iphoting's Sink

Bridging

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:31:49 +0800

Some weeks back, I suggested to one of my friends about conducting some consistent activities to train our brains, so that they don’t rot so fast while we’re in NS. Before long, fortnightly Floating Bridge sessions are started. All who can play float bridge is invited!

Generally, we began with quite some difficulties as we need exactly 4 players at the minimum for a meeting to be successful. After all, national slaves hardly have the time; even if they do, how many would be available for bridge games?

Thankfully, we still managed to get at least four people every time for a great game. Unfortunately, some of the people are here on a temporary basis and managing attendance is one of the hardest things to do given the strict limitations of the game.

That said, it’s mainly a social gathering. Let me know if you want to join us for some floating bridge games, all who can play, and are willing to contribute effort into playing, are invited. We’ve got at least 3 decks of cards.

Driving 1

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:15:09 +0800

On the first day of this new year, I finally overcame my procrastination and went for my first driving practical lesson. It was quite an interesting first lesson and taught me many new advances that put the theory handbooks used for theory tests fairly outdated. Modern manual vehicles no longer require the accelerator to be slightly depressed. Another amusing thing is that the vehicle that I’m learning in doesn’t stall easily. Even at 1000 rpm (with a 1-3 km/h coast) without the accelerator, brake, and the clutch being depressed, the engine doesn’t stall.

Generally the hardest part in getting a driving license is not the driving, but the practical test.

So basically, in a practical driving lesson, the instructor teaches you the skills that you need to pass the practical exam, not just to be able to drive safely. Those skills to pass the exam generally consists of elaborate and sequential steps in doing basic things, such as adjusting seat positions and mirrors, starting or restarting the stalled engine; exaggerated head movements to check blind spots, and gluing your hands to the steering wheel. More importantly, you are not to demonstrate aggressiveness while driving, and to exhibit your highest standard of courtesy to other more nifty (read: nasty) road users.

In all, it’s quite a fun and great experience.

Optimisation

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 17:01:35 +0800

Such speeds are quite easy to achieve in BitTorrent, in an almost stock configuration with BitTornado client, with encryption turned on.

I’m always wondering, why people keep talking about ‘settings’, for more decent speeds. I mean, there’s hardly anything you can tweak in the client that can give you speed boosts in the range of 100 kilobits and more. My hypothesis for their poor speeds is that they have poor hardware and network setup on which the BT client runs.

I mean, it is rather common to hear BT clients running behind a consumer grade router, NAT’ed, conntrack’ed and all, but with very little memory and processing power on these embedded devices.

So really, rather than the magic set of setting combinations, bottlenecks along the way such as tracking table sizes and modem capabilities should be ironed out. A quick and easy method is to use a professional-grade router. Or just replace the router with any micro-computer with sufficient amounts of RAM. Anything with 500MHz and more than 256mb of RAM can be an extremely powerful router for the home consumer. After all, the biggest bottleneck lies with your upstream provider and bandwidth.

Only after which, one can then start with the art of managing one’s upstream bandwidth.

The idea is this, (from my experience) leave at least 5 kb/s of upload bandwidth unused to allow for spikes, above and beyond the allocations by the QoS protocol and the calculated reserve bandwidth (more on that in a while). Generally, for every 15 kbps of download, there needs to be 1 kbps of unused upload bandwidth (8 kbps = 1 kb/s).

Based on the above ratio of 15:1, assuming you’ll want to achieve 1500 kbps of download speed, you will need to have 100 kbps of upload bandwidth available, not in use by BT or anything else to upload data.

To find the optimum setting for ‘max upload speed’ in the BT client, find your maximum download bandwidth, divide it by 15, and you’ll get the reserve upload bandwidth you’ll need. Then take your maximum upload bandwidth and minus your reserve upload bandwidth, and you’ll get a ‘max upload speed’ value for your BT client.

Once you’ve got your bandwidth ratios worked out and balanced, you can then proceed on to tweak the max open connections and the max number of running transfers limits. The values of the above two keys would largely depend on the type of router and modem you’re using.

Stock Take & Visioning

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 22:35:01 +0800

As the year comes to a close, cliqued as it may sound, it is the time to take measure of the past year, and to look ahead of what to do.

One of the things I like to do is to pray about the future, plan about what I ought and should achieve, and commit all that in prayer. Failing which, time flies extremely fast, especially when I’m in a position where I can be at stasis.

A great goal tracking framework that I’ve come to love is the one produced by my pastor, a copy which can be seen below.

I use it as a yardstick to ensure that I haven’t been slacking behind too much. National Service does things to you, one of which is to loose track of your ambitions and goals, if you haven’t got them clearly imprinted somewhere.

At that, if you want an editable soft copy of the above template, drop me an email.

Someone

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:02:56 +0800

Tell someone so that the someone can let someone know what someone thinks:-

Reminds me of my work place – to get things done, and fast, you’ll actually need to know people.

Christmas

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:10:00 +0800

Have a merry and blessed Christmas.

He’s the reason for the season:-

Yay

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 20:41:43 +0800

The past few days had been a great experience. The new batch of people are enlisting and new faces are being drafted into my HQ. It certainly brightens the mood with new people and more people. The coincidences of whom I see is amusing.

I saw, from far, my neighbour. What a small world.

Mao

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 19:58:38 +0800

While I was in HK, I was at PageOne with a couple of friends looking for good books, probably Chinese, to help improve our linguistic skills. English books were comparable in price but Chinese books are really cheap. Just when we were about to leave the shop, I chanced upon a collection of Chinese Propaganda Posters and decided to just buy it. It is an A3 coloured paperback book with full-sized pictures.

I plan to post some excerpts for the fun of it one day.

Rot

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:50:18 +0800

I’ve always suspect that I suffering from a certain degree of mental degradation, of which has been uncertain until now. Through this week in Hong Kong, I’ve experienced first hand my poor my memory has become; I could barely remember the way to the computer mall that I’d frequent – I was guessing rather than recalling.

My just-in-time Mandarin to Cantonese pronunciation has degraded to such an extent that I actually had difficulty communicating with people.

What astonished me most was my game of DotA today. I don’t even recognise myself playing! I hardly know what to do with the shops, what recipies to get, and generally how to play.

Stunned and horrified, I decided that I must do something against this unfortunate side-effect of national service.

On the Job Training

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 11:46:27 +0800

Thinking on your feet:-

Famine

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:07:00 +0800

“¹⁹He shall deliver you in six troubles, yes, in seven, no evil shall touch you. ²⁰In famine He shall redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. ²¹You shall be hidden from the scourge of the tongue, and you shall not be afraid of the destruction when it comes. ²²You shall laugh at destruction and famine, And you shall not be afraid of the beasts of the earth.” (Job 5:19-22).

In famine and destruction, you shall laugh. Isn’t that great?

Home

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:02:27 +0800

I’ll be back in Hong Kong on the 1st December, 2008. Let me know if you want anything. But please, keep it simple to buy and not too expensive that I’ll go broke.

Generally, food and packaged products are easy, clothes slightly harder, and loose electronics the hardest to buy.

Rain of Logs

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 11:28:33 +0800

Started some days back, the flood of co-ordinated, distributed but slow brute-force attempts on my sshd (and possibly others) was evident in my logs. Over a few days, my logs swelled into megabytes, many times over the usual kilobytes.

The attack, I have to say, was rather intelligent. The attacker(s) used many machines, each trying a name starting from a, in concerted succession, alternating one after another. This way, my usual brute-force detection systems fail to kick in as they are seen to be a few invalid logins from each host, when view in a per-host isolated context.

In clearer terms, let’s say there are 1 to 1+n hosts. Host 1 tries to login as a. Fails, wait 1 second. Host 2 tries as b. Fails, waits x seconds, where x < 10 seconds. Host 3 tries as c. Rinse and repeat until the whole dictionary is visited. Innocent as each individual login might seem, when view from the context of an attacker, it’s simply brilliant.

Believe it or not, eventually, it’ll enter my machine if my defences aren’t stepped up to at least trigger a reaction to these events.

Days before, I’ve already implemented login tallies, whereby whenever an user account has experience 3 consecutive failed logins, the user account is locked, regardless of the password supplied. This way, I get to control when the accounts are re-enabled, allowing me to keep a closer eye on the situation.

Coincidentally, while the attacks are going on, one of my friends told me about his account which is always being locked out. As I was away from home, except to sleep, for the large part of that week, I hardly had the time to investigate.

Two days ago, in a bid to improve security, I came across this great defence mechanism, Fail2Ban. It works for multiple services and can flexibly do anything whenever too many failed connections are detected.

CoH

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:13:00 +0800

I rushed down to Funan after work, hoping that I could get my hands on the Company of Heroes Gold Edition which also comes with the Opposing Fronts standalone expansion pack.

I visited numerous shops but all of them claim that the product is sold out. Then, I came across ‘GameSpot’ and looked inside. To my horror and surprise, they have the product on stock, but only at S$19.90. I clarified with the staff as it looked like a misprint – too affordable to be true, compared to the standard retail price of S$59.90. The price was right, and I bought it.

At S$19.90, it’s a good opportunity to pay for a 2006 Game of the Year and play it online; it’s one of the best, if not the best Real-time strategy games I’ve ever seen.

SWBTA

nospam@example.com (iphoting) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:11:42 +0800

I’m back from the Shoalwater Bay Training Area and it’s been an experience to fathom, thanks to the company of great companions. The environment is rather harsh and it’s something that Singaporeans can get to experience out of their usual living conditions.

The nights are chilly and the days are hot; winds stir up huge clouds of dust; dust trails from vehicles colour everything around brown.

That aside, I’ve also gathered sufficient evidence on why flight is better than fight in a conflict involving Singapore.

With that, here’s one of my favourite songs, Today is the Day by Lincoln Brewster:-