spoonfork

Well, at least in Malaysia. Joel has a nice little article laden with economics mambo-jumbo that explains the dynamics of software pricing. The article goes all out explaining and demonstrating how to price your software. Ehem. Ehem Ehem. Seriously speaking though, if you are selling enterprise software in Malaysia, none of the stuff that Joel explain applies. You see, you don't get to sell software here. OK, if that sounds 'huh?' enough, let me just say that business in Malaysia is dirty, and if you are a software wizard thinking of selling your software and earning maximum revenue, things are not by the book. I'm in the business, now, and it sucks.

Errm... if so, then how about our own teechaz? Unfortunately for me, all my teecharz were cool, yo!

Others were simply dopes. One such teacher was the Shiga Prefecture "sir" who kept his marijuana stash at school because he didn't want any of his family members to find it.

Bali bomber writes how-to

After Imam Samudra was charged with engineering the devastating Bali nightclub bombings two years ago, he taunted his police accusers in court, then greeted his death sentence with the cry, "Infidels die!"

So when Samudra published a jailhouse autobiography this fall, it wasn't surprising that it contained virulent justifications for the Bali attacks, which killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists.

But tucked into the back of the 280-page book is a chapter of an entirely different cast, titled "Hacking, Why Not?" There, Samudra urges fellow Muslim radicals to take the holy war into cyberspace by attacking U.S. computers, with the particular aim of committing credit card fraud, called "carding." The chapter provides an outline on getting started.

The primer on carding is rudimentary, according to U.S. and Indonesian cybercrime experts, but it provides a rare glimpse into the mounting threat posed by terrorists using Internet fraud to finance their operations.

"The worry is that an army of people doing cybercrime could raise a great deal of money for other activities that terrorists are carrying out," said Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, a U.S. Internet-security training company.

(Link)

For the past few days, I've been churning lines Perl codes, mostly parsers for various types of firewall and IDSes. At any time, the parser needs to parse anywhere from 60,000+ to a few hundred thousand lines of asskeys (more than 20MB file size) and insert them into a RDBMS, thus performance is really an issue. Interestingly enough, I found one piece of code that I wrote earlier this year that consumes so much CPU and memory, all because of one subroutine - converting dotted IP addresses to long format.

sub ip2long() {
	$ip = shift(@_);
	my @ips = split(/./,$ip);
	foreach $tuple(@ips) {
		$binNum = $binNum.dec2bin($tuple);
	}
	$BigNum = bin2dec($binNum);
	return ($BigNum);
}
sub dec2bin {
 	my $str = unpack("B32", pack("N", shift));
	$str =~ s/^0+(?=d)//;
	my $RetStr = "";
	for ($i=0; $i< 8 - length($str); $i++) {
		$RetStr=$RetStr."0";
	}
	$RetStr = $RetStr.$str;
	return $RetStr;
}
sub bin2dec {
	return unpack("N", pack("B32", substr("0" x 32 . shift, -32)));
}

Absolute murder! I don't know why I was so naive, but the fix is the following:

sub ip2long {
	$ip = shift(@_);
	@arr = split(/./,$ip);
	foreach $a (@arr) {
		$longIP < <= 8;
		$longIP |= $a;
	}
	return $longIP;
}

Just another day in coding-land.

As usual, Gerai Biskut Aunty Lau and Madam Tan is opening at the Fiesta Market at Mont Kiara. We sell: gift baskets, home made cookies (all kinds, macam macam type ada), chinese herbal jelly (also homemade), tapioca chips (comes in two flavor, au naturel and oh-hot), and kungfu jelly. So head over there!