this is a great release that makes participant surprised. Really strong body movement and fantastic punches. I felt a bit exhausted after the first 3 tracks.

After BC28, we know for sure that there will be something new in track no.6 which is normally the recovery or conditioning track. In track 6, we twisted our waist and perform a double chop and double punch and then the back kick. The side kick part was also extra-ordinary. Side-kick once and then hold the leg without touching floor and then immediately extended another side kick. Great great fighting actions !

笑話一則

朋友說沒有身材的女士性慾特別強。

何解 ?

難道你們沒有聽過 "細胸夾狼" 嗎！

Interesting AD Banner

I always think that AD banner should be interesting and innovative in order to lure other people to clike on it. Take a look at the one below. If you are IT people and comfortable with programming syntax, no doubt you will be atracted by it:

critical processes in IT management and governance

I come across an article on IT Governance. It said there are 6 core processes in IT management and governance, namely :

1. Demand Management
2. Portfolio Management
3. Project and Program Management
4. Resource Management
5. Financial Management
6. Asset Management

All of these processes are focused on providing visibility, control, and utilization of IT resources to maximize business value.

For my curiosity, which one of the above 6 processes is the most difficult one to manage ? The answer is .....

She's back now

She's back now. This time for the 2008 Presidential Election.

If succeeded, Hillary will be the first US female President in history.

I very much want to see people create a new page in history.

3-hour cycling class - the celebration of Le Tour De France

Today marked the celebration of Le Tour De France in California and there was a 3-hour cycling class in Causeway Bay. About 80 members participated this enjoyable evemt.

The 6 trainers on stage were Michael, Diana, Phyllis, Gavin, Lyn and Charles. Each of them took turn to lead the class for 30 minutres.

I consumed 1300 cc of water and swallowed a banana during the 3 hours. For those who completed this traning class, they were given a nice certificate. I think I have burnt out at elast 2400 kcalorie.

There is no doubt that I will definitely join again next year.

Corporate Governance

When you browse the web sites of big corporations or multi-national companies such as IBM, Microsoft and some famous banks, do you find if they publish their statements about corporate governance. Strange, I can not find any.

SmarTone)http://www.smartone.com.hk) is one exception. It publishes its corporate governance as follows :

The Group strives to maintain a high standard of corporate governance practices. It has established an Audit Committee to ensure proper reporting and adequate internal controls, with a majority of the committee members being independent non-executive directors. In addition, Remuneration Committee has been set up to ensure a formal and transparent procedure for setting policy on executive directors' remuneration and for the fixing the remuneration packages of executive directors and senior management. The Group is also committed to achieving a high level of transparency with the timely communication of information to shareholders and investors through different channels, including corporate web site, investor meetings, press conferences and financial reports.

After reading, my comment is that an Audit Committee plus Remuneration Committee should not be sufficient to ensure a broad and sound framework for corporate governance practices. More should have been mentioned. How about protecting the interests of stake holders, protection of customer data privacy, setting benchmark to gauge the Group's business and operational performance and establishing a business continuity plan in case of disasters.

Open DNS Server

According to US-CERT, 80 % of DNS Servers in the world have a loophole that allow third party untrusted IP addresses to perform recursive lookup. This risk can give rise to large scale DDoS, cache poisoning and other forms of attacks. The US-CERT and ISC therefore recommend all network administrators to close the recursive lookup by untrusted IP addresses.

I have followed the advice of US-CERT. To this end, the solution is simply adding a single line in /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf

allow-recursion { IP address; IP address/subnet mask; };

or simply put

recursion no;

The former allows trusted hosts to accesss recursive lookup while the latter only serves the recursive lookup function for the localhost only.

Openwebmail 2.52 - Internal Server Errors

A lot of people using Openwebmail 2.52 or earlier versions have encountered "Internal Server Error" during logon. This happens intermittently and if one tries to logon again, the error prompt might be disappeared. I've got this trouble for over a month and after continuously googling, I found that the root cause of the problem lies in virus check of Openwebmail. The workaround solution is to disable virus check in /var/www/cgi-bin/openwebmail/etc/ opennwebmail.conf.

Putting this problem aside, on the whole, I think Openwebmail 2.52 is a piece of surprising webmail package comparable to those used by Hotmail, Yahoo and Google mail.

We suck more, that guaranteed !

I like this wallpaper. Look at the words printed on the drink : "We suck more ! And that's guaranteed". My comment is that it should be changed to "We suck money ! And that's guaranteed."

Germany has the highest Firefox browser penetration

According to onestat.com, Firefox penetration in Gemany ranked the highest in the world, about 39 % :

The rankings of browsers in Germany are :

		July 2006
1.	Microsoft IE	55.99%
2.	Mozilla Firefox	39.02%
3.	Opera	2.78%
4.	Apple Safari	1.73%
5.	Netscape	0.30%

This is not surprising to me as I know people in Gemany are keen to support Linux and their developed Suse.

MYoga

I visited MYoga today. The Club is very spacious, good decoration which should give everyone a high class feeling. The group exercises offered to members are of course a variety of Yoga training courses, Body Combat, Body Pump, Spinning and some dances. Woo.. the greatest disappointment is that there are no physical training facilities. I could not perform ab crunch or running on treadmill. Without training equipment, there is no way MYoga could attract me to join.

All hand-held electronic devices banned onboard aircraft

The time has come to mandate a strict rule in the aviation industry. Passengers are not allowed to carry any electronic devices onboard aircraft. These devices include notebook PC, game stations, MP3 player, ipod and cellular phones. I will not be happy in long hour flight without an ipod. But I have to consider it from another angle. If these devices are permitted, the batteries inside can be dis-assembled and then used to ignite a liquid bomb. For the sake of aircraft safety, passengers please adhere to the new rules.

Phishing skills to hide domain name in URL

This is the link I find in a phishing email.

http://%7a%68%61%6e%67%2e%6d%79%74%
77%2e%6e%65%74/

Average users can not tell what the % and codes after % mean. In fact, the sender is using the HEX value of ASCII characters. By looking at the ASCII table, the above link can be translated as : http://zhang.mytw.net

3-hour cycling class

CFC will host a big challenge cycling class on 19 August lasting for 3 hours. 85 bikes will be placed in the dance studio of Causeway Bay Club. There will be a 15-minute break for members to change their clothes or take some snack.

What should I bring to prepare for this challenge class ? Definitley 2 litres of water, 3 sports T-shirt and some energy bar. I surely need some energy bar because the whole class will help me to burn at least 2000 kcaloires.

rwhod

Strange. I remember that I have never installed or activated rwhod. On performing an Internet security scanning, this one appeared running and I have no idea if it was under xinetd. This was a highly vulnerable daemon which could result in buffer overflow.

What I could do is to chmod /usr/sbin/rwhod and /etc/rc.d/init.d/rwhod to make the binary and script not executable.