A popular question I get, is how to boost a WiFi signal. Folks struggle to get good WiFi connections on the 2nd (or 3rd) floors of their homes because the routers they have don’t pump enough  ‘juice’ to go around. This is particularly true for those that work from home, having poor WiFi while trying to have a teleconference– just sucks. While other applications like YouTube and Facebook could use buffering or caching, a real-time conversation with someone over skype relies on good connectivity all the way from one party to the other, and it doesn’t matter if you have Unifi 20Mbps, if your WiFi is laggy.

I thought I could fix this by buying a more powerful router–but that didn’t work. The signal strength increased, but the quality was still below par.

The best solution is to skip WiFi  and get a Powerline Adapter instead. A powerline adapter uses your home electricity wiring to transmit the data, and because it uses wires, it’ll beat any wireless connection you have. The adapters fit nicely into your 3-Pin wall sockets, and all you need is Ethernet cables to plug into them to hook up your laptop or PC to your router located somewhere else in your home.

The premise is quite interesting and the results are even better.

On April 28th, 4 men were caught for installing card-skimming devices on ATM cash machines in Bangkok Thailand. They were all Malaysian.

On the 14th of May, 6 men were caught for installing similar devices in ATM machines in Jakarta Indonesia. They were all Malaysian.

On the 8th of June, 2 men were convicted in Singapore for installing card-skimming devices on ATMs in Singapore. They were both Malaysian. I wrote about this more than 2 years ago, when some DBS customers noticed withdrawals from their accounts occurring in Malaysia.

I remember this problem from watching an episode of numbers. You’re a contestant on a game show–and you’re given 3 doors to choose from.

Behind one door is a shiny new sports car–behind the other 2 are goats. Your goal is to get the sportscar, by choosing a door. But after you choose a door the host reveals one of doors with the goats. Leaving you with you just two doors, instead of your initial 3.

The truth is we all have something to hide–secrets we wished the world would never know. A political stance we once had, a video of ourselves after too many drinks, or even just a sentence we once uttered at a party somewhere. If you think you’ve got nothing to hide–you should think harder.

So, when European Court of Justice recently ruled that Google had to comply with certain request from individuals to remove links to websites with their personal information–privacy advocates were delighted that we now had the ‘right to be forgotten’. Mario Gonzalez had requested Google to remove a link to a digitized article in La Vanguardia newspaper about an auction for his foreclosed home. Google refused, Mario sued, and the links were removed–only they weren’t.

The understatement of the month would be calling this a peculiar moment. This is far from peculiar–this is straightup WTF?!

My favorite encryption software, TrueCrypt, has been abruptly and mysteriously shut-down(que dramatic music!!!). The official TrueCrypt website now only has some information on ‘alternatives’ and offers the following advice.

WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues

TrueCrypt was really awesome, it had features like full-disk encryption and even encrypted volumes within encrypted volumes for ‘plausible deniability’. The anonymous authors of the software have apparently thrown in the towel on what was the best free encryption software on the web.Yes, TrueCrypt was free just like Apache and OpenSSL, and just like them was pervasively used by tech-savvy web users. So any vulnerability on TrueCrypt would have severe ramifications–just like Heartbleed had for OpenSSL.

To avoid any ‘heartbleed-like’ issues with TrueCrypt–an initiative from within the security community was kicked off to perform a full security audit on TrueCrypt. Support for the initiative wasn’t hard to come by in the wake of recent developments like PRISM, specifically the revelations that the US government was intentionally making encryption software weaker to allow exploitation further down the road.

But just when the audit was making good progress the TrueCrypt team dropped their bombshell. Brian Krebs suggest that the shut-down is legit, and this isn’t some web-site hack or hoax. The speculation churning machine (a.k.a the entire internet) has been rife with guesses as to what really occurred, but honestly no one has the answer, except the authors of TrueCrypt–who are anonymous.

The problem for people who are using TrueCrypt–is what to do? TrueCrypt recommends bitlocker, but BitLocker isn’t available for basic version of Windows–the version most people use? Also, Bitlocker hasn’t been audited either and forgive me if I’m still a bit edgy about using Microsoft products. What with them spying on my Skype conversations and all.

I’m sticking to TrueCrypt for now, and wait till the dust settles before I decide to re-encrypt my drives with a new piece of software.After all the audit hasn’t found any serious flaws, and even if it did I’m betting someone will fork the code as soon as it happens

A Coalition of Muslim NGOs have asked for Cadbury to pay for the ‘cleansing’ of the blood of Muslims to remove any traces of Pig DNA they might have consumed from having eaten Cadbury chocolates.

I’m not going to debate the religious and legal implications, just the scientific aspect. The aspect which says that the DNA of what you eat doesn’t enter your blood–and cleansing your bloodstream is an absolute waste of time, not to mention precious blood.

Pi has always held a special place in my heart and probably yours as well. When people ask me to pick a number between 1 to 10, I always pick Pi (or sometimes the square root of two), which hasn’t made me the life of many parties.

And there’s an entire community of Pi lovers like me out there–people who are just fanatical about calculating pi to the trillions of digits? With just the first 40 digits of Pi we’ll be able to calculate the circumference of our galaxy with an error that is smaller than the size of a proton, so calculating PI to trillions of digits is quite superfluous. So why then do people do it?

Last weekend I had an issue with my hosting provider, WPWebHost.

I switched to WPWebHost 2 years ago, and recommended them because they promised wordpress hosting at an affordable rate. Wordpress hosting is where the hosting provider would support wordpress specific features, e.g. help troubleshoot plugin and theme issues, perform nightly backups, and offer ‘higher availability’ for Wordpress sites. If you’re still wondering what Wordpress is, take a look at one of my previous post.

My latest experience with WPWebHost has left me wondering if indeed this was actually Wordpress hosting or just regular hosting in disguise. I’m now wondering if I should stay with them.

Was my server really getting the 99% uptime promised by WPWebHost? Nope. Did I get the Wordpress Specific support that help identify theme and plugin issues? Nope. Does WPWebhost cost more than regular hosting from other providers like GoDaddy, Dreamhost and my previous provider NearlyFreeSpeech? Yup. So why I am still with them? Read more to find out.

Below is the full un-redacted transcript of my email correspondence with WPWebhost–I’ve left out the customer service agents name because I believe they have a right to privacy. However, nearly every time I sent an email, a different rep would respond making the whole conversation very messy and difficult to keep track off. Some emails were left out to simplify the flow.

There’s a highway they want to build from Damansara to Puchong–called Kidex, and just like any other highway before, people are understandably worried about the construction. This excerpt from the KL-Chronicle details the causes of anxiety:

[box icon=“chat”]Kidex will be constructed over heavily built-up residential areas in Petaling Jaya and will pass very close to schools, houses and places of worship. It will pass just 5m away from two schools – Bukit Bintang Boys Secondary School and Sri Petaling Primary School. Its distance from the Tun Abdul Aziz Mosque in Section 14 is listed as 7m and from St Paul’s Church as 18m. Houses in parts of Sections 2, 4, 7 and 8 will be just 10m from the highway

And so, when Kidex had their townhall last week, a group of protesters showed up to voice their displeasure–as should be allowed in a democratic society. Kidex claimed they had conducted a survey that proved that the majority of the people wanted the highway, this was hotly contested by the Say No to Kidex committee, who contended that the survey wasn’t ‘authentic’.

The video below (from Malaysiakini) has a great interview with the secretary of the Say No to Kidex committee outlining their points of contention on the survey by Kidex. (starts at 1:10)

1. The initial Kidex survey of 300 respondents--of which 73.4% were agreeable to the building of the highway. 2. The Say No to Kidex committee did their own survey on 20 different locations, including the Mosque, Schools, and the resident associations of the areas affected by the highway. 3. Say No to Kidex can't comment on how many people they've engaged but can confirm it was more than 300. 4.Hence the public perception of the initial Kidex survey is negative. 5.The list of the initial 300 respondents has not been shared--as it was confidential. 6.The survey was conducted by a Ph.D in statistics, but this survey itself was funded by Kidex. 7.The next survey as planned by Kidex would have 2000 respondents.

Teachers day was last Friday, and I thought it would be good to make a small post in tribute to an interesting teacher I had in form 4.

Imagine a 200 pound man, with a thick moustache, carrying intimidating rotan, and wore nothing but Chairman Mao style Bush-coats everyday–that’s Mr. Vijay, and he thought me Additional Mathematics.

Mr. Vijay was interesting in many ways, including the wrestling stories he’d tell in class, but for all my years in school I only remember a handful of lessons, and none more vividly than the time he thought me the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss during us lesson on arithmetic sequences.

The story is certainly fiction, similar to that of Newton discovering gravity by watching an apple fall from a tree–but that is irrelevant, what’s relevant is how I remember it, and as my tribute to one of my teachers, I’d re-tell the story here.

Here goes.

Once upon a time, there lived a boy named Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Even while still in elementary school, Carl was already a maths genius, and like all other geniuses was a bit of a nuisance in class. So one day to shut Carl up, his teacher gave him an ‘important assignment’–he was to calculate the sum of all numbers from 1 to 100. i.e. 1+ 2+ +3 +4….+100. The idea was that this would keep Carl busy for the remainder of the lesson

However, Carl came back very quickly with an answer of 5,050!!

How did Carl do this?!!