private TLDs

Well, this is pretty old news but here are my views on ICANN allowing organisations to buy out an entire TLD. For those not in the loop, basically, in addition to .com, .net, .org and others, ICANN will be releasing lots of new TLDs so we could have stuff like .blog, .cloud or even .google. ...

URL shortening services

I have never liked nor seen the point of using URL shortening services such as bit.ly, is.gd . The only time I have used it is during lectures or talks when links are shared by copying them directly off the whiteboard or slides. Even then, there are probably better ways to share the links such ...

windows file metadata

Windows seems to keep a very poor record of file attributes such as date created, date modified and date accessed. These attributes are important especially for audit purposes. My profs are even using these dates (in UNIX fortunately) as submission dates. Furthermore, I believe that these dates ...

Layered security

The unfortunate happened to me a few days back. While pushing a project onto a github public repo, I had forgotten to replace my mysql password with a dummy one. So, it was out there in the open for almost 1 entire day before I noticed it. Fortunately for me though, I had an additional layer of ...

Web = public

A very timely reminder that nothing on the web is private. Having just stumbled upon the awstats page for comp.nus, I have just unlocked a whole treasure trove of information. Among the most useful would be the list of 20000+ URLs generating most traffic, would be very interesting to poke in ...

Continuity plan

Having a good continuity plan is important in case of unexpected incidents. Today, I brought my tablet in for servicing as the touch screen got a little wonky. It started exhibiting "phantom touches" and was bordering on unusable as it would cause foreground applications to go out of focus, ...

happy monthiversary

After more than half a year of tweaking + trial and error, I think I have finally pinpointed the cause of my server crashes. Nope, nothing to do with kernel stability, nothing to do with crond or any other service. Probable cause is hardware related, the pcb for the barrel connector power input ...

EFI

Just when I thought I have got everything sorted out nice, out comes a surprise. Turns out the industry has been stealthily moving away from BIOS towards EFI while I was happily using my old laptop. Result : All my bootable USB drives are no longer supported. Hooray! There goes all my bootable ...