Archive | July, 2006

DigiSniper Has Landed!

Ok so most of you that read my blog know I used to shoot with a Canon Powershot A70, and recently I’ve moved onto dSLR, a lovely Nikon D70s!

And I’ve been doing a lot of stuff relating to photography lately, so I didn’t want to clutter this blog up with phototalk and loads of random pictures and discussions of apertures..

So I set up a new site dedicated to photoblogging and tips/tutorials etc.

https://www.digisniper.com

If you are interested in photography, learning about taking pictures, or photoshopping or you want to be a model, do drop by and give us a shout 🙂

DigiSniper - Shooting the pictures you WANT!

We are just starting up so if you can help spread the word and get some appreciation for the great local photography talent we have in Malaysia.

Cheers!

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Continue Reading · 6 Comments · Photography

Information Security Certifications – L33t H4x0ring!

It’s about I got myself a new cert, it’s almost a year since I got myself OPST Certified..

OPST stands for OSSTMM Professional Security Tester, recursive eh? OSSTMM stands for Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual.

If you’ve never heard of the OSSTMM, you don’t really need this cert 😉

The OPST is a certification of applied knowledge designed to improve the work done as a professional security tester. This is an important certification for those who want or need to prove they can walk the walk in security testing, the discipline which covers network auditing, ethical hacking, web application testing, intranet application testing, and penetration testing. And it is a critical, eye-opening class for security auditors, network engineers, system and network administrators, developers, network architects, security analysts, and truly anyone who works in IT from systems to networks.

OPST Exam

Cool eh? Kinda nerve wracking after submitting the results directly the servers in Spain and waiting 3 weeks for the pass/fail..

Yes that’s X-windows on a *nix station, the exam was done purely on Linux, Windows was used for some surfing, the exam is 90% practical a tunelled connection to spain, kinda slow..the other 10% is about some ethics and parts of the OSSTMM.

Yes of course I passed, top grade in the class I think..

Ah well, wonder which certificate to do next, kind of hard to find decent computer security courses in Asia, I think SANS is in Singapore soon though..

Don’t even mention MSCE, I’ll spit on you 😉 I wouldn’t mind RHCE or LPI next though, or perhaps go the Cisco route or something else proprietary..

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Continue Reading · 16 Comments · Hacking & Infosec

Book Review – Blah Blah Black Sheep by Maggie Gibson

Blah Blah Black Sheep

‘Blah, Blah Blacksheep’ is a helter-skelter ride through one week in your average journalist’s life (no, really). Maggie Gibson’s latest offering is fluid and full of Irish humour – the perfect comic beach read.

This is another one of those cheapo British trash novels I pick up for around RM5 at Popular/MPH, I always look for these, and 90% of the time I really enjoy them.

I suggest buying a bunch of these everytime you pass through.

It’s indeed full of Irish wit, twisting and turning, her editor has a nervous breakdown and is replaced with someone nicer..

Following this she is immediately immersed in the dirty, sweaty world of human trafficking, sweat shops, murder and a nasty little extortionist drug dealer with the wonderfully Irish name of Broylan Grillo.

Somehow she ends up friends with Georgina Fitz-Simons who has has just overcome a flourishing cocaine habit, together they go deep into the world of durgs and murder end up in possession of a rather inconvenient corpse, being chased by a Serbian hitman and involved with an ex Glam rocker..

It’s a well written, well paced book. Rather easy to pick up, not hard to put down and can be devoured quickly in a couple of sittings.

If you see it sitting around on the bargain shelf for the price of a drink, do pick it up.

Not much more to say about it, simple book, simple read, simple review.

I give it an enjoyable 6.5/10.

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Continue Reading · 8 Comments · Books & Literature

The Force is Strong in This One

If you do read anything today…make sure it’s this:

And the path of the Prophets diverge

The prophets the Brand and the Screen are at loggerheads, issues could, have and will arise, the force could cause ripples powerful enough to dislodge those seated in the upper echelons of the Sphere.

and this:

And the domino effect is put in motion

The power of the Sphere indeed does have interesting dynamics, ripples are being felt, the power of the Brand is draining away and the power of the Screen is swelling inside itself, yet the power in the Sphere is being dwarfed by the growing cosmos of white noise flooding the Sphere.

There are other interesting Jedi’s in the Sphere that have power and experience from the dark side such as the prophets Bru and Aisehman.

The Sith that talks has many experiences of the force and speaks with wisdom formulated from these trists.

I am ready to take on the dark side, or perhaps I am the dark-side.

Jedi or not, here I am.

I have reached the Zenith of the 10 pillars, shall I disenage, or shall I remain that is the question.

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Continue Reading · 7 Comments · Serious Issues

The Quality of Pings on PPS Lately

I’ve heard a lot about this lately, a lot of people talking about it, well complaining about it.

And it’s struck me too, the quality of content on PPS has dropped dramatically, I guess it’s inevitable for any kind of unrestricted system, as the volume increases, the quality decreases, the same can be said for music or TV shows or movies even.

Due to this the traffic generated from pinging PPS has also dropped, not that this effects me much as my traffic is about the same if I ping or not.

It also makes me lose faith in the blogosphere, and the quality..where are the good new blogs? Sometimes I read every ping on PPS looking for a new gem, I’ve found a handful decent writers in the past year or so, and even they aren’t consistent. There are some good ones though (Pink Pau, Sabahan and a few others).

Why are the good posts by the same old people from the same old blogs.

Sometimes I feel like my blog is getting lost amongst all the crap, well honestly..perhaps my blog is just part of the crap.

I’ve been meaning to write about it for quite some time, but I never got around to it, it was really prompted after the whole ‘Kahsoon’ thing when a bunch of people started imitating his linkblog style and flooding PPS with crap no one cares about.

There are a bunch of new blogs doing the same thing now (e-globe1, TheTubeVideo, OffBeatEnough etc..).

I mean seriously if I want to see ‘funny’ videos I’ll go to break.com if I wan’t to see stupid pictures and viral emails I’ll go to boreme.com.

All these pseudo pro-bloggers, then there are quite a number that just paste articles from other sites in a hope that they will strike it rich..

Easily spotted as they have more adverts than content..The ‘original’ content is usually misspelt and grammatically incorrect.

Quite a few of these have thankfully died off, obviously the creators weren’t as motivated as they once thought.

Zzz boring all the same loads of pro-blogger kind of blogs alex allied, financially independant

Creating, running and having a successful blog is not as easy as it seems, it takes a lot of work, effort and in some cases technical knowhow.

PPS has also gotten flooded with myspace kinda blogs, journals about irrelevant stuff, no real content, just whinging, whining, emo..

These people have as much right to ping PPS as say Paul Tan or Mack Zulkifli, but really I wish they would realise no one really wants to read their shit, and keep it somewhere else.

I still do use PPS as I don’t have room for everyone on my RSS list, so I check PPS to see if the blogs I like have updated.

I’d really like to see PPS version 2 come out, with the ability to block certain blogs, as some people like to ping 3-4 times a day when really they have nothing to say, they are just making a 1-2 line commentary and posting an entire news article.

Voting like SpyMy might be a good idea too, but well that idea failed as no one in Malaysia is interested in promoting anyone except themselves.

People just submit their own links and move on, they don’t vote nor submit links from others sites or resources…but well that’s another rant for another day.

I’ve kind of lost momentum with blogging lately, most because I haven’t been doing much or eating anything different..

My traffic is at an all time low.

Should I keep blogging? What should I write about? Does anyone even care?

I’ve taken up a new hobby, photography! So pretty much everything has revolved around that, I’m setting up a new site for my pics, tips, photoshop tutorials etc..

Looking for guest writers too.

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Continue Reading · 53 Comments · Ranting

Converting bBlog 0.76 to WordPress 2.0 (Import/Export) Script

I had this hanging around for a while so I thought I may aswell publish it.

I tried quite a few import scripts to get my posts and comments from my old bBlog install over to my new WordPress 2.0.1 installation, but none of them worked properly.

I found one in php which worked for WordPress 1.5.2 and tweaked until it worked on 2.0.x series, it also imports some extra info like commentors IP addresses. (I suggest this one for 1.5.x)

It took me a long time to get it to update the comment count on WordPress properly.

Imports categories properly, simplified it and I straightened up the workflow a bit.

bBlog Import

If you have a newer version of bBlog it should be pretty trivial to get it to work.

The original came from here:

Taj bBlog WordPress Importer

So here you go, an easy to use and reliable bBlog to WordPress import script!

You can download my bBlog to WordPress 2.0 converter here.

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Continue Reading · 18 Comments · Internet & Tech

Thirsty Work

Carrying around all this camera business.

Big Gulp Yo

Big Gulp Yo!

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Continue Reading · 18 Comments · General Nonsense