The Scam

I received an SMS from an unknown number +62815xxxxxxx this morning. The first moment I saw the number I was 'confident' that it was a scam. I copied the message below verbatim, retaining the typos, redundant punctuation marks, etc. found in the original SMS but masking off the liars' telephone number:

TAHNIAH. Simcard Anda Meme-nangi hadiah Cek Tunai RM. 15000 Plus Reload Kredit RM. 250 dari Peraduan DIGI.Sila hubungi: 0062813xxxxxxxx Terimakasih

It's an interesting morning joke. (^_^) First, the English translation of this Malay message. I try to imitate the errors from the original version in an English way:

CONGRATULATION. Your Simcard Wo-n a prize in Cheque Worth RM. 15000 'Plus' Reload Credit of RM. 250 from a DIGI Contest.Please contact: 0062813xxxxxxxx Thankyou

There are so many loopholes here. For some of them:

• I have to call some Indonesia GSM phone numbers to claim the prize from a contest held in Malaysia?
• Meme-nangi (Wo-n)? Plus (already in English)? Terimakasih (Thankyou)?
• I am using a postpaid plan, yet I just 'won' some reload credit for a prepaid plan.
• (No more... don't want to educate those liars.)

So keep an eye on such scams. If some company wants to award you, logically the message should be from the company. Don't be greedy, be calm, and analyze the whole thing.

[Update] The Anti-Scam

On 5-Apr-07, i.e., about three weeks after receiving the scam SMS above, I received a broadcast message from DiGi (well, the genuine one this time):

SMS PERADUAN AKADEMI FANTASIA & LAIN-LAIN SEDANG DISEBARKAN & KONONNYA ANDA MENANG HADIAH WANG TUNAI.ABAIKAN SMS INI KERANA IANYA SATU PENIPUAN.PDRM/DiGi

A rough English translation of the message:

Some SMS messages are being spread, claiming that you have won some cash prize related to the Akademi Fantasia (which is a local reality talent search show) or other contests. Ignore these SMS messages because they are scams. Royal Malaysian Police / DiGi

Not bad. Although this anti-scam message was sent a bit late, hopefully it has helped some to recognize this type of scams.

The Chinese New Year will fall on this coming Sunday (18-Feb-07). I will go back to my hometown tomorrow. Boss gives us a half-day off. I have to settle at least four things this afternoon, and after that wish to go for blood donation if time permits. I have not made any donation since last May. It's good to learn that Pusat Darah Negara opens until 8pm on Thursday and Friday. The time is convenient for office workers.

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous year!

I don't really hate salesmen. People choose to become salesmen to earn a living in a legal and right way (except those liars pretending to be salesmen), and sometimes they really introduce great things to you. However, some salesmen can be annoying sometimes. You see, some salesmen lie about their products; some salesmen are just too persistent; and many salesmen just know how to talk and don't know how to listen. The last point is interesting. Many motivation courses or talks tell you that listening is better than talking, and many salesmen attended many such courses and talks. Yet you still see many salesmen just keep talking and don't listen.

Over years, I have evolved through a few stages with different ways to tackle salesmen. Tackle? Ya, I mean, to tell the salesmen that you are not interested in their products after you have found them useless to you. This could be a tough job.

Disclaimer: I'm not rejecting sales to slow down the global economy (just a bit). I am only doing my own proper financial planning to control my cash flow. Please don't blame me!

Stage 1: Entertain All Salesmen

When I was in the university, and not long after graduation, I responded to almost all salesmen. When somebody tried to sell something to me, I would listen and tried to be polite. I didn't want to reject them rudely and I didn't like to embarrass people. (See, I'm such a good man... haha...) However, I soon learnt a few lessons from this tackling method:

• They sell basically the same things. Take insurance agents as examples. The first few times I 'entertained' some insurance agents, not bad, I indeed learn a lot of things about insurance from them. However, after listening to the policies provided from 2 or 3 companies, I found nothing quite new from the subsequent ones. They simply tweak the policies a bit and hardly innovate new things. Bad experience came in then: The next insurance agent I met would always tell me that her policies were much better and different. "How different?" "We have to sit down so that I can explain it to you in detail!" I was fooled a few times, and told the next one, "I always don't find any significant difference..." "But mine is indeed very special, guaranteed!" And I was lied again...
• Time wasting. Obviously. Many salesmen don't have the simplest sense that, when you don't feel interested, then better stop and don't waste our time. A good salesman will tell you that, after persuading a customer for some time, e.g., about 15 minutes for selling insurance, don't waste your time further with this customer since he or she won't be a potential buyer. However, many salesmen just can't "let go" after 15 minutes, so they just continue to talk to hope that you would buy from them. Come on! Many customers don't expel salesmen because they feel that it's not polite, and they eventually buy something from you after a few hours of talking because they want to stop wasting time and don't want to disappoint you! But this could also be the last business with this customer.

So I gradually felt that there was no use to be polite to salesmen... I'm sorry. Good people would be bullied in this cruel world. In an ultimate case, my friend and I entertained a salesman and were 'fooled' by her for about 5 hours of non-stop talking! (It happened, I swear!) We even didn't have time to tell her that we would like to go to the washrooms! After learning some hard lessons, and my tackling technique evolved to the next stage...

Stage 2: Reject All Salesmen

Rejected all salesmen! I hated every salesman! They just think about money and commission, that's all! The best way is to reject them! Say "No!" to them!

I once received a phone call from an insurance agent. "Do you have any insurance plan?" "No!" "Maybe we can set a time so that..." "No!" "Probably you should..." "No!" He was a bit shocked, but finally he said, "Nevermind then, thank you for ..." "Bye!" and I banged and hung up the phone! I was indeed very rude (sorry!) during this stage. I often felt very angry and bad after rejecting a salesman. How did she or he get my number? And why did she or he had the right to bother me?

However, but why make myself angry if I've done nothing wrong? Being angry is very harmful to health. There are also a few problems with this method. I had made my name bad. When I encountered some rude and persistent salesmen sometimes, they would argued back with me, said something like I was so stupid to miss out good products. This method is a lose-lose method: Everybody involved got angry.

I gradually realized that I better learn to say "No!" in a more polite way. There are some very good articles from the internet that teach you how to say no in a better and more reasonable way. I have learnt a lot from them... and that brought me to the next stage...

Stage 3: Exhaust All Salesmen

Relax! Salesmen may actually bring you good products. If I don't listen to them, they feel bad as they think that they haven't conveyed the message to me. So, I let them to talk first, and after some time, unless the product is really interesting, I tell them "No!" in a polite way.

I receive phone calls from salesmen occasionally. Some get my phone number from a legal way, and some probably get my numbers in an illegal or even an unethical way.

When I receive such a call from my mobile phone, relax! I put on my handfree set, listen to them for a few seconds, and made decision. For example, a salesman may tell you that she sells some products, and then talks non-stop (sometimes obviously by reading from some standard scripts) for a few minutes elaborating her products. If I'm interested, I will listen and talk with her. If I'm not, I will say that I'm not interested. But sometimes, they won't give up. So I just continue to do my own work while not really listening to her... I just notice when she pauses again. Then I repeat that I'm still not interested or the product is useless for me, probably in different ways. (There are some good techniques here. For example, if you pretend to think for a few seconds, and decline in a reluctant but very firm way, the effect is normally better... Keep learning!) I repeat this for a few times until she feels that she has really conveyed her message, feels exhausted, and can "let go" of her stubborn customer.

Surprisingly, the whole session normally lasts for no more than ten minute before she gives up. And the conversation normally ends happily, although she may feel disappointed. But I guess that such a method is not harmful to our health. For a really very persistent salesman, I will say that I have a meeting now, or if I meet the salesman face to face, I may pretend that there's a mobile phone call coming in for me and sneak away!

I only do such a thing to those salesmen who approach me and are very persistent. I won't look at any salesman promoting credit card at the moment unless I need to apply a new one. In short, I don't invite salesmen if I don't need them, and will only 'listen' to those kamikaze salesmen. I'm sorry, but I'm not so rich to buy every product!

What's my next stage? What's yours?

My site was inaccessible for the last few days (since 4-Jan-07 until now). It's finally up again!

I originally held this site in a web server I had full access to. However, due to some reasons, the server connection had been suspended indefinitely. Instead of waiting it to be reconnected (and nobody knows when it will happen), I decided to look for a good hosting company so that I can continue to expand my homepage. After some studies, I have finally resorted to one. So far, the migration of the site, which is mainly powered by Drupal, is good. One problem still remains: the rendering of the mathematical formulas. Hopefully I can resolve it within this week. No major problem now except that I have not (and may not) brought up my old posts which are not in the Drupal database.

Disaster

In the morning of Christmas 2006, I visited this site and encountered a 'disaster'... the Drupal engine complained that it failed to connect to the MySQL database server! Did somebody attack my site? How should I repair it?

I logged in via SSH remotely, and found that the MySQL server had been shut down abnormally. I restarted it and the site was alive again as usual! But when I wanted to check the Drupal logs, the page didn't load... no, I waited and found that it could load but took more than 10 minutes! What happened?

Diagnosis and Repair

I suspected that there were some problems in the Drupal database. First I checked the number of entries in each table with: (Masked off some critical things here. You think I will show you my password huh?)

\$ mysqlshow -uxxxx -pyyyy --count drupal

And I got it --- the watchdog table contained more than 1 million rows! I used mysqlbinlog to find out all recent queries. Well, Drupal had logged more than 1 million entries of PHP errors concerning the failure of opening some ancestor directory that never exists (which involves something like opendir('drutex/../../../../../../../.. (repeated many times) '). To restore the database performance, I did

mysql> DELETE FROM watchdog WHERE message like 'opendir%';

and I had only about 1,000 rows left in the watchdog table. Surfed the logs page again, but it still took more than 10 minutes! Something still went wrong but I suspected that it's still related to the database. So I modified the function _db_query() in the drupal file includes/database.mysqli.inc to record all queries and the time taken, and added something in index.php to store the results:

if (\$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == 'ip.of.my.computer') {
  file_put_contents('/somepath/result.txt', print_r($queries, 1));
}

Surfed the logs page again, and examined the output file. There were 3 queries where each took about 280 seconds, and all of them involved the watchdog table! To confirm the problem, I performed a simple SELECT COUNT(*) FROM watchdog; and it took about 280 seconds. So the table must have been corrupted somehow.

I did a CHECK TABLE watchdog MEDIUM. After 15 minutes, MySQL told me that the table was basically ok. I think that it was not and would get a different result if I had use the EXTENDED option to make a full scan. In fact the problem could be so subtle that it escaped the scan with the MEDIUM option. But I did not want to waste the time and so I just asked MySQL to repair it for me:

mysql> REPAIR TABLE watchdog EXTENDED;

The EXTENDED option rebuilds the table somehow from scratch, and is not generally used. But I believed that the problem was severe, and I was desperate too! There was no harm using the option but it's expected to take a long time to repair. Luckily, it only took about 6 minutes. I tried

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM watchdog;

again and I got the result in less than a second!

Wrap Up

What had happened here? I haven't delved into it much (yet). But even that it's an attack, it's not severe as no data is lost. Besides, I did regular backup of the site. For security, I upgraded all software involved to the their latest versions, including MySQL, drutex, etc. The binary log of MySQL and the access log of the Apache server recording the disaster are still on the server. So if I want, I can do some tedious forensic work here, and use it against the cracker in the court if there's any... Dare you crack me!

I took some photos of my Chinese abacus last night, selected one of them, and used the powerful GIMP to create some background images for this site. The theme may not look nicer but hopefully not too uglier. This theme makes use of the fixed background image supported by the CSS standard and popular browsers except, as 'expected', IE6. Fortunately, the IE7 patch by Dean Edwards is able to fix the problem and thus I've included it. IE6 users can see the effect but they suffer a bit from the performance, because IE6 browser needs to download an extra 24kb of the IE7 patch and execute the patch before they can see the correct effect. If a IE6 user does not turn on the javascript support, he or she will find this page ugly. Sorry that I don't intend to solve this just for IE6 at the moment. Can the real upcoming native Microsoft IE7 render the background properly?

I have finished reading and cracking the murder case of the latest Kindaichi comics (《金田一之狱门塾杀人事件》). If you are also solving the case, no worry to read on as I won't disclose any spoiler here. I first figured out the essential tricks, but had no idea who the murderer is! The main tricks are interesting, but in my opinion they suffer from some unexplained minor flaws. However, there seems to be no concrete evidence to point out the real murderer. After some thoughts, I had two guesses: It's most convenient for person A to commit the crime, but there's no evidence to point to her/him; It's not very convenient for person B to commit the crime, but there is a minor clue (with some flaws) that probably points to him/her. I read on and found that the murderer is really one of them, but evidences presented are really not convincing. If you are also solving this case, how do you think? All in all, I enjoy the comic but a bit disappointed by the flaws and unconvincing statements.

Although suffering from the toiletgate scandal, the World Chess Championship still finally completed with Kramnik winning the unified World Chess Champion. From 25-Nov-06 to 5-Dec-06, Kramnik will fight with the computer monster Deep Fritz in Germany. I hope that he can win the battle!

I have just finished the novel 2001: Space Odyssey, and I find it quite interesting. Also took some time to verify whether the artificial gravities described in the book satisfy the laws of physics. I have the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, which solves many mysteries in the first book. I hope to finish it as soon as possible, but I still have a lot of other things to do. So I'll read it in a much slower pace this time.

My brother challenged me to solve a murder case in a detective comics. After reading a lot of detective stories and developed my systematic way of mystery solving approach, recently I have been able to solve almost all fictional murder cases, :) provided enough evidences are given. I don't mean to bluff, but I just like to read detective stories because they exercise and challange my brain.

I would like to play the games Myst IV: Revelation and Myst V: End of Ages too. I have completed the previous three series (Myst (Masterpiece version), Myst II: Riven, and Myst III: Exile), and am eager to finish the rest. But I have to empty my time first, as well as 10GB of harddisk space just for Myst IV! The puzzles in Myst series have been quite challenging and attracting.

Jia has been suggesting various opinions for improving my site's interface. Well, her suggestions are reasonable. Thanks! The banner of the page needs some work, and I have been thinking about it these days. By the way, I will write a page explaining the extra things I have done on these pages for IE6. I don't simply say that IE6 is not standard-compliant, but there are hard evidences out there and it's a widely known fact.

The World Chess Championship Match 2006 has begun, and Kramnik is leading Topalov 3-1 at the moment. Latest by 12-Oct-2006, we will see who can laugh last. The match so far has been very interesting, and they have played high-level and really exciting games.

Too ambitious... too many things to do... but I hope to do some things to stablize my income first... :) No choice.