Body Combat 30

I practised BC30 tonight at Whampao. Actually this is the launch of BC 30 in Hong Kong. Guess what. There were five instructors on the stage; Yvonne, Charles, Tina, Michelle and Sunny. Those participating members acted like we were having a great party.

In BC29, I think the most attractive move is the double chop and double punch followed by a back kick in the recovery track number 6. For BC30, the action impresses me most is the evasive sidekick. I have never imagined about adding a jump in performing side kick.

Actually, the sound tracks in BC30 are not so good. Some tracks are already used in other earlier releases. The good thing is on the whole, the body movement and actions are beautiful.

Image spam again

I try to take a thorough thinking about image spam. It is too bad for me to realize that image spam can defeat anti-spam engine in the server side apart from paralysing key-word filter or Bayesian filter in the client side. This is because in every spam generated, the image contained in it is a bit different from the other. On the anti-spam engine, file hashing can not work as the hash values of image files are not matched. I wish IT people in the email anti-spam field soon come up with quick solution to deal with inage spam. I am a victim suffering from the image spam nuisance.

IT Sub-sector Election Committee

There are 39 candidates competing for 20 seats in the IT Sub-sector Election Committee. The group IT20 nominated 20 candidates, most of them are managing directors or professors in university. None of them has said anything about competition in CE Election except Charles Mok. Great, this guy never disappoints me. Another distinguished guy that attracts my attention is Ricky Wong. He says Hong Kong needs competition for a better tomorrow.

I have made up my mind how to vote. Actually, there are not enough candidates for me to rely on. At most, I can only select 15 candidates.

6 USB port in a PC enough or not

There are 6 USB ports in my son's PC. I find that all the 6 USB ports have been used up because of the following devices and connections :

1. USB mouse
2. card reader
3. 802.11b WLAN client
4. Web camera
5. colour printer
6. writing PAD

In case of the need to transfer music to portable devices, we have to disconnect the card reader and leave the port to MP3 player. Well, of course, there is also a need for USB drive for backup or other practical reasons.

Because of the wide spread use of USB connections, I certainly think that a PC with 8 built-in USB ports is a standard entry level configuration.

Firefox 2.0 Anti-Phishing Feature

Finally, Firefox 2.0 has successfully built with user alert warning for phishing web sites. This is really great. I know that IE 7.0 will offer the same. I haven't tried it yet.

This is a screen dump of alert by Firefox when attempting to access a phishing site.

The longest domain name I have seen

I had a bottle of Heineken beer today. There was a label sticked to the bottle with the words "please visit enjoyheinekenresponsibly.com". Woo, a total of 27 characters. This is the longest domain name I have seen in commercial products. Will consumers spend time to hit 30 keystrokes just to visit a web site ?

A question arises. What is the maximum number of characters in a domain name ? According to IETF standard (forget which one), the maximum length is 63 characters. Here is a domain with 63 characters which I guess is used for playing only :

Iamtheproudownerofthelongestlongestlongestdomainnameinthisworld.com

Image spam is on the rise

At one time, spammers tried to use confusing words in message body or subject heading such as V!agr@, C alis, 0 E M to escape from being caught by Bayseian filter or key word filter that are bundled with email client. This is a game of cat and mouse chase. Spammers are already tired of this. They have come back to an old trick of image spam. All non-sense contents are contained in an image and by default, email clients and web mail interface capable of handling email in HTML format will display the image spam by default. Will end users be determined to config their email clients to only read text-based email and put image-embedded to trash ? I guess not.

Open DNS Serve again

I talked to some of my friends who are in the IT field about open DNS server. To my dismay, most of them do not consider open DNS Server to perform recursive query as a security vulnerability. I think the mind of people will only change only when there is a large scale attack associated with this unplugged hole.

Lame Server Nuisance

My server has captured a large volume of error logs related to lame server especially on reverse DNS lookup. Put it simply, a lame server is one that is not responding to a name request it is expected to handle. Network administrators are in general lazy. They do not spend effort in properly setting the reverse lookup of domain records.
For me, I have to eliminate the large volume of lame server logs. The way to do it is add the following in /var/named/chroot/etc/named.conf :

logging {
category lame-servers { null; };
};

All-in-one printer

Guess what. I bought a HP Deskjet F380 printer at HK$688. This is an all-in-one printer. Apart from printing documents from PC, it can be used as a scanner and photocopier. I never dream that the price of inkjet printer will ever drop to this low level.

Testimonial

Alen Lo invited me to write a testimonial published in i-totalsecurity web site. I accepted the invitation. This is what I have written in the URL http://www.i-totalsecurity.net/company.php#TESTIMONIAL:

"I like to thank Alen and Keith for conducting a well-organized CISSP traning course. I passed the CISSP exam on a first attempt. Apart from passing the exam, I have acquired the skills and knowledge to remain competent in the IT security field. If I can make it, so can you."

六年前的投稿

這是我六年前的一篇投稿，名為女朋友:

女朋友

我 有 兩 個 女 朋 友 ， 年 近 廿 五 ， 曾 為 花 旗 國 國 防 部 辦 事 。 雖 則 性 格 古 怪 ， 辦 事 能 力 卻 高 深 莫 測 ， 以 致 追 求 者 眾 。 為 了 接 近 依 人 ， 小 弟 勇 往 直 前 ， 併 命 追 逐 ， 放 棄 了 不 少 私 人 時 間 ， 換 來 卻 是 IT 世 界 ? 更 多 不 解 及 疑 惑 。 她 們 的 名 字 ， 你 猜 中 了 ， 是 TCP 和 ＩＰ 。

My trip to New Zealand

I returned from New Zealand after visiting the city of Auckland, Hamiltion. Queenstown and ChristChurch. In the South Island, the weather was cold in the morning (1 - 3 degree C) while temperature in the afternoo could rise up to 22 degree C.

New Zealand is a lovely country for sight seeing with plenty of beautiful lakes and snow mountains. There are a lot of fine food everywhere.

I bought a head banner with silver fern. To NZ people (Kiwi guys), silver fern is a sign of their country. Just look at what their national ruby team wear.

My photos are in the link http://www.i3way.net/nz/