In the third year running, the highly successful Mizuno Mount Faber Run is back again, taking runners through the sights of the southern hills of Singapore.

Race Details

Venue: Open carpark space between Block 121 & 123 Bukit Merah View
(There will be multiple tents erected in the carpark itself)
Distance: 10km
Race Start Time: 0730hrs
(No reporting needed, just arrive on time with Bib)
Registration Closing Date: 24rd May 2009

Getting There
Based as of previous year events, baggage deposit is provided for all runners at the surrounding HDB void decks near the event main tent.
Otherwise you can leave your bags in your vehicles (if you are driving), there are ample HDB parking lots around the area.
Nearest MRT station: Tiong bahru (head into the mature HDB estate opposite Tiong bahru park)
Buses: 961, 855, 197, 147, 14, 196 (From Jalan Bukit Merah)

Race Route (See map image above)
Distance about 10km, but with relief feats. Similar to last year’s race:

• Henderson road up skipping the industrial distripark, across the AYE towards Pasir Panjang road, then turning up the Mt Faber hill from Pender Road.
• Passing round the route through Mount Faber landmarks such as the cable car station and comm tower.
• Down Mt Faber from Faber lodge towards CHIJ at Bukit Purmei towards Tiong Bahru park, then Delta House before circling Gan Eng Seng School and back up to Henderson road for the finish.

Modes of Registration

1. Online registration
You can register online. Registration page.
Online credit card payment (only VISA or MasterCard) is accepted.

Online only, World of Sports & PAssion card members’ Promotion!

• First 500 World of Sports or PAssion card members will receive a FREE pair of Mizuno running socks (worth $8.90) on the Race Pack Collection Day.
• Indicate and key in your World of Sports or PAssion card number during your registration.
• A separate email will be sent to you 1 week before the Race Pack Collection Day.
• Present your confirmation slip, promo email, together with your World of Sports or PAssion card on the Race Pack Collection Day

2. In person, walk-in registration venues:

• Mizuno VivoCity #02-16 Tel: 6377 0261
• World of Sports AMK Hub #B2-14 Tel: 6752 4267
• World of Sports Jurong Point #02-29 Tel: 6792 0547
• World of Sports Tampines 1 #03-14/15 Tel: 6786 6705
• World of Sports Paragon #04-29/30 Tel: 6735 4187
• World of Sports Velocity @ Novena Square #02-69/72 Tel: 6259 9656

3. Registration forms are also available at the selected community centres:

• Henderson Community Centre
• Cairnhill Community Centre
• Radin Mas Community Centre
• Bukit Merah Community Centre
• Queenstown Community Centre
• Leng Kee Community Centre
• Tanjong Pagar Community Centre
• Tiong Bahru Community Centre
• Tanglin Community Centre
• Pek Kio Community Centre

Race Pack contents:

• Running Tee
• Runner’s Tag
• iTag for Electronic Timing
• Mizuno Waist Pouch (worth $29.90)
• Mizuno Limited Edition Running Singlet (worth $32.90)
• Lucky Draw Entry
• 30% Discount on Mizuno regular-priced merchandise

Excludes selected nett priced items. Other terms & conditions apply.

Due to be launched on the 5th of May and the first of it’s kind in the world, Dell Swarm by Intel and Dell is an online ordering portal targeted at students and value hunters alike. So it works like a mass order system we usually see taking “lobangs”, only that this time, you are dealing the lobang directly with the supplier. You start by picking the laptop you would like to purchase, which is the “Buy” part, so you are the first buyer to join a Swarm and you’ll enjoy a price lower than dell.com.sg’s best discounted price (after cash rebates). So say your starting price is $899 SGD. You enter and the price drops so $854 SGD.

Dell swarm 2009 site main page

The swarm page

Keep in touch with social networking or SMS

Here comes the good part, for every member you comes in and joins your “swarm” you will get a lower price for every member which comes in, so say after 8 members joined your swarm, the prices drops to $809 SGD. To reach the maximum discount, you can grow the Swarm by Sharing with your friends through social networking sites and functions, such as facbook, tweeter, etc.

When you’re ready to join the Swarm, click on the Buy button, register and the website will contact you once the Swarm ends and the price is finalised. This happens once the limit of 15 buyers or 72 hours is reached.

For users not ready to buy yet. You won’t be left out either with a range of monitoring services available, you can also choose to follow your choosen Swarm through updates via email and SMS.

To test drive the site, visit http://dellswarm.com/sg/ and log in with the following information (Prices shown in beta site are placeholders only.)

Read more about the new spanking new website on the click:

Well, progress on the site revamp is rather fruitful. It started with a rather tough fight to get div containers to go fluid on percent values for a 3 column layout, fixed width divs are more predictable over a range of browsers, so I am still contemplating whether to allow the fluid width option for content. Nevertheless I am quite happy with how the site is coming up so far. Though the site looks very similar to the current one, I can say that the codes are 50% leaner, is world wide web consortium xhtml 1.0 and CCS compliant and can easily load just as fast, the best of all, there are no tables in sight now! Now it’s just a matter of fixing PNG transparencies on IE6, which most users still browse with.

The design is almost 100% finalized but that is just it. Now it’s a matter of upgrading some of my code and content throughout the site, thereafter, it’s quite alot of coding for the upgraded shoutbox, so there is quite alot to do. A cool new feature on the site is that since it’s running off a single stylesheet at any given time, I can get it to automatically load a new one whenever there’s like an occasion, say Christmas, New year’s day, National day, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Earth Hour, etc duh. So it can be rather interesting to check out the site on these days.

This new design has it’s primary focus on the user, so there will be lots of accessibility enhancements such as AJAX search, dbx-boxes, font adjustments and readability. The site’s main font size will be increased as well, to Arial 12px. The blog will be running on the latest version of wordpress and gallery. Though I have yet to get used to the new admin layouts on my test environment, I still prefer the old wordpress top admin bar.

More updates to come.

I’ve been receiving quite a few emails asking about my “Ad” on few popular online classifieds sites, such as 88db. Which left really really puzzled as I do not feature my freelance services anywhere else on the internet other than my portfolio pages on this website. So I went about a search on the net and found ads placed on those sites and written in a way that I’ve posted it. Oh my god, impersonations!

Whats more the adverts and classifieds postings also feature images and photos ripped from this site as well. A little bit of post-mortem suggests that the list of services listed came in a very reassuring format presumably lifted from my namecards. So I guess it could be added from an acquaintance from my networking sessions.

Though I never accepted any jobs from such sources and personally, I have nothing against those people who post these ads. But what I fear are the exploits which could result from this- anyone can steal your work and claim it theirs, which could be rather worrying. After all, there is no safeproof method to copyright your work and often watermarks and text can all be lifted and altered without consent.

So, I guess the best rule is of course not to post anything online that you can’t afford to lose that is.

Am updating all scripts on my servers as I type along in this blog post, there is quite much updating to go, I guess I just sneak an update here. After much investigation of the previous hacking attempt in my last blog post, it seems that the DoS problem narrows down to a vulnerability in the roundcube webmail program, so if you have that running on versions before 0.2.1, please do an update.

In layman’s terms, what the hackers did is to exploit a code injection vulnerability in Roundcube towards Apache which causes it to eat up so much resources that it forces Apache run a safety shutdown to terminate the script, thus explaining those sudden SIGTERM disabling all your server’s webservice. But once that happens, it will unable to start itself up again as a Apache is “still” running the service and using the ports, thus resulting in a denial of service.

I’ve updated all my servers and did a full rootkit scan, currently all is running fine and A-OK. (Keeps fingers crossed). Oh yes, do note that roundcube-0.2 requires PHP 5 to run.

I guess, the cool thing about being your system administrator is that you get you get to learn all kinds of shit which comes thrown at your server.

Mmm don’t know should I try to install PHP 6 on my development server, I am sooo liking their new date functions.

Sorry for the 1 hour downtime last night from 12:30am to about 1:30am (Singapore time). The site is up and functional now. I jumped when I got a downtime message from my servers, strange, the server can be reached and pinged, so not a hardware or network problem, but my website cannot be reached. A short search later led me to finding Apache stopped and unable to restart automatically. After viewing my logs, it seems that my server was issued a SIGTERM to terminate Apache, possibility hacked with a Trojan:

A snippet of the logs:

This is like 1 of the 10 trys this hacker from Germany tried to spam my servers with. These bastards seem to trick the server to killing my processes and downloading a Trojan called Kaiten. But based on what I see in the logs, they are unable to run it. Think setting all downloaded files unable to execute in the temp folder was a good choice.

So it’s very much a DDoS attack. It managed to get a service to run under the “apache” username which blocked the ports required by Apache itself. I managed to find the pesky process blocking port 80, killed it, restarted Apache successfully and changed all my passwords. I am puzzled if the file was not run, then how the file managed to kill Apache in the first place.

So if you try to run Apache, you get an error with this message:

for a quick fix to the solution, what you can do is to find the pesky service running by entering the following command as root

The next thing is to do a complete scan of your server for any residual files lurking. Who knows what could be installed with the Trojan, I will be damned how they got in the first place. Now I have to consider whether to reload all my backups and do a fresh install of the OS on the infected servers.

Mmmm, I guess say the wise saying goes “No server is unhackable”, but I think with every such incident, you just get stronger every time you combat them.

Update: Updated post and removed the hacker’s IP to prevent it from getting indexed here.

Always wanted to get a site revamp up since last year, but just do not have the time and commitment to do so. I guess I has been more busy creating and building websites for my clients that I think that I am starting to neglect this very site. Bummer.

Furthermore, in the age of code compliance, web 2.0 shit obsession, this design conceived around 2001 is starting to show it’s age, still spotting tables and hard-coded styles which can send any other webmaster snickering in the darkness. I guess I am not doing justice for the site I call my own.

This revamp to design 12.5 version v1.0 will “grow” up abit, but still retain much of the site’s look, colour and layout, but will spot a more clean and user-friendly backend. It will be less database intensive despite the increased number of functions, sounds along the pitch of “increased horsepower with lesser emissions?”, maybe, to auto manufacturers.

Maybe the difference is that I ain’t needing any bailout here. With the jokes aside, this upgrade/revamp will also mark a new start in my life as well. This old design was for my transition from secondary to JC/Army/Poly, this new design will be dedicated for my time in college and doing my masters. Now, only to get it all coded by the end of next month.

The updates, as planned.

User orientated and accessibility features

• User customizable module layout (planned)
• 3 levels of user defined site-wide font setting (currently only on the blog)
• Fixed or fluid site width
• All settings and user fields are saved for all site components (avatars, comments and shoutbox)

Code improvements for faster page loading

• Full table-less CSS driven site
• Condensation of all JS files (currently about 5) into one
• Condensation of all CSS files (currently about 3-4) to one
• iframe-less div scrollable shoutbox
• Re-writing and cutting down on queries of certain functions
• New backend integration and facility for article, tutorial management

The ability to have a single CSS file will simply many of the wants I always wanted for the site, such as the ability to change the site colours on the fly by loading in another CSS file, currently most of the styles are hardcoded in the template, so that will be quite a pain to change. Now I can get the site to automatically say load a white look for the site for Christmas, a black one for Halloween and say maybe a red-white one for national and on!

Furthermore, much of the site content will be revamped I find few sections of the site quite irrelevant on the site now, considering these had been here since the site started. This also catered to the needs of my users and backed using statistical evidence on popular pages. Those getting the hook will be the photo galleries as well as the links section:

Site content re-arrangement

• Expansion of about and portfolio sections
• New “column” page for articles
• Addition of apparel store
• Removal of photo galleries (who visits them anyway haha)
• Removal of links section
• Various re-organization of content for SEO

Same as always, the site will always be Ad-free! (who likes ads anyway).

It’s ain’t no april fool’s joke, but hey Singapore does have a reputation of a fine city. And what better way to see it through the eyes of a rather chatty taxi driver.

Though I think the expats have not really seen much of Singapore to make any firm creditability from their remarks, I guess Singapore will still be a stack contrast to the other countries in the neighborhood. More on the click:

Here is an excerpt of the author of the short film: