and so the prodigal son returns

Its been 6 months since I've felt the urge to blog. While Facebook and Twitter are pretty good to share quips, they still cant beat blogging. So many things have happened in the past few months - love was found, love was lost, OSSA, FYP, Syscan, CEH. Not to mention quitting WoW until Cataclysm comes out. Also built a new rig with the help of Leong Aik and Esmund.

Love
I wish it didn't have to be this way and it's something I always will regret. I'll never forget the memories we made together. Perhaps one day we might meet again.

Organizational System Security Analyst (OSSA)
One of the best 5 days of my life because I had her in my life while going through the course. I managed to do pretty well for this certification - pulling off a 91.2% landing me in the Honours division. It seems that getting into the Honours division is actually pretty rare.

Final Year Project
I'm doing my final year project with Ishaan, Esmund and Cheng Shen. We're working on the implementation of IM-based honeypots. Its actually rather interesting since we get to work with Python and Honeypots. I'm really looking forward to the next term, its going to be so fun.

Syscan
Urgh, We didn't do too well during the CTF. Honestly, we could have done alot better if we had planned better. I ... Urgh. It makes me sick when I remember how the winning team won.

Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
Well now ... I'm a CEH now. To be honest, I don't really feel like I've earned the certification. While I did put in effort to study, the main reason why I managed to get 91% was due to Samson giving us practice questions to keep drilling on. Some of the facts did get into my head but its not much. Hopefully during the next few months I'll have time to really go through the material and fully grok it.

My rig!

• Intel i7 860
• Asus Maximus III Formula 
• 500GB Caviar Black HDD
• 4GB Cosair RAM
• CM 690 II Advanced case
• ATI Radeon 5770 from MSI

Its pretty slick! The main aim of this system is to let me utilise virtual machines without lagging and I'm pretty happy with it. Only things I'd do to improve the rig would be to add more RAM and a larger HDD.

Life so far
Its been pretty meh. Seriously meh. I'm hating myself because I'm become fat and weak. I'm going to change.

Amazing

I finally found the right mood to blog. The beautiful thing about it is that I'm procrastinating now. Instead of revising for my Systems Development Techniques test, I've been trying to edit XML files for my warlock. Oh well.

The past two weeks have been pretty intense. Jeremy and I were the emcees/host/whatever for the IT Security Awareness Day. Alot of effort had to be put in to get a working script to the exacting standards of our lecturers. After that followed the grilling. Thank god its over. Hopefully the next time I get to emcee, I'll start work on it very much earlier and schedule many more rehearsals so that it would be more fluid. ITSA day was overall a success. Sadly one of the speakers I was looking forward to listening to got caught at the airport and was unable to attend. Hi ho hum.

Yesterday was the deadline for the Perl assignment. True to what Mr Wong said, majority of our class started working on it 1 week beforehand. A small minority started 3 days before. I hope everyone managed to submit on time. The first assignment for any language is always a challenge. Once you have internalized the basic syntax and the control structures, it becomes so much easier. Think Java 1 to Java 2. The first assignment was easy yet we took ages to complete it. While I know that hindsight is 20/20 but our second assignment in Java 2 proved *much* easier since we understood the basic concepts and were able to apply the advanced ones to a certain extent. I hope that this proves the same for C later in the semester.

After playing a few AB games to "destress" after the perl submission, I started researching into our ethical hacking(ETH) assignment. The first few tasks are pretty easy to execute but task 5 is the killer. Thankfully after much google ninjitsu, I managed to find an acceptable solution. I doubt it would be possible to work in a real world situation but for the lab its just fine. Further research into writing meterpreter scripts would come in handy.

I've come to the conclusion that I don't like people having holidays which start just when I'm supposed to take exams. The feeling sucks when people call you out and you can't go because you need to revise. Oh well. Don't worry best friend, after this week I have 3 whole weeks to while away. I'm sure I would be able to schedule you into it :P

Well thanks for reading. Writing this was cathartic - I've got so many things to say but so little time to share.

Musings

"I got bored. I blogged".

Thats how this blog got started up. I'm kinda sick of WP and since I'm with Google for everything else, its not much of a stretch to move over. There are so many things going on now - ITSA Day, Ethical Hacking Special Interest Group, AISP Student Chapter, Perl assignment, Applied Cryptography reading. In addition to all of that - I'm raiding again. I think I've gotten the hang of managing my time during the week but weekends are still slouchfests in my chair - mindlessly marinating. I suppose that I really should get off my ass and go outside but ... Yeah, you know the feeling.

Alright, I've really got to pay attention to WEBS but the lecture is really boring. I prefer doing the tutorials and practicals. I'll just share this lovely XKCD cartoon. This is for anyone who had to read Cryptography specs.