An Ada Talk will be conducted at UTAR to introduce Ada and to let the students aware of available technologies in software development. This talk will introduce the history of Ada, a quick comparison of Ada and C, and the use of Ada in all sort of software development. This talk will also help students to realize the available technologies in software development.
Venue: Room PD108, UTAR PJ section 13 campus
Time: July 9, 2008 1430-1630
A 2-day Ada Workshop will be held at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The workshop is targeted to CS students with or without programming knowledge/experience.
Venue: Project Lab 2, 3rd Floor, UTAR PD Campus at PJ Section 13
Time: July 1 - July 2, 2008 0830-1800
Project meeting will be held at 1900-2000 for participating FYP students.
Following the Ada Seminar last month, I was invited to be a judge for FYP (Final Year Project) 2008 at UTAR FICT. There were 3 judges including me. The other two were FICT lecturers (seated from the right). The event took place this afternoon from 1430-1700. This time, all selected projects were software development by nature. Almost all of them were web applications. The finalist projects were online help desk system (web based), web based document management system, activity tracker and costed BOM analysis (web based), web based document template system, progress chart management system and unified interface for video and event management system.
Presentation was generally good except some of the presenters were unable to manage their time properly. As the result, insufficient time to demonstrate their applications with full details.
Compare to the last two FYP judging I had attended, a slight improvement in the way students presenting their projects, the selection of finalist projects and the judging process. There was no over-ambitious projects this time round.
I was giving an Ada talk at UTAR (PJ Section 13) this afternoon. The venue was changed from PD108 (B2) to a computer lab on 2nd floor. This was the 2nd talk (first talk at MMU on February 25) after 3 years of inactivity. I have added quick introduction to Ada2005 to the original slides. I’ve also added some video clips about Ada I found from some Ada web resources.
Sun has successfully completed its acquisition of MySQL. This signifies Sun has positioned itself as a global database player in the US$15 billions database market worldwide. With Sun, MySQL will soar to higher extent.
This acquisition will strengthen our strategic partnership through AdaStar Informatics which has been developing applications under Sun Partner Advantage Program. AdaStar Informatics has developed and deployed applications for Sun Solaris on both SPARC and Intel platforms.
I will be conducting Ada seminars at MMU and UTAR on February 25 and March 5 respectively. The seminar is targeted to lecturers and students with or without programming experience. FET students at MMU are encouraged to join. Please refer here for the outline of seminar.
Venue: MMU Melaka Campus, CLCR2001
Time: Feb 25, 2008 1500-1700
Venue: UTAR PJ section 13 campus, PD108
Time: March 5, 2008 1330-1600
Starting from October 8, 2007 MYT 13:00, we will be performing maintenance and migration to new server with dedicated IP. The migration is part of our expansion and consolidation exercise. Please expect DNS propagation to take up to 72 hours to complete. During this time, you may experience downtime at our site. Please come back again and check for comments on this post for updates. We apologize for the inconveniences. Thank you for your patience.
Warren’s APQ and AdaVox projects are hosted here. APQ is an Ada95 thick binding for PostgreSQL and MySQL databases and AdaVox is a sound software which is a friendly Netscape browser help program.
See the post here.
Wireless hotspots blossom in recent years and have become popular spots for businessmen, executives, working class, students and even veterans to surf, read and send emails. Cafes, restaurants, shopping complexes and many other public installations are providing wireless hotspots to lure visitors. Majority of these public wireless networks are configured with lowest security to allow trouble-free and ultra convenient connections to visitors. People equipped with wireless-capable notebook computers and PDAs overdrive this convenience. While they are enjoying their coffee and communicating wirelessly, little do they know that someone could be eavesdropping their digital conversation.
When you are connected to public wireless network, anyone with some technical knowledge could have easily watching you sending your username, password, messages and essentially everything you send or receive. This is like someone overhearing your conversation in public area. With packet sniffer, anyone with little computer knowledge could effortlessly intercept your wireless signal going to and coming from your computer without you knowing they are doing so.
How? Computers communicate with each other over the network send and receive information in a form of packets. A packet contains information about the origin and destination of the packet in the header. This information includes the IP addresses of both sender and recipient. The body contains the data. When the packets are transmitted wirelessly, anyone within the wireless range can intercept the packets without any difficulties and you knowing it. These data packets travel freely through the air in clear text. There is also no indication that the packets have been intercepted or received by computers other than the intended recipient. It is just like you are talking to your friend with many strangers around you in a cafe. Everyone including your friend can listen to your conversation. The only difference is that they are not necessarily sitting near you. They can be in another room or anywhere as long as they are within the wireless range.
They can receive, save and analyze packets to obtain your username and password and use them against you. The next terrible fact you need to know, is that, the packets can be intercepted even on wired network. As long as the perpetrators are on the same network with you, they can easily intercept your packets using any sniffer software.
When an email client is sending or receiving messages to and from your email server, these messages including your username and password are in clear text and not encrypted.
How can we secure our wireless email? One easier way to do it is to tunnel your email access through SSH (Secure SHell). SSH is the standard for secure file transfer and remote logins over the internet. All traffic including terminal emulation and X11 traffic is encrypted with public key cryptography. It also supports tunneling and forwarding arbitrary TCP ports.
Essentially, anything that passes through SSH will be encryoted and appears to be garbled and meaningless to human eyes. Through SSH tunneling and port forwarding, all incoming and outgoing email as well as your username and password used to access your email will be encrypted.
In this article, I am going to show the steps to configure SSH tuneling on Mac OS X. I assume you already have set up public and private RSA or DSA keys for SSH. Although it looks a little tricky, the setting up of these keys can be as simple as the execution of a few Terminal commands. I will skip this part.
An email client typically uses POP mail which usually travel over port 110 to receive email. Sending email via SMTP uses port 25. This process of sending and receiving email needs to be redirected through the SSH tunnel to take advantage of its security. This is done by using port forwarding.
The setting up and controlling of the SSH tunnel is done through Terminal with long command-line instructions that intimidate users. Fortunately, some programmers have developed small applications to handle this job with easy to use GUI.
There is a FREE Mac OS X utility called SSH Tunnel Manager (STM). It is a convenient GUI utility allowing you to create SSH tunnel to connect between SSH and your email client. It is simple to configure when you have understood ports and forwarding and SSH tunnel. Once configured, it can connect the tunnel automatically every each time you login to your Mac OS X user account.
On Linux, there is Gnome SSH Tunnel Manager (gSTM) which appears to perform similar task.
Download and install STM to your Applications folder. Launch STM. You will see STM’s main window (SSH Tunnels). Click Configuration to add new tunnel. A preference window will appear. Click [+] button below tunnel list. Enter the name of this tunnel, your ssh username, password and your ssh server location. The standard ssh port is 22. Most likely your ssh server uses port 22 as well.
Next, you will need your mail host and port number. In my case, my mail host is mail.adrianhoe.com, POP port is 110 and SMTP port is 25.
Then you’ll also need to configure unique port number to correspond the server’s port number for each connection you want to make. For instance, to redirect your POP’s 110 port number to your SSH tunnel port number 1100. In my case, I added another 0 to 110. Similarly, I added 00 for my SMTP tunnel. Remember, the local ports must be greater than 1023 and should not have conflict with anything else running on your local machine.
In this case, my POP and SMTP port (110 and 25) are tunnel through port 1100 and 2500 on adainmotion.com respectively. You can use a local IP as your ssh host.
Since you want to redirect through the tunnel locally on your computer, you’ll use Local port forwarding. At the preference window under Local redirections, click the [+] button to add new port forwardings. Your unique local port will be on the left, then your remote mail host, and followed by your mail port number on the right.
The last thing you need to do this click on “Options” button on the lower right of the preference window. Make sure the “Auto connect” option is checked. Other options and the command-line instruction are available in this drawer:
Close the preference window. You’ll see your new tunnel in the main STM window. Click on the grey start button to connect. Hopefully, after a few seconds, you’ll be asked to enter your password for your ssh account if password is required to authenticate. Enter your password and you should be connected to your tunnel.
The last thing you need to configure is your email client. Before you can take the advantage of SSH tunneling, the settings of your email client have to be tweaked slightly. The following steps are specific to Apple’s Mail application. It is possible to make similar changes in other email clients.
Open your Mail’s preference and go to Account. Under Account Information, change “Incoming Mail Server” to localhost.
Click on “Server Settings” under Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP). Change “Outgoing Mail Server” to localhost and “Server port” to 2500.
Lastly, click “Advanced” tab. Change “Port” to 1100. Save your changes and quit Mail.
Launch STM and allow it to connect automatically or click the grey start button to manually connect the tunnel. Once the tunnel is connected, you’ll see a green button beside your tunnel name. Launch Mail. Assume everything has been configured correctly and is working, your email should automatically be encrypted, garbled and safe from preying eyes on the same wireless network.
If you see your mailbox in the Inbox has been greyed out, that means Mail cannot connect to local port 1100 and 2500. Check whether STM is running and your tunnel has been connected. If your computer shuts down or goes to sleep, it will disconnect the tunnel. A brief outage of the wireless connection will destroy the tunnel as well. In this case, reconnect the tunnel.
You can configure Mac OS X to launch STM every each time you login to your user account. On the dock, right click the STM application icon and make sure “Open at login” is checked.
That’s it. You have just protected your email from wireless sniffing. These steps should help keep your email more private than you think it was.
AdrianHoe.com is set to provide more high value services to business of any size in Asia region. Besides our native and web applications development, we have been providing web design and hosting services to customers.
Today, we launch 2 new services. Our outsourced system administration and ISAS (Information Security Assessment Service) provide a more complete and affordable high value solutions to ensure smooth and trusted computing for your ever demanding business operation.
Our capability to begin truly professional operation with short notice to anywhere in the Asia region provides quick responses to tackle emergency cases.
For more information, please visit our Services page.
Ada In Motion announces the partnership with AdrianHoe.com and AdaStar Informatics to provide web applications development. The applications will be targeted to Mac OS X and Solaris.
The trio represent a new force in web applications development in this region. The team aims to develop mission critical web applications using Ada and AdaCGI as the main development tools.
Ada has earned excellent reputation in mission critical system and software development since 3 decades ago.
AdrianHoe.com together with AdaStar Informatics, announced today its new service to provide web application development. The new service also provide website design and hosting. AdrianHoe.com will develop web-based application to provide interactivity to web sites it develops and hosts. The development also includes database applications development for web-based applications.
We have been developing a pilot project since two months ago. This project is a mission critical web application aiming to provide on-line registration and management of contestants in a sporting event. Its final implementation is in 2009/2010 in a world championship.
Using advanced reliable software development technology, AdrianHoe.com is confident in delivering mission-critical and reliable web-based applications to its clients.
The applications will be developed and deployed on Mac OS X. The company chooses Mac OS X because of its reliability and robustness as a platform for web applications. The company has no plan to develop on Linux and other Unix at the moment.
The Ada programming language has been field-tested in mission critical system/software development. Originally developed for DoD (Department of Defense) in the 1970s for the development of embedded real-time weapon systems, mission critical C4I systems, scientific and general purpose computing. Ada has been field-tested in both military and civilian avionics.
Ada’s readability makes it easy to read and understand when maintaining huge software source code. It’s reliablity increases ROI (Return of Investment) and reduces down time by the ability to identify bugs and possible software glitches during compilation.
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard for interfacing external applications with information servers, such as HTTP or Web servers. A plain HTML document that the Web daemon retrieves is static, which means it exists in a constant state: a text file that doesn’t change. A CGI program, on the other hand, is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information.
With AdaCGI, it is possible to development web application using the Ada programming languages. Web applications developed with Ada are more reliable and suitable for mission critical environment of all modern businesses. Downtime, support and maintenance costs can be effectively reduced thus cost-effective for businesses.
The demand of cross-platform applications is increasing as businesses trying to reduce IT expenditure by moving to open source software such as Linux. The web applications running on a web server which can be accessed by any clients regardless of their operating systems render the traditional computer programs (platform dependent executable binaries) useless under multiple OS environment.
Web applications can be deployed on server running Linux, Mac OS X or Solaris. Its clients can accessed the applications from any computers running different operating systems using any web browsers on local and remote network.
By moving to open source operating system such as Linux, businesses can save thousands of dollars in software licensing scheme.
AdrianHoe.com uses technology such as Ada and AdaCGI as development tools. The applications will be targeted to Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux running Apache Web Server and MySQL as the database backend.
We believe our experience in developing mission critical software using Ada will be of advantage in this area. AdrianHoe.com is also the few developer that uses Ada in this region.
With increasing demans of web presence from the small and medium business, AdrianHoe.com has decided to provide contents development, hosting and administration services to company seeking to leverage corporate identity and open up new business opportunity with minimum IT budget.
AdrianHoe.com will provide complete turnkey solutions from design and development of web contents, to hosting and to provide administration services according to customers’ requirement helping them to achieve maximum benefits of web with minimum IT spending.
A workshop will be held at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). This workshop provides learning experience in GUI design using Ada and GtkAda for cross platform GUI development. The workshop is targeted to CS students with both programming knowledge/experience in Ada and GUI programming in Linux using GTK+.
Venue: Project Lab 2, 3rd Floor, UTAR PD Campus at PJ Section 13
Time: Oct 3, 2005 0830-1800
I was invited to be a judge for the FYP (Final Year Project) competition at FICT (Faculty of Information and Communication Technology).
Adrian Hoe will present Software Process Seminar at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). This seminar introduces PSP (Personal Software Process) to CS students.
Venue: PD 208, Level B3, UTAR PD Campus at PJ Section 13
Time: Jul 13, 2005 1400-1600
A 3-day Ada Workshop will be held at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The workshop is targeted to CS students both with or without programming knowledge/experience.
Venue: Project Lab 2, 3rd Floor, UTAR PD Campus at PJ Section 13
Time: May 9 - 11, 2005 0830-1800
Adrian Hoe will give an Ada Seminar at Multimedia University, Bukit Beruang, Melaka. This seminar is targeted to lecturers and students with or without programming experience.
Venue: UNIX Lab, First Floor, ITC FIST
Time: Mar 11, 2005 1000-1200
Adrian Hoe will give an Ada Seminar at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The seminar is an introduction to the Ada programming language and is targeted to all levels of students.
Venue: PJ section 13 campus, PD007
Time: Feb 23, 2005 1430-1630
AdrianHoe.com marks another milestone today with its business fully operational. Adrian is really excited and looking forward to this day.
AdrianHoe.com is set to provide software consulting and development services using Ada. We provide public seminars and workshops on Ada, Transition to Ada, Software Process and SCM at universities and corporate offices. We also provide software project outsourcing services to help our clients reducing IT expenditures. With our expertise in mission critical software development, we are confident in delivering reliable mission critical software products to our customers.
Adrian Hoe will give an Ada Seminar at College University of Technology and Management (KUTPM). The seminar is an introduction to the Ada programming language and is targeted to all levels of students.
Venue: G-01, KUTPM, Shah Alam
Time: Oct 29, 2004 0900-1100
The new website for AdrianHoe.com had come out from the design board to embrace his new extension as a software engineering and consulting house.
The new extension will be fully operational by December 25, 2004.
A 3-day Ada Workshop will be held at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The workshop is targeted to CS students both with or without programming knowledge/experience.
Venue: PA134, UTAR PJ Campus
There are 2 sessions to choose from:
Session 1: Oct 4 - 6, 2004 0830-1800
Session 2: Oct 7 - 9, 2004 0830-1800
Adrian Hoe will give an Ada Seminar at University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR). The seminar is an introduction to the Ada programming language and is targeted to all levels of students.
Venue: PJ section 13 campus, PB005
Time: Aug 18, 2004 1430-1630