Friday.

No security class in the morning as the instructor had “something urgent” to attend to, which is fine, considering that I’ve been having a bit of information overload from the past couple of days.

Time flies, doesn’t it? We are already half-way through the year. For me, this half year has been smooth if not unspectacular. Probably after more than 4 years of exciting time in university, it’s time for me to quiet down and have a stable life. That said, this 6 months in my current job has been an eye-opener (or in my HOD’s words, “culture shock”) to me, and indeed it’s not easy to adjust myself for the kids here. There are some really talented and motivated ones, there are some lacking in either talent or motivation, while there are some who sadly are missing in both. So to balance myself to try to cater to all of them makes the whole job pretty difficult.

Anyway my HOD has already expressed his wish to keep me here. Now it’s up to me to decide if I’m keen to sign on the dotted line, which will keep me for the next year. To be honest, if I can see what I’ll be heading for or can do what I really want to do, staying here isn’t so bad an option. After all, I do like hanging around with my students. But again, if I can only be here to sit around and not do the things I want to do, then there really isn’t much point as well.

But since I’m going to be in Hong Kong for at least the next 2 years for my Masters, returning to Singapore is not an option in the foreseeable future. Oh well, maybe I’ll go back to Singapore and discuss this with my family, and perhaps a few of my friends… that will be next week!

Masters.

The instructor for the security course went missing yesterday (more like he was sick and couldn’t come for class), so I decided to spend the time to play around with NetBeans, a Java IDE. Well, a lot of concepts that I previously didn’t understand in university suddenly came to light and I must say that I totally enjoyed my day of programming, even though it was just kind of programming for fun (something that I probably never expected to do when I was in university).

The weather this morning isn’t good – in fact it has been raining for the couple of days. I don’t mind the rain, except it really isn’t a good thing when I’m in school – it would have been a whole lot nicer if I’m at home because that would make for a highly conducive sleeping environment.

Next week this time I should be ready to board the plane to fly back to Singapore, and I’m really looking forward to see everyone back home. After being away for such a long time, it’s always nice to be back in Singapore, even though it’s going to be just a week. Hopefully everyone can squeeze out some time for me!

And another piece of good news – I got offered a place in the Masters of Science in Electronic Commerce program by City University! I’m going to be a student again!

More Security.

I think I’m in danger of turning my journal into a geek box or something.

Yesterday’s class was on packet fetching as I laid my hands on Ethereal. Did some monitoring of outgoing and incoming packets and I noticed that as long as a particular site is not secured (not necessarily a bogus site, but one that does not protect data and information using things like SSL) can be pretty scary. For example, I tracked my communication with Friendster and I noticed that my username and password was sent via plaintext (again):

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Of course I had my password covered, but what you would notice is that the username (the email address) was sent over the channel in plaintext form, and it was the same for the password. Mind you, Friendster isn’t the only site that sends username and password in plaintext form. If your data packet somehow gets intercepted by some evil people, then God knows what might happen to your account.

And then my password was apparently cracked by LC5 using brute force attack:

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I ran LC5 all over again yesterday from the start, and it took the program less than 5 hours to crack it. And mind you, my password was a combination of alphabets and numbers! However, for the HelpAssistant account, apparently even brute force can’t seem to be able to crack it, as the scan was completed without being able to decipher the entire password:

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So what it means is that for a password to be relatively more secured, it should be long enough for you to remember, and hard enough for the cracker to crack. Furthermore, one lesson I took from yesterday’s class was that there is actually no completely secured password per se, instead a so-called secured password is just one that a cracker would spend a long time trying to crack and in the end would give up on doing. If a cracker is intent on cracking a password, he will do so anyway. So pick a password that would probably take too long a time for the cracker to crack is probably the best option of all.

OK, before I get too geeky, I’d better get out of here.

Toastmasters.

Yesterday’s security class was fun – I had a field day trying to crack passwords using LC5. Don’t worry, I wasn’t cracking somebody else’s password – I was merely using LC5 to check if the passwords that I have in my working computer was safe or not. Apparently it was – at least after more than 2 hours of brute force attack:

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But the scary thing about passwords, as I learned yesterday, was that as long as it is a dictionary word, it takes the password crackers (not just LC5, but generally most password crackers) less than a second to crack – when I tried to put “orange3970” as the password for a test, it was cracked the moment the cracking process began! Blimey!

I went for a Toastmasters Club meeting yesterday evening for the first time in my life and I think the experience there was pretty good. What I enjoyed the most was to be able to talk to a lot of other people – I’ve never done that since I’ve returned to Hong Kong – and also to pick up something about public speaking. I won’t mind going back again, or even sign up as a member! In a certain way, I’m kinda looking forward to the next session. Haha.

Security class later again. Hopefully there’ll be something fun today as well.

Weekend.

The weekend that just went past was pretty enjoyable. I went back to school on Saturday to attend the CompTIA Security+ Certification course (the second installment in a series of 10 sessions, may I add). It’s pretty interesting to be playing around with the Windows Server 2003 (even though it was only on a virtual machine), as I learned about all things security-related. It’s actually quite a shame for me to claim that I came out from SOC yet I didn’t know all those things about computer security. Sure I did a course on security back in university, but if you asked me to set up the security perimeters of a server I probably would tell you I didn’t know how to do it. Now that I get the chance to learn, it’s definitely a good thing.

And in case you don’t have any idea about how insecure our computers are in terms of network communication, check this out: (if you already knew about this, pardon me for trying to show off something that you think probably the whole world knows)

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This is the network monitor on Windows Server 2003, with FTP being installed as one of the available services. If you take a look at lines number 29, 30 (the one being highlighted in blue) and 32, you’ll notice that if you do not apply IPSec (a security feature) on the channel communication pathway, everything that you communicate with the server is being sent on plaintext, meaning that your username and your password are all visible (in this case, the username is “myuser” and password is “password1” – though I entered a wrong username/password combination, just to illustrate this point about it being plaintext). I always had the idea that FTP communication isn’t exactly safe, but I didn’t know it was that unsafe.

Spent the whole of yesterday playing on my Wii. Generally my verdict about the Wii so far is that most of the games are silly in nature, and are generally meant for a group of people having a bit of mindless fun. I think it’s good once in a while to just put aside the frustrations that I’m having for my work and engage in some “excuse brain” activities.

My eyes are hurting now – I wonder if I’m getting old, or is it because the air in Hong Kong is so bad that I’m having these frequent eye irritations. Hmm.

Going for my security class later. Hopefully it’ll be fun.

Lessons.

Yesterday’s morning website building workshop for the F5 kids was OK. It wasn’t the toughest thing I’ve ever done in my life and I think the kids had a bit of fun learning that little bit about website building. Or at least I hope they have.

Then in the afternoon I went over to the HK Convention and Exhibition Centre (it’s apparently named this way) for the Java Certification Day. It was actually more of a showcase of Java applications by some of the Sun people. I was quite impressed in the first half of the session, seeing how Java is being used to generate SVG graphics (that was one cool thing) and how to deploy a web application using Netbeans without the need of keying much Java code. The most impressive thing I learned in the session was perhaps how Java finally bothered to merge it’s highly impressive but highly irritatingly huge library with scripting. It’s kinda hard for me to explain what this whole deal is – for those of you who are interested I think the people at Sun can do a much better job doing the explanation. I think I should really go pick up a bit of Java again so that I can go for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam.

Managed to sneak this picture at the event – this shows that I was really there!

Then I rushed over to City University for the interview for my MSc application. The professor doing the interview with me seemed like a nice guy, and he was quite happy with my credentials. Of course I can’t say if that means that they are going to take me in, but I definitely hope I would get a place there.

Spent the whole of today attending lessons – my department is organizing this pre-certification training for the Comptia Security+ certification, and I think there’s definitely no harm in attending. The stuffs taught today was interesting, but I was so tired in the afternoon that I didn’t really pay much attention. Still managed to capture something into my memory, and I think whatever went into my head were interesting. The bad thing, if any, is that I still have 6 full days of lessons to look forward to, which include tomorrow!

Time to go sleep – I don’t want to be yawning away in tomorrow’s class like I did today.

Tuen Ng Festival.

Public holiday yesterday, though I didn’t really have that much of a rest because I spent the entire afternoon wasting my time at Mong Kok for a function. It wasn’t fun to be queuing up for 3 hours for a short 5-minute session. I think it’s best forgotten.

I got my Wii on Monday evening after deliberating for… 3 months? I think so far the investment still looked like a good one because I really had a lot of fun on it. And through the game Wii Sports I had my share of exercise as well! I remembered my PE teacher in JC once told me that if any of your body parts is aching, that means that you have been exercising (whether correctly or wrongly she didn’t say). So since my back and my right arm are hurting like mad now, I must have been exercising a lot! That said, I’m still feeling exhausted from all the exercise, or should I say gaming, yesterday. But after a workout, I did sleep much better last night. I think I shall go on and make Wii my exercise partner – 30 minutes of Wii Sports a day seems like a good idea, according to this website – that should be useful.

The latest addition to my gallery of gadgets – the Wii!

Back to work this morning, and I think I’m going to spend some time drafting up proposals for some of the projects that I want to do in the next academic year (if I get to stay here, that is).

One week.

Suddenly it’s been a few days since I last did an update. Well, after finished marking the kids’ exam scripts, I haven’t really been entirely productive at work. Besides spending the whole of Thursday playing around with C# and the whole of Friday preparing the materials for the IT workshop that I’ll be conducting for some F5/F7 kids, I haven’t really been doing anything. That said, those two days, especially Thursday, were still meaningful, as I managed to learn a lot more about C#, which can only be a good thing.

Went over to the Hong Kong Exhibition & Convention Centre yesterday to check out the International Travel Exhibition (aptly short-formed as ITE). The exhibition was quite interesting as I went around and checked out a lot of travel destinations. At the end of the whole walking around, I managed to collect about 2 big bags of travel information, and at the same time applied for a 3-year membership to Hosteling International. That means if I get the chance to backpack to places in Europe or America, I would have some reasonably-priced accommodation!

After the travel fair I went over to Mong Kok to do some price-checking for people back home in Singapore, and in the process I was almost tempted to get a set of Wii, but somehow managed to hold back. It wasn’t easy.

Need to go sleep now – work tomorrow, but it will be a public holiday on Tuesday!

Midweek.

I’ve developed this latest knack of updating my journal in the day while I’m in office. To be honest, it’s more got to do with me being lazy while I’m at home in the evening. Sometimes I don’t even bother switching on my computer. Comparatively, I’m much more freer nowadays in school during the day. So since I don’t really have much to do, I might just as well use this time to update my little journal.

My job is still not looking up these few days – the examinations are over, and I’ve also finished marking the papers for the module that I’m teaching. Let’s just say that it wasn’t a particularly difficult job, partly because since I was co-teaching this module with another colleague, so he had marked about 60% of the papers, and I just have to do the other 40%. Another reason – well I guess after hearing me moan all the time, I don’t really need to say why the marking wasn’t difficult to do. If ever there is something that I feel more pleased about their answers, it’s that for one of the long questions that I’ve set, most of the kids did pretty well in it. That perhaps is the only good thing that I can derive from marking the papers.

Coming towards the end of my term here, I’m really beginning to think what the next path of my life should be. What lay in front of me are three visible paths – stay in this job, look for another in Hong Kong and return to Singapore. To be absolutely honest, returning to Singapore is still my last option because I still want to try here in Hong Kong. Now the choice would be between whether to stay in this job (provided I’m being offered another term). If I don’t get offered another term, I’ll still have to find another job no matter what. But now the issue is if I’m offered, would I stay around? Actually for me that’s kind of a hard question to answer. As much as I’m quite frustrated in this job, there are still occasional good things to take away from it. For example, my bunch of FD kids who are brighter and more hardworking are one of the positive things to take away from. I guess it’s a matter of hanging on to try to derive positive things from this job and bear with the frustrations (or better still, turn these frustrations into positives) or get out of this job to try to find something better. Honestly, as far as personal development is concerned. this job offers little. If there isn’t any extra curriculum projects that come along once in a while, it’s actually difficult to gain any form of personal development in terms of fulfilling my potential.

Let’s see what the future holds for me. And I think I really need to find something to do – like writing a proposal or something. And ya, since I haven’t been putting pictures lately, here’s some for your viewing pleasure:

The Charlie Brown Cafe in Dundas Street, Mong Kok – this one is a slightly bigger one than the other one in Mong Kok – and being a Snoopy fan I really love the place.

All these mobile phone accessories are all available for sale, and it’s probably a heaven for Snoopy fans. There are more Snoopy merchandise available in the cafe, and I think it’s just great to see all these cute little things.

Announcing the new addition to the England squad – KC Ferdinand!
(To be honest, that’s me in the new England shirt, costing $499 including the printing of name and number – a pretty decent deal I think).

Programmer Personality.

Your programmer personality type is: PHSC

You’re a Planner.
You may be slow, but you’ll usually find the best solution. If something’s worth
doing, it’s worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You
write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.

Interesting observation – get yours here. But for those non-computing people or people without programming knowledge this might be a little bit hard to understand.

This is another example of how bored I am now.