sharepod to replace iTunes

iTunes is too bulky to manage ipod songs.  I have now changed to sharepod, small file size, just 5MB file size plus the interface is neat and clean.  


Another headache of iTunes is that if some songs in a PC's folder  are inadvertently deleted, iTunes attempts to delete the same songs in ipod because of auto-sync.  No such hassle in sharepod. 


The only shortcoming is that I have to connect ipod to sharepod if I want to listen to music through  my PC.

25GB Cloud Storage

I got 25GB cloud storage from PCCW.  It is a free service. Once connected, there will be a u drive with the name uhub.  Just like plugging in a USB flash drive.

Doesn't sound much increase in storage capacity if one is using desktop or notebook.  However, the cloud storage is accessible by iPhone and Android and this feature is very significant since smartphones do not come with hard drive.

The speed of access is a bit slow which can not be compared to accessing a local hard drive. The transfer of files is not aided by encryption. If this option is available, it makes access even slower. However, the experience of commercial paid cloud storage should be much better and encryption is a MUST.

watching Youtube freezed after installing Windows 7 SP1

For the past 3 months, my Windows 7 notebook freezed  whenever watching Youtube videos or videos of appledaily news.  I thought it could be due to system drivers corruption.  I re-installed Windows 7 again and in the first 3 days, everything was fine. Afterwards, automatic update installed SP1 and the problem appeared again.  Shit, some bloggers say this SP1 problem had been confirmed by Microsoft because of a weakness of memory manager performs frequent paging in and paging out requests when memory usage is high.

Microsoft has released a hotfix to it downloadable at :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2575077

I did not apply the hotfix.  I just uninstalled SP1 and my Windows 7 is now stable and performing well.

Shall name-based virtal hosting be used in a web server even only a single website is hosted on the IP address

This is a web server security question. Shall name-based virtal hosting be used in a web server even only a single website is hosted on the IP address ?  The typical cases are www.hkexnews.hk and www.hkex.com.hk.  The  websites  respond to clients even the HTTP headers do not contain a hostname, just an IP address only .  The answer to me is quite obvious. 

Multiple SSL websites on a single IP address

Apache 2.2.12 or higher version can support Server Name Identification (SNI) in Transport Layer Security (TLS). That is to say, multiple SSL websites can be hosted on a single IP address. This is a great help. In fact, SNI in TLS has become an IETF standard (RFC 3546) dated back to end 2003.

There is now a tool to test if browsers can support SNI in the TLS handshake:

https://sni.velox.ch/

During the test, I noticed IE8 prompted an error message of invalid certificate, I just pressed the  continue browsing button and I saw more details about IE failure. 

What I observed is that the current version of Firefox, Chrome and Safari are capable of SNI while IE still lacks this function. On server side, I track that Microsoft IIS 7.5 is not able to do this SNI thing, but Microsoft has committed to make it in the next version.  For browsers in smartphones, I can not test one by one since there are so many different packages.

This is just a bit of development. There is a long way to go before a single IP address can support multiple SSL websites on all different platforms while some browsers might still fall behind.

Apache Killer killed

After waiting for 6 days, Apache Software Foundation finally released Apache 2.2.20 which removes the HTTP Range Exploit.   The fix is that if  the sum of all ranges in a request is larger than the original file, the server ignores the ranges and sends the complete file.


All system administrators should be relaxed now.  The most devastating bug in the history of the open source community has been eliminated.