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/