I am back in the UK after a 10+ hour uneventful flight from Male' to London Gatwick on Monday. I even managed to pass through immigration and customs without any problems despite the presence of the large number of electronics components and circuit boards - items that had caused me much trouble at Indian and Sri Lankan airports recently.

However, things managed to kick up into storm thereafter and I had to forego rest and sleep till early morning on Tuesday! Disaster continued on as I ended up oversleeping, then going through the hassle of catching two trains to land me in Reading city in time before the end of working hours. The next task of moving into my (new) home for the year also had me shuttling between the city center and the letting agent on a mix of travel on bus and foot. It took a while before paperwork was over with and I could move my old stuff in and finally set my butt down.

The place isn't too far from the university and is quite cozy. It is still in the process of being whipped into liveable shape but I reckon that will take a teeny bit more time 'coz I'll probably be in deep slumber out this sheer exhaustion that is setting on me!

Toodles.

Phew! I am back in Male' tonight after a tiring week in Malaysia. My schedule was quite tight and consuming and didn't leave me with extra time to explore the place. I didn't even get the chance to climb up the world famous Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur as I had hoped to

Time to snore...

Selamat Datang! I am in Malaysia at the moment after flying into Kuala Lumpur yesterday. I am here on a business trip and plan to stay put for a week.

This is one country I hadn't been to before and so was quite surprised by the sights. I quite like the looks of the things around here. The city is landscaped amazingly well and gives the impression of being well developed. The airport, the public transport system (LRT) and the buildings are very admirable.

The shops are vast in number and there seems to be quite a lot of range - in quality and variety - available here. Most noticeably of all, the price of things are very much affordable (especially compared to the UK!).

Miadhu, one of Technova's recently launched websites, was attacked yesterday. The intruder gained access to the site via our custom developed Content Management System(CMS) backend that handles the management operations of the site. Access to the CMS was gained by means of password guessing - a work which was made unbelievably trivial with the presence of an account name and password to match - "miadhu" for both! The attackers then attempted to delete existing content and to add data to the website of which the latter they managed to execute successfully. They left behind random messages in the articles they added - messages that were as deep and simple as a "kekeke" to ones dissing Jabir and President Maumoon.

Miadhu notified us of the intrusion and we spent a good hour rummaging through the logs, mapping out the actions of the attacker and assessing the damage. Patching the door through which the attackers entered only involved changing account names and passwords in addition to advising the client to maintain secure password policies.

The website is now back running as it were...

Apparently the only food outlet (allowed to be) open in the buzzing city of Male' past 1am is the joint at the first floor of the Fish Market. I have no idea WHY it is the ONLY place allowed open, however, I certainly appreciate having atleast one such place open past the normal times. Afterall, even the shops are all closed after 11pm

Going all the way to "hotaa" above "mas maarukeytu" in the rain is a bother but the place certainly proved itself useful again tonight when me and my buddies found at a loss for a place to grab some chow after hours of work into the night. I am all for having more places open at night. I am sure lots of people who, like me, usually live on a 180 degree out-of-phase pattern compared to the conventional work/sleep schedule, will greatly appreciate the presence of extra choices!

The official website for Technova finally limped onto the net today. Completed with the design and layout work by Immi, the website is the first in a series of planned developments over the coming weeks as per a recent company resolution to strengthen our online presence and services. The website currently contains some basic information about us, our projects and services. We hope to load it up soon a stash of in-house programmed commercial software and enough of free utilities and services.

Meanwhile, if you or your business is interested in developing a desktop software or designing a website/web application, do feel free to drop us a line.

The Technova site resides at http://www.technova.com.mv/

DVDs carry something called a Region-Lock. It is a restriction that prevents DVDs marked as a particular region from being run on a DVD drive set for another region. This isn't usually a problem - as long as the DVDs are set to the same region as the drive or the DVDs aren't region locked at all. However, the problem starts to arise if you have a laptop that you carry around in your travels and want to play movie DVDs from the various "regions". It will also be problematic if you have movie or game DVDs bought from another region in the world and it happens to differ from the region your DVD drive is set to.

Most of the computer DVD drives also carry this restriction. If you inspect the properties of your DVD drive, chances are it is set to a particular region - the region/country you reside though normally you wouldn't even be aware of this setting if you haven't encountered a region locked DVD. The older generation of DVD drives had something called RPC-1 (Regional Playback Control). RPC-1 leaves the enforcement of the region lockout up to the particular media player you run on the computer. This is quite easy to bypass and so the newer DVD drives all carry RPC-2. RPC-2 drives enforce the region locking by themselves and don't leave it up to the player software. The drives usually allow a maximum of 5 changes to its regional setting. So if you had a DVD marked as US and changed your drive to US region and then changed it again to play a DVD from Australia and then so on till finally you've used up the five allowed changes, then the drive becomes locked to the last region you set to. That means DVDs from all other regions are unplayable!

Thankfully, there are workarounds and software devised by a sneaky smart bunch of people who don't like this restriction. One of the more popular methods is to use a software called DVD Region+CSS Free. It acts as a layer between the DVD drive and the player software to allow playback without the RPC-2 hassle coming into effect. Sadly, the software isn't free. I prefer the next available method - known as firmware flashing. Firmware flashing involves installing a "patched" firmware for the DVD drive that revert the drive to a RPC-1 drive. Firmware is software that runs on chips inside the DVD drive and work independent of the computer the drive is installed on. Thus, firmware flashing leaves the drive as a RPC-1 even all on its own and gets rid of the need to install special software like DVD Region Free. However, I must note that firmware flashing isn't the end of it all - you still need special software even for RPC-1 drives to make it work smoothly. A software to do just this, called DVD Genie, is available for free and is a small download.

If you are keen to get your DVD drive flashed to RPC-1, head over to www.rpc1.org where they have listings of patched firmware for the various manufacturers and drive models. A bit of warning though, firmware flashing CAN leave your drive dead as a brick if done incorrectly. So read up and double check before going through with it. The RPC1.org site has excellent information guides and an active forum where there have been many questions clarified and problems solved - READ IT!

Enjoy!