Newbies keep complaining that Windows ate their hard disk space because their 80GB hard disk showed only 74GB in Windows. So these really smart people hypothesized that formatting your hard disk takes 6GB out of your hard disk for Windows to play with. Is this true?

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In Malaysia where utility power is transient and noisy, protection of sensitive equipment such as servers, personal computers and peripherals is a must. Normally, we will use a voltage regulator to handle the job but nowadays it seems like blackouts and browouts are getting more common. The answer to the problem is a UPS but unfortunately, most Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) sold in the market have very misleading specifications.

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There are tonnes of software firewalls available on the internet, and 99% of them claims to be the “best” firewall that offer “comprehensive protections” like rootkit detection and this and that. Unfortunately, this neat article slaughters all the claims: http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=849.

There’s nothing worse than a false sense of security. Attackers always target the temporary lapse in security enforcement caused by overconfidence over a particular security product. Though my network at home is protected by a Symantec Network Security SGS 320 (now discontinued) hardware SPI Firewall + IDS/IPS, I never think that I’m immune to attacks. So I’m always keeping a watchful eye on every system, be it Windows or Unix.

Those who’d enabled Gzip through Litespeed (unconfirmed on other servers) might find that the spellchecker in WordPress 2.5 no longer works. This is due to TinyMCE not decompressing the compressed output into plain text (my speculation).

To fix this, edit /wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins/spellchecker/rpc.php

Change the following line:

header(‘Content-Type: text/plain’);

to

header(‘Content-Type: text/xml’);

or anything that Litespeed is not set to compress (Usually anything other than text/plain, text/html and application/x-php).

Microsoft Research’s Asira (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a human interactive proof that provides a rather viable alternative to classical CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that use distorted/warped texts on colourful backgrounds.

Asira is inspired by Frozen Bear’s HotCaptcha, Carnegie Mellon’s PIX CAPTCHA, Oli Warner’s KittenAuth. However, the major difference is that Asira uses a 3 million picture database from Petfinder.com while the last two have relatively small collections of images.

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