Category: Tech

After my line got upgraded to ADSL2, I didn’t have problems for about a week or 2. Until recently, I’m getting a lot of disconnections. Mainly an unstable ADSL signal. Second time now. I’ve already called Singnet and they will send a technician to do a line test this Saturday morning.

However, what worries me most is the problem occurs randomly. Sometimes, it’s stable for a few hours. Sometimes, I get disconnected every 3 minutes. So I’m afraid when the technician comes, the line just happens to be stable and he leaves saying there’s nothing wrong.

It’s becoming very frustrating especially when I’m playing FFXI.

/sigh

So today’s the first day at my client’s office. The thing about this place is they have very strict firewall rules. A lot of sites have been blocked. So using my laptop borrowed from work, I did a quick scan and randomly connected to one of the unsecured wireless networks. There were about 10 results, 7 of them encrypted and requires a password.

After connecting, I tried to connect to the router. A screen popped up requesting for a username and password. On that same dialogue, the model of the router was displayed. I googled that to discover that it’s a D-Link router.

Went to D-Link’s website and downloaded the user manual there for this router I’m connected to. Scrolled a few pages to find the default username and password to be admin/admin.

Tried accessing the router again, supplied this default username and password, and "wallah!" I’m in.

This router also happens to contain the login details for the internet account! The username is clearly displayed in a text-field and the password is hidden in a password-field. So, view source…

<input type="password" name="password" value="t3hp455w0rd"> (this is just an example!)

Then I logged in to his ISP’s website, went to customer service and logged in to see this person’s account details. Sadly, it’s only a 256kbps account. I was hoping for a 10Mbps connection so I could use it and leech some stuff.

As the building I’m in is an office building, the nearest home apartment building is about 100-200 metres away. Signal strength: Fair~Good.

Message of the day: If you are using wireless routers, be sure to at least set a WEP password.

I bought my Nintendo DS back in January. Only bought a few games, and completed one. The only DS game I had is Mario 64 DS, I’ve played and stopped at the last level. The GBA games I bought are Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls, Zelda: Minish Cap(completed) and Riviera (which turned out to be unenjoyable.)

Yesterday, I took some time to browse some gaming forums to find magazine scans of Final Fantasy 3 being remade for the NDS. This time, in 3D!! Here’s the link to the Gamersquare forums thread. But it appears from the scans that it may use only 1 screen. ( >_<)

I also bought Zoo Tycoon DS yesterday only to find out (1 minute ago) that IGN had rated the game badly. Anyways, finally a game that has a better use of the touch screen.

Also just found out that some of the latest NDS games that come with wi-fi compatibilty actually means it can make my NDS connect to my wireless router and play with people all over the globe!

The current wi-fi game available is Mario Kart. But I had enough of that back in my SNES days. I’m waiting for Animal Crossing: Wild World now. Hope I can find friends with NDS in FFXI and it would be interesting to interact with them in this game as I lie on my bed.

Unfortunately, my wireless router seems to be incompatible. But perhaps by the time Animal Crossing is available in Singapore, I would have upgraded my internet connection to ADSL2+ and perhaps bought a new modem and router.

So yea, any of you readers out there have a Nintendo DS? [XD]

While most people use thumbdrives for storing or exchanging data with other people, I ran a slew of programs on mine.

Before my work PC in office went nuts, I managed to setup a web server and database server to run from my 128MB USB1.1 thumbdrive. It worked wonderfully thanks to PortableWebAp. Note: The current version 1.2 of PWA runs the apache webserver on default port 80 and mysql on default port 3306. Although I’ve managed to reconfigure them to run on different ports (800 and 33060 respectively), I’m unable to reconfigure the launcher program of PWA to point to http://localhost:800/ instead of the default http://localhost/.

From then, because USB1.1 was too slow, I spent my own money to get a 1GB USB2.0 thumbdrive for S$129.00. With all this extra space, I used it to store some important files and tried to load in a few more programs.

FlashFXP (FTP client), CrimsonEditor (text editor for my PHP files) – Requires registry editing each time when run on a new PC, now trying out EditPlus cos it seems to work better on USB then CrimsonEditor, copied in my winamp folder and it’s working fine so far, installed Miranda as my MSN and IRC client and set up Portable Thunderbird as my email program for work and home email.

There’s also portable versions of free word processing software customized to run on USB thumbdrives and Firefox internet browsers. More here.

Great to have most of my frequently used software installed and run independently on thumbdrives. Here’s also a true story that happened to me 2 days ago.

For some unknown reason, WindowsXP suddenly fails to boot up in Normal mode, a blue screen with the words "Page Fault in non-paged area" shows up. So the only thing I can do is boot into safe mode and perform a system restore. With all my apps installed on USB, I wasn’t afraid of losing anything critical, especially my current CRM project.

The only things I lost through that system restore was my Firefox installation, Skype software, my wallpaper, which is all pretty easy to recover. I also have an exported copy of my Firefox bookmarks and adblock filters onto the thumbdrive.

Oh, and one thing I like about exported Firefox bookmarks, they are saved as .html files so you can open it with any browser and click on the links inside. It’s like having your list of bookmarks converted into a webpage.

But be warned that thumbdrives don’t last forever, but at least a long time and you’d want to make backups once in a while.

And again, one comes all comes. Just a few days I backed up all my data files on my server PC from the second harddisk to the first. The second harddisk had bad sectors/clusters and produces clicking sound once in a while. Lucky it’s just the storage disk so I need not reinstall Windows2003.

Then, my PC at work went haywire. It kept shutting down all of a suddden. At first I thought it was the graphic card. The fan stopped spinning because too much dust went into it, and the capacitors on that graphic card are leaking. So I had it changed. But noooo. Problems still persist.

When I managed to boot into Windows 2000, I changed how the power button should work when pressed. I could only choose between "Shutdown" and "Stand By". Switched it to stand by. And instead of suddenly shutting down now, it goes into stand by mode.

Which leads me to believe that something’s wrong with the power button on the casing or the motherboard. Something’s triggering the power switch randomly without my intervention.

But, there are also cases where it completely just shut off. Take yesterday for example. There was a voice in my head screaming for me to save my files but I ignored it. Then suddenly, the screen went blank. There goes 100 lines of edited code.

It never rains, but it pours. ( T-T)