facebook is an election propaganda

Facebook is a great propaganda for election, especially for functional constituencies like the IT Sector. Candidates can find the eligible voters by searching key words such as MIET, HKCS, BCS, CISSP, CISA etc. More importantly, this handy tool is free of charge. In the coming LegCo Election in Sept 2008, the communications and networking powers of facebook will be unleashed.

Hardware encrypted USB memory sticks

The recent privacy incidents happened in HK arising from the use of portable storage devices tells me that for maximum security sake, I need to use hardware encrypted USB memory sticks. I know that these devices are really expensive, around US$100 for a 1 GB USB flash memory. To my dismay, I visited the computer malls in Wan Chai and Sham Shui Po and could not find one to buy.

Hong Kong is at the forefront of IT. How come such useful devices are not off-the-shelf in general computer shops.

Raising Funds for Sichuan victims

CFC is the largest gym club in Hong Kong. So far, it has not organized any super theme classes to raise funds for helping Sichuan victims. My patience on this has gone and I decided to sent my message to its management. I asked the management to check past records of what they did in helping tsunami victims.

單車教練

我認識的 CFC 單車教練之中， Johnny Chan 最為特出。 記憶所及，從他第一天執教開始，他已是穿着專用單車裝束，在學員面前，沒有穿過其它雜款運動服裝。 當 Schwin 車加裝單車鞋托之後，他是首批 (極可能是首位)穿上單車鞋去執教的。他那份追求專業、完美的精神，對我來說是非常值得學習。

High Definition TV

This might be a good news or a bad news.

The communal antenna distribution system in our building has been upgraded to support High Definition TV (HDTV). I have the chance to watch HDTV by spending HK$1x,xxx for a high-end LCD panel and a HDTV decoder. If I really do that, I will be creating a big piece of junk by throwing away my 29-inch traditional TV set. What else !People will laugh at you when they know that your building can support HDTV while you are still watching with a traditional TV set.

For the sake of the environment, forget about what other people say.

點歌

上完BodyCombat堂， 教練問學員有沒有興趣點歌，全班學員默不作聲。 聰明的教練巳經估到了，原來他們一齊要求點播 “Sound of Silence”。

SPF -all

For those system administrators that make settings of their Sender Policy Framework (SPF) with –all in their DNS zone records, I like to pay my tribute to them. They are the real anti-spam heros that have the competent knowledge to fight against spam.

What does SPF –all mean ?

"v=spf1 ip4:1.2.3.4 -all"

In the first line, it tells only the IP address 1.2.3.4 can claim to use the designated domain name in "mail from" field. All other IP addresses can never claim.

v=spf1 a:mail.example.com a:xyz.example.com -all"

Similarly, in the second line above, two hosts can claim to use the designated domain name in the "mail from" field while all others will be rejected.

Sadly, only about 1 % of domain names in use are having SPF -all settings in place.

SSID of Government WiFi Service

I notice that the SSID of Government WiFi service is set as "freegovwifi". At a first glance, I can not distinguish from this SSID this is a government service unless I interpret the SSID as three separate part as "free", "gov", and "wifi". Could some wise guys develop a better name ? Yeah, using hyphen in between words could help and "free-gov-wifi" is very distinguishable. However, I like to add that stating "WiFi" in SSID is meaningless and a bit redundant. My suggestion is simply use "hk-gov" and every body can tell it is a service offered by the HK Government.

Write protect switch on USB thumb drive

My 8GB USB memory stick suddenly went wrong. No file could be written on it. It was because of a write protect switch toggled to the on position. I have used 5 USB thumb drives before, from 128 MB to 2GB and I never found a write protect switch on them. This is quite confusing. The provision of a write protect switch should be a treated as a standard feature for the benefit of consumers. Also, another aspect frustrating is the LED light. Some USB thumb drives are equipped with LED indicator to show the status of data access while some are not. I need to look at the LED to be sure that the USB thumb drive is working, reading and writing.

GSM network to cover fixed line service

SmarTone-Vodafone makes use of its GSM network to provide wireless fixed line service. The phone to be used at home is a modified GSM phone with a base and a handset. The monthly charge is not competitive indeed, at HK$118 per month. One of the benefits is the basic plan has covered unlimited IP calls to overseas. The public acceptance of the new service remains not clear but SmarTone has made inovative use of its network to attract fixed line customers.

BC 35 - United Vibe

I am much impressed by track 2 of Body Combat Release 35 - United Vibe played by Scooter. This track lasts for 7 minuets and 12 seconds, the longest track ever seem in BC series except those that are warm up tracks. The choreography matches the music in a perfect order. Every movement looks so nice, energetic and full of agility. I must say I am addicted to this track.

Farewell to Yvonne

Today California Fitness Club in Causeway Bay held a farewall party for Yvonne. Can anybody imagine how many guest instructors were there ? I counted to 10, Eric Yeung, Benjamin, Patrick S, Kelvin, Sunny, Jeremy, Martial, Louis, Rex and George. They came voluntarily.

I followed Yvonne for 4 years on BodyCombat, BodyBalance and Pilates. I had a lot of good time in her classes. I am not sure if I can find another instructor like her. To me, she is more than an instructor. I shall always remember her.

What are the changes to evening classes after Yvonne left ? At least two, BodyCombat and BodyBalance Class at PakPoLee on Wednesday will be cancelled. I am not aware of any change of schedules in other clubs.

Running Sendmail with Sender Policy Framework

My experience in getting SPF milter to run on Sendmail is recapped below:

1. Check sendmail package already has MILTER plugin compiled:
# sendmail -d0.1 -bt < /dev/null grep MILTER
2. Get libspf2 rpm and install by rpm -ivh;
3. Get spfmilter rpm and install by rpm -ivh;
4. Add the following in sendmail.mc
INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`spfmilter', `S=unix:/var/run/spfmilter.sock, T=S:4m;R:4m')
5. Rebuild sendmail.cf;
6. Run #spfmilter unix:/var/run/spfmilter.sock
7. re-start sendmail

A chart of IPv4 allocation

This is an interesting chart.



Do you believe we still have 25 % unicast resources remaining ?

how to show DNS recursive resolution

If I am asked to explain the concept of DNS recursive resolution, I would prepare a sketch like this one below :



There is an altenative. In a Linux/Unix shell, just issue the command "dig +trace FQDN" can do the same. Dig makes iterative queries to resolve the name being looked up and will follow referrals from the root servers,showing the answer from each server that was used to resolve the lookup.

Using different port number for SSH, SFTP and SCP clients

How could I access hosts running SSH daemon with a different port number such as 747 ? SSH can support SFTP and SCP on the same daemon so the commad syntax for SSH, SFTP and SCP should also be remembered. The answers are here below :

#ssh -p 747 user@abc.com
#sftp -oPort=747 user@abc.com
#scp -P 747 user@abc.com:/directory/file .

The small and capital letter of p means different things, in SCP, -p means preserving modification times, access times of file whereas -P specifies a port number. For SSH, no -P exist, just -p will be ok for port number.

Performance Pledge on network availabilty

The 5 biggest ISPs in HK (PCCW-IMS, HGC, HKBN, NWT and i-cable) have all published their performance pledge on network availability. PCCW-IMS, HGC, HKBN and NWT all pledge to achieve network availabilty of 99.99 %. As for i-cable, it only guarantees 99 % of network availability delivered to subscribers. Actually, 99 % availability means loss of services of 87 hours in a year. I could not understand what makes HFC and cable modem technologies not as reliable as xDSL and Metro-Ethernet.

funs with zdump

Want to find the current time of places in other zone ? zdump is the answer.

# zdump Japan
Japan Mon Dec 17 11:31:55 2007 JST

If the place contains two words like San Francisco, New Zealand etc, an underscore is to be inserted in between

#zdump New_Zealand
New_Zealand Mon Dec 17 02:33:58 2007 New_Zealand

This is quite a handy and helpful tool.

Microsoft DNS Server

Infobox has completed the third annual survey on the global DNS services. There are 11.7 million DNS servers running on the Internet. Only less than 3 % are running on Microsoft DNS Server.

The reason is that Microsoft DNS Sever lacks many important security features such as IP address-based control on queries and dynamic updates of zone records.

I would advise Microsoft to stop bundling DNS Server in Windows 2003 server packages.

Body Combat 34

Body Combat 34 真的帶比我不小驚喜，所用上的氣力要比平常高四成以上。在這個 Release, 所有集中力都是全新的踢法。我從沒有想像過 jump kick 可以加過 Ginga，大厲害了. Track 6 將會是最受歡迎，何解 ? 270 度的踢腳法 (1 sidekick, 1 frontkick + 1 back kick)真的很勁.

Body Combat 34 的來臨還帶給我另一喜訊，那就是終於都不用再練習 evasive sidekick了。