I started sponsoring a child in Laos through World Vision

I have just started sponsoring a child who live in the district of Phonethong (丰桐), at the northern part of Laos (寮国).

This is done by joining the World Vision Malaysia Child Sponsorship Programme by contributing RM50 per month per child.

Child sponsorship is about bringing hope and making a world of difference for a struggling child, his/her family and their community. It will help remove the obstacles of poverty and diseases placed in the child's path and help him/her discover love and the unique potential he/she possesses.

Currently, there are about one thousand children in Phonethong who are still waiting for a sponsor to provide them access to education, health care and food security.

While we are fortunate enough to be born and live in a place that have food to eat, clean water to drink, basic facilities such as electricity, transport, telephony and even Internet, we have to also realize that there are people living in other parts of the world who suffer from starvation, poverty, bad living condition, etc.

You can also sponsor a child (or more children) in those less fortunate places through World Vision, with a minimal portion of your monthly income.

This is a good deed of charity, that will plant good seeds in your karma.

Note that contribution to World Vision is not Malaysian income tax deductible, but this shouldn't be the reason to deter you, right?

Is Windows 7 Home Premium good enough? Do you need Professional or Ultimate edition?

MS Windows 7 has been around for quite some times now, and the OS for new computers nowadays will be Windows 7 (no more Vista nor XP), beside Linux.

If you were to pick Windows 7, as a home user, you have a few options. Most PC vendors will let you select between Win 7 Home Premium or Win 7 Professional.

The question that many buyer will ask: Is Win 7 Home Premium good enough? Do I need to pay extra for the extra features in Professional or even Ultimate edition?

I found a report by Ed Bott in ZDNet pretty informative.

After reading the article, I found that most home user should be enough with Home Premium, unless:

• Your computer has more than 16GB RAM, or plan to upgrade the RAM to that amount in near future.
• You want easy access to network projectors.
• You want a one-button way (the Presentation Mode) to disable things like pop-up notifications and screen savers.  
• You want a built-in Encryption File System (EFS) to encrypt a file or folder inside your Home folder so that it can only be unlocked when you log on with your user credentials. (Note: there are 3rd party alternatives which are equivalent or better than this)
• You want to have a licensed copy of Windows XP (at no additional cost) to run as virtualized machine within your Windows 7.
• You want your system image backup files to be stored across the network. (Home Premium will store it locally)
• You want a built-in folder synchronization feature similar to Windows Live Mesh. (You need to install separately for Home Premium)
• You want to make full use of Active Directory features. (Do you have many Windows PC at home until you need to use Active Directory?)
• You want a built-in Remote Desktop server for other to remotely access and control your computer.

The above are additional features in Win 7 Professional on top of Home Premium. And the below are additional features in Win 7 Ultimate on top of Professional:

• Boot from virtual hard drive
• Availability of Multilingual User Interface (MUI) packs. (Language Interface Pack is available for other editions of Win 7)
• BranchCache and DirectAccess to improve connectivity on networks that use Windows Server 2008 R2
• AppLocker
• BitLocker drive encryption
• Subsystem for UNIX applications

Mystery code "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a" in US Cyber Command emblem cracked

The emblem/logo of newly established United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) has something unique from the emblems of other units in US Department of Defence (DoD).

If you look carefully, you will notice a ring of mystery code "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a" along the inner gold ring of the emblem.

Over the past few days, this code has become the hot discussion in the Internet, and also well reported in the news media. By now, the code has been cracked.

It is the MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) cryptographics hash of US Cyber Command's mission statement, which is:

USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.

In fact, the message above cannot be "decrypted" from the code itself, as MD5 is a kind of cryptographic hashing method instead of 2-way encryption. However, if you know the original text, you will get back the same code by hashing it with MD5.

One major use of MD5 is to verify the integrity of files and messages stored in the computer and/or transferred over the network. If the content is not the same from its origin, the MD5 code generated will be different. We call this unique verification code a "checksum".

Let's try yourself to generate the MD5 code for the above mission statement here. You can also try to crack it here. If you wonder how it can be cracked, just read the explanation on that webpage.