THE GRAND

10% off for regular-priced ticket purchases at cinema box office of the Grand Cinema, ELEMENTS!

Quality means doing it right

Quality means doing it right when on one is looking.
- Henry Ford

VPN Protocol

1. PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol)
2. L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol)

Office Tools

- LibreOffice

Music Tools

Linux
- Ubuntu Studio
- KXStudio

Drum
- http://onlinedrummer.com
- http://easybeats.net

iPad
- Drum Set+

7 steps to a successful startup

1. What is the unmet need?
2. How big is this market?
3. Can we  create differentiated market positioning?
4. How will I make money and who will pay me?
5. Why us?
6. Why now?
The end: or is it the beginning?

Unless you try to do something

Unless you try to do somethig beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Router features

1. Intelligence/Smart Load Balance
2. QoS / IP QoS
3. Hardware DMZ
4. VLAN
5. ARP Inspection
6. Guarantee & Limited Bandwidth
7. Smart Load Balance
8. Multi-WAN Broadband Router
9. How fast of NAT?
10. How fast of VPN?
11. How many session?
12. How many VPN Tunnels?

Nexus S Android 4.0 OTA 更新展開 (附手動更新)

若果各位 Nexus S 用家不想等，可以按照下面的步驟進行手動更新。
以下步驟不適用於 CDMA 版本 Nexus S
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
1. 下載 OTA 更新檔案
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/ota/google_crespo/VQ8PQk_V.zip
2. 將下載檔案重新命名為 update.zip
3. 將 update.zip 複製至內部儲存空間的根目錄
4. 將手機電源關上
5. 按住［音量+］鍵並按［電源開關］鍵，進入 Bootloader 畫面
6. 選取 "Recovery"，按［電源開關］鍵
7. 當 "警告三角" 圖示出現，按住［電源開關］鍵並同時按［音量+］鍵
8. 選取 "Apply update from /sdcard" 再選取 "update.zip"
9. 更新程序會展開。
10. 當更新程序完成後，選取 "Reboot system now" 重啟手機
Reference:
Nexus S Android 4.0 OTA 更新展開 (附手動更新)

Mobile Number Portings (MNP) / 流動號轉攜

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) refers to the an arrangement for the porting of numbers from one mobile network operator to another, usually upon customers' request.

10 New Reasons to Virtualize Your Infrastructure

Source: 10 New Reasons to Virtualize Your Infrastructure

1. Common Management Interface

2. ILO Not Required

3. Easy "Hardware" Changes

4. Snapshots

5. Prototyping

6. Fast System Communications

7. Easy Decommissioning

8. Templating

9. Fast Deployment

10. Dynamic Capacity

職場衰人收入較多

【明報專訊】俗語有云：「善有善報，惡有惡報」，不過此話在職場未必是定律。一項研究發現，表現惡形惡相的「衰人」員工收入明顯比友善的「好人」員工多，其中以男性情况特別明顯，「衰人」的年收入可比「好人」多9772美元（約7.6萬港元）。

美國康奈爾大學、聖母大學及加拿大西安大略大學的人力資源管理專家，做了一項名為「人善是否被人欺？」（Do Nice Guys-and Gals-Really Finish Last?）的研究。研究分析了20年間由3項問卷調查蒐集得的數據，涉及約1萬名來自不同行業、年齡薪酬各異的受訪者，當中受訪者需自評友善程度。

惡男每年多掙7.6萬

研究人員分析數據後，發現友善程度低於平均值的惡男員工比友善的男員工平均收入多18%，年收入相差達9772美元（約7.6萬港元）；而惡女員工亦比友善的女員工平均收入多5%，年收入相差1828美元（約1.4萬港元）。另外，研究人員在另一研究中亦邀請460名商科學生，模擬人力資源經理，透過簡短的描述，篩選應徵顧問的人員，結果發現，被形容為非常和善的男士較少獲取錄。

友善者少爭取好待遇

研究員利文斯頓博士（Beth A. Livingston）稱，實驗結果顯示好人受到「不公平」待遇。


Reference: Yahoo News - 職場衰人收入較多

New website of Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Hong Kong launched

Healthcare

1. 4 Jul, 2011 - New website of Pharmacy and Poisons Board of Hong Kong launched
1. http://www.ppbhk.org.hk/eng/index.html
2. 24 Jun, 2011 - Google Health will be discontinued as a service
1. http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/health/about/

General

1. 20 Jul, 2011 - (Video) 蘋果告侵權 谷歌力挺宏達電 (不如睇下動新聞)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DGMnTv23S4
2. 14 Jul, 2011 - Postmortem : Google Java App Engine outage
• http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/07/postmortem-java-app-engine-outage-july.html
• Summary
• On July 14, 2011, beginning at 7 PM US/Pacific time (PDT/GMT-7), a subset of Java App Engine applications were affected by a service outage, which gradually increased in magnitude over time. During this period, affected applications would have experienced high latency and error rates. Approximately 1.9% of total App Engine traffic was affected at peak ...
• Root Cause and Analysis
• The main lesson learned is to improve our live traffic testing as a relatively minor bug triggered a corner case for some of our customers. The bug was in a new release of the infrastructure in the App Engine Java execution environment. During development, testing, and qualification, this bug was essentially hidden from view because it only manifested itself under specific load patterns …
• …
• Timeline
• July 14, 2011 - 11:30 AM US/Pacific - The new Java execution environment is released to production.
• July 14, 2011 - 5:00-6:00 PM US/Pacific - The previously scheduled Master/Slave read-only maintenance period occurred.
• July 14, 2011 - 8:00-9:30 PM US/Pacific - Monitoring shows error rates and latency for Java applications in the Master/Slave system are slowly increasing across the entire system. Investigation reveals that the new Java execution environment is malfunctioning …
• ...
• Remediation
• Faster notification on our status site and downtime-notify mailing list
• More live traffic stress tests for new releases
• Better black box monitoring to detect small impacts more quickly
3. 7 May, 2011 - Why The New Guy Can’t Code
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/07/why-the-new-guy-cant-code/

Jasper Tutorials

1.    http://jasperforge.org/website/jasperreportswebsite/trunk/documentation.html
2.    http://kristantohans.wordpress.com/tag/tutorial-jasper-report/
3.    http://ireport-tutorial.blogspot.com/
4.    http://kristantohans.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/new-to-jasperreport-build-your-first-impressive-application-part-2/

Using iPad as menu to order food

User can use iPad2 camera to scan the 2D barcode to order food. 

Reference: http://diningcity.com/china/

FREE Android apps outnumber FREE iPhone apps

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/28/shocker-free-android-apps-outnumber-free-iphone-apps/

Android TV-Out for presentation

I have do a study for how to connect android phone to projector / TV. HTC Desire HD and Samsung Nexus S (like most android phones) do not support TV-Out.

Until now, only Samsung Galaxy S has TV-Out function in Hong Kong. However, we cannot use Samsung Galaxy S as our development phone. Because we have used some Android 2.3 API for our Barcode Scanning customization and Samsung Galaxy S is used Android 2.2.

(p.s. HTC Desire HD is used Android 2.2 platform.)

An alternative solution - Android Screen Cast - it can mirror your app screen to your notebook and connect to a projector. The function is work, but the quality is not good (may be poor).

BTW, Samsung Galaxy Tab has TV-Out function and many of Android tablets have HDMI out. I am thinking that we can port our app to those devices for presentation only. But it may have extra effort for development.

(p.s. Samsung Galaxy Tab is also used Android 2.2 platform.)

All comments are welcome. Thanks!

Reference:

1. TV-Out on the Nexus S?
2. TV-Out on HTC Desire?
3. HTC Desire to tv or a projector?
4. http://code.google.com/p/androidscreencast/

DenyHosts

Features

1. Parses /var/log/secure to find all login attempts and filters failed and successful attempts.
2. Synchronization mode (new in 2.0) allows DenyHosts daemons the ability to share data via a centralized server to proactively thwart attacks.
3. Can be run from the command line, cron or as a daemon (new in 0.9)
4. Records all failed login attempts for the user and offending host
5. For each host that exceeds a threshold count, records the evil host
6. Keeps track of each non-existent user (eg. sdadasd) when a login attempt failed.
7. Keeps track of each existing user (eg. root) when a login attempt failed.
8. Keeps track of each offending host (with 0.8+ these hosts can be purged if the associated entry in /etc/hosts.deny is expired)
9. Keeps track of suspicious logins (that is, logins that were successful for a host that had many login failures)
10. Keeps track of the file offset, so that you can reparse the same file (/var/log/secure) continuously (until it is rotated).
11. When the log file is rotated, the script will detect it and parse from the beginning.
12. Appends /etc/hosts.deny and adds the newly banned hosts
13. Optionally sends an email of newly banned hosts and suspicious logins.
14. Keeps a history of all user, host, user/host combo and suspicious logins encountered which includes the data and number of corresponding failed login attempts.
15. Maintains failed valid and invalid user login attempts in separate files, such that it is easy to see which valid user is under attack (which would give you the opportunity to remove the account, change the password or change it's default shell to something like /sbin/nologin
16. Upon each run, the script will load the previously saved data and re-use it to append new failures.
17. Resolves IP addresses to hostnames, if available (new in v0.6.0).
18. /etc/hosts.deny entries can be expired (purge) at a user specified time (new in 0.8)
19. FreeBSD support (added in 0.7)

References

1. http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net/
2. http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/rhel-linux-block-ssh-dictionary-brute-force-attacks/

Red Hat Directory Server

Features Overview

1. Centralizes management of people and their profiles, reducing administrative costs
2. Acts as a central repository for user profiles and preferences, enabling personalization
3. Allows 4-way multi-master replication of data across the enterprise, providing a centralized, consistent data source available to enterprise applications
4. Enables single sign-on access with a partner solution
5. Provides scalability for massive numbers of users by containing the information control required for developing extranet applications
6. Provides full support for 64-bit HP-UX, Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms
7. Provides the foundation for strong certificate-based authentication when used in conjunction with a Red Hat Certificate System

Reference:

1. http://www.redhat.com/directory_server/

HTTP accelerator

1. Varnish
2. Squid

p.s. The Norway biggest online news provider use 3 Varnish machines replace 12 Squid machines. Wikipedia is planning to use Varnish instead of Squid.