ConceptLane Pte Ltd

10/05/2022

AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650GE - Saving the Earth 1W at a time

28/09/2020

Enhanced the VR exhibition in time to celebrate the centennial birthday of Mr Lim Tze Peng! This adds new features not available during the first exhibition. While the aesthetics are still largely artificial, we hope that in the near future, mobile device computing power will reach an average that enables the use of more realistic shadows by actually generating them. Now that we have a mini-map, perhaps a multi-level space would be fun to implement?

PS: Sorry we had to cheat and implement a teleport functionality, in cases where the pathfinder is unable to work out the route due to the complex layout in this exhibition. We'll keep working on this to improve the realism!

22/09/2020

An uneventful 20th anniversary for us came and passed, in view of the ongoing pandemic that has fallen on our beautiful home called Earth. No amount of digital creations or fancy graphics can save our planet, so we take this opportunity to dedicate our thoughts to Mother Earth and Mother Nature. May we all recover from this and go on to do more physical goodness for them both.

07/09/2020

Just another WordPress folder listing? Unfortunately, all those cryptic looking filenames aren't pages that were intentionally named to prevent people from easily accessing them. They are the work of trojans, and in most cases than not, the result of either a poorly-written WordPress plugin/theme, or one that intentionally provided a backdoor for direct access into the server. Whilst it could possibly be cleaned up relatively easily (though it's time-consuming), it is likely to be futile as the site would already be marked as insecure, and the site would just be compromised again. So businesses, beware of the caveats when you sign up to deploy a website that is powered by WordPress and which uses a multitude of "free" plugins.

* The above image was captured as we were inspecting a client's complaint that one of their websites "wasn't working right". We found a deployment of a Denial-of-Service by using .htaccess files, and then spotted this in another website's folder on their VPS, highlighting the fact that such worms and trojans infect whatever they come across, and in different ways.

17/08/2020

This project was one of the most interesting ones we've done in a while, reminding us of one of our roots in online gaming. During the extensive circuit breaker period, we started dabbling and taking baby steps in WebGL, when Ode To Art gave us an opportunity to compete with other established virtual art spaces and actually implement something. We then went into overdrive, having to express-learn WebGL and a mere subset of the computational logic behind the API, observing and mimicking actual structures and the shadows resulting from various light sources, and determining which computational tasks needed to be avoided in order to provide a consistent experience even on older devices like the iPad 4. Please give it a spin on your desktop and/or mobile device, and share your feedback with us so that we can make it even better for the next exhibition!

PS: No, we have no plans to make it a "multi-player experience" where you will actually bump into another visitor, or have to throw elbow punches to make to move around!

Join us for Becoming and Being [蓄], the fifth solo exhibition of Hong Zhu An with Ode To Art, and our first-ever virtual exhibition!

https://odetoart.com/vr.php?room=hza

Take respite in his delicate calligraphy and gentle fields of colour, and breathe in centuries of art history within each painting.

Made possible by the support of the National Arts Council Singapore

18/04/2020

Following a successful reshape of our Ceph cluster, we managed to craft out a customised module for our own monitoring, after having fleshed out our concept for IoT sensor reporting. We're getting there.

07/04/2020

In this critical period, we will largely be working remotely. However, there is no need to worry, for all our servers have kept to their cases and refrained from socialising with each other. In the meantime, we will be consolidating our virtualisation servers and putting in the final jigsaw pieces to complete our Infiniband+Ceph infrastructure. Time saved on commuting can now be used to further enhance USys and prepare for migration away from our Ubupanel and uCLCP backends. Every day we spend in self-quarantine is a day towards normalcy. We'll get through this and embrace the fresh clean air together in time to come.

17/03/2020

One of our hosting clients notified us that they couldn't receive emails from some senders. Turns out that the sending mailservers aren't properly configured and couldn't STARTTLS with us. Do we turn off STARTTLS capability or get the client to ask their senders to notify their own web host? The latter, but not without first diving into the source code of the mailserver and adding more customisations to turn off advertising TLS for those mailservers. Now we wait and see if it works. Just another ordinary late night.

04/03/2020

Barely a week after trialing our Pacemaker+DRBD+NFS cluster, we tore it down (unexpectedly due to kernel 5.4.0 breaking DRBD), and just 1 day later we're now trialing Ceph storage. Despite our VM hosts having an uptime of over 400 days, this revamp of our infrastructure can't be rushed. We need to absolutely sure this setup can chug along for more than that. As much as it is a production test of the software, it is also a test of the hardware, particularly the Infiniband backbone tying the cluster together.

07/12/2019

Infiniband, Pacemaker, DRBD, PCS, Clustering, and the list goes on. 2 weeks of experimenting and designing our new server arrangements went by in a flash, and soon these buzzwords from years past will make their way into our infrastructure.

20/09/2019

On our 19th anniversary, we choose to mark it with the alpha launch of our online platform USys.SG. Despite it still being in infancy, we hope it will provide relief to startups and small businesses without a proper information system in place. We hope to see more users turns friends, and friends turn users, as we see business relationships as more than just "you pay we do".