I’m starting to think that our selection of computer goods in Malaysia is severely restricted to the gaming variety. I had the chance to visit Digital Mall, PJ last weekend and spent a while perusing the 4 storeys of shops selling mainly gadgets, phones and computer products. Unfortunately, I failed to find any place that sold anything suitable for my HTPC.
You can see that the local computer retail industry seems to be driven by games. You can see the retail stores pushing high end processors, motherboards and graphics cards. Supposedly, these are needed by the gamers to experience the best and greatest in state-of-the-art games. Unfortunately, gamers are a dumb bunch and end up shelling out a fortune to build a gaming rig that doesn’t perform as well for games as they thought it would have.
Unfortunately for my purposes, I’m going after low power, low profile and low cost systems for my HTPC rig. Seems that my tastes run counter to the main stream. So, trying to get stuff off-the-shelf is not as easy as I had hoped. I was planning to just pick up a suitable e-machines computer or similar for my HTPC rig. Unfortunately, there were none to be found in the whole building. There was only one e-machine model being sold in one-store but it was not suitable for my rig.
Seems that I might actually have to travel down to Low-Yat to have a look, this weekend. I hate having to go down there. Parking is a pain and the crowd is just crazy. Maybe I should take an LRT down instead. I’ve got a new book to read with me and this might be a good time to start. I really need to get my HTPC rig built. Otherwise, my new HDTV is being wasted.
My requirements are really simple – a quiet system that is capable of full-HD output and 5.1 sound. If I had to assemble one myself, at least give me the option of buying the component parts. Otherwise, I would be willing to pay for a ready-made machine at the right price.
As I mentioned earlier, I have been keeping tabs on the fuel consumption of my not so new car and I am happy to announce that there are some preliminary results. The chart on the right shows the average fuel consumption of my car under different conditions (the higher the bar, the better). Basically, the figure is about 10-ish km/L for normal city driving and about 14-ish km/L for long distance travel.
Although the fuel consumption figures are nothing to shout about, it is good enough for me. The figure only becomes quite bad in a traffic jam (the first bar). However, since I rarely go into the city anyway, this is quite unlikely to happen. So, normal driving would be about 10km/L. Please remember that these are empirical results of my personal driving style. So, your mileage may vary tremendously.
Overall, I am quite happy with things.
My measurement methodology is simple. Each time I pumped petrol, I filled up my tank. So, I can easily find out how much fuel has been used by converting the amount I paid for the fuel with the fuel price. Then, I note down the odometer readings and use that to calculate the km/L values. I tried to isolate the type of usage by filling up my tank before I go on long distance travels and immediately after I return.
There is good reason that my blog has been silent for a week. My whole family decided to go to northern Thailand for our holiday this year. So, we all packed up for a 7D6N holiday in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, which was filled with a lot of interesting activities. I will be writing more about the things that I did over the course of the week, after I upload some of the photographs. However, I will just put down some overall thoughts for now.
My family has only traveled to parts of southern Thailand in the past and this is our first trip north. Although we have never ever been to Bangkok before, I do think that Chiang Mai is quite a beautiful city. We had an excellent tour guide who also doubled as a baby-sitter for my niece and nephews. He told us many stories about local things including local politics. He also brought us to a lot of local places, instead of just the touristy places. So, it was quite an interesting experience.
I thoroughly enjoyed my trip there although it was really tiring and I also fell ill on the very last day. There are may things that I will take away from this trip, including several tailored suits, tailored silk shirts and other souvenirs that I bought from there. It seems like a great place to go shopping for clothes every few years as the prices are really good while the workmanship quality is quite impeccable.
One big lesson that I learned from this trip (and from my other trips around South East Asia) is that we have been exceedingly lucky. The main reason why Malaysia and Singapore has managed to emerge as leading nations in this region is not due to any magic sauce or economic miracle of our doing – it is simply because our neighbours have been far to busy shooting themselves in the foot for them to exact any sort of significant progress. In the case of Thailand, they have been rewriting their own constitution so many times that even the constitutional lawyers have trouble keeping up.
So, the only countries that I have yet to step foot into in SEA are Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar. I plan to fix that soon. I would certainly like to visit Angkor Wat some time soon and get some good photographs there. I fancy that Vietnam would be another interesting place to visit, particularly the north. As for Myanmar, I’ll just wait till the Junta sorts itself out before dropping by for a holiday.
Anyway, I’ll need to go sort through the hundreds of photographs that I took and upload the more interesting ones. Stay tuned for a more detailed account of my experiences there.
I spent last weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland. For some reason, it reminds me a lot of Ipoh. Both cities are surrounded by hills, are about the same size, and the way that the main city centre is laid out between two parallel straight roads, just seems so quaint. The main difference, is obviously the overbearing presence of the castle.
I took a noon flight on Saturday. Ray picked me up at the airport and acted as my chauffeur and tour guide for much of the weekend. He took me on one of his standard whirlwind tours on the first day. Mainly, we visited the castle complex, which was interesting. Then, we went to an OZ pub where I had some roo meat. I actually think that it tastes quite good. It’s a little tougher than chicken and much juicier than beef.
However, by the end of the day, I was knackered. So, I went back to my hostel to sleep. I checked into a mixed dorm and got put into a room with four other girls. After getting a shower, I quickly fell asleep but was disturbed many times by people chatting. Two girls in my room came back late and kept whispering away for an awful long time. But there were noisier kids in other rooms. At one point, somebody lost their cool and shouted at the people making the noise, and it worked.
The next day, was my own free day as Ray had to go help prepare and set up things for a wedding. And seeing that the weather forecast said rain, I decided to go visit some museums. The National Museum is really quite good. It provided the history of Scotland, from the time they were a bunch of mixed tribes all over, came together as Scots and got unified with England. Now, I can understand why there is so much talk of devolution. The Scots were never conquered and so, still retain all their pride as an independent nation.
Then, I met up with Ray and some of his friends from church. After dinner, we went off Musselburgh, which is outside Edinburgh, for some really good ice cream. The name of the place is S. Luca and it has been selling fresh ice cream for more than a century. There was a long queue outside when we arrived but service was quick. Then, we went to various beaches at Portobello till it was quite late.
After sending his friends back, we went off for some fish and chips where Ray introduced me to the Edinburgh sauce, which had an interesting taste. We then had some drinks at the pub and chatted for a bit about the frustrations of writing up a thesis. As we had a wedding to attend the next day, I went back to my room, and slept. It was a quiet night and I slept nicely till morning.
I’ll talk about the wedding in another entry, after I have post-processed the photographs. I got some really good ones and I might make a photo book out of it, for the bride. Post processing may take a while though, as I have to work on my thesis. And post-processing wedding photos can be quite a chore, as I need to make the photos exude love and happiness. Hopefully, it’ll be easy in this case.
If you look at the small gallery of photos I have on Edinburgh, you will see three that look a bit odd. These are more experiments with HDR photography. I really need to figure out a way to get rid of the noise in the sky. I particularly like the one of St Mary’s Cathedral and the Castle.
In light of recent developments in Malaysia, with the computers of certain prominent anti-establishment bloggers, consistently being confiscated for dubious investigative purposes, I thought that it might be a suitable time to write a little about information security. The whole idea behind information security isn’t to foil justice, but to make sure that the rights of people are not infringed.
With harddisk sizes going into the Terabyte range, there are lots of things stored on a person’s personal computer, including personal information that nobody has any right to access. Sometimes, these confiscated computers are subject to random checks in the hope of finding something, anything, that can be used to entrap the owner. So, let’s start with the basics.
Email Security
Although the technology has been around for more than a decade, I’m surprised that most people do not know about it, much less use it. Email, is transmitted in the clear. So, anything that is said through an email, can be easily intercepted and read by others. The only way to protect the content of email messages is through the use of public key (PKI) cryptography.
The most commonly used software is PGP or if you want an open source version, GNUPG (GPG). Both these software integrate fairly well with all popular email programmes, whether it be Outlook, Thunderbird or Kmail. So, you wouldn’t even need to know any voodoo to get it to work. If you use a webmail programme, these tools also provide a regular text based mode, which can encrypt/decrypt plain text documents, which you can then cut-and-paste into the webmail client.
This software allows you to encrypt every email that you write, so that the only person who can read it is your intended receipient. So, I would urge everyone to install and learn how to use these tools. These tools should be used for all business communications as well, if you don’t want your competition eavesdropping on your sensitive communiques.
How PKI works is by exchanging public keys. A public key is a very large number that is represented in text, as shown below. When you send me an email message, your private key and my public key is used to generate a secret key that is used to encrypt the message. When I receive it, I will be able to decode the email using my private key and your public key. So, at no time would either of us need to expose our private keys. All these things happen mathemagically.
Any eavesdropper would only end up reading a bunch of random letters and numbers (much like the ones above). As an additional step of protection, do not store your emails locally in an unencrypted form. Leave them encrypted and have your email programme decrypt them each time you wish to read them. All these steps add an additional layer of protection.
There are no known exploits that can easily defeat this scheme, at least not until computers can factorise extremely large numbers quickly enough, at which point, you just double the size of the encryption key and continue using it. The easiest way to steal a PKI protected email is to just haul you to court and force you to divulge it’s contents.
Harddisk Security
It’s no use just protecting our communications channel if we do not protect our data storage as well. So, all harddisks, whether internal or external, should be encrypted. Truecrypt is a tool that runs on all platforms, which allows on-the-fly-encryption (OTFE). OTFE essentially intercepts all access to the harddisk and encrypts anything being saved and decrypts anything being read, transparently.
So, if you ever lose your laptop due to carelessness, theft or legal confiscation, at the very least, your data is safely tucked away. Anyone who tries to access your data without the correct keys, will only end up reading a bunch of random gibberish again. So, all your private communications, photos and videos, will be protected under heavy lock and key.
However, there is one caveat to using OTFE encryption, which only applies if you’re traveling to the US. The government is legally allowed to make copies of your harddisk data at the border. If your computer is encrypted, they are also empowered to deny you entry or to confiscate your computer. So, it may not be a good idea to travel with encrypted data through US customs.
There is one currently known exploit, to defeat this system, but it involves a lot of preplanning. The attacker would need to physically compromise your computer within minutes of it being shutdown, and preserve the memory contents by freezing your memory module, as illustrated through the following video. The solution to this problem is to not leave your computer running, unattended. Given enough off-time, the following attack would not be plausible.
There is good reason that my blog has been silent for a week. My whole family decided to go to northern Thailand for our holiday this year. So, we all packed up for a 7D6N holiday in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, which was filled with a lot of interesting activities. I will be writing more about the things that I did over the course of the week, after I upload some of the photographs. However, I will just put down some overall thoughts for now.