Tony Du’s Blog

Love seem to be the hot topic for many of us. Apparently, Love is also a topic to be discussed by scientist. I found this online article about love interesting. Are you deeply in love with someone right now? Scientist say that this loving feeling will not last very long :

Your heartbeat accelerates, you have butterflies in the stomach, you feel euphoric and a bit silly. It’s all part of falling passionately in love—and scientists now tell us the feeling won’t last more than a year.

The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers…

…The Italian researchers, publishing their study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, said it was not clear how falling in love triggers higher levels of NGF, but the molecule clearly has an important role in the “social chemistry” between people at the start of a relationship.

*source*

One might ask how would a couple be together for a very long time and still madly in love with each other if this is the case? I think being in love isn’t just about the happy feeling that you have when you first meet the person, it’s about devotion and repsect that you have for each other. It’s about caring between two person, about sharing the happiness as well as sadness. It’s about forgiving, accepting each other mistake and weakness etc. I dont know how to define love in short and concise way or maybe i just dont know what love is

Đố ai định nghĩa được tình yêu
Phải chăng như thế một buổi chiều
Nàng đến bên ta tựa gió nhẹ
Hồn ta ngơ ngẩn …. đó là yêu?

Sigh, i dont know how to translate my poem to English!
By the way, any of you Biology major or Chemistry major know how to measure the “nerve growth factor (NGF)” ? LOL, i would like to test it out …hahhaah

I decided to write this post to show how to have random banner on your wordpress blog because when i wanted to have random banners on my page, i can’t find a good site that show me how to do such thing. This is very simple actually.
Note: I didn’t play around much with other themes but i’m sure that this method will work with any theme that the header image is originally referenced in style.css

Requirement:

- Your banners (of course )

Now you’re ready to go!
- Create a directory and put all the banners you want to display into this directory.
- Backup you style.css and header.php (in case you mess up). This’s usually in the directory wp-content/themes/your_theme/
- In the style.css file, locate the block defined for you header. It should looke similar to this:

#header {
background: url(’img/greentopa.jpg’) no-repeat bottom;
height: 175px;
margin: 0 auto;
width:700px;
padding:0;
}

You should save these information to use inside the header.php file. After saving these, you can delete all the content in this #header block as you dont need them. The header image will be reference from the header.php file instead

If you have your random file plugin activated, then you can use the function provide here, namely function: < ?php echo c2c_random_file('‘);?>

Since you need to declare the header block in this file, you can do something like this:
(Notice how all the value for background-position, bottom, height, width etc. is the same with what originally in the style.css file)

[div id="header" style="background-image: url(< ?php echo c2c_random_file('‘);?>); background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position: bottom ; margin:0 auto; padding:0; height: 175px;
width:700px;” ] [/div]

Save your new style.css and header.php file into your theme directory and you should have your random banners working

This post is driven by the comment that Terry left on my “unforseen circumtance” post:

“This is my first time visit this site despite I knew you for couple years. I aggree what you said and I had the same feeling, too. Comparing with many of my friends with my same age(!I am old), I choose to seek my destiny in USA. My life is full of unforeseen circumtance. I only had $275.85 when I just landed amercia. But now I graduated from University and I am going for my graduate studing. I never thought I can be as I am today. But I did it, and I believe we all did it. If we can embrace what we had and always full of hope and faith. Then, unforeseen circumtance will become the motivation to push us forward.“

For those who dont know Terry, he’s my second sister’s boyfriend/fiance. Their engagement is coming soon (Dec 10, 05) . Congrat! ……To me, he’s not just a soon-to-be brother-in-law, but also a good friend. He’s also computer science major and we talk about it alot. I want to use his comment as well as story as an example to tell myself and everyone else that no matter what circumtance you’re in, you can always strive forward to make it better. You must alway have hope and believe in yourself. One of my favorite quote by Confucius is :”The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.”

I have to admit that i had alot of luck compare to many others. I can’t be as i’m today without that “luck” but i also telling myself.. that i can’t be dependent of it. I try hard on everything that i do (so far only academic and career). Whenever i feel like i’m slacking off, i alway try to find example that will give me more “will power” and push me forward. Let us all try our best to reach our full potential and hope that luck would come to everyone!

But remember balance is the key! (sorry i dont know to translate into English - whoever can, please do tell me)
Ho.c kho^ng cho*i da’nh ro*i tuo^?i tre?
Cho*i kho^ng ho.c ba’n re? tu*o*ng lai…..

Thanksgiving is here! I would like to say happy Thanksgiving to all my friend around that world; yeah…to all of you, those in Vietnam, England and here in the US. I had a great time so far at home although i’m being unproductive *sigh*. Beside all those lucky one who’s alway at home with their family, most of us students are not, so this is a great chance to share all the quality time with your family. I did and will continue to do so. Last night, my family had a party (with Turkey of course) and then we sang karaoke afterward. I sang to much that my throat was kinda hurt. I drank quite a bit too . Some of you might say, why the heck we have the party so early? Well, we want to have a party with only my family and then tonight (the actual Thanksgiving day), my uncle invited us to come over along with many other relatives.

I consider myself a noob in the cracking/hacking. With much to learn, i’m still have some basic knowledge of cryptography. WEP is a (still) popular protocol to secure your wireless network for most regular user.
Here some info i know about WEP.

A little about WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy):
WEP uses the stream cipher RC4 for confidentiality and the CRC-32 checksum for integrity. Standard 64-bit WEP uses a 40 bit key, to which a 24-bit initialisation vector (IV) is concatenated to form the RC4 traffic key. However most of manufacturers implemented an extended 128-bit WEP protocol using a 104-bit key size. A 128-bit WEP key is almost always entered by users as a string of 26(Hex) characters (0-9 and A-F). Each character represents 4 bits of the key. 4 * 26 = 104 bits. Adding the 24-bit IV we will have “128-bit WEP key”.

Flaw in WEP
Unfortunately, key size is the major security limitation in WEP. Cracking a longer key does require more packets be intercepted, but there are active attacks that stimulate the necessary traffic. There are other weaknesses in WEP that are not helped at all by a longer key.
Because RC4 is a stream cipher, the same traffic key must never be used twice. The purpose of an IV, which is transmitted as plaintext, is to prevent any repetition, but a 24-bit IV is not long enough to ensure this on a busy network. The way the IV was used also opened WEP to a related key attack
One can have a passive attack that can recover the RC4 key after eavesdropping on the network for a few hours. It is possible to perform the attack with a personal computer, off-the-shelf hardware and freely-available software.
There are two generic weaknesses of WEP reported:
* the use of WEP was optional, resulting in many installations never even activating it, and
* WEP did not include a key management protocol, relying instead on a single shared key amongst users.
In 2005, a group from the U.S. FBI gave a demonstration where they cracked a WEP-protected network in 3 minutes using publicly available tools.

How to crack WEP in 3 minutes
A few months ago, two FBI agents demonstrated how they were able to crack a WEP enabled access point within a couple of minutes. 3 minutes to be exact. This is unbelievable when compared to, say 3 days of work. Here is how they did it, and how you can do it. You may need to know your way with each and every of these tools to get this done. You can ask Google for that. Anyway, if you are familiar with them, just do as follows :

1. Run Kismet to find your target network. Get the SSID and the channel.
2. Run Airodump and start capturing data.
3. With Aireplay, start replaying a packet on the target network. (You can find a ‘good packet’ by looking at the BSSID MAC on Kismet and comparing it to the captured packet’s BSSID MAC).
4. Watch as Airodump goes crazy with new IVs. Thanks to Aireplay.
5. Stop Airodump when you have about 1,000 IVs.
6. Run Aircrack on the captured file.
7. You should see the WEP key infront of you now.

The software runs on Linux . And finally, I think you should always use a combination of 2 or more security features. As for what you need, get Aircrack (Includes Airodump, Aireplay, Aircrack and optional Airdecap for decrypting WEP/WPA capture files) and get Kismet.
Source is here