Cracking crackit2.exe

In this video, i am going to show how to complete the second "crack it" challenge in www hackquest com

PC fairs 2009 in KK

July 30th to August 1st was the PC fair and ICT exhibition hosted by UMS in the main hall. The organizing can be summarized as fairly successful, where from what I heard, they succeeded in convincing the computer stalls that the students are low on budget, so that the stalls would sell off their products at a much lower price than what can be found in the market.

As an example, we found that a 500GB hard drive cost just only RM289 in the UMS e-World PC fair, and was instantly out of stock in just one day! A week later, another PC fair, namely PICOM PC fair, was hosted in KKIPC, but the cheapest 500GB hard drive I could find there was RM315! the other stalls selling 500GB hard drive cost around RM340 to RM350! Wow! The prices are RM50 higher than the one sold in UMS!

I bought a USB 8.0 mega pixel PC camera from the UMS e-World, but was doubtful about its true pixels though.. It doesn't seem to be 8.0 mega pixels, but around 3.0 to 5.0 mega pixels. Yet, what is bought is bought, too bad this is Malaysia, and goods sold are not refundable here, unlike in the USA where consumers there can get refunds within one week of purchase.

My friends and I hung out in the hall for hours during the second and third day, chit-chatting, touching on many topics which I couldn't recall, but 'twas all good..

Thanks for the enjoyable times my friends, you are all a blessing to me!

A thought on the english science and math policy

One of the most recent happenings in Malaysia's education system is the reverting of the policies of teaching science and maths back to teaching them in Bahasa Kebangsaan.

Some question comes to my attention on this subject though, what are the governments doing, shouldn't they plan out this thoroughly before implementing? Why isn't this policy of teaching in English working? I know one thing is for sure, the six years of teaching science and maths in English is an atrocious experiment!
Maybe teaching science and maths in English is a badly flawed idea?

What really disgusted me is that the government virtually knows that this changing to English implementation is flawed, and they should have known that their science and maths teachers could not teach in English, yet they had this experiment running for six years! Meaning that we had a whole generation of students undergoing this massive change but all for nothing. And now we will have another generation of pain as thousands of students get stuck in the education limbo while the government phases out this failure of a policy.

What is more, all these are totally unnecessary. They could just have at least tried to implement other changes first such as preparing the teachers to use English in the classroom, but they did not. They pushed through the policy when it was plainly not ready.

In summarizing, we have just spent six years in an experiment, and have no improvement to show from it, because of a flawed plan. I have no blame for the government to end the policy if they wished to, but I blame the government for keeping it up for so a long period, even though it is already obvious to almost everyone that this could not have worked the way the government said it would.

Nevertheless, the implementation is a good one for students who already have the foundation in English, with teachers who are capable of delivering them in the language.
Perhaps one suggestion to this issue, is to let the parents and the individual schools decide on the language to be used.

Japan begins a new governance by DPJ

The results finally came out, and the news was good for the Japan's opposition party, Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), ending the half-century of almost unending rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and breaks a deadlock in parliament, ushering a new in a government that has promised to focus spending on consumers, cut wasteful budget outlays and reduce the power of bureaucrats.

"The people are angry with politics now and the ruling coalition. We felt a great sense of people wanting change for their livelihoods and we fought this election for a change in government," said Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama.

The ruling party loss ended a three-way partnership between the LDP, big business and bureaucrats that turned Japan into an economic juggernaut after the country’s defeat in World War Two. That strategy foundered when Japan’s "bubble" economy burst in the late 1980s and growth has stagnated since.

"This is about the end of the post-war political system in Japan, it marks the end of one long era, and the beginning of another one about which there is a lot of uncertainty." said Gerry Curtis, a Japanese expert at Columbia University.

The technology I am waiting for release

One of the recent technology I discovered and am interested in so far is the 'still in beta' Google Wave. It was announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. Google wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and a communication protocol, designed to merge e-mailing, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.

Here are some of Google Wave's innovative features:

• Real-time Collaboration: This allows all collaborators edit a document concurrently, and collaborators are able to see what the others are typing word by word.

• Wiki-functionality: Anything written with Google Wave can be edited by any

• Extending Google Wave: With Google Wave APIs, Wave can be embedded in other sites, and can allow adding of other add live social gadgets.

• Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, to foster innovation and adoption amongst developers.
  

• Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said or written.

To have a more detailed look at Google Wave, and a live demonstration of it, here is the Google I/O conference recordings on the demonstration of Google Wave.

Another one down, four more to go

What a rush I had today! Hadn't been sleeping last night trying to absorb as much of the systems' security knowledge as possible, and in a few hours time, I would have my midterm test on it. Well anyways, that was many hours ago.
Well, what happened was that after reading as much as I can, I laid my head on the table, and fell asleep!! and when I woke up, it was 10am!! it's the time my midterm test is scheduled to start! Om my >.< When I got there, I'm already 40 minutes late. Fortunately enough, I was able to answer all of the questions in time, using approx 30 minutes, and being one of the earliest to hand in the paper, despite the longer time my other mates had to complete. Anyways, that is not important, am just trying to share that my effort paid off :)

All in all, in was a productive day today :)
All the best in tomorrow's exam everyone! Gnite

Information nowadays

I was reading off a blog on ZDNet today, and came to clicking on this video to watch, and so induced me to share with you all.
"Web 2.0" in just under 5 minutes.


Information R/evolution


This video I find interesting and seem to reflect upon most of our thoughts.
A Vision of Students Today

a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Second half of the semester begins

Gosh! What a tiring day! Stayed up all night rushing to complete two assignments.. All has paid off... I'm satisfied with my work, but am not sure what my lecturers will think of it though :D Anyways, I tried my best :) and am contented. Thank God it's all done. Yet, more assignments coming :\

I was supposed to sit for a midterm exam today, but good thing that my lecturer for that subject moved it to next week :) There is no lecture for her subject today too, probably because she is not free today, so our lecture will be on Wednesday this week. However, I am going to have three midterm tests next week!!! Oh my gosh :O

No lecture tomorrow, Yay.. I can rest a while...
Good night everyone. Pray for me so that I can wake up in time for my web technology lab :D Ty
All the best guys in all your undertakings!

Busy busy

It's been a few hours since my meeting with my supervisor, and boy I am so tired! Hadn't slept yet, rushing to have something to show to my supervisor, yet I am here, with my brain spinning with tiredness. I couldn't say that I have much progress in my final year project report, but hopefully little by little everyday, my report will be full.

In my last post I promised some pictures of the hedgehog we found under the car. Here they are...

A picture of it face front


A picture of it from above, to show its quills

It's still not so used to humans as of yet, but hopefully it will soon. Oh by the way, how much does a hedgehog cost anyway? I recall someone told me it is sold for RM300+ ? Is it true? If it's that expensive, the previous owner must have felt a great lost then... But so far, no one came to claim it yet..

Tomorrow some friends will be going for a trip to Kelly Bay, which is situated just behind Shangri-La Rasa Ria resort. Too bad I won't be going though, so I'll just bid my friends a pleasant trip. So I say, it's fairly affordable, compared to the price offered by some other people who suggested to organize for us, particularly because unlike the people, we will never earn our friends' money. Stupid enough, we got to know how much the people earn from each trip! Boosting our motivation to organize the trip ourselves! Thank you God for helping us save money!

Two assignments are due this coming Monday, where one is to describe the characteristics of the various artificial intelligent agents there are, and the other is to do a study on the network security solutions that are available in the market, and write a report discussing about the solutions my group will choose.

Another task I have is to draw out the design for my intelligent agent, not so sure how I should be doing it though. Am going to need more reading. So if anyone is prompted to give me some tips into using the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT), please do drop a comment or two!

I'm also going to sit for two midterm exams next week, security systems and project management.
So, all the best to me :D

Till my next post, have a great week ahead everyone!

The Dog and the Hedgehog

Wow, It's been two days since I last posted! So many things happened just within these two days...
I want to start this entry with something odd to share with you guys, but before that...

Today is a special day for someone... So the first thing I want to do is to say.. Happy birthday! May the good Lord bless you abundantly in everything you do!!

Two days ago when I finished off my post for that day, my mom suddenly shouted me to go down and have a look at something! I went down, and they were outside. My dad was holding a dust pan talking to my neighbor about something like a porcupine. . . So I went to take a look to see what's the commotion about, and when I got there, I saw an animal curled up like a ball, and first thought it was a porcupine! haha! My parents told me what happened, and apparently, my dog found it under the car. One thing's for sure, is that my dog had sense! It didnt want to kill it, but is just curious about it, so it just used it's paw and nose to push it around, as if playing with it. Well, if other dogs would have found it, I think they would have killed it! So, we brought it inside and put it into a box, and started to 'google' porcupines' diet. However, it eventually led us to the fact that it is a hedgehog! Gosh! My dog found a hedgehog!

But I wonder how, and where this hedgehog appeared from. . .
We had been living here for more than 10 years now, but neither we see any creatures like this! So I presumed this belongs to someone, a neighbor likely, who bought it from a pet store, but lost it.
For those who would want to know, hedgehogs eat insects, but after much 'googling', we found out that hedgehogs in captivity has 'cat food' for their diet, and insects are given as treats.
What's more interesting is that hedgehogs in captivity has a longer lifespan than their relatives who lives in the wild.

Well, yesterday, we fed it 'fish food' though. So this morning, my mom and bro went to those small scale pet shop to get some items to create an environment (usually for hamsters) for it, and brought some meal worms (beetle larva) too! So it's living in a aquarium with a better and nicer surrounding now. Am going to upload some pictures to show you guys.

Oh yea, two days ago, Saturday, was the day my bro got back. So, he'll be leaving back to Kuching for a new semester in 1st September.

Today was a another different day for me I guess, happy to have a different day everyday. Woke at around 10am, and just sat in front of my computer to complete my assignments. Till around 1pm when my bro ask me to accompany him to the super market to get some dog food, and cat food for the hedgehog, and so I did along with some other tidbits, which I bought for myself. After reaching home, my bro went up to start a movie (Up), which I watch with him before falling asleep. haha!
By the time I woke up, it's already around 6pm, almost 7pm, and Michael called me on skype that my bro woke me up to answer my friend. Apparently, the group is already in a friends house waiting for me to go there to have ourselves some fun with a steamboat dinner. My bro came along too! And my friends got to know him, and yes, I heard the comment again of me being smaller than him in size. Haha!!

I finally downloaded the Prometheus Development Tool today, and some modules for Drupal. Going to need to start on my literature review soon. Oh yea, GI Joe download is finally completed. So that means I can watch it before dozing off for the night.

Have a blessed week everyone!

Start of mid sem break

It's mid semester break right now, but I had got so many work that needs to be done. Woke up so late today, around 6pm! Gosh, I slept for so long! Well, mostly it's because I slept around 5 to 6 am this morning. So it's not a surprise I woke late.
Dont even know what I did yesterday night. I know I'd been mingling with many things, but most of them are trivial, meaning I wasted my time. Further, I'd not followed my timetable, so that means today i would have to do an extra hour of study just to catch up! Gosh

So! When I checked my phone today, a friend texted me around 5pm asking me whether I'll be joining them at Atmosphere, but I didnt answer though, cos it's passed 1 hr.
So after that I continued with my work. Well initially, I didnt know what I should do first, but I ended up logging into this blog to write a post for my assignment.
This blog is an assignment for one of my course actually, not too bad. But I think 1 of the good reasons to have this assignment is to help students into realising and improving their ability to pen down their thoughts, or "type in" their thoughts rather.
I'm one of those who is not so fond of writing down thoughts too, so this gives me an edge to do it.
Thanks Pn Shaliza :)

Well, one thing I learned from my web technology course recently is on installing a CMS onto a server. We learned to install "Wordpress" onto a web server package, int his case, we used XAMPP. Then later on, through learning to install "Wordpress," I came across the "Content Management System" (CMS) term and further learned about Drupal and Joomla.
I also re-found out XAMPP! Initially, I didnt know that XAMPP actually has a mail client! Cos' usually, i only thought of it as just a basic web server package like Wampserver. But not long ago, I delved into creating a mail server on my home server, and found out about the "Mercury Mail Transport System". Little do I know, XAMPP ver 1.7.1 uses Mercury as its mail server!
However, this version was given by my lecturer, but (for those of you who knows me) I always want to seek if there is a later version of the program. And so I went onto the XAMPP website on apache friends, and found ver 1.7.2, and found out that it no longer uses Mercury as it's mail server, but "MSMTP.?"

After further investigation on this 'alien to me' mail server, I found out that MSMTP supports both the TLS and SSL encryption protocol! Where TLS is needed if you want to send mail through Gmail's smtp server. However, Mercury does not support TLS, thus making MSMTP a better candidate for my home mail server :)
There is a cut down though. . . Streamyx broadband limits its users from using external SMTP servers, which affects users on dynamic IP. That's why it's better to use MSMTP cos then I can just send mail through Gmail's smtp server. Too bad though, cos I wont be able to use my own domain name in my email address.

Well, am learning to use Drupal now, and hopefully will be able to incorporate it with my projects for my other courses :)
Yet again, thanks to Pn Shaliza for her coaching on using CMSs.
Till the next post! Am gonna finish of my other works now :)
Note to myself: Meeting with Dr J on Wed to show fyp progress report

All the best to everyone reading!