NemesisV: May 2011

Monday, May 23, 2011

Groupon Treat at Paradise Dynasty

We were pretty into Groupon recently buying coupons and savings on them (or rather spending more, but less.. how ironic...). Actually, so far it has been a great experience, until I used one at Paradise Dynasty:
http://www.paradisegroup.com.sg/dynasty/

Let me quote from the groupon:
http://www.groupon.sg/deals/singapore/-790-for-any-basket-of-10-xiao-long-baos-at-paradise-dynasty--worth-up-to--1980-/715831155

Enjoy a basket of 10 same-flavored Xiao Long Baos or try the Signature Dynasty Dumplings (8 in a basket)
8 first-of-its-kind unique flavors: Original, Ginseng, Foie Gras, Black Truffle, Cheese, Crab Roe, Garlic, Sze Chuan
Comfortable, luxurious restaurant setting
Experienced chefs
Perfect with friends and family

Sound perfect. But guess what? You have to take 10 pieces of the SAME favor or 8 pieces of the pre-mixed combination! Gotcha there! Ya, I did not expected that, but then, it was probably ok, so we chose 2 favors and used 2 groupons. But of course you know thats not the best part. From the look of the groupons, there isn't anything about charges, but we ended up having to pay about $10 for something. Thats what I call a con-job. The bill was pretty confusing listing the original price, then the groupon price, then some stuff here and there and its about $10 for two in the end. That totally sucks. I recalled that I had used vouchers from Citi-Bank, Maybank etc which I walked in and eat and walk out without paying a cent at other places. Why should I be charged for something which should be covered by the groupon?

To make things worse, this was actually the second time I went to this restaurant at ION because they said the groupon cannot be used during EVE of holiday as well! Well, my bad for not reading the fineprint, but it totally rubbed salt onto the wound.

I won't be going back to this place for anymore food, thats for sure. BTW, the xiao long bao sucks. At $2/piece, its only marginally better than those from Ho Kee...

Shopping at Happy Paws Pet Kiosk

I love going to Serangoon to do my shopping at Petmarts, Happy Paws etc Oh, btw, there are actually 2 Happy Paws shop there. They are NOT related is what I was told. One of them is Pte Ltd and the other is Pet Kiosk. Actually, for this trip, I bought something from both.

Serangoon is basically a pets lover paradise because of the price and variety of pets stuff available. I was there to buy the Purefresh beddings for Keko and I ended up buying from Happy Paws Kiosk with some other stuff, totalling over $100... Well, it was cheap at least as compare to buying from neighborhood stores or from malls. However, I noticed I was over-charged this round after totalling up the stuff and I was kinda upset that it ended up more expensive.

But, that was my lucky day actually. So out of all hope to make the day any better, I thought I gave them a call and see how things can go. To my surprise, they recounted the stuff over the phone and confirmed that they had made a mistake and offer to refund us the extra charges, but as we do not live close and does not goes there too often, it was a bit hard to turn back. In the end, one of the kind staff (whom I always bought from) offer to fund transfer it to us. In less than 10 minutes, all was settled and just like that. I am impressed. Seriously, I did not expect any shop will actually give a damn, let alone give us a refund. So, I say, I am very very impressed at the service of Happy Paws Pet Kiosk for their understanding and flexibility (not entirely actually, the boss did not want to do the fund transfer and insisted we collect in person...).

Anyway, after I got home with all the stuff, Keko just give me a bluff look and went back to sleep as if nothing has happened... (Tear Drop on Head...)

Thursday, May 19, 2011

BackTrack 5 32 Bits KDE FileServe Mirror

Since I had uploaded the Gnome version, I thought I might as well upload the KDE version.

Again, here is the official MD5:

Download the files from:

http://www.fileserve.com/file/KeyVe5c

http://www.fileserve.com/file/hkjjSsq

http://www.fileserve.com/file/4dwwW6x

http://www.fileserve.com/file/eRrNbTE

http://www.fileserve.com/file/33JEsCD

http://www.fileserve.com/file/wTzKDYE

http://www.fileserve.com/file/dtMBSrX

http://www.fileserve.com/file/myjP6Zb

http://www.fileserve.com/file/avNtSRp

http://www.fileserve.com/file/DsWQfRw

http://www.fileserve.com/file/2MfN9Mu

http://www.fileserve.com/file/h73v5mv

http://www.fileserve.com/file/sqa9aGY

http://www.fileserve.com/file/QndXngt

http://www.fileserve.com/file/pdeVVFt

http://www.fileserve.com/file/FwmbGK3

http://www.fileserve.com/file/zJvcvWh

http://www.fileserve.com/file/xMMQZYM

http://www.fileserve.com/file/3Km2KAm

http://www.fileserve.com/file/S3srU7q

http://www.fileserve.com/file/WF49nc5

http://www.fileserve.com/file/tZen67y

http://www.fileserve.com/file/RTUwAyt

http://www.fileserve.com/file/YerjGgq

http://www.fileserve.com/file/RPRsJk9

http://www.fileserve.com/file/Kvet9Br

http://www.fileserve.com/file/mTAj6Aa

http://www.fileserve.com/file/HYxTqS5

http://www.fileserve.com/file/J8wRUHt

http://www.fileserve.com/file/AnM3jKq

http://www.fileserve.com/file/PqUemVh

http://www.fileserve.com/file/jSYY7CQ

http://www.fileserve.com/file/ju8ZSey

http://www.fileserve.com/file/y92WZwj

http://www.fileserve.com/file/URb9Cht

http://www.fileserve.com/file/smY4Ku6

http://www.fileserve.com/file/cEhjthG

http://www.fileserve.com/file/ZVkkVzz

http://www.fileserve.com/file/KJgpEfz

Sunday, May 15, 2011

BackTrack 5 32 Bits Gnome FileServe Mirror

Since its first release, there are only torrent link with no direct link, so I had uploaded the 32 Bits Gnome version to Fileserve so that you can download faster. However, since direct links are available, you can try that too and see which works for you better.

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/

Don't trust my files? Yes, you shouldn't. But at least trust the official MD5:

b01a93a916fabb6d1640bd0054428e17

Catalyst 11.5 Yet Another Cock Up Again

It looks like it will become a common trend now for ATI driver to always havea hotfix version. In fact, for 11.5, the hotfix came out within 30 mins of release. For my personel use, I find that I was not able to install the original driver due to BSOD and I always have to install the hotfix version, at least since 11.4.

Here is the link to the 11.5 hotfix version:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst115ahotfix.aspx

Sunday, May 08, 2011

AMD Catalyst 11.4 installation failed. ATI Display Driver could not be installed.

Yes, it looks like AMD had fucked up again with the release. Even though they had taken a long time to release their drivers, they still did not get it right, at least for me. The ATI Display driver had failed to installed for my HD 6950. I had tried to removed all drivers, reinstalled etc yet nothing works. I am about to give up and roll back to 11.3 when I thought there might had been a hotfix. For AMD, there are usually some hotfix because some card just could not install the driver here and then. And I was right.

Download the Catalyst 11.4c hotfix here:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalyst114cHotfix.aspx

Despite the descriptions saying that it remove some flickering in some games as below:
Resolves intermittent flickering issues seen in the following applications in a system using an AMD Radeon™ HD 6600 series graphics card with DDR3 memory and running in DirectX® 9 mode:

Civilization 5
Dead Rising 2
Fallout 3
Mafia 2
NBA 2K10
ShenGuiChuanQi
Starcraft 2
Warcraft III
World of Warcraft

I found that the driver somehow works for me this time. Thank goodness I did not need to roll back my drivers. I hope AMD gets it right in 11.5.

Thursday, May 05, 2011

Metasploit Framework 3.7.0 Released

With BackTrack 5 coming soon, MSF had been updated to 3.7.0. Needless to say, lots of enhancements.

Here i the updated release notes:
Statistics
Metasploit now ships with 685 exploit modules, 355 auxiliary modules, and 39 post modules.
35 new exploits, 17 post-exploitation modules, and 15 auxiliary modules have been added since the last release.

Highlights & New Features
Feature highlights

Support for SMB signing, enabling pass-the-hash and stolen password attacks against Windows 2008 Server environments.
The Microsoft SQL Server mixin (and all modules) now supports NTLM authentication.
Data import backend has undergone a rewrite, speeding up most import tasks by a factor of four.
OS information is now normalized to make fingerprinting more accurate and easier to deal with.
Highlights from the new modules include:
Apple iOS Backup File Extraction: Extract sensitive data from iTunes backup files (location, call history, SMS content, pictures, etc).
Exploits for two different Adobe Flash vulnerabilities exploited in the wild.
Code execution modules for MySQL and PostgreSQL when a valid login is available.
Exploit for the Accellion File Transfer Appliance Default Encryption Key flaw found by Rapid7.
Over ten new exploits for HP Network Node Manager (plus an HP OpenView exploit).
Post-exploitation module for privilege escalation through the .NET Optimizer Service.
Post-exploitation modules for stealing stored WinSCP and VNC passwords.

Download it at http://www.metasploit.com/download/

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Ubuntu 11.04 Nutty Narwal goes Final

A few days ago, 11.04 just went final and I am sure many of you are as anxious to upgrade it as me. I had several VM still running 10.10 and this seems to be the right path to go.

While its not rocket science, the most important thing to remember when you want to perform an upgrade is to ensure you download the right ISO. In this case, you can only use the alternative CD from here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/alternative-download

Then the rest of the instruction are more or less the same as before, but the exact details can be found here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NattyUpgrades

Also note that only direct upgrade from 10.10 is supported.

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