The Piper

Let’s have a little thought adventure for a change today. Disclaimer: may be factually inaccurate, may be harmful for consumption by readers above 18.

Messaging

I was at Happy Chef in some Crawford Lane kopitiam today, and had an uninspiring Batter Fish. Chunk of fish big and thick, coleslaw dry, veggies unappetizing, mountain of thick fries. It’s a run for your money (and Han’s), but don’t expect tip-top food there. Get there early for dinner. Try the bak chor mee stall too; it smelt very good.

After evaluating Mediashout 3, I’m underwhelmed. It looks difficult to use.

Offices

Nic’s on page uno for a while.

I’m going to mention this again – some interesting previous awardees for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Office 2007 looks funky. I might give it a spin – but I definitely don’t have any plans for my organization to adopt it. After all, the rest of the world is still on Office 2003, the new formats break, the system requirements are much higher – since things are going to break you might as well move to something with nicer bling – Keynote.

Another AC has something up about faciliating collaboration, and it’s a pretty amusing read.

ChemicalBurn is this really cool screensaver that simulates a transport system or something. Now, picture Singapore =)

The PopSci Predictions Exchange is an interesting concept. But, it’s not implemented very well – maybe we could set up something like this! Play money, of course, but coupled with a much better interface, I’m sure we can win them. That’s besides the different audience involved, of course. Exciting!

Zip

Saw this review of the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ some time ago; still, the benchmarks (generated by what?) are interesting. Maybe you can get better performance on your desktop with some tuning. It’s not a small difference.

Halls

Your in-depth results are:

Ravenclaw – 11
Slytherin – 11
Gryffindor – 9
Hufflepuff – 6

Ha.

Faulty

Amusing Technical Notes by Fortinet.

• FortiGuard Web Filtering Service Technical Note way back from ‘05.
• Instant Messaging, Peer to Peer, and Voice over Internet Protocols Version 3.0 MR4 from January ‘07.

Read carefully, be shocked or impressed as you see fit, and laugh. No clue as to what extent these things are enabled.

Blink

So, ACSIMUN is over.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Advisory

There was this really exciting thing some people accidently noticed recently. Check out this snippet at Pastebin.

Essentially, this is a typical SSL/TLS man-in-the-middle attack, except it purports to be mounted by an appliance that has been specifically installed for various purposes, and this activity also appears to have been started only recently.

In this case, sensitive applications (such as phpMyAdmin) will be affected by this man-in-the-middle attack – and clients may not be the wiser because they typically will just click-through the warnings their browser, Microsoft or not, issues. The warnings may be further minimised if the Fortinet certificate is installed and trusted on client machines – in that scenario, the only issue the browser would notice is a DNS name mismatch.

Based on limited sampling, for Google Inc, the certificate is issued to Google Inc, Mountain View, CA, for the specific DNS name, and signed by Thawte. Google should have been moving away from a wildcard *.google.com certificate for several months already.

Therefore, as a public service announcement, please be advised to take precautions to protect your online privacy – which may include changing passwords at a more secure location, and avoiding use of sensitive online applications while in public locations.

Don’t forget that the School does not in any way guarantee electronic privacy, as far as I can tell. Instead, [mis]quoting from the Computer & Internet User’s Agreement, “.. the school will provide reasonable supervision for computer and internet use ..”.

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In related news, the said appliance also appears to be blocking “Category: Unrated” sites. Workaround? Submit a review request from the link thoughtfully included on the webfilter violation alert page, and they really usually acknowledge and update their database within one or two calendar days.

Three cheers!

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In other news, I am taking a hard look at this thing called www.raffles.sg. Maybe we need one to better illustrate the multitude of oft-confusing school career routes within the ACS Family. After all, the current IP/DSA site is not only difficult to use, has outdated and since-invalidated information and illustrations, difficult to locate even with explicit instructions, and causes many queries from prospective parents and students; clearly, something must be done.

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The IBO released a new set of visual identity materials a couple of months back, as some others have noticed. What do you think?

Diplomats

MUN Notepaper.

I suspect the wireless coverage at the new LTs probably hasn’t improved. Is there any other way to get on the net there?

Tunes

Stop press!

In iTunes 7.3, when you are viewing music and the sort order is “Album by Year” (or related), iTunes now sorts using Album Artist instead of Artist. Japanese characters get sorted to the bottom.

That’s an annoyance because I like to see English names in the genre/artist/album browser, and original-language names in album and coverflow view. And in Front Row.