MX 2005

It was weeks ago. Attended the MX 2005 conference held here to launch the V8 of Macromedia products including Flash and Studio. I find that the programming part, used to be called ActionScript 2 (now ActionScript 3) is getting more and more like Microsoft IDE. In fact, many of the top designer and man in chargeof the systems are ex-Microsoft guys. :) So we can expect MS people to pick up quickly on this.

During the QA, top question came up to be "What is PHP?" I wanted to slap my forehead, then I suddenly remembered. We all know what that is (maybe some of us don't) but what does it stands for? PHP stands for "PHP:Hypertext Preprocessor". Yes its a recursive shortform. :) OF course many other questions came up and it seems pretty normal to most people. Not to the programmers of course. One of the audience (The same one that asked the PHP question I think) pointed out that "i++" in a for loop is wrong. I almost died laughing. But come on, from a non programmer, that certainly looks BS to me.

Anyway, I do wish to get some time to try out Macromedia products, but unfortunately they did not give out any demo.

Of birds and snakes

There were a group of birds who live in a wooden box in the garden. The box are opened one way and they hide from their enemy, the snake, who wanted to eat them.

One day, Bird A discovered a hole on the box and informed the Elder bird about it. The Elder, instead of being thankful, accused Bird A of making the hole in the first place. Bird A was quickly punished and banished to silent the whole issue.

Bird B is a good friend of Bird A, but is not brave enough to voice out the truth. But knowing the danger, he fled from the box in fear that the Elder will punish him if he knows that he knows about the hole.

In the meantime, everyone believed the Elder and he said it is perfectly safe in their box. However the snake soon found out about the box and started eating up the birds one by one.

A few months passed and Bird B came back to the box. There is no one left. Bird B took a stone and stuff it into the hole covering it and lived happily everafter. Nobody heard of Bird A, some said he was eaten by the snake, others said he founded his own box somewhere else.

Sony XCP DRM Rootkit Remover V1.2

Made some changes about rebooting... Apparently, its better to reboot and then delete the aries.sys. Anyway, if anyone who has tried this, please leave me a comment.

V1.2
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9GE654PS
http://rapidshare.de/files/7806904/Sony_XCP_Rootkit_Remover.exe.html

Sony XCP DRM Rootkit Remover

Based on Mark Russinovish of Sysinternals finding and methods :
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

Affecting the following CD (not exhaustive) :
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/list-of-cds-that-have-drm_09.html

And here is the Sony XCP Rootkit Remover:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DYC609KS
http://rapidshare.de/files/7704839/Sony_XCP_Rootkit_Remover.exe.html

It works in Win NT/95/98/ME/XP/2003. Please leave any comments here.

Sony DRM

I am totally disappointed at the way Sony handles the DRM issue : By Installing a Rootkit! Well if you are going to ask what the hell is a rootkit? Its something that injects inside into your computer, then stealth itself so that even the process list cannot find it. Basically, it took over your computer. Well, back to Sony DRM. As usualy, this ends up hurting the people who bought ORIGINAL and support the music industry (well, at least Sony's industrial). Well done. The pirates never had a problem and its is highly unlikely you will find the DRM rootkit in those pirated CD.

OK, now comes the interestign part. Sony says it cant be harmful. Totally wrong. So far, 2 variants of trojans and several MMORPG trainers had made use of this. All backed by Sony's Technology. Now, when the DRM rootkit is in anyfiles named $sys$*.* will not be detetable. Don't laugh, I know what you are thinking. ANY process you can just rename it such and you have a stealthware protected by Sony's Technology. I can only imagine what else can people make from this? Perhaps a random file deleter? Emm... IF you own a Sony CD in the past year, its time to sweat, because as of now, there is no way to remove it without crippling your Windows. I am researching a bit on this. Hopefully, can fidn a way to undo the damage.

KDE on Gentoo

Well, I finally got some time to work back on the Gentoo Project. After a sucessful reboot with al lthe building of kernels and stuff, I am still basically in a shell with nothing there. Ok, almost nothing. So, I figure I need KDE since I already had Gnome on most of my other system... So why not? And I probably wnat ALL the KDE package for that matters... So here goes...

emerge kde

That was 4:00pm today.. Its still compiling. KDE and Gentoo is definitely not for the fast and furious.

Upgrading Ubuntu

V5.10 Breezy has been out for a while. I guess many people are probably still unsure what needs to be done to upgrade from 5.04 Hoary... Well, I learn it the hard way.

Let me tell you the wrong way to do it first. Download the CD. Not the LiveCD but the installation. Either its cache or the Internet is really fast. Then pop it in and install it. Wait, it stopped somewhere saying it found the old version and cacenl itself. Well, I should had thought why did it do that, but I was just rushing and I went back to the menu and force it to install anyway... After some more wasted time anda reboot. My Ubuntu is pretty dead. Another one bites the dust.

OK, let try another approach. On another Ubuntu. I installed Synaptic. Its cool and I am going to tell you why. First you open up /etc/apt/sources.list. Backup this file is you want to. Simply replace blindly "hoary" to "breezy". This is where I miss my [Ctrl][H]. Anyway, just get it done using emac, vi, or whatever.

Then fire up Synaptic. Go to Sources and you probably still see your old CD source there. I don't know why I didn't removed it in the sources.list. Anyway, its a good check. If its there delete it. If not, no harm done. Next insert the 5.10 CD if you have it.

Edited : You will have to remove the first line usually with the "cdrom" label in the source.

Run "apt-cdrom add" and it will add your CD as the new source. Unless your CD is damaged, it should be recognized as the Brezzy CD.

Run "apt-get update" and it should update your source list to point to the new breezy repositories. IF this part fail due to network, please try until it works.

Now, this is the longest part. Run "apt-get dist-upgrade" and yes, you may need to download some package since Breezy has been out for a while and newer package may had been out. Mine was about 450MB anyway, but I didn't really care. Time to grab my cereals and skim milk and take my breakfast.

After the reboot, you should have a working Ubuntu breezy now. I did. Just don't do what I did in the first place of this article. Now, I have time to tacklethe Gentoo...

Scarborough Fair

I remember Sarah Brightman's version of this song... But thats about all I know of this song.
I happened to hear it again a few days ago while watching Futurama S3 and even in the 30th century, the hibbies still are singing it, well, with some robotics remix in it, but still the same song.

It has brought up enough interest in me to dig up my DVDs of both Sarah's concert and listen to the wonderful song again. Then after a few repitition... I started to surf for information on the song because honestly, I really did not understand much about why the singer is asking the man she love to do all these impossible tasks.

Then to my realization, this song was not written by modern days writers... Its date back all the way to Dark Age... And because it was carried by the bards of those days from town to town, there are many version of it around. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme turns out to be flowers which carries a different meanings then. The meaning of the songs are clearer, especially after some explaination from these sites :

http://www.geocities.com/paris/villa/3895/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarborough_Fair

Its a great song to enjoy under the pale moonlight in solitude.

Gentoo - The Hardest Linux to install?

Just when you though Debian or Ubuntu is hard enough to be installed... There is Gentoo. Debian, especially installation from a floppy disk, is already one of the hardest way to install linux. Yet, how is Gentoo even harder? Why would someone want to torture himself compiling the kernel for Gentoo?

Gentoo, in short does not use RPM, DEB or any form of packager by default. Gentoo promotes the compiling of the application and drivers AND the Kernel as well. Therefore you always get the latest by compiling and you never have to wait for the next Distro release. Its very Cool indeed for Power Users.

I had long since compiled a Linux Kernel.. Must had been about 5 years back. The nightmare always catches up to you. You can never hide... So here I am facing the laptop and the Cute Gentoo (by the way, is believed to be a type of penguin) Logo. Here goes... Compiling...
What a way to spend my holiday...

Stucked in the MRT

This are actual photo sof a bag stuck in the train door while the MRT is moving...

We all thought it couldn't happen, but obviously the sensor is not there to prevent this...

Imagine if this is a little children hand or something...

Recovering the Linksys WRT54G

From router to brick... after a failure to flash the firmware.
Here is your last chance to make a comeback from brick to router again.

Full article at :
http://www.cerberus-network.com/Home/tabid/63/ctl/Details/mid/397/ItemID/5/Default.aspx

Bobi's Birthday

Finally have the time to take out the camcorder and extract the short clip captured for Bobi's Birthday. Its horrible. Well, cos its dark and shaky and well, I don't care. It's Bobi's Birthday that counts.

Bobi's Birthday

Bobi and Greenie

Bobi just had his first birthday on 15th Oct. I was really too busy tied up with everything... From the audit to my company stuff. Well, but Iat least I attended the birthday party. There were lots of dogs there. Mostly Shih Tzu though. I will post up the picture later on. But meanwhile, here is a nice video I made to celebrate Bobi's 1st year. Its sure brign back lots of memory when he was small and playful... and still nto able to break the hard greenie with one bite. :)

Bobi and Greenie

Trapt aka Kagero 2 Dark Illusion

Just released the original link for the japanese version is really hard to find now on the gameaq site.

Anyway, if anyone still needs the FAQ, its here:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/game/924502.html

Cerberus Antivirus Lite CD V2.00

I had been very busy with some Wifi auditing projects so I might not be able to catch up on the win32 version yet if anyone is still using it...
It came to me as a point I wonder whether its worth going on or not since the batch file now primary works and mine seems like a duplicated work.

However, I had continued on with the Lite version which I now I had renamed Cerberus Antivirus Lite (I hope you guys dun mind). The new ISO (14MB ZIP) based ius ready and contains both Mcafee and f-prot as the DOS scanning software.

I had also modded some of the core system files and boot image in order to make changes to the selection to choose which scanner to use. Because of the difficulty in using hte previous updater (believe me I know) I am going to revamped it into a single EXE files which automatically unpacks the necessary files and do all the work with just 1 request to the ISO file. The Updater will be ready soon.

Meanwhile here is the ISO for Cerberus AV Lite 2.0

Bit Torrent
cavlite.torrent

Emule
ed2k://filecavlite.zip14854757F971F36D55A63038451054900D9327AE/

Https
cavlite.zip

Well that all I have so far until I can find more bandwidth.

Writing Report for Audit

As you know Cerberus Network has its first project and the report is really kinda killing me. Escpecially since I broke my leg nowand I probably has nowhere to go but to sit right here and write the report. Hopefully it will be over soon... Show me the money man! :)

童话

Here is the song I had promised to sing. Firstly, for Angel and also for J as well since she is the person who had introduced me to this nice song. Hope you love it.

Tong Hua V3

IE and Netscape can read your clipboard

Ever had to enter a password that is like 16 characters or your credit card number or even something like a serial number? The most common way is to copy it into your clipboard and paste it on the webpage. Well, you are in for a shock.

Copy this into a file and save it.

<script language="JavaScript">
var content = clipboardData.getData("Text");
if (content!=null) {document.write(content);}
else {document.write('Clipboard is empty');}
</script>

Copy some text into your clipboard. Execute it. You might get a toobar block, but there are ways to work around it just that I only meant to demostrate this. Just allow it.

See what I mean? You still feel safe about your clipboard?

Ubuntu Grub Recovery

Another mini disaster stuck. I had to reinstall WinXP on my dual boot machine and the problem was I forgot to backup the boot sectors. Result was that the boot sector was overwritten during WinXP installation and I cannot go back to my Ubuntu now...

But fear not there must be plenty of help on the internet... Ok, let see.. Redhat, Debian, SuSE... Well, there are help for everything else except Ubuntu. And obviously this method don't quite work the same way, especially linux rescue doesn't work in Ubuntu bootup disc.

OK, so here I am going to post the solution. Bootup as per normal. Break the install procedure and get to the menu. You may shortcut to here but using expert as well. Anyway, you will need to go to the partition part and edit your mount point / in. BUT DO NOT FORMAT THE PARTITION!!! Ubuntu will doube check I think and warn about formating a previous installation, which IMHO is cool. OK, now you can skip the rest of the steps and go to the Install-GRUB option. btw, you may want to try and run install-grub from a shell in ubuntu... You will be shock to only find the *.deb there with nothing you can do. OK, back to the menu. It will try to install. If it did, good for you. For me, the instruction is not quite right. My first HDD turns out to be hd0 install of hda or whatever. Its pays off to check it while your ubuntu was working.

In any case, after sucessfully install grub, you can skip the rest of the step and reboot. TADA. IT works. And guess what the boot menu for me has changed. It even detected that I had upgrade from WinXP Home to WinXP Pro. Cool.

童话 ~光良~童话

I came across this MTV and I must say it touches me in a very unique way. Its not just the song, but the story. If you know my story with Angel, you will know what this means to me. I know its not such a new song and I know someone who also sang it. I wanted to sing this again. Someday.

童话~光良

忘了有多久
再没听到你
对我说你最爱的故事
我想了很久
我开始慌了
是不是我又做错了什么
你哭着对我说
童话里都是骗人的
我不可能是你的王子
也许你不会懂
从你说爱我以后
我的天空星星都亮了

我愿变成童话里
你爱的那个天使
张开双手变成翅膀守护你
你要相信
相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局

你哭着对我说
童话里都是骗人的
我不可能是你的王子
也许你不会懂
从你说爱我以后
我的天空星星都亮了

我愿变成童话里
你爱的那个天使
张开双手变成翅膀守护你
你要相信
相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局

我要变成童话里
你爱的那个天使
张开双手变成翅膀守护你
你要相信
相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局

我会变成童话里
你爱的那个天使
张开双手变成翅膀守护你
你要相信
相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局

一起写我们的结局