Chat with Google, interesting facts about Google

Posted January 17, 2005 at 8:22 pm in Hacking & Infosec

On another search engine related note, there was a recent evening with Marissa Mayer, one of the top players in and product manager for Google[/url].

Nice highlights from Alan Williamson include..

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.

2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

3. The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

4. Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

Full notes are HERE.

Continue Reading · No Comments · Hacking & Infosec

Weird Search Terms

Posted January 17, 2005 at 8:21 pm in General Nonsense, Site News

Regarding the search terms…have been having some weird ones lately, people who come here searching for cum eaters and pictures of naked malay men, you need help really.

My favourites, each is a link to the actual search that returns my site somewhere on the page..

[list][*]Asian Cum Eaters
[*]Naked Malay Man Pictures
[*]Cum Shots
[*]World Biggest Penis[/list]Strange what search engines turn up eh?

For phrases I get:

cum shots 11 7.2 %
dota maps 5 3.2 %
download dota 4 2.6 %
dota 4 2.6 %
tamakeri 3 1.9 %
shaolin show 3 1.9 %
girls tatoos pussy 3 1.9 %
kung fu hustle torrent 3 1.9 %
kung fu 3 1.9 %
dota download 3 1.9 %

For single words:

dota 34 6.6 %
fu 26 5 %
kung 26 5 %
cum 20 3.9 %
shots 17 3.3 %
download 17 3.3 %
hustle 12 2.3 %
the 11 2.1 %
in 10 1.9 %
maps 8 1.5 %
pics 7 1.3 %
movie 7 1.3 %
pussy 6 1.1 %
torrent 6 1.1 %
world 5 0.9 %
penis 5 0.9 %
biggest 5 0.9 %
tatoos 5 0.9 %
shaolin 5 0.9 %
girls 5 0.9 %
show 5 0.9 %
it 5 0.9 %
naked 5 0.9 %
asian 5 0.9 %
male 4 0.7 %

Continue Reading · No Comments · General Nonsense, Site News

New Dials and the Infamous Blue Light

Posted January 17, 2005 at 2:01 am in Food/Eating, General Nonsense

Well what to write about today let’s see I have a whole range of pent up topics, but as it’s monday no one is into thinking too heavily…so I’ll do a menagerie of random crap.

Sunday, Sunday was a typical Sunday, I did jack shit, went to look for a big ass punch bag too, but they were all sold, only small ones left..ended up in Eneos car centre for a while, they had a phat sub on special but I am broke, like totally broke until the end of the month..

Bought a new thermometer and matching humidity meter for the car, looks pretty cool, registered average for here, 30 degrees and 40% humidity (yesterday was at 60%, damn humid).

Went to eat the lala again in SS3, and remembered my cam this time…but the stall was closed, so had a burger and a hotdog instead.

Obviously not as good as the heavenly burgers attained from SS2 mamak area, but well not bad, and presentation was good!

Malaysia has the best burgers in the WORLD.

Big, juicy and greasy…first time I’ve had a Ramly with brown sauce on it, it was good!

After that went home with a mind to go the gym, so I went…but the freaking car park was closed, so I couldn’t get in, the gym is open till 12 midnight, but the carpark closes at like 10pm, if anyone knows how to get in Celebrity Fitness at like 10.30pm let me know..

So I had some McD ayam goreng (fried chicken) and a chocolate sundae instead…healthy I know.

I did some work at home instead and ended up finishing at around 3am…I’ve gotten another module out of the way though which is a good thing!

Took a random picture of my car to demonstrate the ahbeng blue interior light everyone keeps mentioning..

Cool eh?

On a final funny note, someone got arrested for drinking listerine…How desperate thou must be..

A woman who admitted drinking three glasses of Listerine mouthwash had a blood-alcohol content more than three times the legal limit when she was arrested for drunken driving, police said Friday.

The woman, identified by police Sgt. Mike Shadbolt as 50-year-old Carol A. Ries, was arrested Sunday night and released on personal bond the next day. She was to be arraigned late next week on a misdemeanor charge of operating under the influence of liquor, Shadbolt said.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=414051

I actually use Listerine, the original one not the pansy blue one, and it’s so hardcore it makes my eyes water..I couldn’t imagine wanting to actually drink it..

Anyway that should be enough to keep everyone happy for monday..

BTW what is the consensus, is it better to have 1 long post with loads of random crap, or loads of small posts relevant to each topic?

Continue Reading · 17 Comments · Food/Eating, General Nonsense

Clubbing, Prawns and Pwns.

Posted January 15, 2005 at 4:06 pm in Food/Eating, General Nonsense

Well it’s been a good weekend, and it’s not over yet!

It’s past 5am and I’m sitting here listening to some old school best of Otis Reading (yeah I got eclectic tastes), chatting complete bollocks to some random stranger on MSN and well writing my blog (duh).

You can consider the below Dim Sum post the first of a series of my favourite things to eat in KL mostly, probably the rest of Malaysia and the rest of the world too (when I go back to UK).

Friday night, had some good lala (mussels/clams) cooked with curry powder, curry leaves, garlic and some other magic ingredients…will take pics one day as it’s one of my favourite foods.

After that had an offer to join a party in KL, haven’t been drinking or clubbing or dancing for quite some time, so I collected my hombres and off we went.

Also picked up FireAngel[/url] on the way, I can confirm she is hot, and can dance REAL good..

So good in fact she got picked up by a hot chick that unbuttoned her shirt and waved her (non-existent) cleavage at our dear FireAngel[/url].

I on the other hand, got picked up by some scrawny sausage jockey who I wouldn’t even want to fuck if I was into uphill gardening.

Suan[/url] turned up late, and pissed as usual.

We drunk quite a lot of beer, as either they mispriced it, or it was just really fucking cheap, but it only cost $62RM for 2 jugs…which is the price of 1 jug in most clubs.

KY and TheGreatFaggot graced us with their prescence too….and pigs can fly, the faggot danced.

Kimberly[/url] was also there, as chun as always..hubba.

And we finally got to meet the infamous super hot Jayna, yes, indeed folks, she is hot.

Got a bit drunk, danced quite a lot, had fun anyway was a good crowd, decent music and for once we were somewhere that wasn’t too packed.

The joint was named La Casa (Yeah classy I know ‘The House’ I guess they think it’s cool or something..), it’s just behind Passion, which was surprisingly empty, I guess it’s because of the new kid of the block, Rum Jungle, will have to check it out some day…but that night it was totally packed.

Got home pretty late, slept at 5am I guess, and woke up some time in the afternoon to read FireAngels rant which I totally knew would be there.

Got up and grabbed myself a prosperity burger…3rd day in a row, sad I know but I’m kinda hooked, when they are really fresh they are REALLY good.

Had my car washed, they still can’t get the rims totally clean…stupid racing brakes.

The faggot finally got himself a car, quite a neat looking car too..

Imagine that…it’s even got a freaking LCD screen inside so you can watch VCD’s in the back (Pr0n anyone?)..

Congrats dude, it’s about fucking time.

We headed to the Asam Prawn place again, this time hoping they actually had some prawns (last time they sold out, so we ended up with Asam Fish).

We had ourselves some phat drinks, that’s phat with a capital P and H.

And ordered up a storm with the normal veges and tofu, and Braised Pork Belly (Kao Yuk)..

Yeah baby, we finally got the freaking Asam Prawns we had been yearning for since last year 😉

As usual when we are hungry and attack a table full of food…it’s inevitable you will see this..

We had some side bets aswell regarding the faggots ability to finish his giant Orange Juice (he normally can’t)..

But well he did it, congrats again dude.

Full pics in the Food Gallery as always.

After that headed to USJ to catch Liverpool vs Man Utd….first half was good, action tailed off in the second half, Liverpool couldn’t even put a goal in against 10 men..

And no, this doesn’t mean I’m a football fan, I can just tolerate watching now and then 🙂

When the game was over, it was time for some hardcore DOTA, mostly came up against noobs though and ended up pwning everyone left right and centre..

Hard to get a good game nowdays.

On another note a random hot chick (Flirt in a Skirt[/url]) made a link button for me, feel free to use it if you wish to pimp my blog (DO IT, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!).

On another random note, I wanted to post this..

100 Things we didn’t know last year [i]BBC[/i]

Those of note for me are…

8. Brazilians are the nationality most likely to read spam. (Dumb fuckers)

31. Herrings break wind to communicate and keep the school together. (Imagine THAT, synchronised farting as a means of communiation)

38. Yoda was based on Albert Einstein. (I did wonder)

63. Just one in a hundred workers goes to the pub for their lunch, according to a study. The same proportion spend lunch having sex. (Lucky bastards – that goes for both..)

74. Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons. (I always tell people curry is the national dish of the UK, looks like the worm has turned)

100. Bill Clinton sent just two e-mails while he was president. (Damn Luddites)

And well here I am, back to reality back at home, feeling stoical and much better than I did for the last couple of days.

Life is good.

Thanks for participating in this particularly long and pointless post.

Cheers my dears.

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Continue Reading · 13 Comments · Food/Eating, General Nonsense

Dim Sum Breakfast at Dawn

Posted January 14, 2005 at 3:42 am in Food/Eating

Well yesterday and today was a bit weird timewise..

After dinner last night I got home and passed out on the sofa at about 8pm, I woke up around 1.30am and didn’t feel like sleeping any more…so I didn’t I did some hardcore work writing documents about attacking networks, firewalls and routers (packet sniffing, session hijacking, fragmentation attack and so on).

I worked till about 5.30am then felt hungry, decided it would be good to have some hardcore Dim Sum, as I love it, I haven’t had it for ages and it’s best served fresh around 6am.

I called out some other crazy eejits that happened to be awake at that ungodly hour and off we went to Taman Megah for some Dim Sum loving.

Most people have probably had some experience of Dim Sum at some stage, it means something like ‘Little things that touch your heart‘.

The key to good Dim Sum is variety, decent places often have 100 varieties or more of these tiny treats, the common ones being Siu Mai (Pork Dumplings), Har Gow (Prawn Dumplings), Lo Mai Gai (Glutinous Rice) and Fung Jow (Phoenix Claws). These kind of resturants also usually serve Chee Chong Fun (Rice Sheet Rolls), Juk (Congee or Porridge) and various Baos or Buns such as my favourite Char Siu Bao (BBQ Pork steamed bun).

Most of the stuff is steamed and made of either Pork or Shrimp wrapped in rice sheet, tofu skin or wantan skin. There are a few fried things and a few crispy deep fried things like the gorgeous Wu Gok (Yam Puffs) and Lo Bak Kou (Fried Carrot Cake).

Without doubt my favourite thing is the Jing Pai Quat (Small Pork Ribs).

When we left it was totally pitch black, like the middle of the night, we ate during sunrise, which is a nice feeling..

Dim Sum resturants would typically look like this..

As you can see on the right a big stack of Baos, and on the left a huge stack of giant Steamers.

There is no western equivalent really, the ‘waiters’ come round with huge trays of steaming fresh goodies like so..

We enjoyed some good Chee Cheong Fun..

And we had quite a spread, as can be seen by the aftermath..

Dim Sum is typically accompanied by lots of coffee or tea and talking a load of crap. This morning was no different. Full pics are HERE.

In the ‘olden days‘, used to go clubbing, go play DOTA till the early hours then go eat Dim Sum, go home and pass out till sunset the next day.

Have been feeling a bit down the last few days, I guess it’s being tired and work stress, I blame it on biorythms or something like that (I have no reason to be down whatsoever, everything is great at the moment..)

Oh well such is life, at least I get good food 😀

Continue Reading · 18 Comments · Food/Eating

The Aviator & Leonardo DiCaprio

Posted January 12, 2005 at 10:32 pm in Movies

Well I went to check out this movie last night, it’s been fairly well hyped and apparently Leonardo put his heart and soul[/url] into the part and really did the whole method acting thing.

I discovered Mr. DiCaprio could really act well in the olden days of What’s eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries.

He can play harrowing roles very well, drug addicts, people with mental problems and is a serious method actor.

It’s a shame his reputation got ruined by the crappy epic known as Titanic followed by the flop that was The Beach.

After this his was only known for being a floppy haired pretty boy in some crappy films, totally lost his reputation.

He’s come back with avengance recently though with great movies such as Gangs of New York[/url], Catch me if you can[/url] and The Aviator[/url].

Also coming next year is The Departed[/url], a Western remake of the Hong Kong series of movies called Infernal Affairs (Wu Jian Dao).

Anyway back on topic, The Aviator is an excellent movie, well acted through-out with a stunning support cast, a mesmerising performance by Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn and excellent performances from William Baldwin (Trippe), Gwen Stefani (Jean Harlow) and Kate Beckinsale (Ava Gardner).

The film was a touch on the long side and but didn’t really drag, it didn’t detract from this being a great movie. Probably due to the genius director Martin Scorsese, his classics such as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas are still watchable today.

The Aviator was framed to show the good sites of Howard Hughes as he was indeed a genius and a great man in many ways, most people would remember him as the dishevelled, long-fingernailed recluse stuck in his hotel room surrounded by tissues, but well he revolutionised Movies and Aviation and should be remembered for that..

The Hercules for example in some form is still in use by the military today.

DiCaprio and the film captures hughes as the genius, the paranoid, the obsessive, the womaniser, the film-maker and of course the aviator.

The film is beautifully cast, beautifully shot and beautifully directed, it tells the gripping story of a troubled dreamer who ignores advice and shoots for the stars, sometimes he falls..but he always carries on. It shows his troubled love-life, his fears of germs, the public, his deafness and many other elements of his life.

All in all it’s well worth watching.

I’d give it 8.5 out of 10.

Continue Reading · 11 Comments · Movies

Blogging Tools

Posted January 12, 2005 at 12:54 am in General Nonsense, Hacking & Infosec

I’ve updated the site bar a bit and added all the blogging tools and sites I find useful.

I discovered a new one yesterday, BlogClicker, it’s basically a rip-off of BlogExplosion.

You should sign up now as it’s new you’ll get a good downline and basically earn credits from other people surfing.

So what have I found useful.

The first of course being BlogExplosion, you can find my explanation and low-down on it HERE[/url].

This was prompted by me reaching 1000 visits on BE.

Another is BlogHop[/url], which is Your friendly neighborhood blog portal.

You can rate me here:

Rate Me on BlogHop.com!

the bestpretty goodokaypretty badthe worst

BlogExcerpts[/url] is also pretty cool and allows you to share excerpts from your favorite blog posts to attract more visitors, it’s very quick and easy to use and attracts quite a few visitors if you have an interesting or topical post.

Then there is BlogStreet[/url], which I haven’t quite worked out the point of it yet, although a lot of pepole are using it. It doesn’t seem so show anything for my site.

Then there is BBA, Best Blogs in Asia, A directory of Asian blogs which has some interesting reads, and like most places a load of boring drivel too.

There are a few directory type sites too that I use:

Globe of Blogs
Weblog Directory
Blogwise

And finally for Malaysia bloggers of course Project Petaling Street[/url], a blog-tal aggregating content from a cross section of Malaysians being Malaysian.

For stats I am using SiteMeter[/url], which for free gives decent stats although I prefer Webalizer[/url] or AWStats[/url] in Cpanel. But for these packages to work you need access to the web server logs or at least proper hosting.

Finally I use WhoLinksToMe[/url], just by linking to it, then clicking on it you can see who links to you and where, which Blogrolls, Google, MSN and so on. Pretty neat!

As for the downtime, I might be down soon again for a couple of days while the DNS propagates to my new host, I’ve setup a domain for hosting and signed up for a package so Suan[/url] should be back soon too.

Had a session with my new personal trainer last night at the gym, was pretty neat, he punished us good, going to see him again next wednesday to work out my training program. My fitness isn’t bad actually, but my Tricepts are killing, not so bad today but yesterday was agony, serves my macho-ass right for overdoing on my first visit to the gym after more than 10 months of abstinence.

Have phoned StimX about my slow line, they are looking into it, going to watch Aviator tonight, should be cool.

Nothing else much of note has happened recently, am formulating some more interesting thoughts in my head to ramble on about shortly..

Watch this space.

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Continue Reading · 3 Comments · General Nonsense, Hacking & Infosec

Art? What the hell is Art?

Posted January 10, 2005 at 9:57 pm in Ranting

What the fuck is art actually, I know it’s a highly subjective term, but still please..

I found a set of pictures, toted as art by Ashkan Sahihi[/url], which are interesting to say the least.

The quote from the Village Voice[/url] being:

For a weirdly compelling portrait series titled “Cum Shots,” Sahihi asked his male and female sitters to bring along a male partner to ejaculate on their face just before the photo was taken. Because the subjects are seated fully clothed before a neutral studio backdrop, the results buzz with the tension between formality and abandon. Confronting the camera with semen splattered across their cheeks, each of these people has an odd post-coital glow–a flush of ebbing excitement that leaves them emotionally, totally naked.

The whole series is available HERE, there is one in particular which I find quite grotesque.

I mean excuse me for being some fucking back water redneck but what is artistic about that?

Is THIS art?

As I mentioned above, art is a subjective thing, but still please, isn’t art supposed to be something beautiful, possibly mystical and pleasing to the cognitive senses?

Art has evolved or devolved since post-modernism and the advent of ‘abstract’ art, some of which I can appreciate like Salvador Dali[/url]. If art has become something which is to shock, or evoke any kind of emotion, then well yes certainly this is art, but is that hat art is intended to be..

The classical definitions for art being..

The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful in a graphic or plastic medium. High quality of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.

Another leader in this area is the famous Damien Hurst, notably his ‘Away from the flock‘ piece as seen below.

A lamb preserved in formaldehyde.

Surely this is more suited to a biology expo rather than an art gallery?

So if I want to be an artist, I just have to evoke any emotion possible in the people viewing my ‘art‘ including repulsion, disgust or plain shock. Is this what art has become? Something devoid of beauty?

If I want to shock you I can just send you to goat.cx or tubgirl.com, does that make me an artist? Are the people that put these sites up artists?

Some of weird porn fetish scat shit disgusts me, does that mean it’s art aswell?

Where do we draw the line?

What is art to you, what does art mean to you?

For me if you want to see some beautiful art, by my definition check out https://eye.box.sk/, to me that is amazing.

Peace, and for now, out.

Continue Reading · 16 Comments · Ranting

The Aches, The Downtime, The PC Debacle

Posted January 10, 2005 at 2:58 am in General Nonsense, Site News

I am traumatised….my blog has been down since Friday and only just came back in the middle of Sunday night…

If you are wondering what the hell happened..this site is hosted on the same box as security-forums.com[/url], which is a rather large and resource hungry site (can do 30GB a month, sometimes with 200-300+ concurrent database connections)..Any reasonable machine should be able to handle this, but well the machine we were on couldn’t handle it and MySQL kept crashing, when that happened my blog also went down, along with darknet.org.uk[/url] and Suans site[/url].

So the box kept going down, the host…decided to suspend our account, which meant all sites under it were also suspended, including this one..without notice or forewarning..which sucked basically, and they refused to re-enable unless we upgraded to a dedicated server, thus if we crashed we would have root access and could sort it out ourselves..and we wouldn’t be effecting anyone else with our apparently excessive usage..now we only use 30-40GB per month out of a 200GB quota, so that’s not the issue…it’s a resource thing, and well they never give us any proof or work with us to resolve the problems, they just reboot the machine or lately resort to disabling our account.

It’s been a frustrating, stressful and tiring weekend trying to get this sorted, get access so we can download the site via FTP and dump the database via MySQLdump…

I will be moving my blog to a new host asap, so it no longer has to co-habit with Security Forums[/url]. Following this I will be offering hosting for Malaysia bloggers for 100RM per year, a very reasonable price I believe 🙂

Saturday was interesting day for various reasons…the less said about that the better, was supposed to go clubbing too, but no one had much mood, and KY was away so it was called off, got a new motherboard on Saturday too and did some shopping for other stuff, got myself a new bookcase too.

The beautiful board I got was an Abit NF7-S.

Which is all well and good but I wanted a board that supported SDRAM..not DDR, oh well.

I spent all night putting the beast together anyway, would go and get some DDR RAM on Sunday.

It looks cool, I cleaned the case out and made the new install really tidy, was impressed by my wire tie skills 🙂

The old install looked like this, nice and dusty..

I whipped everything out following that..

The lovely neat new install looks like this..

So yesterday I went and got some DDR RAM from the friend that got me this board, came back home and promptly stuck it in..

The machine promplty wouldn’t boot..

Not from the HDD, not from a CD-ROM or even from a floppy, it just hangs.

Knoppix for example you choose the Kernel options then it gets to vmlinuz….and hangs.

Same for everything, I think maybe the CPU got fried when the motherboard blew.

I’m tempted just to send it to a computer shop and let some other monkeys work it out.

I was annoyed to the say the least, I ended up with some Franken-PC setup to test my HDD’s still worked, which is the most important thing, used my Mini-ITX[/url] machine.

Thankfully they do and the poor little PC ended up downloading around 8000 e-mails overnight (I have a lot of accounts I haven’t checked for some time..

It’s now not self-contained with the hard-drives from my main machine balanced on top of it..

So well at least I have some kind of working desktop now..

Last night I assembled the bookcase I got from Tesco too, which is pretty nice, but for flatpack furniture it was probably the most akward needlessly complicated thing I’ve ever assembled. It was a pain the ass TM!

It started out with 6000 peices and looked something like this..

After some serious consulting of the Japanese language instructions..it looked something like this..

After some serious shuffling, cursing, random falling apart…it got to this stage..

Finally it was done, in all it’s beauty..

Flatpack furniture it’s a great way to excercise 🙂

I spent Sunday afternoon in the gym the first time…for more than 10 months I think, I’ve been a member for about 3 weeks and been so busy lately haven’t had time to go, but I shall endevour to start going regularly 3 times a week, it’s nearby so should be able to keep to it 🙂

I pumped some weights, went on the cross-trainer and did a Body Combat class, was kinda fun, but was totally exhausted after.

Anyway am aching like shit today..argh!

That’s all for now, need to take my clothes to the laundry before I run out of pants and have to go commando..and need to eat, might be a good idea.

Damn stressful weekend.

Continue Reading · 3 Comments · General Nonsense, Site News

Because I can?

Posted January 7, 2005 at 9:32 am in General Nonsense

Well welcome me to the broadband revolution, that being ‘broadband‘ in the very loosest sense of the word.

The light finally stopped blinking this afternoon after almost a week of the line not being synced, which meant I was finally connected after activating the account this evening! So I’m posting this from home, on my coffee table with my laptop watching Jackass on TV. The bliss!

The line is however rather slow..and proceeded to disconnect itself every 3.46 minutes after I first connected, I switched the cheap-ass china brand ZTE modem out for my own trusty ADSL enabled router.

My mighty Draytek Vigor 2600, which has a splendid feature set and has never failed me in the UK.

The line is slightly faster and more stable now, but it’s still a crawl compared to the mighty 1MB it’s supposed to be running at..

The speed and stability issues are probably to do with the quality of the copper pairs from my appartment, the phone itself is quiet (possible low gain on the line) and it sometimes crackles (which may account for the ADSL dropping sometimes) as there is probably static on the line.

But well it’s still like 4 times better that dialup, which is a big difference, I’ll have to shout at them until it gets to at least 800kbps, then at least it’s worth paying for 1MB. I’m basically posting now, because I can.

On another note I found a couple of intersting things, the only automated face reader in the world, https://www.faceanalyzer.com/[/url].

Will post again soon…

Continue Reading · 1 Comment · General Nonsense