iphoting's Sink

Update 1: I’ve tested the profile and found that it doesn’t not work due to certificate issues. I’ve updated v0.2 of the profile and I hope it solves the problem.

Update 2: There have been infrastructural changes, i.e. WLAN-Student is depreciated by WLAN-SMU. Hence, please refer to SMU Macness’s Configuration Guide for Mac users and ignore the configuration profile on this post. Their instructions supersede that of here.

Singapore Management University (SMU) employs 802.1X authentication for its wireless network access. Mac OS X has always had certain kinks when dealing with multiple 802.1X profiles, such as SMU’s and Wireless@SGx’s.

Apple has changed the 802.1X configuration screen for Mac OS X Lion. End-users are no longer able to manually add 802.1X configuration profiles within the Advanced Network Preferences panel. All 802.1X configurations are now managed by a “configuration profile”, provided by a systems administrator. I hope this redesign increases the stability and reliability of the 802.1X mechanism in Mac OS X.

Well, you may ask, what is a “configuration profile”?

Apparently, it’s quite simple. They are the same .mobileconfig profiles used for iOS devices and the same Apple iPhone Configuration Utility can generate compatible profiles for Mac OS X Lion.

For your convenience, I’ve provided an untested configuration profile here, that will configure your SSID to WLAN-Student and to use 802.1X, according to the credentials you supply when you install the profile onto your computer.

Do look through the contents of the profile before installing and ignore the warnings that the profile is unsigned. I will provide further updates to the profile when I have a chance to conduct some field tests.

I hope this helps the early adopters out there.

Download: Lion Wireless 802.1X Configuration Profile for SMU v0.2.

I’ve succeeded and my backups worked flawlessly. The only problem was that it took way too long to copy files from my backup to my main drive.

Applications that I’ve installed so far are working rather well. Roaringapps.com has an application compatibility list for Lion. Do take a look before upgrading.

That aside, I’m loving how Lion is a little snappier in the interface and it comes with iPhone’s autocorrect. It’s just that the scrolling requires some getting used to. I’ll post more when I’ve got more to say.

I first got my Mac in 2006 when the first Intel-based Macbook came onto the market, running Mac OS X 10.4.4, and have upgraded to every new OS X release ever since. The seamless OS upgrades have really spoilt me and made me put off doing a clean install for the past 5 years.

Now that Lion has finally reached Gold Master (GM) status, I shall now take this opportunity in the summer holidays to do a clean install of Lion, blasting ageing and possibly incompatible software and configuration files into the trash. Of course, the toughest part to any reinstallation is backups and now is the best time to test how well my backup regime and redundancy holds.

Wish me luck.

If you’re a frequent visitor, you may have noticed that my blog now loads much faster than before. Inspired by a post on Coding Horror that Performance is a Feature, I happened to come across Google’s Page Speed Online while reading up about site optimisation techniques.

I loaded my blog address onto Page Speed and was hopeful that the scores that were to come are much improved, considering that I had enabled CloudFlare CDN for my blog. To much of my surprise, the speed check tool detected a few areas where further performance enhancements can be made to my site. Upon reading the suggestions in greater detail, I’ve picked up a few easily implementable techniques that anyone can use for their sites.

There are a few key focus areas, namely optimising caching, minimising round trip times, minimising requests, and minimising payload size.

While digging deeper into the documentation, I found out that Google has released an Apache 2.2 module, mod_pagespeed, to specifically automate some of these techniques. With this module, one can expect speed increases out-of-the-box, with minimal configuration.

After getting the module installed and running, I’m extremely surprised! My blog used to take approximately more than 6 seconds to load completely and it now takes only 3 seconds. A 50% speed increase!

Looking through the documentation further, there’s another technique to speed up site loading called domain sharding. Enabled it by adding a few CNAME records and tweaking a configuration setting, my site loaded even faster.

Now, on average in most locations, my site loads just under 3 seconds.

So, if you’re an Apache administrator, why not check mod_pagespeed out?

This post took me a long time as I was thinking about the right perspective to approach this new service—iCloud. I consider it one of they most mysterious of the three products announced at the keynote.

All the time was spent demonstrating and explaining what iCloud is and what it can do for end-users from Apple’s perspective, not much was mentioned about developers and the potential applications of the technology available to 3rd party developers.

However, in recent days, some functionality of the APIs offered to developers under the Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA) has been leaked. According to an article from This is My Next, 3 key APIs are offered for 3rd party developers for integration into their applications. The article further postulates that one of them offers the ability for applications to save and restore preference “key-pairs”, and this offers a potential for applications to save state across different devices.

An article on Engadget further elaborates on the concept of the “continuous client”. Imagine a time where you can be messaging, surfing the web and listening to music on your desktop machine, and then decide to continue doing exactly that somewhere else on a laptop. The “continuous client” allows you to do exactly that by saving and synchronising application state across devices. You could just turn on your laptop and continue exactly where you’d left off on the desktop.

This is actually inline with the vision that Steve Jobs articulated in the closing WWDC keynote of 1997. Looking at the advances of Lion (with autosave and resume), iOS 5 with very tight coupling with iCloud (already with autosave and resume), and finally iCloud being offered for free to all users, it looks like the situation that I’ve mentioned above might be a reality really soon.

Just recently, ChromeBooks, powered by Chrome OS, were released to the public. Google has a slightly different view from Apple regarding the concept of cloud. Google wants applications to be powered from the cloud through the context of the browser, anywhere. Apple wants the cloud to be the enabler of various applications through the context of their hardware. The difference is in the viewport. Native OS chrome versus browser-based chrome.

I believe that native chrome UI will prevail in the long run as the browser rendering engine is still limited. Only a subset of applications can be used with a browser chrome UI without difficulty. Just recall when Apple first launched the original iPhone for sale, users were all up in arms when Steve Jobs mentioned that there will be no 3rd-party native applications available and encouraged developers to write web-applications. Hatred towards browser-based web-applications were very visible. JailBreakers raced to crack the iPhone wide-open, bringing in plenty of unauthorised, but very useful, 3rd party applications.

Given that short history, why would users change their mind and embrace the ChromeOS philosophy? Users want “continuous client” across devices, but not a consistent yet unoptimised viewport of their applications.

To conclude my post, here’s an article by kicking bear on how an innocent Push Notifications Service launched by Apple in 2008 has slowly but surely, morphed silently to what iCloud is when launched.

With the release of iCloud, Apple is declaring war against Google, proper.

Recently, I’ve been introduced to CloudFlare in an article on The Next Web, and another article which I lost the link to that is along the lines of Coding Horror’s Performance is a Feature article.

If you haven’t heard about Cloud Flare, it is a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with security features built-in. Available for free and affordably (with the Pro plan), for those who need greater security and site-protection features, and it can be used by anyone who owns a domain and has control over its nameservers, not just by the rich, large, and the powerful.

Just 9 days ago, they colocated in Singapore, bringing CDN and speed benefits to us living in the South East Asia. With 11 other operational facilities around the world, with 2 more up-and-coming, Cloud Flare seems serious in the business of CDN.

Having enabled Cloud Flare for my site last night, the time taken to load my site has been greatly reduced, especially for visitors outside Singapore. I also used loads.in to test my page load speeds and have found the results rather positive.

Although they claim that adopting the Cloud Flare service is easy and takes no longer than 5 minutes, it is only true for sites with a simple DNS zone file. Cloud Flare requires sites to adopt their nameservers in order to enable their services as it will allow them to seamlessly handle IP transitions without user intervention, putting their service between the web-visitors and your web-servers. As older sites are more complicated, additional time may be required during set-up as you will need to verify your zone files to ensure consistency when you switch DNS nameservers. The good thing is that it’s an one-off exercise that yields positive results, well worth the effort.

So, if you own a domain and would like to get some performance improvements to your site, why not give it a try?

Recently, an unfortunately accident occurred at Ang Mo Kio MRT train station. A fourteen-year-old girl lost both of her legs when she felt drowsy and fell onto the tracks.

The most recent development has it that the teen’s family is sueing SMRT for S$3.4 million dollars. The damages requested are to cover the cost for “a new pair of custom-made legs every three to five years, depending on how fast she grows and rate of wear and tear”.

I’ve also noticed a huge outcry among netizens claiming that SMRT is not at fault and that the damages requested is far too outrages.

Given that SMRT has only assisted the family with a “goodwill” of S$5000 for the family’s medical expenses, far from sufficient to cover S$46,000 chalked up at Tan Tock Seng, I think the family has the right to ask for more. Based on the calculations offered in the second article, the damages requested looked reasonable and foreseeable.

My honest opinion has it that the way SMRT behaved, to abstain from all liability and responsibility in this accident, was extremely irresponsible. To begin with, this is a real accident as the victim fell onto the tracks unintentionally, making this situation different from suicide incidents. The least SMRT could do is to just cover all her medical expenses and a little more and the case will close quietly. Now, it is a Public Relations (PR) nightmare for them, for being on the wrong side of ethics.

Although I have to disclaim that I am not a qualified lawyer, I believe that SMRT is negligent in this case. It is only reasonable for the family to sue SMRT for their rightful damages, not for momentary profit, but to cover their medical, loss of earnings, and other foreseeable expenses.

The next big question that people would wonder is, does SMRT have a duty of care towards its passengers? Definitely! They are even liable if you trip and fall and injure yourselves in their stations and trains, what more getting hit by an oncoming train. Foreseeable? Of course! They’re finally installing platform gates now, albeit too late.

Certainly, there are more factors in handling negligence: duty of care, breach, causation, and remoteness, but I’ll leave detailed qualifications to the courts to decide. Nonetheless, having thought about it, the victims (plaintiff) should have a reasonable chance of succeeding in their claims. It’s a matter of public policy considerations and the amount of damages.

Hence, I offer no sympathy to SMRT. For a company that is raking in hundreds of millions of profits annually for offering a public service, it definitely has the resources to “do the right thing”, but ultimately dropped the ball.

They ought to be sued.

Matthew 22:39 (KJV) calls for all believers to love one another:

…Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

There is no simpler interpretation to that passage—suspend judgement, and simply be accepting and loving, regardless of who your neighbours are; even towards your enemies.

Just recently, over 10,000 pink-attired Singaporeans turned Hong Lim Park into a sea of pink, where they gathered to form a giant pink dot in a show of support for inclusiveness, diversity and the freedom to love.

This is the greatest irony. It took the last marginalised minority of volunteers to preach the message of love to the public. And they successfully got their message across, even through the mass media. Why isn’t the church the one doing it instead, preaching the message of love?

The institution of the church has been too busy judging and criticising areas of society that it has failed to be relevant to take the lead in shaping society’s views. Their actions have left the LGBT minorities alienated and rejected from the body of Christ (and their accompanying social support structures), as if they are not of God’s creation, and that God’s love is conditional.

If the church were to reject them, who shall they turn to? Do they not deserve God’s love and care that is showered through the followers of Christ?

Even if believers are to condemn “their sin” (a discussion for another day), why do we apply double-standards to other sins? Are divorcees condemned to hell the same way LGBT minorities are? Why are followers of Christ tolerant of people who break the covenant of marriage? What about the adulteress? Or those that have pre-marital sex?

I believe that broken people need God’s love and touch (through His believers) the most, and a majority of the LGBT minority are, or are once, broken and/or abused. With untold discrimination and the lack of social support structures, these people have difficulty seeking assistance and support. Bigotry and hatred will not help nor improve things, and there always have been cases of unnecessary suicides.

Thanks to the virulent nature of the Internet, such a case spawned the “It Gets Better” project where strangers from all over post videos on YouTube to encourage LGBT individuals not to waste their lives unnecessarily and to just hang in there as “it gets better”. The institution of the church was no where to be found.

“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

To be a light of this world, and the salt of the earth, how could any follower of Christ ignore this minority? How would believers be able to plant the fruits of the spirit within them? Why would they even want to hear the gospel if no one wants to hear their plight?

It would really be tragic if the status quo is to be maintained any longer. Your thoughts, if any, in the comments section please.

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P.S. I avoided using the word “Christian”, even though it implies the followers of Christ, as there are many that call themselves Christian and yet do not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.