The Palace Museum, ranked as one of the world’s five best museums, had just completed a renovation. Since I lived in Taipei, I had no excuse not to see the exhibition. From start to finish, the experience inspired a sense of awe. The Palace Museum building alone was splendid enough to make the bus ride worthwhile, but the true treasures were inside.

I’ve finally taken the time to rotate, crop, and upload the photographs from my trip to China. I posted about 100, along with a few from my previous visit. If you are interested, you are welcome to view them in my gallery. Feel free to email me if you find any of them interesting. I would love to hear what you think.

Over the years I have been shrinking the number of computers I own. At one point my dorm was littered with old P100s, running whatever OS I felt like playing with at the time. VMWare comes to help. In this recent oops, an image I made (for Windows XP), was slightly too small. I didn’t feel like reinstalling XP + cruft, so just resized the image. This is the process:

To all my loyal (but most likely few, and mainly with the same last name as me): I think I’m going to redo the structure of my site, yes, it is about time. I’ve been using a CMS (Content Management System) to categorize everything, but it is time to ditch that and write something. Time to stop being lazy. Time to stop procrastinating. Time to learn something new. Let me make this clear: version 3.0 surely won’t be based off PHP.

As you may know by now, I’m in Taiwan. Live is pretty good here, especially the internet – I’m sitting on a pretty decent 12M/1M connection. But the company I have my internet through seems pretty laid back about network usage -- which for me isn’t good. Their entire IP subnet appears banned from IRC, which means I have to be a little sneaky when I want to talk to my I.T. friends in New Zealand. Worse, some websites even banned the entire subnet:

I love my Snort, I really do. But sometimes, I just don’t need all the extra overhead – sometimes the resources on a server are somewhat, limited. Looking for a solution I stumbled upon PSAD , a way to detect port scans. Since port scans are often one of the first tactics used to find vulnerabilities on a server, it is a pretty good idea to detect them. Depending on the attack, I receive a nice little email telling me what is going on. To test it out I first fired up nmap, and received a few emails. Next I fired up nessus with updated plugins – you can be the judge. I now have 50 emails from myself telling me somebody is doing something naughty:

Historically I’ve used the ever-so-popular AutoMySQLBackup script. While it seems to work just fine, I’ve decided to give another solution a whirl. This solution, provided through Zmanda, seems to be less hackery and more enterprise. The instructions are very clear, and the backup test went as planned. Looks like this is another gem for the toolchest.

My buddy Ian mentioned Amazon’s S3 service, and the potential for using it for fun webapps. While utilizing it for webapps will have to wait a few months, I was able to use it as a cheap backup for my home server (pictures, documents, etc,.) – and my server that houses my email and websites. The setup is pretty quick, and most of it can be detailed in this S3 backup walkthrough. The ruby package is available at s3sync.net I’ll toss in my recommendation to use the jets3t Cockpit application for viewing the buckets, especially considering the Firefox extension didn’t work as advertised. My only two comments will be this:

Luckily, there was an internet cafe next to the hostel, so I bought a membership. For the rest of my time in Shenzhen, I spent much of the day there watching movies. My new roommates, one from Taiwan and the other from Canada but originally from Mali, both snored heavily (and you know how much I like snoring). I enjoyed some excellent conversations with the Canadian, who shared his efforts to secure a better future.

The day was quite bittersweet. I was dropped off at the border so I could catch my return flight, and with my head hanging low I took the subway back to the hostel. For the next few days I would be trying to conserve money while I waited for my passport.