A Better Title

It seemed like only yesterday that we graduated from the school. Three-and-a-half years later, some of us are in the local universities, preparing for the final year. Some have just started the second year. Some are in overseas universities, some disappeared completely, and some are already working as cleaning auntie teacher-in-training and banker.

But on Thursday, 28 June 2007, sixteen of us gathered together for a minute of silence at Din Tai Fung, Raffles City.

Yes, that’s right, sixteen of us: HB, ET, TL, MW, NL, SM, EF, CC, DL, FY, MC, JT, LL, CL, BT, GY. That’s like more than half of the class. It’s a pity that CF couldn’t make it because he was having in-camp training, and the rest of the others who are either overseas or simply didn’t respond to the mail sent.

It was great catching up with your old friends, where you know you can just be yourself. The friends who struggled with you for 2 years. The friends who laughed and cried with you when you were still in school.

So for SA2, the most wonderful class I’ve ever had in my entire life: Glad to meet up with you all again, and hope to see everyone again often in the future.

Ok, this is not going to be relevant to you if you’re not from NTU… I just have to get this off my chest.

It’s really confusing to have such terms as GE, PE, GER, and UE in NTU. The multitude of names came about due to the updating of the academic system in NTU. As if the different terms are not confusing enough, people confuse all the names altogether too!

Under the (very) old system, we have to fulfill a few categories of modules in order to graduate from NTU. Other than the core module, we have to complete modules from the following categories as well:

• GE (General Elective). Somewhat like a broadening module; for general knowledge. Subjects taken under this category can come from almost any modules offered by any of the schools.
• PE (Prescribed Elective). A more restricted version of GE. Not all subjects can be taken under this category. To graduate, a student has to take a few modules from subcategories such as arts, humanities and social sciences (ASS AHSS), business and management (BM), and science, technology, and something else (STS; I forgot what the last S stands for).

Then under the (updated) old system, the name of GE is changed to UE, which stands for Unrestricted Elective. It slightly clears up the definition. But most students still stick to the old name GE, so for a time the category is known as GE/UE. So under this system, we have the following categories:

• GE/UE (General Elective/Unrestricted Elective)
• PE (Prescribed Elective)

Now under the new system, the names are revamped one more time. Now the categories are called GER-UE (General Education Requirement-Unrestricted Elective) and GER-PE (General Education Requirement-Prescribed Elective). More details about this can be found here. So under the new system, the following categories exist:

• GER-UE (General Education Requirement-Unrestricted Elective)
• GER-PE (General Education Requirement-Prescribed Elective)

Here’s the problem. Some students from the new system for some reason like to call the categories UE and GE. What they mean are GER-UE and GER-PE respectively. Shortening GER-UE to UE makes perfect sense, but I have no idea why they have to shorten GER-PE using the two initial letters as GE.

Now UE is fine, but GE is extremely confusing. On one hand, the letters “GE” exist in both GER-UE and GER-PE. Not only that, but students from the old system uses GE to refer to what is now called GER-UE! In the mind of the students under the old system, the students of the new system are referring to the same thing!

Confused yet?

If anything, this shows that changing the name of something which has been used for quite a while is a very bad idea. Just like the story of Microsoft which for no reason decided to change the all-familiar “Add/Remove Programs” to “Programs and Features” in Windows Vista. It’s a bad, bad idea, because most people still remember the item in the Control Panel as “Add/Remove Program” instead of the latter.

Luckily for Microsoft, they didn’t create a new feature with a name sounding similar to “Add/Remove Program”, otherwise even more people will be confused by the change.

How many of you remember the song “We Live in Singapura” sung by Hossan Leong a couple of months almost a year ago? (thanks DK for the correction :P) It was broadcast in the mrbrown show back then.

(For those who don’t understand, there’s a great explanation of the lyrics)

Well, call me slow, but I’ve just discovered that the song wasn’t original, but rather a parody of an old song by Billy Joel called “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. Interestingly, both songs (somewhat) talk about history. Check it out…

Update: Arzhou posted the animated version of the We Live in Singapura song. Check it out on his blog.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Blockoo, discussing whether it actually works.

Despite rummaging through the entire website, I couldn’t find a definite answer as to how Blockoo actually works behind the scene. They did mention that they request access to your account to get the list of people who blocked or deleted you. It sounds quite fishy, why would MSN want to divulge such information to a third-party so easily? And if Blockoo can do it despite being a third-party, can’t anyone else do it too?

Curiosity got the better of me, and I went on to analyse how Blockoo (probably) works.

Note that the discussion may be a bit technical, and readers are strongly advised to read through to the end at least once in order to form a rough picture of the process, before reading in more details.

My first suspicion with Blockoo was that it must be using something that all of us have been using all along, knowingly or not: the MSN protocol.

First of all let’s talk about the MSN protocol. A protocol is a set of predetermined codes that allows two computers to communicate in a standardised way. When you use MSN Messenger, the application has to follow this standardised way in order to connect to the server, see who are in your contact list, talk to your friends, etc. To put it in another way, for the application to communicate with the server, they have to be “talking” in the same dialect.

The MSN protocol has never been published officially to the public. However, there are people out there who actually analyse the series of commands that MSN Messenger exchanges with the server by using network sniffers such as Wireshark. The messages sent by MSN and returned by the server can be captured using these sniffers.

These people then infer the protocol (i.e. the standard) from these series of captured commands. MSNPiki is a good source of information for the MSN protocol.

From here, anyone with a good programming background should be able to read the extracted protocol, and create a custom application which “talks” like MSN Messenger (think about it as the application claiming to be MSN Messenger by “talking” in its dialect). The custom-built application can do anything that the protocol allows (e.g. chatting, blocking people, adding/deleting people).

In the course of the conversation between MSN Messenger and the server, there is one point where the contact list is being downloaded into your computer. The contact list details contain the email address, friendly name (”nickname”), and the mode of every single person in your contact list.

The mode is a number, which when represented in binary consists of 4 digits RBAF, which in turn stands for the following:

• Reverse List (RL) - Whether this contact has you in his/her contact list.
• Block List (BL) - Whether you are blocking this contact, they won’t be able to see you when you’re online.
• Allow List (AL) - Whether you are allowing this contact to see you when you’re online.
• Forward List (FL) - Whether you have this contact in your contact list.

For example, in the screenshot above, the person [hidden]@hotmail.com with a mode of 13, or 1101 in binary, has the following status:

• RL: 1 - The person has you in his/her contact list.
• BL: 1 - You are blocking this contact.
• AL: 0 - You are not allowing this contact to see you when you’re online.
• FL: 1 - You have this person in your contact list

These fanciful lists actually do exist on MSN Messenger. They’re just quite hard to spot.

The Forward List (FL) and the Block List (BL) exist in the form of your contact list.

The Allow List (AL) and Block List (BL) can be accessed by going to the Tools menu > Options… > Privacy page

The Reverse List (RL) is accessed by clicking on the View… button next to “See who has added you to their contact list”, which is located in the Privacy page above.

So how do these lists come together and how does Blockoo make use of the protocol and the contact lists to find out who blocked or deleted you?

Stay tuned for the next part…

PS: Although in this blog entry I call the application as “MSN Messenger”, the entry also applies to “Windows Live Messenger”, which is the new name for the application.

Update: Read the second part here.

What a pleasant surprise when I checked my Yahoo! Mail this morning. It now offers unlimited storage! It sure beats other mail providers which until now only offers a maximum of (for example) “over 2868.606412 megabytes (and counting)” or less.

I’m not sure if this is only for Yahoo! Mail Singapore or whether the other Yahoo! Mails will get the same feature.

On the other hand, I really wonder how long one will take to actually fill up the space provided. As for myself, I won’t be using much of the space provided since I always download all my messages into my PC using Mozilla Thunderbird.

Intrigued by the recent Blockoo controversy here, here, and here, I decided to find out how Blockoo works.

In the website, Blockoo claims that “You can see who blocked or deleted you. […] you can know for sure using this service.”

What I found was expected: Blockoo CANNOT check who blocked you. At least not in the right-click-on-contact-and-click-block sense. It does check for people who deleted you, to a certain extent.

What it really does is to show you which people doesn’t have you on his/her contact list, whether by ignorance (forgot to add you back) or by choice (deleted you from his/her contact list). Not only this, the person has to be in your contact list in order for them to show up.

To investigate this, I signed up for a new MSN account just for testing (no, I’m not that gullible to give out my real username and password to a third-party). Let’s call this new account Gorilla. My main account is Yahoo.

.

Scenario 1: Gorilla is not blocked in Yahoo’s contact list

I added Gorilla in Yahoo’s contact list, and vice versa. Of course, they both show up as online in both contact lists.

Then I checked the Gorilla account at Blockoo. Not surprisingly, it says noone has blocked Gorilla.

.

Scenario 2: Gorilla is blocked in Yahoo’s contact list

Then I blocked Gorilla in my Yahoo contact list. As you can see, Yahoo looks offline in the Gorilla contact list (it shows as Mobile as I activated MSN Mobile for that account).

Upon checking the Gorilla account at Blockoo, surprise, surprise… it says noone has blocked me! Congratulations! Yeah right…

.

Scenario 3: Gorilla is not blocked, but deleted in Yahoo’s contact list

I continued by unblocking Gorilla, and then deleting Gorilla from my Yahoo contact list. Now Yahoo looks online in the Gorilla contact list. If I were Gorilla, I’d know for sure that Yahoo doesn’t block me.

Guess what Blockoo said? Yahoo has blocked or deleted the Gorilla account! This is the only occasion where the result is somewhat accurate (it does say blocked or deleted). Ignore the error message, some voodoo is going on at their server.

.

Scenario 4: Gorilla is deleted in Yahoo’s contact list, and vice versa

I then deleted Yahoo from the Gorilla contact list. So right now Gorilla doesn’t have Yahoo, and vice versa.

Blockoo decided that noone has blocked or deleted Gorilla again! Yay!

.

So as you see, Blockoo does not do exactly as what it claimed. It does check for people who have deleted you from their contact list, but that’s about it.

Moreover, Blockoo’s reputation is further tarnished due to the following points:

1. Password is sent to a third-party site
2. Password is not encrypted before sending (the new Blockoo site uses SSL, but to get there you need to click on the FAQ, and then click on a link which is not translated to English yet)
3. Blockoo will spam the person’s contacts by default, where most people will be caught unaware
4. It will sign in on your account automatically (however, this is necessary to check the contact list. More on this on the next post)
5. Hidden adult-site ad that looks like a Windows Live Messenger alert (refer to the post on benetleong.com for a screenshot)

So do consider these things before you decide whether you want to use Blockoo.

As a side note, the whole controversy actually prompted me to find out more about the MSN protocol. By understanding the protocol, it’s easy to see how Blockoo actually works and where the pitfalls come in. I’ll write more on this in the next post.

I’m finally back to work after taking a one week break. The break was quite a good one, although I fell sick right when it started. That forced me to stay at home for quite a while, before finally going out on Thursday to help Nicole’s Voice Collection Project to pack up. Congratulations to Nicole for completing the collection, and all the best for the remaining of the project.

I spent the break finishing up some games and game demos that I’ve downloaded. Now I know which games to get the next time I obtain one.

Black and White is a very good game series in which you become a god who can control towns. You can either be a good god and provide everything for your town, wooing people from other towns to come to yours; or you can be an evil one who wages war against the other towns in order to take over them. The goal is to take over the entire island, and finish the quests.

DiRT is an amazing racing (rally) game which is so realistic that I can’t even drive properly. Seriously, it’s very hard using a keyboard to control your car in the game.

Need For Speed: Carbon is yet another racing game I’m dying to lay my hands on.

Penumbra: Overture is another game from the horror genre. It features an advanced physics engine (e.g. you can block doors using items, to open doors you actually have to grab the door and push/pull it), advanced physics-based puzzles (e.g. you have to shake a shelf by rocking your mouse back and forth in order to drop a fuel can on top of the shelf), realistic dynamic lights (which creates a very eerie environment), and advanced AI (if you make too much noise, the enemy can hear you). Check out the Tech Demo, and I’m sure you’ll be blown away too.

Another game I want to get is MS Flight Simulator X, however I’m still thinking thrice as a lot of airplanes and enhancements designed for FS 2004 are not compatible with FSX yet.

OK, this post isn’t supposed to be about games.

It feels weird coming back to the office. As some of you might have known, I’m extending my internship by one month, excluding the one week break that I took. This time, there are not many other interns as most of them are not extending. The office feels very cold and quiet, without the “college-feel” (quoting my supervisor at work) that it had the last time. I guess this is what work is going to be like when I become a full-time employee.

Anyway, I still have some projects to finish while I’m here. Wish me luck!

… is evil, I tell you. Whenever you have something new to blog about, you’ll tell yourself that you have to blog the backdated entry first before blogging a new one. Before you know it, the new entry becomes backdated too. This is (hopefully) going to be my last backdated entry, purely because I’ve taken the time and effort to actually upload the photos.

Friday, 1 June 2007

Had KFC Miso Crunch meal for lunch. Miso Crunch is KFC’s attempt at fusing western fried chicken with Japanese seaweed and bonito. Weird combination, in my opinion.

In the evening met up with Nicole and her mum and sister for dinner at Ayam Penyet Ria. My treat as I promised them when I started my internship.

Nicole’s sister and mum had the smashed chicken (ayam penyet).

While Nicole and I had the smashed prophet promfet (ikan bawal penyet).

And we had the sour soup (sayur asam) on top of the main course, and bottled tea (teh botol, not in picture) to wash the food down.

Saturday, 2 June 2007

Met up with two old friends, Alex and Chin Fung for movie and dinner at Vivocity.

Chin Fung…

… and Alex.

We watched Shrek 3, which is entertaining, but has a very predictable storyline. Nevertheless, the graphics are amazing and the fairytale references are hilarious. We had dinner at The Mussel Guys.

We had cream of broccolli as the appetizer.

I had sweet and sour chicken for the main course.

Chin Fung had pan seared dory…

… while Alex had some chicken thingamajig (forgot what the name was).

Of course, we have to try their signature dish. Nice, juicy muscles mussels.

And coffee to end the meal. The Geek Terminal coffee is still better.

Guess what we saw after the dinner…

Lamborghini Gallardo in Vivocity for some Italian festival.

Alrightey, so here ends my backdated entries. From now on the entries should (hopefully) be more up-to-date.

Update: Oh yes, almost forgot about the PLAY! A Video Game Symphony concert… Head over to Nicole’s blog to find out more!

Helping out for Theresia’s project, Vibrant Blood 2007…

Vibrant Blood is a special project jointly organised by the Singapore Red Cross Humanitarian Network of the Nanyang Technological University Chapter( RCHN-NTU ) and National University of Singapore Chapter( RCHN-NUS ). It was conceived in 2004, by a group of students from NTU who decided to take on the challenge of bringing blood donation into the public and encourage more people, in particular youths to come forward to embrace blood donation as an integral part of life. This year we have the pleasure of organising it with the NUS chapter.

Vibrant Blood 2007 aims not only to continue this success story but to bring it to a new level to further develop the image of blood donor as one who is vibrant, healthy, fit and fun. He/She is also portrayed as someone who loves life and also gives it to help save people.

Vibrant Blood 2007 will attempt to incorporate a dance competition amongst 3 other activities; namely a record breaking competition, street performances and a blood drive. The venue of choice is the Westmall whose aim of enriching the public through education synergies with Vibrant Blood’s objective of educating the public, in particular the youths, on the importance of blood donation and the responsibility of a regular blood donor.

Vibrant Blood 2007 aims to collect at least 400 units of blood in the two-day bloodmobile and to sign up at least 1500 potential blood donors.

- NTU RedCross & NUS RedCross

Link

Hello people!

We’re a group of NTU students helping a local research agency in developing a voice-recognition system for Singaporeans. For example, such system will allow a Singaporean to ask for directions by saying it out into a machine (e.g. “Computer, how do I get to IMM?”).

To understand how Singaporeans speak, we’re collecting voice samples from Singaporeans. At the moment, we have already completed the collection for Chinese and female Malay Singaporeans. We still need to collect voice samples from 50 people* (Malay males, Indians and Eurasians) who are 30 years old or above.

If you fulfil the above criteria, please do come down to our booth at IMM Level 2, outside Kopitiam to give your voice samples. You just need to read 100 English sentences, which will take up less than 15 minutes of your time. We will give you $10 in cash for your time and effort.

Do bring along your mum/dad/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend. As long as they fit the above criteria, they are eligible to give their voice samples too.

The booth will be at IMM until Thursday, 14 June, daily from 12 noon - 8 pm. For any enquiries, please call Nicole at 9119 0883.

Hurry! Don’t miss your chance to earn easy money and help out in a research project!

Terms and conditions: