David Sum

So it’s that time again where I need to get a new phone. If you know me you would know I’m still using the original Samsung Galaxy S. I don’t think I have to tell you that the phone is far beyond its retirement point.

The obvious options on the market or soon to be are the HTC One and the S4. When I think about buying any kind of hardware, I always take a look at the specs. The specs seem to be identical except the cameras. On the outside the One seems to have a more durable build and a nicer feel to it. Not too mention that the One has front facing speaker and a LCD screen. Choosing a phone should be based on what phone will fit to your current lifestyle and a pretty good indicator of that is how you use your phone now. The problem is I don’t use my phone that often besides tethering (both phones offer LTE). Sure, texting, calling and maybe a photo every once in a while. Maybe if I have a better phone I would see more usage. So what phone should I choose?

Why does Samsung pretty much own the Android market?

It’s no secret Samsung holds a large part of the market. Everyone attributes this to their massive marketing budget. I’m not saying they’re wrong but maybe it’s time to think about what gives the other manufacturers a part of the market especially when their marketing budgets are not even close to Samsung’s. The answer is obviously hardware quality or build quality. We can take a look at the Nokia 920 or HTC One to see a good example of this. These phones look great and are much more sturdy compared to the plastic feeling of Samsung’s. Samsung provides slimmer and more lightweight devices by building phones made from plastic.

What would happen if Samsung built a phone like Nokia or HTC did? If other manufacturers can’t stop Samsung from having a large part of the market now, wouldn’t Samsung gain market share? I like to think that those that want to see better quality devices from the company that practically owns the android market should probably think about the end result.  Overall I’m not bashing either side for not spending enough money or having lesser quality phones. I think between the One and the S4, I wouldn’t be wrong for choosing either one.

It has been about 4 months since I have bought my Korean monitor and I have to say that I really love it. Maybe it’s because my previous monitors (now accessory displays) weren’t the greatest but this monitor is incredible. If you’ve been on the market for a new monitor for the past year or so, you would have noticed the popularity of these 27″ Korean monitors. They provide a high resolution of 2560×1440 for a price that was never possible with domestic monitors. Here’s a little review on the model that I purchased.

Yamakasi Catleap 2B

Now in the title I mentioned my monitor’s model. It was a little bit more expensive and I’ll tell you why. The monitor itself is built exactly the same as regular Yamakasi Catleap monitors but the difference is in the circuitry. The Catleap 2B is the overclockable version of the Catleap monitor. It allows the refresh rate to be raised all the way up to a theoretical point of 134Hz. Not all monitors will get to that high of an overclock but generally between 110Hz to 120Hz.The overclock is not just dependant on the PCB itself but the cable from your video card to your monitor. Although I still use the cable that came with the monitor, many people swear that 24AWG dual link DVI cables have better throughput for a better overclock. The cable that came with the monitor seems to be holding up pretty well at 2560×1440 @ 120Hz.

The panel quality itself is pretty good. The batch I ordered from didn’t seem to suffer from many if any pixel defects at all. No stuck or dead pixels and no real back light bleed (at least from my perspective). I still kept in mind that the panel was graded as A- for some reason or another but overall I don’t see any defects that jump out at me.

For regular monitor use, the resolution really helps in certain applications like programming and graphic design. Browsing the web can be a little awkward at times. Sometimes text needs to be blown up to be read at comfortable levels and some website layouts might not fill the screen. You can see this on left-aligned websites such as YouTube. On the other hand, the IPS display and resolution brings anything like gaming to a whole other level in terms of experience. You will enjoy your games more with these displays especially coming from older TN panels or lower quality monitors in general. One thing to note for using these monitors for gaming is that you need to have the GPU power to run games at that resolution with the eye candy at decent settings. I’m using two GTX 670s in SLI which I find is the sweet spot for performance. I’m certain a pair of HD 7950s would work too.

Overall the monitor is great. Whether you buy a regular or an overclockable model, you won’t be disappointed. You can find these Korean monitors on eBay but if you’re looking for the overclockable version there are two websites I know of that sell them. They are 120Hz.net and OverlordComputer.com.

Sorry I didn’t really go into much technical depth but if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

It seems that Mega has been receiving a lot of flack for promoting its security and it’s easy to see why. There are many websites reporting on some oddities found in Mega’s implementation of some of these security features. The reason I say oddities is that some of the ideas behind the security are good but the ways in which they were implemented are not ideal (and would indicate very little knowledge about cryptography). Having the most ideal solution may not always be practical for a project but sometimes you can’t just go with “good enough” especially when security is one of the main features.

What was found about Mega’s implementation are poor decisions like the confirmation link covered by Ars Technica. Another example focusing on the verification of the javascript has been posted over at fail0verflow. I chose these two examples since they provide working proof of concepts (POCs).

So what is my point in all of this: I don’t think Mega should be disregarded so quickly despite being under the scrutiny of many security researchers. Kim Dotcom has openly tweeted supporting the security debate and even mentioned an encryption challenge. If you also take a look at this post over on the Mega Blog,  they address several of these articles. The responses show some of the ideas behind their decisions. In the second last paragraph of the post, you will find they speak about the verification of their javascript files that are distributed across their CDN. The same thing the POC addressed over at fail0verflow. So it will be interesting to see a specific response to that.

Almost all of the responses from Mega should be considered as damage control but similar to any type of software, version one may not be the greatest. It’s obvious Mega accepting the criticism and implementing ideas properly are the right steps to take. If we see all of the issues fixed, I believe there’s still hope that Mega can accomplish its security goals.

Just a quick update to start the blog off. I recently picked up a new VPS to use as a remote development & source code management server. I did some basic preliminary testing and the performance is not much worse than what I had with my previous VPS host. Spec wise: 2GB of RAM, Intel E3-1240v2 (shared of course), 50GB storage and 2TB of bandwidth. The specs are a little high for a development server though (for my uses) but the price made me go for it.

The price: $15/quarter. That’s ridiculous cheap. I expect the servers to be oversold considering it is using OpenVZ and they weren’t able to provision my VPS due to running out of IPs. At this price, I don’t think I could go wrong but I’ll keep you updated on performance over time.