Its been a crazy time. I'm on long leave, pending a change in job. Had a new spawn. Passed my digital forensic exam, set up my new laptop as a hacking system.

Its been a really busy time for me, even without going to work.

Haven't really had time to pursue some of my more personal hobbies, that is photography and online marketing. Yes, online marketing is my hobby. Strange but true.

I've always had some personal projects at various times in my life, and interestingly enough, it always seem to be useful in my daily life.

Like the time I was picking apart program installers to find out what makes them tick. I got such a good understanding of installers that I was hired to make installers for a large consumer electronics.

Or that ever since I started working, I have been finding ways and means of circumventing every electronic safeguard in place, and after that I became a professional ethical hacker.

Throughout the years, I have been helping others recover their lost data. Today, or rather this week, I'm 1 step closer to getting my forensic cert. CSI, here I come.

Anyway, I just got free hosting, hopefully, I can put it to good use soon. Very soon.

Woah it has been a long time. I have been busy. I wanted to update my blog earlier, but life got in the way.

Anyway, ever since NS, I learnt one very important thing. That is, acquiring a skill, no matter how mundane, is one thing that no one can take away from you. Skill is one thing that people pay big bucks for.

However while skills are tough to acquire, tools are quick, simple, just a matter of money and tools provide a multiplier effect.

I see it in every role, every line and business. A couple of upstarts will buy/steal/use the best tools, and despite their deplorable skills, they produce quick and good results. After all, its the results that count in this day and age isn't it?

Conversely, I always tend to treat tools and a secondary consideration. To me, skills, while not providing the same quality of results as tools, allow me to produce results even when my toolkits are far away from me. It provides me with an initial analysis and of course attack vectors to continue my work. In the presence of tools, my skills will allow me to extend my capabilities beyond.

This is part of my philosophy in life and is pervasive to many aspects of my life. Always develop the skill first, before buying or acquiring tools. Its not what you have, its always what you know. Knowledge is, especially in this information age, power. Power gives you might, and that keeps you employed.

Looks like I'm not as disciplined about my time management as I would want to be. Nevertheless, I still managed to remember my password to my blog.

Anyhoo, recently, I've been really busy with my (not so) new toy, the HTC Desire. Yes, it has many features I desire and many quirks which are undesirable. Along that lines, I've had tons of friends ask me which mobile device should they get as their mobile phone and what are the striking differences between some of the more popular OSes.

Although I have blogged about this in many forms, let us revisit this issue in view of the latest changes in the mobile world. RIM's blackberry has been parrying with the governments of India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia over security concerns. The iPhone 4 has taken the world by storm, in an interesting way and WinMo seems to have all but died. Android sales is still astronomical and PalmOS is still a joke, in asia at least.

Back to the main story, what are the main differences between phone OSes, or rather, what are the strengths of the various mobile phones that we can leverage on as users.

Having been a WinMo fanboy for years, I'm not going to touch on this platform as it is as good as a dead platform and Windows Phone 7 hasn't seen the light of day yet. Rumours and speculations do not count.

iPhone (not to be confused with Cisco's IPhone). iOS (not to be confused with Cisco's IOS). The Jesus phone. The most controversial to date. Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it. Its strength lies in its simplicity. When Steve Jobs said that copy and paste wasn't necessary, he meant it wasn't necessary for the basic user. But he relented and now there is copy and paste and multitasking on his latest iOS4. But don't be mistaken. The iPhone still does not compete on specs (it is lower specs than all its competitors) nor does it compete on features (100 iFart apps does not count as 100 features). Its settings are simple, intuitive, elegant. Its navigation is idiot proof. You don't need a PHD to understand it.

And the games. My goodness. There are tons and tons of free games for this phone. If you get bored easily, or if you have a long boring commute, or if you generally need to keep yourself entertained constantly, this is the phone.

Needless to say, the new Retina display gives you a better movie experience than any other phone ever can.

Blackberry. My constant conundrum. The BB (aka crackberry) exudes professionalism and reliability. And I'm not just saying this because a friend of mine proved its toughness by flinging his phone multiple times to my horror (my floor!). It is the most secured phone so far. Digital forensics on it is impractical, stealing information from it is impossible. The encryption is end (your device) to end (Canadian RIM servers). It has exceptional power saving mode, has all the pro business features and has the most reliable push mail to date.

Android. The geek's answer to the aging and ailing WinMo. While Android tries its best to be another iPhone, what most users don't give it enough justice for is its self awareness and customization. I'm not talking about wallpapers and ringtones. I'm talking about using location to trigger actions. Automation. Adding functions to the basic phone. SMS scheduling, call management. And of course, the main focus of Google, search. Android users, stop scrolling and haphazardly trying to locate contacts, apps or website. simply search. That's all you need to do. Forget the app tray or the list of contacts. Type into the search and let Google handle it.

Automate your phone. Wallpapers, ringer volume, launching programs, radios. Is there anything Android cannot automate?

While the iPhone excels in entertainment. the Android excels in being a workhorse. The BB has emails and work as the center of its universe.

If I were to liken the mobile OSes to women, the BB would be the boss, the Android the worker and iPhone the mistress.

I've always been confident of my geeky skill when it comes to software. I do put in effort in keeping up to date with the latest, greatest, in the clouds and otherwise. Its no mean task, I assure you, for an old man like me to constantly read and find out more about technology, trying to jostle in cyberspace with all the younger and more updated kids, teenagers and yuppies.

And keeping up to date in the clouds is what my geek phail of the week is about. You see, there has been some information that I want to be constantly updated of. What's the latest internet post about, what new information has someone released about that topic. And how I've been "monitoring" these information has been to save a google search as a thumbnail, and I can see if there are any new hits each time the thumbnail refreshes. I know there should be better ways of doing it, but I am reluctant to sign up new accounts with dubious internet firms for this. Of course I also use twitter keyword search in my twitter client to constantly monitor for new hits as well.

That was until I realised that Google was offering this service for free. For a long time. And it integrates nicely with all my other google services. Now I have Google deliver the information to my inbox where I can be notified about the latest posts or releases on my topics as it happens.

I'm glad I managed to catch with technology... for now.

I just read that the local government is intending to issue an email to every citizen for the purpose of government related correspondence.

I don't know how our million dollar scholars think, but as a IT security professional, this is raising all kinds of alarms and red flags for me.

Assuming that the government will "never" violate our privacy (lol, what privacy?), I can think of all kinds of problems and abuse that will occur.

All 3rd party websites and online services will not accept any other emails other than the government issued ones, just like we're supposed to use our NRIC for everything. This uniquely identifies each user to phisers, scammers and other identity thieves. Now there will be a better way of causing a denial of service or to steal your identity. Also, you can be black marked way easier. Got something bad to say about any service in this country? Sure, log in to the forum or website using your unique email address to voice your "concerns" and you'll be black marked and not receive anymore service. You want to whistle blow? Sign in using your email address. You get the point.

What are the secuirty concerns when pushing the government mail to your mobile or to another email box? Will you get sued under the official secrets act? Will putting all your CPF, tax and e-citizen information on your mobile be a huge breech of security? Bear in mind that all enterprise PDA and blackberries have PIN lock and remote wipe functions to protect the company. The government, in all reasonableness should not.

I have a habit of constantly changing my mobile number. It drives everyone I know up the wall, but it keeps telemarketers confused. When I bought a property, I did not use any of my numbers or addresses, however, all the property agents seem to be able to find my details and contact number. They have been calling up my parents' home ever since. Imagine what would happen when you have a fixed email address that you were forced to use. All the spams and scams will be delivered to your email box. There is no way of running. At least now, I have 3 personal emails, 1 dedicated to spam. All the property agents and magic stone salesmen will know that you can't "not" check your email. You're tied to a tree where everyone can shoot you. You can't run.

Over the years, we've seen how hotmail, facebook, twitter, myspace etc have been hacked. Those are personal accounts, i assume very few government related information is stored in those accounts. Now imagine that the government issued email was hacked. Everything, CPF, NS information, tax and property information, all laid bare for the world to see. From history, you can be sure the government will never admit its their mistake nor will they even bother helping you recover your account. All they will do is to "reset" your password. And if you are familiar with the efficiency of our civil servants, you'll understand when I tell you good luck with that.

I'm using gmail, yahoo and hotmail as my personal email. I have 2 office emails (I can't imagine why I need 2), 1 email from my university which I am no longer using. Amongst these emails, I use another email provider to forward mail from one mailbox to another. I also have my NS mail box and an e-citizen account. I've got so many passwords to memorize, sometimes I take 2-3 tries to enter the correct one. I don't really want to pay for yet another email. I'd be paying to give myself more headache.

Plus, after so many years of trying out so many email providers, I've used online and offline spam filters. As part of my course, I've studied all kinds of fancy spam protections, from baysien, heuristic, bahaviourial and signature based, decision trees, gaussian, natural language analysis, I've come to realise that spam protection is still very rudimentary. Only Google's Gmail has a viable spam filter, no one else seem to be able to keep spam out. Rest assured the government will not provide state of the art spam protection. As with everything else, they will tell you to stop whining and get over the spam.

Whenever you receive forwarded emails that say you'll get free stuff for forwarding emails, or that someone needs a new kidney and they can get it by simply forwarding the email, your well meaning friend has just exposed you to spammers, hackers and identity thieves. You can thank them although they won't recognise you while your electronic identity is erased, "Enemy of the State" style.

All in all, its a bad idea, together will everything else the damn scholars think up.

Its just after the hacker competition. Although I didn't win, I did learn a lot. Both soft and hard skills.

First thing is, I learnt to be a human firewall. I spent 2 days as a defender, literally staring at 3 screens to cancel connections to my 3 Windows boxes. For some reason, my open source firewall didn't seem to stop anyone, I had to recourse to being the firewall.

I also learnt a lot about cisco systems, although I'm still far from being to handle any of their devices.

One thing I want to learn more of is using linux boxes. I guess I have to start learning more about linux if I am to be a serious IT professional. I mean, I've used linux on and off over the years. I use it for pen tests and forensics, but I've never needed to install it and use it daily. Perhaps its time to try.

I've also learnt that perhaps getting help from FTs is a bad idea. They have no motivation, no sense of urgency and are unable to think out of the box.

I can't have team members coming 1-2 hours late and stubbornly refuse to think out of the box.

I've never really been a great fan of "unboxing videos" that gadget enthusiasts love so much. That is because most high tech gadgets cannot be appreciated the first few minutes out of the box. You could do that with a table or a handbag, but trying to validate the entire existence of a gadget based on first impressions is like trying to tell if a book is good during the "unwrapping video". Sure there are anecdotal evidence, but you can get that without unboxing or unwrapping anything.

Nevertheless, its been one week since I've gotten my HTC Desire. I must say, I'm getting to love how all the apps integrate nicely together. It gives a nice seamless experience without making you feel like you're opening and closing aps all the time. e.g. I have friendstream on my HTC Sense. Touching on a post will take me to HTC Peep. Touching a link will transition (nice slide to the right) to the built in browser. Pressing back will tak you back to HTC Peep. It feels like its one happy family of aps.

There is no button to close aps, a heresy to a WinMo user. I've spent some time reading, and apparently to some geeks, Android manages programs very well and has no need for third party task managers. I've also noticed that Android doesn't take nicely to task managers. I'm on to my second task manager and HTC Sense still seems to show hatred towards the task manager. Another peculiar habit is that upon reboot, all the programs are open and running in the background.

Talking about rebooting, coming from a Windows background, I've been "trained" to reboot frequently. My laptops, mobiles, etc. Everything has to be rebooted due to memory leaks and to clear dead processes and all my caches. Linux on the other hand is sufficiently lightweight to not warrant a reboot for a long time. I've reduced the frequency of rebooting my mobile to twice a week from the daily reboots of my WinMo.

I've started to push my office email to my mobile. This really reduces the time of response to emails for me. Of course I'm not chained to my work.

Android, being a Google OS, is very well integrated with Google services, except tasks. I'm flummoxed to see that the geeks at Google didn't think highly enough about the tasks function to want to sync with their clouds, considering there is a google task feature in gmail. Luckily, a nice developer stepped in and gave us gtask. This allows users to sync their tasks with google's underutilized task. However, its functions are so basic that its almost not worth using.

I currently use Astrid to do remember the milk (RTM) style and getting things done (GTD) style tasks. This task manager integrates nicely with Locale, an award winning software that can trigger actions based on your location. Its interesting to set actions that you can set. For example, I set my ringer volume to half when I enter the office during office hours. When I'm sleeping, I lower the volume as well. However I also set VIPs on my list to always bypass those rules and their calls always ring at full volume.

All those apps add functionality to the mobile making a smartphone much "smarter". And that's where the Android market comes in. I can see the appeal of the Apple store at iFanboys have been raving about. However, with everything in life, things which are truly good have to be seeked out. I still go online to search for nice apps for my Android.

I'm still looking for more aps to make my smartphone smarter. And I'm still learning more about the Android OS. Its a journey of discovery, and its going to be an exciting journey.

I've just bought a new phone at the IT fair. Not that my old phone is... old. Its still pretty much cutting edge. But I was tempted by HTC's latest Android "super phone", or so they called it.

Its quite a jump for me, moving from a Windows phone to an Android one. Having used it for less than a week, I realised that I've been "trained" by Microsoft to use their mobiles like a computer. As a user, I expect all the same things that I see on my laptop on my mobile too. Things like a taskbar and a close button (the infamous "x" at the top right hand corner).

The Android interface, skinned by HTC with their wildly popular "Sense UI" gives the Android a very modern mobile phone interface. There is no closing of programs, no management of tasks. All these are done for you in the background by the OS. To escape from an app, there are these nifty hardware buttons "home" and "back" which were standard on older Nokias and Sony Ericsson mobiles since a generation ago.

The entire way I use my mobile has to be changed moving to Android. Firstly, Windows phone have a notification queue. That means that programs can be closed and not running, but are still able to wake the OS and sound whatever alarms or alerts required, all without adding to the load of the memory as it does not spawn a new process. The Android requires the offending program to be running in the background to do the same thing, adding to the load of the OS. However, it bears noting that Android, running on the Linux kernel, takes way less resources than Windows in any of its in incarnations. Hence the extra load can't be felt by the user. As for whether it affects battery life, I'll need more time (not playing) with the phone.

One thing that really drew me to Windows mobile was its ability to help me do pentesting. I would search the net looking for the right tools to use. Android has combined all its offerings into a market place. I'm still searching and finding out which app can turn my mobile into a ninja assassin.

The irony of my new phone is not so much the phone itself but rather the circumstances after I got it. I remember last year, I carried 2 mobiles, the Samsung Omnia and the Samsung Omnia 2 to a client's place because I was in the midst of transitioning to my new phone. This year, I went to the same client's place carrying 2 phones, the Samsung Omnia 2 and the HTC Desire. Deja vu.

So far the journey with this new companion is proving to be an exciting one, filled with new paradigm and new concepts. Maybe sometime down the road, I'll start writing apps for the phone. Let's see where this takes me.

Been so swamped with work lately, hence the lack of updates. Audits, pentests forensics and competitions all seem to come at the same time.

Anyway, been reading up about increasing speed of browsers, so that you can passively increase your browsing speed.

As usual, internet explorer is screwed, so don't bother trying to tweak that. I've tried tweaking firefox (I use for pentesting) and Opera (speediest browser ever) and the improvements, while small, are quite satisfying.

The concepts works by not only increasing the cache to store your pages and reuse the downloaded data (so you don't redownload the same things over and over again), but also to increase the number of requests to the server, so that you can concurrently download more objects from the same server, potentially utilising more bandwidth.

Off to destroy my mobile with the latest hacks. twiddles.

An interesting article by Sunny Chow taken without permission from http://www.temasekreview.com/2010/05/20/8-reasons-why-singaporeans-should-just-leave-singapore/

1 ) Land prices are ever rising. With a 4 room HDB flat at $400,000 now, interest rates and a 20-30 years loan, there is probably nothing left in the CPF come retirement. What kind of price will your children pay for their HDBs 30 years down the road? If you stay in landed properties, you will be sure you can afford a few big bungalows overseas with swimming pools.

2 ) CPF retirement is set to rise from age 62 as the years go by. The board will not be able to support a mass withdrawal of monies from citizens and hence schemes like CPF Life have come up. Come 2013, unless one meets the minimum sum, he would have to wait till retirement age before the monery trickles to him in the hundreds monthly.

3 ) This place will hit a population of 6.5 million population soon. With thousands of PMETs unemployed, jobs are still going to so called “global talents”, what’s next? Even fresh grads out of the local universities have to compete with their foreign peers who have their tuition fees sponsored; while they have to slog for years before they repay their tuition loans.

4 ) The land is too small for weekend recreation. Those who have stayed in other countries will tell you that their weekends are trips to the mountains, fishing lakes, historical places, scenic train rides etc. Here in Singapore, we have the neighbourhood malls to jalan jalan.

5 ) The education system is too stressful and breeds the kiasu / kiasee mentality. Just take a look at the teacher’s workload. If these educators are so stressed up, what more down the line to the students?

Performance bonuses are paid to teachers if their students do well, what kind of stress do these teachers (especially from the top schools) put on the children? And as if school isn’t enough, they still have to go for tuition after school to ensure they score the As.

6 ) As long as the government does not change, so will our economic strategy. Attracting foreign MNCs to set up shop, no doubt will provide jobs but we are forever a hunting ground for cheap (albeit skilled) labour. And with the influx of foreigners, the lower and middle income class can expect their salaries to stagnate (with relativity to inflation) for a long time. The environment is such that it is pro MNCs. One good example is the GST: it was raised primarily because the corporate tax was reduced in order to continue making Singapore a competitive place for businesses. The era where passing of skills to locals is now bygone. It’s long overdue that an entrepreneurial culture has not been set in place. Children only study and aspire to be ministers, doctors or lawyers.

7 ) A fresh poly grad can earn up to $1500 a month on average 10 years ago, today it is still the same. A fresh university grad can command on average about $2500 a month 10 years ago, today it is about $3000; not much of a change considering that HDB prices have gone up 3 folds.

8 ) A car here easily costs 2 or 3 times those in other countries. While you slog it off and be a slave to your car for the next few years servicing the installments, in other countries it can be paid up in the blink of an eye.

Taken without permission from http://starblog.stomp.com.sg/post.php?blogid=1603

Read more on this topic from http://www.singapore-window.org/sw05/050213st.htm and http://starblog.stomp.com.sg/post.php?blogid=1598

By Dawn Yang.

Dawn Yang - This is something that stumped me.
Which is highly unfortunate, being a local lass myself.

I don't think I'm being too far-fetched here, check out some of the scathing comments when I asked my friends on Facebook (last names protected for their safety!)

The thing is, I have traveled and lived around the world before, meeting women and making female friends of all different nationalities and backgrounds.

So what I'm going to say now is pretty much a reiteration of what my friends above have pointed out.

From experience and observation, the truth is most Singaporean ladies in general, in comparison to many of our foreign counterparts, are not that beautiful nor as stylish (same goes for the men, haha!). If men wanted to be surrounded by gorgeous Asian girls, they'd be better off in Taiwan, Korea, China or Japan. Singaporean women have a tendency to be b****y and gossipy, competitive, not as sweet or sincerely nice; they aren't very interesting or fun (the exceptions being my close girlfriends - I'm discerning and I've been blessed!) Plenty are demanding when to comes to potential suitors, their checklist could be as long as toilet roll. One girl I know has even proclaimed that guys should ALWAYS pay no matter what. I asked "shouldn't platonic male friends be an exception at least?" and she gave a resounding NO.

If I were a man I might be booking the next flight out of Singapore too.

And it's not even like they are that competent in taking on the role of a wonderful housekeeper who can whip up a 5-course romantic candle lit meal and waits to give the man a massage when he comes home. Most have had maids/mothers cleaning up after them their whole lives.

But of course, I have to give credit where credit is due.

Singaporean women do have some things going for them:

They are highly-educated

Thank you MOE. Your stringent and pressure-cooker education system has helped ensure that our percentage of the bimbotic population is likely much lower than the worldwide average.

They are self-reliant

There is something very sexy about an independent woman who can hold her own and do her own thing.

Also, earning their own income means that they are more likely to love a man for who he is, and not his money.

Nonetheless, that is by no means a guarantee (even independent women are often materialistic I've found), but at least there is more of genuine attraction shared; after all how much true love can there be with a bride half your age you know nothing about picked out from a mail order catalogue?

They are well-balanced

Singaporean women have both Eastern and Western sensibilities. They are modern and forward in their thinking, but at the same time retain their cultural traditions and roots. It's a nice "best of both worlds".

They are slim and have good aging genes

So Singaporean women may not be the most beautiful or attractive, but hey, at least the majority are slender-figured, and look young, even into their 40s!

Anything else to add to the list?

To reiterate though, desirability has a connotation of a deep passionate attraction and fervent lusting after.

As they say, you can love someone but not be IN LOVE - in other words there is love but no real desire.

Can men DESIRE Singaporean women based on our traits of intelligence, independence, and interesting idiosyncrasies?

Guys out there, you tell me!

Taken without permission from http://starblog.stomp.com.sg/post.php?blogid=1598 because it reflects exactly my experience from dating Singaporean women.

Seah Chiang Nee put it too politely in his column "Singaporean girls, a challenge to love (http://www.singapore-window.org/sw05/050213st.htm where I copied without permission from http://tanhonam.livejournal.com/54004.html)

In fact Ju Len is very polite in catigorizing Singaporean women with B cups. An old joke I remember was that local girls are very competitive, everything also they want to get A. Tests, exams... even cup size also, all A.

And now to the column proper.

Written by Ju Len.

Ju-Len - SURELY THIS WEEK'S topic is a joke? Of all the women I've dated, around half in number have been local and the other half from the four corners of the Earth, so I think I've given Singaporean women enough of a chance to decide for myself that they are the least desirable members of the world's better half.
I don't know where to begin.

Never have I met women as calculating and grubby. It's probably a universal attribute of our species that men will always be judged by the cars they drive, but not only is that the case here, local men can also expect to be sized up by what condo stickers they have on the windscreen.

To all the foreign women I've been with, the material things have been immaterial.

Never have I met women as bland and uninteresting as the Singaporean specimen.

Foreign women are interested in culture, history, literature, films (as opposed to movies) and above all, world affairs.

A local woman's idea of geography and current affairs is knowing where all the latest malls are on Orchard Road.

Foreign women collect art and books.

Local women collect shoes.

Foreign women have exotic accents.

Local women sound like Bolo Santosi:

Sorry for subjecting you to that. I hope you haven't put a screwdriver through your eardrums.

Actually, it's probably unfair to compare the typical local woman to Bolo Santosi.

To my ears, the Singaporean woman sounds much more like a donkey. I can just imagine their response to that now: "He haww, always like that one! He haw, always say us one!"

Even if they absolutely have to bray like that, I would at least like my women to look like women.

Changi is not the only airport to take note of in Singapore, if you catch my meaning.

Unsure of whether I was simply imagining the flatness of the local landscape, I asked my (foreign) girlfriend if she knew whether the average cup size here was a "B" or a "C".

"If you have to ask," came the very witty reply, "it's B..."

Anyway I was curious about the numbers, so I idly googled "flatchested Singaporean" and got about 292,000 results.

I googled "busty Singaporean" and my search came back with a mere 41,400 results.

Even the Internet thinks that too many Singaporean women can't be seen sideways.

In fact, I did the whole Google wars thing with a number of terms. Here's a few interesting results:

SEARCH TERM
RESULTS

bossy Singaporean women
491,000

demure Singaporean women 260,000

loud Singaporean women 155,000
ladylike Singaporean women 92,300

materialistic Singaporean women
587,000

down to Earth Singaporean women
295,000

Need I say more?
I guess what I feel about local women can be exemplified by what a former Starblogger once said to me.

She informed me that she didn't feel the need to learn how to drive a car because she didn't have a car yet, and needed one to have an incentive to learn.

That neatly sums up the unfortunate mindest of the local lass here.

The local girl has a sense of entitlement - buy me a car first, even if I can't drive it yet.

The local girl doesn't believe in learning for its own sake - why have a licence if you haven't got a car?

The local girl wants her reward before having to even apply herself.

I'm not sure who presumed to suggest that Singaporean women were desirable, but based on what I've written above they can at least be described as princesses.

That might be considered desirable in your book, but marrying one would make me feel more like a fool than a prince...

Facebook has been on the receiving end of a lot of privacy complaints. Some reasonable (e.g. making public everyone's photos and posts) and some ludicrous (e.g. being asked to block employers from searching for employees' accounts). All in all, I applaud their efforts at making improvements to privacy in facebook.

By now, the new security and privacy features are old news. Everyone not living under a rock have heard of it and probably tried it. The privacy settings are highly customisable, probably to cater to a wider group of people having different kind of concerns. And of course, to compensate for misuse by users with a rudimentary understanding of privacy, like me.

However, I find myself tweaking and tightening the privacy constantly. I can customise may aspects of my account and for differing layers of acquaintances, exactly how I have set my instant messenging and email lists.

At the tightest and most restricted, acquaintances whom I hardly know and people who think that they are Jesus (judging me) are placed here. Chances are, I don't want to see what they are updating, and in return, I try not to burden them with the details of my life, least they make it their life mission to judge everything I do (he took photo of 1 beer, I bet he is a drunk), everywhere I go (I bet he goes to the east to find whores) and everyone I meet (why can't he hang out with rich and famous people like ME).

At the next most restricted group, business acquaintances and associates. They do not need to know where I go at night or what I think of a certain movie. Only occasionally do I reveal posts that include this group (e.g. greetings, well wishes).

And different groups for different friends. This allows me to focus my posts to cater to different interests and different level of tolerances.

I do hope more social networking sites improve their privacy and hopefully, facebook privacy may add more controls for users to toggle.

Hi,

After battling a round of the flu while still obliged to to go for my certification course, I'm back!

Anyway, I had a good chance to play around with Starhub's TV on Mobile.

The wife tried to watch her favourite Entertainment News, but for some reason, that channel doesn't load. Until now, I'm still trying to find out what is wrong with that channel. My favourite History Channel works fine though.

Also, being the forgetful person that I am, the reminders for upcoming shows is great! The Starhub TV app will actually set a reminder (which is backed up to my Google calendar) for an upcoming show such as Battles BC or Battle Plan and give me a 15 minutes reminder before the show. Good stuff.

Watching it in the train is a hit or miss. I managed to watch NatGeo Adventures from Dhouby Ghaut to Serangoon without any quality degradation. However, the moment I stepped out of the station, the channel started its dreadful "buffering". I also got cut off at City Hall and Kallang. Looks like Starhub has some coverage issues to settle.

The video quality is not the best, no HD or 3D, but watchable. The audio is pretty good and clear. Depending on your coverage, you might experience some buffering or jumpy video, but other than that, you should be enjoying this!

Let me get back to my TV now ;)

I just got an email and guess what? I got a free trial to Starhub TV on Mobile thanks to the good people at RippleVox.

The mobile I'm using is a Samsung Omnia 2, Windows Mobile 6.1.

Originally, I used Opera browser to access Starhub's free tv. Unfortunately, some settings must have changed, for not long after, I was unable to enter that same page. I had to log in or something.

Thankfully, the nice people at SPB partnered with Starhub and came up with a great TV viewer for Starhub subscribers (SPB TV for Starhub). Its not the same as the vanilla SPB TV.

While Starhub provides great content, the TV client packages that content and brings tons of functionality to make accessing that content a great joy.

First off, there is that function that I've always wanted but never managed to get, picture in a picture view. Yes, for a TV addict like me, what's better than having TV access 24/7? Being able to watch 2 channels at once 24/7. So its History Channel on the "big" screen and Channel News Asia (with the pretty Korean news reader) on the small screen.

And ever since the nice people at Starhub added History Channel, I've been watching it none stop.

TV addict. Me.

But we digress.

Despite all the bad press about Starhub's poor reception, you can actually watch the shows in "high definition". I seriously doubt that its HD, but the quality is quite good with acceptable buffering.

Another feature I must have is the channel guide. You get to see what programs are on the channel before watching. So I check if Kim Possible is showing on Disney Channel (for the little boy in me) and if Battle Plan is showing on History Channel.


There is also a program reminder so that you don't miss your show but I haven't tried that... yet. So that should be the topic for the next blog post, unless I spend all my time watching TV...

I've been using Opera browser for quite a few years now. I've never really used Opera as a full fledged browser, only the Opera@USB version.

If you've never heard of it before, you wouldn't be alone. Opera browser drop from being the third most popular to... I don't know, the fifth most popular? And for good reason too. There are tons of things to hate about Opera, such as how Google Apps isn't fully compatible with Opera, and Opera isn't as extensible or as full featured as Firefox.

However, none of that is the main strength of Opera (even though the developers might beg to differ). The main strength of Opera is the blazing fast speed. No other browser comes close. Sure tech journalists would do their "hot" and "cold" tests on all the browsers, but I see the speed difference everyday.

When a friend sends me a link in MSN (the lousy official MSN client), I would left click on the link to launch it in IE 7. After IE has launched and passed its irritating "connecting" phase (seriously, what does it has to do to "connect"? No other browsers I have show the same, stupid connecting status) I would copy the link and press ALT+Tab and CTRL+ALT+V into Opera browser and watch Opera load the page while IE7 still has a blank white screen. And that's after a good 10 seconds head start for the "official" browser. WTF?

I tried installing Safari (I had to use it to test a web service) in my Windows box once. After installation, I tried to browse Safari to the Google search page. Pure and simple task. Nothing too complex. After about a minute or so of waiting, out of sheer reflex, I launched Opera and its 20 tabs of my previous browsing session, not only was I able to launch the Google search page (meh), I also managed to load up the 20+ tabs including RSS feeds before Safari even completed loading the one and only page. I guess Mac users, with their slower brains, require the extra time to process their thoughts, or the lack thereof, that's why "It just works".

And that's why I still use Opera as my main browser, both on my desktop and my mobile.

IE7 and Safari sux.

I've always been a sucker for applications and utilities. I download tons of programs to my computer and phone everyday just to try them out.

While most of the apps I use are utilities and automation, there are a great many apps that I use in "weird" scenarios. Its all a little off the beaten path, and totally antisocial. In this post, I will illustrate some of my most antisocial applications and how I use it in my daily life.

Scenario
There are those time when I'm on a bad date, in a boring and unimportant meeting, or simply walking along side unpleasant people. These are the times when I actually "will" my phone to ring.

App
Fake Call by Trinket Software. What the program does is to cause your phone to ring, either immediately, after a short delay, or scheduled at a certain time. Its good for pranks, showing friends that they are "accidentally" calling me, making them panic and grab their phones. It is also one of the best excuses to escape.

Solution
First, I would pretend to check my phone for SMS (the tedious menus on a WinMo phone makes that believable) and set my phone to ring. The application causes my phone to ring, complete with a contact from the phonebook, call timer and even a wav file to play in case someone is sitting too close for comfort. This is where I excuse myself and run off to talk, make worried sounding noises ("Really? Are you ok? Do you need me to come over now?") and off I go!

Scenario
I don't know about you guys, but I absolute abhor telemarketers, cold callers and hidden numbers. I've never been much of a people person, and as you can imagine, strangers and rejection are things that I was never able to handle satisfactorily. I absolutely hate not knowing who is calling, and now that we're on that topic, why do telemarketers (aka verbal spam) have to hide their identities? Do they feel that they are doing something wrong?

App
Mobicall and CallFireWall comes to play. I've used either one at different times and am currently using Mobicall now.

Solution
I have set the app to "pick up and drop" all unknown numbers. This way, I won't even see a missed call. Not to mention, cut short the swindling attempt by the caller. Of course many telemarketers and privacy intruding marketers do use an office line. That's when I blacklist the number for my "ignore" (aka ring until line is cut) filter. BTW, did I mention that I don't use voicemail?

Scenario
I might as well tell you the excuses. Its self explanatory:

"I know we planned to meet from last week, but today my friend asked me out to dinner and I just HAD to go"

"We were supposed to meet at 7pm, but I knocked off at 6pm so I went home to bathe first and now I don't feel like leaving the house"

"You reminded me yesterday and this morning, but I forgot about the meeting when leaving the ofice, so I went home/out/met another friend/stayed back in office"

"Even though we planned to meet today, how was I supposed to know if you didn't confirm with me just before meeting?"

App
CTScheduler from Connective Tools and Vasquez. CTScheduler schedules actions and utilities on the phone. Vasquez is a prank app. It allows you to spam SMS and calls over a period of time or up to a certain number of SMS or missed calls. Its all in good fun! Aren't you glad I don't have unlimited SMS?

Solution
I use CTScheduler to always send a sms reminder 5 days before a gathering, 1 day before a gathering, once at lunchtime of the gathering itself and once at knock off timing. Sure the excuses can still come in, but at least no one can blame me for not doing enough dammit!

Whenever I organise any gatherings, I'm always blamed if someone else is late. Its like my responsibility to ensure everyone's punctuality. Compound that with habitual latecomers who arrive 30 minutes late AT LEAST, and some can be as late as 4 hours, if they even bother to turn up at all. I even knew a guy who was perpetually 30 mins late, except for one time he was 5 mins early, didn't see anyone, so decided to go watch a movie while waiting. That meant that he was 2 hours late, but he kept insisting that he was 5 mins early. Another odd thing, when people are late, they almost never answer their phones.

Vasquez automates the calling for me. The victim can no longer use excuses like "I didn't hear my phone", "you only called once", "I'm too busy to notice that some of the missed calls are from you" and of course the latest I got in Jan 2010, "I'm too tired to pick up the phone even though I'm holding it in my hands".

Such excuses are moot with 200 missed calls spanning over a period of 30 minutes. You didn't notice my number in your missed calls list? Really? Its ok, next time I'll do 999 missed calls. All for your convenience!

That's all for now. Do stay tuned for more pranks and practical jokes for real life scenarios using my phone!

Taken without permission from http://www.techatplay.com/?p=482

Written by Paul Mah.

BlackBerry

By using an Network Operating Center (NOC), the BlackBerry method represents the most battery and data efficient method for push email. In a lay person’s term, the email is forwarded to your BlackBerry by the RIM-operated NOC only when there is email. And even then, only the first chunk of email is sent. In the absence of email, nothing at all happens, and your BlackBerry behaves much like a normal mobile phone.

As you can imagine, unless you receive a hundred emails an hour, enabling push email on the BlackBerry does not normally result in any noticeable reduction in battery life.

RIM is able to do that because of your BlackBerry registers itself with your Telco, which forwards the information on to the RIM NOC. The result is that the NOC now knows exactly where to forward your emails to. This is also the reason why a normal data plan is not adequate to give you BlackBerry email services.

Windows Moble

On the other hand, the push email employed by Windows Mobile uses the HTTP protocol, which is a clever piece of engineering to do away with an NOC, actually.

Imagine typing an URL into your Web browser and then hitting “Enter”. Instead of a response coming in right away, imagine your Smartphone doing that and then waiting instead for up to 8 minutes (default). If nothing happens, the Smartphone does it again just to make sure that the connection is still up.

If there is an email though, your Windows Mobile Smartphone will get a response. At this point, your WM Smartphone will perform an over-the-air activesync to retrieve it. Since your WM Smartphone talks directly to your server, no NOC is necessary, nor any involvement on the Telco level beyond the availability of a normal data connection.

Battery life is shortened however, due to the constant need to connect to the server even if there is no email.