All cleared!

For the last few days, it has been clear weather, the sun is out, the haze is gone, hopefully, it stays this way.

I learned a lesson from this hazy weather; never to trust the weather men (or women), they are never near accurate in weather forecast. Earlier on, they said it the PSI will not go beyond 100, but on the next day, it was over that. Few days back, they said the haze condition would last till mid of next month, well, it's clear now. What's next? Don't know. I think the most accurate weather forecast is to look at the sky just before stepping out of any shelter.

Recent hot topic, read it, should be pretty interesting: http://www.womendiary.net/2006/10/22/wee-shu-min-the-slammed-rjc-girl/

Survivor Cooks Island

While people here are still arguing the new Survivor season is appropriate to be on TV, our only local TV station has already decided to go ahead and air it. In US, there are people not wanting stations to show it on TV.

Quote from one reader (country and people references have been removed, XXX):

"In a multiracial city that owes its peace and prosperity to good relations among the various races, XXX cannot allow the mass media to condone divisions along ethnic lines in the name of entertainment.

Airing the show is a blatant disregard of social sensitivities post-9/11, and it undermines the government's efforts at bringing XXX closer as one people.

If XXX walk away with the idea that it is all right to assess one's physical and mental abilities on the basis of their race, that it is all right for one race to feel superior to another because it wins in the challenges, that members of one race feel like they are losers because of the colour of their skin, then we have indeed not matured as a people and not learnt the painful lessons of the past."

Lesson no. 1

Attended the first lesson of the hacking course yesterday's evening, the teaching was totally different from the 1st introduction lesson previously, where the class was slow moving. It looked like the instructor has finally started his engine and engaged high gears in his teaching.

Two modules were taught, the basics, theories and also introducing the methods and tools that can be obtained in the Internet to gather information. It about Footprinting, meaning to map out the security profile of a organisation. The information gathering activity can be divided into seven phases: Gather inital information, locate network range, ascertain active machine, discover open ports/access points, detect operating systems, uncover services on ports and map the network.

We were told websites such as www.allwhois.com can be used to retrieve domain information and IP addresses. There are also website like www.archive.org, which we can access to checked archived or past webpages of any websites!

The course is getting more exciting now, lesson no. 2 tomorrow...

Rainy...rainy...

It finally rained, after weeks of no sun weather. Not sure, though, whether the rain did fully clear away the haze, the PSI had been around 100, which was still in the unhealthy zone. From a distance away, the sky still looks either qiote misty or hazy, can't really tell the difference, maybe have to wait till the rain stops. However, the rain did bring in some coolness and wetness as well, so it's good that it rained.

I just came from buying a food item, it's a pack of ready to cook Indian pancake, Roti Prata. My mum is also making curry for lunch today, so, we are going to have rice, Roti Prata and curry. It's pretty easy to cook the Roti Prata, just put some oil in the wok or fry pan, then put the Prata in, flip it so that both sides are evenly cooked then you can serve it. Yummy, I'm going for lunch now....

What's for tomorrow?

Tomorrow, two of our database guys will be going to office to perform the database upgrade for one of our servers.

They should not need the system guys to be around, but we will be on standby just in case. This is always the case, like last week, if I had not gone to office to look at the OS upgrade, some of the problems may not have been resolved, and probably won't be able to complete the upgrade in time. But, it's good to be ready and remain contactable, in case, they need help.

Prep for exam

I finally completed studying all chapters in the system security certification book today, will be going through the reviews and questions in next two weeks. Hopefully, at the end of the second week, I will be able to take the exam.

This exam is not an easy one, not all the topics are clearly easy to understand, so have to work hard and earn it. I got to pay for the exams first, and hopefully, my company will reimburse me later, they better do that.

So, how is the weather today? It's good, I went for my weekend jog in the afternoon, the sky is also clearer from haze. Hopefully, it remains this way.

Meet with customer

I said before, I don't like meetings, especially with customers. Basically, in the meetings, they will try all sort of ways to thrash you up. Most of the time it has to be with payments, they just like to delay.

We met up with our customer, a monthly meeting yesterday. Again, it all about money, most of the items have been discussing in circles for many months, never close. One of the payment items that was discussed, in the previous meeting, they told us to buy the equipment and set it up first, but, in this meeting, they just refused to pay, saying we should be the one paying. In the end, we had to take this item separately off the meeting.

The meeting took more than 2hrs, way past our working hours, and it was a Friday.

Also in this meeting, I found that I should brush up on my communication and presentation skills.

More more sweet words...

This one...

"If I could rewrite the alphabet, I would put U and I together."

This too...

"I looked up beautiful in the thesaurus today and your name was included."

So, now, after what were said, are you interested in me? Would you like to join me for romantic candle-lit dinner tonight?

Hacking lesson

I finally attending the first lesson of the hacking course, ya, computer hacking, that is. I made an effort to reach the school just in time for the lesson to start.

The instructor is very experience in security, network and systems. He claimed that his company manages systems and desktop world wide, and he also have experience in implementing security firewalls, etc..

I guessed maybe he was in a holiday mood because come this Saturday is a festive holiday for him. He was also not so eager to start the class, taking his time to try to download the instructor's slides, but was unsuccessful due to the slowness of the network.

The lesson ended without really going through the modules, and he said we will get another make up lesson.

Some more cool words..

Here are some more, in case, you haven't had enough.

"Can I borrow your hand phone? I need to tell my mom I've just fallen in love."

More?

"Can I have a picture of you so I can show Santa what I want for Christmas?"

And more?

"Do you believe in love at first sight or do you want me to walk by again?"

Got enough of all these? ;-)

Cool....

Gal: I'm going to call the Police.

Guy: Why?

Gal: It's because someone just stole my heart. 8-p

Guy: hee..hee.. 8-)))

It's cool, isn't it? Saw this in a news article, there are also a couple of others, but I can't remember. Some people are just so creative, nothing to do huh?

Air not fresh

Don't know why, seems like the haze problem has taken a hit on my health. I have been feeling weak, tired out and eyes feeling uncomfortable easily, this is not something that I would expect because I used to work in air-con environment and don't usually go outdoors, unless during lunch time.

The PSI still lingers around 100 plus daily, the burning smell is not that strong. The weather people says this problem will last till November, hopefully the rain will come then. Hopefully, they are right in their prediction.

Information Security

Question: What is Information Security?

Answer: Information Security is the Confidentiality, Intergrity and Availability of information.

This, must remember, as our security audit is coming, we were told to remember by heart after attending a briefing yesterday. We were also told to clear our desks, never to leave any network diagrams, sensitive or confidential information, printouts lying around.

I better go clear my desk soon...

Earthquake

Have your heard? There was a strong earthquake at Hawaii early Sunday. Some roads were blocked by landslides and buildings were damaged, but no casualty reported.

According to the National Earthquake Information Center, the quake measured 6.5 hit Big Island, but no possibility of tsunami. Hopefully, the quake does not create serious problem.

Remember that time when I suggested going to Hawaii next year? Well, I am still interested. No change of plan for now.

I just feel like writing more

Well, it's me again, don't know why I just feeling like writing more and more. This happens to be my 80th post.

My dear Friend, you asked me yesterday what I want so that you will buy for me when you are back home, I think I also don't know, maybe anything would be good. Food? Chocolates, sweets, red wine, lime juice? Yummy, anything else edible? Maybe also, pins? I like collecting pins.

Well, I just hope that you will be back soon, do you best in whatever you do, cheers and enjoy yourself there!

I love milk

I bought two packs of one litre milk yesterday, my favourite, with added Vitamin K and D. Althought it doesn't taste like the real cow milk thing, but I like the taste, not too sweet, and it's chilled.

Tell you something, I have not been drinking milk for the last one month or so, I craved for it, that's why I bought two packs, it's usually cheaper than buying one. I reckon that I should be able to finish them in one week's time.

Calcium intake is good for the bones, I heard in order to absorb these material into your body, you got to have Vitamin K and D too, they 'attract' the precious metal, just like magnets.

Back to Office on Sunday

I am back in office today, woke up earlier than usual on a Sunday's morning, reached office at about 9:30am. My two other colleagues were already there.

The plan was to do a OS upgrade for one of our Unix servers, we thought it should not be so complicated, but then, it took us more than eight hours, till now haven't finish. Earlier on, during the installation of the new OS, we found that one of the system mount points was not setup with enough disk size, again had to re-install everything.

The bulk of the time was used to do restoration of data files from the backup cartridage tapes, because the backup server and the server those OS was to be upgraded were in two different VLAN separated by firewalls and hardware loadbalancers, it exceeded our expected time. We are behind the scheduled time now...

Doing own business

My cousin told me on Thursday that she will be going into sales business, opening a boutique to sell clothes, to be exact. She said that she had already got the money to cover 80% of the costs, including rents, purchase of goods and utilities bills, etc.

I went with her to a wholesale shopping centre to buy some goods, i.e. clothes, mostly from China and Hong Kong. Price range of these clothes are from 10 to 35 dollars. According to the wholesale people, they can sell them from around 30 to 80 bucks, that's a profit of more than 100%! You could get a party gown for about 30 plus, which can be sold at 80 plus. There are a lot of different styles and patterns to choose from, although the quality isn't there. She spent about 300 plus to buy about 20 sets of clothes, well, let's see how many can be sold when her shop opens for business in a few weeks time.

What's wrong with the job scheduler?

What's wrong with the job scheduler?

There was a problem with the job scheduler yesterday, for unknown reason, a job was terminated. After carrying out the investigation, we could not find what was wrong with it, it doesn't seems to be caused by human error, just somehow it erred.

It was a critical job that was terminiated, an incident, the log file didn't give much information. I got this feeling that the job scheduler had gone haywired and failed to recover by itself. As a result of this issue, a couple of depending jobs were not triggered. I have one of our administrators to investigate further, but I don't think we will be able to gather any more valuable information for investigation.

An incident

An incident happened today, a foreign currency job was wrongly submitted to run, resulted in wrong report being generated and possibility incorrect updates on the database.

From the Operator's side of the story, he claimed that he did check and verify correctness before the submitting the report to run. From the Apps' side, they claimed an account ID was wrongly updated. Deadlocked!

What I was get the database table name from Apps, which is supposedly to be "updated", and ask the DBA to check the audit trail. The DBA couldn't find it, so we had to proceed to restore the previous day's database data and check whether changes were done, and by who. Need to recall the tapes from offsite, so have to wait....

Completed scripts for two new interfaces

I have finally completed the scripting for the two new SFTP interfaces and also updated the technical documentation.

Both interfaces go to the same remote server, put and get files, the difference is with the scripts used and the scheduled time to run. It is simpler if the run time is always, say, 1st day of the month, every day of the week, but may not be always so. Some of the jobs are set to run on working days, if a particular run is the last day of the month, how difficult can be it to set it on the Windows scheduler? Think again, Windows scheduler only offers very simple run calendar, you have to set all this 'last working day of the month' run date manually. The other way is to write a text file, pull all the run dates, e.g. 20061010 for year 2006, month 10 and day 10 in it, then write a script to check and compare this 'run date' with the system date, and only initiate a connection to the remote server to get or put files when there's a match. Also, setup your scheduler to run this script every day.

Clear sky

As at 3pm, the PSI figure has gone down t0 34, in the healthy range. The sky clears, although it did not rain. The burning smell that came with the haze problem has gone too. Take a look at the picture I post here, you will see the difference. Hopefully, for the rest of the day, it's like that. I think this is just so incredible, you can see what in one day the difference is by comparing this picture with the one I posted yesterday, don't you think so, too?

I also had the chance to going for a jog session and swim, I really feel good now.

Stays indoor

The Health Advisory says : Persons with existing heart or respiratory ailments should reduce physical exertion and outdoor activity.The general population should reduce vigorous outdoor activity.

As at 8pm, the PSI figure was at 143, still within the unhealthy range. I didn't go swimming or jogging today, will see whether the weather will improve tomorrow.

I will be calling my Friend tonight.

PSI exceeds 100!

Today's haze problem is the worst, the official PSI (Pollutants Standard Index) as of now is 130, which is in the unhealthy range. People with breathing or respiratory problems have been advised not to stay outdoors.

To give you an idea of how bad is the condition, take a look at the picture I posted. The visibility was definitely very low, and can hardly see far . I guess nothing much we can do now, but just stay at home and close all the windows and doors.

This is a picture taken in a cave

I think this is my 70th post.

Look at this picture, pretty amazing, isn't it?

I don't know how to descript a picture like that, well, as the saying goes: A picture tells a thousand words. See for yourself.

I don't know whether I should go for my weekend run tomorrow because of the haze problem, will see how it goes...

Upgraded 1x Windows 2003 server to R2

I have planned for this upgrade for the past one month, finally got the time to do it today. I expected that the whole exercise would last at least half a day, but I managed to complete it within an hour.

The upgrade itself was pretty simple, just run the setup and it automatically up from SP1 to R2 in just 5 mins! However, after the reboot, there was a slight problem, the web application could not be launch. It was later found that one of the web application services was not up, once it was started, it was working fine.

The good thing about the Windows OS is that everything is in GUI, but it's not so friendly when it comes to Disaster Recovery, especially when trying to restore data onto another machine.

Haze, haze, haze...

You know what's the most common topic here for the last few weeks? It's the haze problem. Today, in particular was worst, the official PSI figure was around 70+, but from the way I see it, it should be much higher than that. The burning smell is still there, lingering in the air. I was hoping that it will rain soon.

The weather people said this condition will last till mid of the month, but it seems like getting worst each day.

FTP or SFTP?

You know the difference between FTP and SFTP? The FTP is usually provided as part of any operating systems, as for SFTP, which is a more secured method of data transfer via un-secured network or channel, you have to pay for it to install in your systems. The good news is, you may also get it for free from Open source, but, the trouble with getting it from Open source is that you have to compile the source code on your own to suit your usage. I learnt the hard way, tried to compile it, but didn't work out, in the end, I downloaded the compiled version from another source.

Be aware, however, getting it from Open source means you don't get full technical support, and it might be buggy. Nevermind, if it works fine, why not?

I have got one of our Unix administrators to test and set in up on all the Unix servers.

Busy day

I have a busy working day today. One of our guy is off site, one on urgent half day leave, one went back to his hometown to settle something important and will not be back until next week, short of hands today. I have to double up as Windows, Unix, Network and App administrator, plus having to handle, evaluate and work on requests. Worst still, one of the Unix server's HDD went haywire and needed to be replaced.

I have just finished with a request to write some scripts to be run on a server and now, I will be going to fix a modem dial-up issue.....

My boss approved the course!

My boss approved the course that he told me that I should sign up. The course starts mid next month and is for three days.

You mum called me today, asking me to check on the availability of the air ticket to your place. I did a check on the airline's website, I found the cheapest departure from here needs to transit via another destination. Then she called me tonight saying that you had booked for her, one that is slightly cost more, but direct flight.

Haze

It was still a clear view when I woke up this morning, I could still see the mountain a few hundred kilometers away. Now, it's hazy, visibility was very bad, barely can see the blocks of appartments from my apartment room's windows.

I was still thinking about going for my weekend swim, but now, not a good idea. It's not hot now, as the sun is 'hidden', but you can still feel that the air is not that fresh to breathe. I wonder when is it going to end. Hopefully, the rain comes and clears away the haze, just like yesterday.