Author Archives: Tech Admin

How Fast Is Internet in South Korea?

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In a country where being digital is an articulate part of the lifestyle, some talk about internet speed and accessibility can be fascinating. This time, it’s a short story about pervasiveness of the internet in South Korea, the home for Samsung, currently the world’s largest electronics company and a part of the conglomerate that contributes for more than 20% of South Korea GDP.

There have been some reports, including these two about the distribution of internet speed in the world. In both reports, South Korea was crowned as the country with the fastest internet speed, with average countrywide speed at 16.63Mbps and 13.7Mpbs respectively. Interestingly, the internet speed in South Korea itself is not dominated by a single region. When looking at the lower scope, the fast internet speed is distributed across the region. Taking the more recent report published by Akamai in one of the report samples, cities in South Korea sweep clean the top 10 and dominate the top 20 under the category “cities with the fastest internet speed”. The striking domination can be seen in the following figure. Continue reading →

Quick Update: Working on the Next Release of Amikelive Adsense Widget

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I have been away for a while from posting contents on this blog. I was a little bit occupied with exciting things at work. However, don’t worry. I don’t abandon the projects I started and am always trying to find some spare time to update them.

As you notice, there are errors with Amikelive Adsense Widget. It seems that the plugin has stopped working since Google updated their Adsense interface. I am now working on the fix and also complete some new features that I was working on but had to be temporarily stopped because of other activities. I hope I can post a new release at WordPress plugin repository this week.

Stay tune!

Quick Guide to Detecting Phishing and Avoiding Being A Victim

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Having talked about spamming, in this post, I would like to shortly discuss about phishing, a technique for identity theft, which in my personal experience, has become more rampant these days.

If it is the first time for you to read this fancy term, phishing is an attempt to steal somebody else’s sensitive information such as username, password, credit card details, and other personal credentials usually done by sending an email containing a false claim to the target. The content can be a threat, warning, and other form of falsified truth carefully crafted to encourage the target to submit his personal credentials. As you may have predicted, phishing was derived from “fishing”. The “fisher” is the person who wants to steal the information and the target is the “fish”. The false claim is obviously the “bait” used to attract and hook the “fish”.

Identity theft is disadvantageous and can sometimes become disastrous to the victim. Let us take a case of a phishing attempt from a sender who falsely claims as your email account provider. The message contains warning to verify your email account by supplying your user account id and password. If you inadvertently submitted the requested information to this site, you might have never imagined how creative the phisher is in exploiting this private information they stole from you.
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VMWare Customer Day 2010 Korea: Cloud Computing Adoption in Enterprises and vSphere 4.1

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On Friday, September 10th, I attended VMWare Customer Day 2010 Korea, which was held at COEX Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul. Even though it has been a while past the event, I would like to share some notes worth sharing, combined with my personal thought about substantial content found in the talks I listened to during the event.

As the event title suggests, the talks mostly covered introductory concept about cloud computing and virtualization as well as some promotional materials about VMWare products. This is coherent with the majority of the audience who came from the enterprises: IT staffs, ISV representatives, and company delegates. Three sessions were arranged for the whole event. The first session was a talk from Mike Sumner, the VMWare Asia Pacific SE Director. He talked about customer journey to IT as a service by riding the cloud and harnessing virtualization. Second talk about VMWare case studies was presented by Lee Mun-hyong, the Director of Channel and Alliance, VMWare Korea. The last session was delivered by Lee-Hyo, the head of VMWare Korea. He explained about vSphere 4.1 especially the new features in the release. The second and third session were presented in Korean so I only grabbed the general understanding and did not really grasp the details.

In his presentation, Mike talked about cloud computing as an emerging trend in the enterprise. He also explained key drivers and phases toward its adoption in the enterprises and an era of IT as a service powered by the cloud. He started with listing several IT challenges in the enterprise environment. The challenges he mentioned include the necessity to deliver more business value, the ability to move faster and stay ahead of the competitors, the competency to maintain secure and compliant environment, and the capability of maintaining a stable system. Legacy IT business model relies on infrastructure ownership and dedicated IT force. With the introduction of the cloud in the enterprise, CIO may consider the transformation from a pay-in-advanced system into a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go system.
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Sample PHP Application: A Simple PHP Command Line-based File Generator

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PHP is a great scripting language to build web applications. Reckoning my first exposure to the language, I have been tinkering with PHP for some years by now. Despite the sluggish improvement and development towards a more architecturally robust, more feature-rich, and less quick-and-dirty programming language recently, I still love coding bytes in PHP. Some people may think of PHP as the language for programming the web quickly. Write some HTML, embed some javascript, add some CSS, put some PHP code, and voila… a dynamic web page is created. I won’t praise how good PHP is for developing a web application. Several companies may have done that. Name Facebook and Yahoo as examples. With some optimization to native PHP codes, both companies have shown how to use the language to cater to millions of users and run a serious business.

In this post, I’d like to highlight another feature of PHP, the command line interface (CLI). In my personal experience, PHP CLI can be an alternative to some administrative tasks. Linux users may have been familiar with shell scripting for carrying out system management and configuration tasks. So, why must PHP? The answer is portability. The same PHP code should work not only on Linux but also on Windows. Some critics may argue that other languages may also have answer for portability. I concur to that criticism while at the same time emphasizing PHP as another viable option.
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