, and attended some very interesting sessions. The highlights were these 3 sessions:Speak, present and impress!A session on advanced presentation skills. The presenter was very knowledgeable about the art of presenting. He touched on the differences between presentation, speech and academia skills. Many people start their presentation with the words “I”, which actually belongs to a speech where the speaker has power over the audience. The presentation should be about the audience, and hence the first word should really be “you”.The main point that hit me was that many people were “post”-senting instead of “pre”-senting. A good example is myself, I usually use Powerpoint slides to highlight points, and just read them off and explain a bit about it, and in short just read out the slides to the audience.This apparently came out of the ancient religious tradition, where the clergy could not read, and the priest had to read out for them. Presentation should be about clarity and value, not fancy Powerpoint slides that we read out to people. Very interesting session, and I highly recommend it to anybody who presents regularly to audiences.Exploiting and defending networks & web applicationsThese are actually 2 sessions, one specifically on web applications and the other on networks. It’s targeted towards people internal to an organization who have to understand how crackers think and will attack their networks. Very similar in content, with minor differences in between. In hindsight, I could’ve probably just attended one of it and get full understanding of the session.This hands on lab walked us through the process that an attacker might take to attack a network system. A simulated environment was on hand, and it was surprising how easy it was to execute things like an SQL injection attack, based on small errors that web applications give out to users (ie. exceptions that are not caught). The speaker is a security consultant that has been doing this for a long time, and he explained how vulnerable most systems he goes into are, including some quite large banks and companies.Main point from these 2 sessions: make life difficult for a cracker to break into your system, for it’s not possible to completely eliminate security threats.
It’s Kurnia (Cun-Cun as we call him) ’s birthday today. All the best for life and the future Cun !
Itchy watery eyes, stuffy runny nose, irritating sneezes, headaches …. what do all these have in common? They’re symptoms of hayfever / allergies, and I got them !!! It’s so damn annoying and I feel like gouging my eyes out sometimes because it’s very itchy, and my nose is running almost all the time.
Took anti allergy pill to make things better for a bit, and yet in the morning these come back. Aaaaaarrrggghhhh.. annoying…
Gyargh…. my building must be the most fire alarm friendly around. The alarm just seems to go off at will. The last 2 weeks, every Friday and Saturday, on or around midnight, it goes off a couple of times, letting us know of its presence.
Some people have said it’s a malfunction caused by the second phase building next to us, and that it was fixed last week. And yet for the last 2 nights in a row, it kept going off around the same time, and appeared to come from the same floors in the middle of the building. The fun part? This building’s management just keeps mum on every issue around, hardly any notification about it, and when there’s some small announcement, it just doesn’t give any useful information.
I just hope this isn’t some punk playing pranks on us, because if it is, I sure hope he/she gets to meet the whole building in an egg throwing contest or something. Grrrr….
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