Year: 2007

Clipperz: Online Password Manager

In my previous post about passwords, I wrote about why you should not use shared passwords. One thing after another, in the comments section password storage became a topic and I suggested KeePass and at all cost avoid online password managers. I had a reason in mind, and you have guessed it right – security.

While it is possible to have a secure online password manager, it is not possible to see any source code for such system if it is implemented using server-side programming (processing done on server, e.g. PHP). Why see the source code? Well, that is the base of all security system – so that people who knows how to read the source code to figure out what a particular piece of software does, and if it is really secure and contains no malicious code.

As a matter of fact, someone just told me that I should include the source code of the Portable Pidgin I packaged so that he can be sure that I didn’t put anything malicious in there. I did, and the source has always been there since the very beginning.

Back to online password storage, one of the guys at Clipperz contacted me and asked me to look closely at the system and to analyze the source code of the JavaScript. And I did just that. I am not going into detail on what features Clipperz have, as you can always read it on their site. I am going to focus on the security side, while trying to stay as not technical as possible.

Please click on Continue Reading if you are interested to read the rest of the article.

Continue reading Clipperz: Online Password Manager

Slow Streamyx

For quite some time Streamyx has been quite stable for me, no complaints. However starting from a few days ago it has become really painful to access the Internet, and to even access my own blog. I guess the problem is with international connections again as accessing a local server hosted in Netmyne is not as painful.

Oh well, I am getting too old to rant about Internet in Malaysia anyway.

What about you, notice anything different lately?

World of Microprocessors

I have been terribly busy lately and my energy seems to be drained out completely once I reach home. It’s time to write something.

Penryn Die

For no apparent reason I was browsing the Internet when my eyes caught on the words Intel and Penryn. I was curious. Really curious so I Googled the words.

The results of my search was a bit surprising. Not long after Intel® introduced Core™2 processors (a year plus ago), based on 65 nanometer process, Intel is planning to release Penryn in the second half of 2007. Penryn is the next generation Intel® Core™2 family processors which is built using 45 nanometer transistors.

After Penryn, in 2008 Intel is planning to release Nehalem which will have a brand new micro architecture and after that, they will go for 30 nanometer transistors.

Penryn basically introduces SSE4 (with 47 new SSE instructions) and should run faster than the current processors clocked at the same speed. It is much smaller so that a silicon wafer can produce more chips which in turn translates to lower cost and better profit for Intel. I wish I have some share in that company. Penryn also supports 6MB of L2 cache per two core, meaning that the quad-core version can have up to 12MB L2 cache. Everything is built with 410 million transistors. Amazing.

The race for smaller transistors have long begun, and Intel has been succeeding as a leader compared to the rival – AMD®. While Intel introduced the 65 nanometer processor in late 2005, AMD was only able to release the same technology roughly a year after. To outrun Intel, AMD has vowed to try to release its 45 nanometer processors within 18 months after the release of its 65 nanometer processor, and that roughly translates to mid 2008. It looks like Intel is not allowing that to happen.

As a long time Intel user, I am of course biased towards Intel. But I still remember my 80386DX was made by AMD 😉

What is happening is indeed a proof of Moore’s_law being valid. It states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. Mr Moore is still alive and kicking and he was the co-founder of Intel.

If you’re a college student, avoid doing a project to research about all processors that were ever made unless you are really into it. When I was in college I was so into microprocessors and that is what I did. However back then it was still possible as the latest processor available were Pentium II. Nowadays, I am all confused with so many code names and numerical conventions. The latest processor that I have in my household is a Celeron D, while my torrent box is running on a 9 year old Pentium III 600MHz.

Read more:

45nm Hi-k Next Generation Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture
A review at AnandTech

How current is your PC?

Advertlets Performance

From other Malaysian and Singaporean bloggers I can see that they experiencing very good performance with Advertlets. Unfortunately it is not the same case for me. Since having the widget for quite a while, and I remember that I am in the first batch of advertisement as well when it started but I only received RM0.20.

I don’t know how well the Advertlets ads are receiving clicks since there is no proper stats page for it like AdSense does.

For me, my AdSense performance for this blog has dramatically increased in the year 2007 to the level I have never expected.

So should I remove the widget, or should I wait. I am still evaluating what to do. It is a very good opportunity for bloggers to have an extra stream of income but not everything works for everyone.

How well is your Advertlets performance?

Nokia 5700 Commercial Song

Recently in Malaysian TV there are several commercials with very cool music. One of them is the Nokia 5700 Express Music commercial with a very funky music performed in a foreign language. Googling around I found out that the song titled Solta O Frango is performed by Bonde Do Rolê, a band from Brazil. The music came from their first album (2007), titled With Lasers.

Here’s a video from YouTube:

Knowing that the official language for Brazil is Portuguese, I am guessing that the song is also in Portuguese. I am unsure of what the song is all about but in the video the main characters seems to be the two guys in chicken costumes fighting with each other 😉 I am not even sure whether the video is official.

Other musics from commercials that I like are the song in the Sony Ericsson W880i commercial, Want You To Know by Freelance Hellraiser, and the other one used in Canon commercials (I have not discovered the song yet).

Update 09-June-2007

Direct translation of the title: Untied Chicken. This explains the video clip.

Disclaimer: the song contains one mention of the word Jesus which was mentioned as a reference to God who everybody loves, from the translation by Google but it is not a worshiping song or Gospel so I don’t worry much about it. But for the conservative, do avoid it if you want and spare me the preaching.

You Can Make Money Online

For the skeptical, here’s a post as a simple proof that you can indeed make money online. During early March 2007 I introduced my better half to Pay Per Post. Since then she has been happily blogging and earn around USD15-25 per day. Within two month’s time she accumulated more than USD1000 in her Paypal account with money from paid posts.

As the money comes from her hard work, she is very proud with it and so am I. For the first USD500 she withdrew, she decided to buy a big screen TV for our bedroom since our old TV was fried by lightning earlier this year. Since we don’t want to spend all of the money, or too much money we decided to buy a slim TV instead of a LCD. We got a LG Slim TV and a DVD player:

LG TV and DVD player

They are not state of the art equipment but good enough for us to watch DVDs and downloaded DivX movies.

There you go. You can make money online. This is a proof that with hard work you can get some extra money from paid posts. But do remember to not fall into the trap of any fast money scheme or work at home scheme that will usually causes you to lose money instead. Be wise.

As for my better half, she is as happy as a clam and I am very very impressed and appreciate her effort especially since she is extremely busy with her business these days… 🙂

Oh by the way if you bought or thinking of buying the DVX162 DVD Player, it is useful to know that it does not read DVD+R/RW as the box said. It only reads DVD-R/RW.

Yahoo! Mail Now Unlimited

Yeah, you heard it right. Yahoo! has finally disabled the storage limitation for all users!

As a long time Yahoo! Mail Plus user with 2GB max storage I was surprised to see that my limit has been decreased to 1GB and only 35% of my email exists where it was at 50% level before. Of course, I did not notice the fuse on the storage meter:

Yahoo! Mail

Logging into my other Yahoo! Mail account (free), I can see that the storage limit is still there. Perhaps Yahoo! is implementing this phase by phase. You can read more about it officially from Yahoo!. Quote:

“users that follow normal email practices and comply with our anti-abuse limits can consume an unlimited amount of free email storage. This will apply to both new and existing users.”

Have the storage size limitation been lifted from your account?

Pidgin 2.0.1 Released

Have you heard? Pidgin 2.0.1 has just been released two hours ago (as of the time of writing – 25 May 2007 20:10 GMT). This release fixed various bugs, where 112 tickets were closed. Go here to see the Milestone page and here to download Pidgin.

However my most waited enhancement is not in this release. Maybe some day.

I shall be building and testing my version of Pidgin Portable soon.

I have updated my version of Pidgin Portable to use Pidgin 2.0.1 🙂

Imagine Hiro Yelling “Bonsai”

I am working at night this week and as always as I want to enjoy the “lunch” my wife prepared for me I would look for something to watch. Searching for Heroes I found this clip containing an interview with Masi Oka (Hiro Nakamura) and Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli):

The script originally contained the word “Bonsai” and luckily Masi Oka is fluent in Japanese (he goes to weekend school to learn Japanese). Just thought it is interesting.

4.0Mbps Streamyx?

I was browsing through some blogs when I found myself on this particular post in doBot’s blog. Here’s the official announcement.

Familiar Malaysian forums have been discussing this for a while, and as usual I’m left behind again. Some of them mentioned that the 4Mbps is nothing if TMNet still decides to limit/throttle traffic especially for P2P users. I’m actually neutral in this P2P throttling issue, even though I am a heavy bittorrent user. Why? Well actually the number of broadband users in Malaysia is not that high, and most concentrated only among savvy Internet users. If most of these users are using P2P daily and TMNet does no policing act on it, the whole Streamyx infrastructure will most probably overload. This, is not deniable due to the incompetency of TMNet but IMHO every company deserves a chance to improve themselves, provided that they are trying to improve.

As I read everywhere in the media, TMNet is heading a committee for the second submarine link (I don’t remember the project name). That is indeed very good if it can provide us a secondary pipe and a fail-over mechanism. I have no idea but I am really hoping that this will widen our International link in a massive scale.

On the introduction of the 4Mbps link, I think it is to soon if no International link upgrade has been done. If anyone from TMNet can enlighten me that would be great, as I have no idea of what is going on in there that they actually decided to offer the 4Mbps package.

The price of RM268 is indeed quite high, but it is very reasonable IF AND ONLY IF there would be a huge improvement to speed and reliability. I know users in some other countries pay a lot more for broadband, and of course some pay less. It’s really just business and you can’t really do much about it. I’d pay RM268 if the service is good and reliable, with superb customer support. I guess I’ll just wait and see before running to the nearest TM Point.

If you want to be the first to test this service, go quick as they are offering RM198 before 17 June 2007. I need your feedback on the service before deciding. Oh yes, check the availability/coverage in your area first before even thinking about it. And of course, you have to be with 3km or less from the exchange 😉

I wonder how they would consider/calculate a package upgrade?

What do you think… would you go for this package?

What Are .ISO Images

Have you ever downloaded a file with the extension .iso and have no idea what to do with it? It has been not once, not twice, but at least 6 times I have provided a .iso file to a friend / family member and the .iso file ended up to be a single file on the CD/DVD. I know there are many computer users out there who still have no clue about .iso images.

ISO Image

Newer CD/DVD burning applications usually will associate .iso files so that when you click on such file the software will launch and open the CD/DVD burning wizard. However, most often than not I see the files having ‘unknown’ icons and not associated with anything.

A normal user will encounter .iso files much less often than geeks like me. But there are circumstances where .iso files are needed. One good example is when I was asked for a MS-DOS boot disk for a laptop without any floppy drive. So I just took a bootable .iso image I created a while ago and send it via e-mail (the size is not that big, just about the size of a floppy).

So the .iso file usually ended up in a CD/DVD rather than the files in it.

Simply put, an .iso file is an image, sort of an archive to house many files in it. It is an exact image of a CD/DVD file system. I know some gamers who use illegal games have utilities like Virtual DAEMON Manager to mount .iso images and fool the game that there’s a CD/DVD inside the drive.

Tools like IsoBuster can also help Windows users to see (and extract) the files contained in .iso images.

So next time when you receive an .iso image don’t burn it using the normal burning wizard. For Nero, use the Recorder > Burn Image menu:

Using Nero to burn .iso image

For more geeky technical reading on mounting .iso images on Linux, click on Continue Reading…

Continue reading What Are .ISO Images

New Metrics & Ranking System

I was alerted by Firefox earlier today to update one of the plugins I use: SearchStatus. It is a plugin which displays Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and the latest update includes Compete Rank.

SearchStatus plugin with Compete Rank

It turns out Compete has been around for quite a while now. I am surprised why I never heard of them. According to the about page, the service has been created in 2000.

Five main areas provided by Compete are:

  • Compete SnapShot™
  • Compete Search™
  • Compete Toolbar™
  • MyCompete™
  • Compete Blog™

The technology looks promising, and I am going to register to use MyCompete. Why don’t give it a try?

Compete Logo

This is definitely NOT a sponsored post!

WordPress 2.2

WordPress 2.2 has just been released about 14 hours ago. There are a lot of new goodies with this release, among the big ones are Integrated Widgets, Full Atom support, New Blogger importer, Infinite comment stream, protection against plugins or edits that will break your blog, and also a hook for a future WYSIWYG support in Safari.

There are a bunch of new features for developers too. Looks like I will have to check my simple random posts widget plugin whether it still works in 2.2.

WordPress 2.2 also marks the total obsoleteness of my blogger rss import plugin 😉

Now I have to find time to upgrade all blogs I maintain. I own only one blog, though.