The new WordPress
Just finished upgrading WordPress to 2.7.1 with a totally new user interface. I still prefer the one in 2.6.x so I guess I need a little time to get use to the new UI.
The upgrade is inevitable because some of my sites were affected by Yahoo! Counter malicious malware. It is a nasty injection of script. I could not locate where it was injected and my web host wasn’t very helpful. I decided to upgrade, hopefully, to wipe out the code injection.
Now, I have to file a request to Google to clear the malware listing of my sites.
Ada Obsession
Well, well, well. Kazeserver alpha RC1 has to be delayed due to some design issues and I am rewriting most part of the software so that the source can be understood easily. For the past two weeks, I was troubled by the old design but I have got a new picture now.
Isn’t Ada code easy to understand? Well, yes. But I was using a lot of Unbounded_String in records which made my code hard to read and understood. While Unbounded_String is compatible with database operation, it lacks the understandability and readability if compared to String (1 .. 10) for example.
Today, I am totally obsessed in Ada and am feeling the strongest Ada obsession after a couple of years. The feeling is still burning. If my Ada obsession keep burning, I believe I can release KazeServer for alpha testing before of June. Hopefully.
Patched a security hole in KazeServer
While I was at Honda waiting for the technician to reprogram the ECU, I found a security hole in the authentication part of KazeServer. An unrecognized user id with a null password would grant access to KazeServer but without any significant usability but posed a potential risk.
I quickly identified the cause and rectified the problematic logic in the program design. One down and many to do. One of the other critical problem is that KazeServer will get over with initialization and execute even without the MySQL server is running. A serious bug though.
Another 3 more days to release Alpha RC1 and yet so many problems and unfinished parts. I feel the release will have to be postponed then.
Pre-Alpha RC1
I am in the midst of getting the KazeServer to roll out. During this pre-Alpha RC1 stage, works have been a little pressured especially cleaning up parts of the codes to make it neater and more efficient. A number of factors are also affecting during pre-Alpha stage.
One of them is the gnat Ada compiler issue on Ubuntu Hardy Heron or 8.04. Hardy comes with gnat-4.1 with a number of packages not added. Without these packages, I can’t build AWS-2.3. So, I have to roll out Alpha RC1 on Mac OS X until Ubuntu Intrepid or 8.10 with gnat-4.3 is released (hopefully with gnat-4.3 by October). I have another option which is I have to move to Debian Etch with gnat-4.1 but including the libaws-2.2.
libaws-2.2 is a pre-built library for AWS on Debian Etch. I am developing using gnat-4.4 and AWS-2.3 on Mac OS X. Moving to Debian Etch means I am downgrading the version of gnat and AWS and I feel a little skeptical about it. This is one thing I hate most, version inconsistency among the Linux distro.
After talking to my friends on this matter, it looks like I have few choices but to target on Mac OS X for the moment considering the tasks of installing and get the Debian Etch up and a whole lot of uncertainties in gnat-4.1 and AWS-2.2.
Entering Alpha stage
Finally, after weeks of experimental development, KazeServer is entering Alpha development stage. I expect to roll out Alpha RC1, hopefully before this weekend.
KazeServer is a web-enabled membership management system that allows registered members of an organization to login to review their membership data and other membership related transactions or records. KazeServer is developed 100% with Ada and AWS (Ada Web Server). The application itself is a web server. No web server, e.g. Apache, is needed to run KazeServer. It is a totally stand-alone independent application with a built-in web server (AWS).
Looking for a web hosting provider?
Alright, you need to find a web hosting company which provides web hosting services at a price ranging from $4 to $8. And you want a detailed review of their web hosting service to ensure reliable service. Look no further, visit webhostingchoice.com for a list of web hosting providers. It is easy, quick and hassle free.
At webhostingchoice.com, you have a comparison chart of pricing, fees, disk space, transfer and rating to help you choose a web host of your choice. Click on every links to checkout the web hosts’ websites to learn more about their products and services before you jump in.
This site also includes a learning center to help you through the web hosting jargon words, hosting scams, marketing gimmicks used by web hosting providers to lure and lock in customers. The site provides comprehensive advice and FAQs to guide you selecting a web host and to avoid pitfalls and tricks.
A list of useful links and resources is also included for your convenience. You may want to sign up their newsletter for monthly updates of hosting tips, offers, coupons, interviews and etc. to keep you abreast of the web hosting business and to enjoy discounts from coupons.
Take a look before you jump!
China’s proven world class competency
During the snow hazard in China this February, the Chinese government had successfully managed the natural disaster and crisis with much professionalism in such a short period of time. According to an unconfirmed source, the Chinese government managed to develop a Disaster Management System in just 5 days. 75 software engineers from the Chinese military worked around the clock for 5 days to bring up a web based Disaster Management System to collect, manage, disseminate, coordinate, and to provide command and control to the military disaster relieve team during the recent snow hazard.
The system was developed using Ada, AWS (Ada Web Server) with a little of PHP and Perl. The system deploys a MySQL database running on Linux. The system is hooked up to air-borne SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) for real-time acquisition of landscaping information in snow hazard affected area to help assessing the damage of rail ways, roads, housing and forest. The Chinese army engineering company was dispatched by the system to areas in need of assistance.
I have yet to receive further details of how the system works and probably will not. Anyway, that shows the Chinese ability and responsiveness in dealing with natural disaster. Hail China!
Looking for Windows web hosting?
If you Google for “Windows web hosting”, it returns 3,260,000 or more of possible websites providing Windows base web hosting services. These web hosting company offers a wide range of hosting plans and offers. To skim through all these searches for a right plan is not an easy task and usually daunting.
WebHostingChoice.com provides you a competitive list of windows hosting plans and company. The website also provides information about scam, domains, dedicated server, and a lot more in its learning center to help you understand jargons of the web hosting. You can search or browse web hosting services by features. Perfect for beginners to learn about web hosting to avoid pitfalls that could possibly hamper your website traffic and popularity. It saves you time and money. Try it out today.
If you are running a web hosting service, you can advertise your hosting service here by submitting your web hosting company details. A great way to start your web hosting business from home and let your website and web server monetize for you!
What else? You can subscribe to WebHostingChoice.com newsletter by submitting your email address to receive up-to-date web hosting business trends and information. You will never be left behind and always ahead for the latest offerings.
Free Web Polls
Alright. You need to get an idea what your visitors think of an issue. You need a web poll which is easy to setup and most importantly it is free and does not take up additional disk space or database. There is a free web poll which provides myspace polls. It takes less than 2 minutes to sign up and get your poll up and running. Everything is stored and calculated on their server. Everything they offer is completely free and no pop-up advertisement or banners.
Spam emails and your privacy
Have you been wondering why are you receiving those spam emails? Worst when you check your email with your colleagues around and suddenly a porn email pops up. It is so embarrassing. There is a convenient software to remove porn. It can delete any files using secured method is higher than government standards, making sure the files you have deleted can never be recovered.
The software, Evidence Blaster, does not only securely remove any files or folders, it also protect your privacy by clearing all your private information about you in your browsers and email clients leaving no trace of what you did on the Internet. The software helps you to safeguard your job by covering your tracks before your employer can find any from your computer.
Make a copy of your favorite website
Have you ever come to a website and found the contents very interesting, you saved it but later after a month, you can no longer find that page again? Some websites have dynamic contents. After a certain period, the contents will be removed to conserve disk space. But, that article has something for your research paper and now it is gone!
Well, there is a website to allow you to copy web site, save it to your local hard disk. Unlike save page in web browsers, the software saves the html code, grabs the graphics, audio and video at lightning speed. Once these have been downloaded and stored on your local hard disk, you can browse off line anytime even though the original page has been removed.
This Web Site Downloader is an useful application to archive websites and/or dynamic contents for future reference. It is easy to use. Just 4 simple steps: 1. Create your project, 2. Enter the URLs, 3. Begin downloading, 4. Start browsing off line!
1 million visits
Yipee! My website has surpassed 1 million visits milestone on this last day of 2007. It took almost 6 years (since February 1, 2002) to reach this mark. A good reason to celebrate.
I like to thank all visitors and fan readers from all around the world for giving the support. Thank you and I wish everybody a Happy New Year 2008. May you and your family in good health and have a prosperous new year.
How to choose a web hosting provider?
There are thousands of WHP (Web Hosting Provider) with various plans. It is very difficult to make comparison of these plans and services offered by these WHP. Finding one is already a hard start. Web Hosting Choice (http://www.webhostingchoice.com) lets you source your favorite WHP. It also provides useful database query tool to search for the WHP of your choice according to your requirement or budget.
The query tool is very easy to use. Just enter your budget and requirement parameters, for example, the monthly fee you are willing to pay, the amount of hard disk space and bandwidth you expect to be provided. Then it will list all the WHPs that fit into your budget and requirement. Simple!
Whether it is for business or personal website hosting, no more wasting time, Web Hosing Choice is the right place to begin with.
Steganography and Information Security
One of the major threats in this information age is the exposure of sensitive information in the Internet. The most common method of securing information is through encryption technology. Today, 128-bit technology is the commonly used encryption method in emails and documents. Recent upheaval as my ISP closing down port 25 for SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) has rung an alarm to my computing needs on the Internet. My ISP’s decision is to curb spammers who have abused direct SMTP access to email servers. The act is a foolish one as this will not stop spams but at the same time, it affects those genuine users.
A 128-bit encryption can be broken into with cluster computer. A cluster computer consists of computers, called nodes, with one or more CPU. These computers are connected to a network. A special program capable of distributing calculation tasks to all the nodes is needed. This architecture is called Beowulf. Breaking a 128-bit encryption is just a matter of time depending on the number of nodes and the number of CPUs on each node.
My ISP forces all direct SMTP connection to be routed to an unsecured proxy server. As an emergency contingency to my Internet use, I quickly setup encryption for my email client. So far, the closing of port 25 has not affected me.
As I have the need to send sensitive work information across the Net, I feel the encryption is not enough on a unsecured proxy server. I would elevate the level of information security by using steganography together with encryption.
Steganography is a technique to embed information to a digital photo or picture without altering the photo or picture at eye level. The technique uses advanced algorithm to manipulate bits of data in the digital image with the bits from the information I am going to send. To extract the information from the encrypted digital image, an original image is the key. Only my intended recipient has an original copy of the digital image.
Information Forensics
What is information forensics? Information forensics is a science of investigation into systemic processes that produce information. Systemic processes utilize technology, primarily computing technology, in creating, delivering, storing, evaluating and processing of information. This process is usually complement by manual process. Information forensics investigation dwells into the aspect of creation, operation and evolution of the enterprise information.
My first exposure to information forensics was during my project seeding at UTAR. Dr. Robert Tee was a good friend of mine and he exposed me to information forensics. Although we did not dwell too much deeper into it, I did some research myself and practice it. I provide Information Security Assessment Service to my clients on demand basis.
Information forensics is also very useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). My current SEO effort has fully utilized my skill in information forensics investigation to optimize my blog search results on search engines. I also utilize this skill to investigate the visiting patterns of my visitors by cross-referencing their IP addresses from various sources, visiting destination, search criteria, and other interests. From this information, I can have a deeper understanding of the visiting habits of my visitors and identify their search interest. To date, I have identified some spammers and reported them.
I am amazed how information forensics investigation helps me in SEO. If you would like more information about SEO or ISAS services, please visit here.
Safari 3
I updated to Safari 3 two days ago. It is included in the free 10.4.11 (Tiger) software update. Although it is still in Beta, it is already usable and it has got many features which I like.
- Movable tabs – It is sometime a need to rearrange the tabs according to the tasks I am working with on the browser. When I was too tangled up with web projects and web browsing, I used to like Firefox as it allows to rearrange tabs.
- Reopen all windows from last session – This is another handy features which you can reopen web pages where you left off after say, you accidentally closed the browser. Again, I don’t need Firefox anymore.
Rendering of Chinese characters on Safari is the most superb. No web browser can beat Safari. This is another great reason why I still stick with Safari.
MySQL server down
I’ve recently experienced a frequent downtime of MySQL server at my WHP. It was down twice in a day yesterday and thrice in this month. Apparently, I think some processes had overloaded the server and brought it down.
I contacted the tech support of my WHP and they were able to bring the server up in less than 15 minutes. They have done a great job.
Yesterday, I wrote a message to Fathi Said, CEO of IX Web Hosting informing of the downtime I have experienced and my concerns. This morning, I received a call from Chris Bingham, the Customers Relation Manager. He offered me to move my hosting account to another server hopefully that will solve the problem while their technical support will fox out what has been overloading my current server. So, expect my sites will be down for a few hours during the moving exercise.
This is the greatest support I ever had amongst the WHP I had hosted with. I will recommend IX Web Hosting if you are looking for a web host.
Looking for a home based business?
Have you noticed your neighbor and your friend’s husband do not need to go out to work? Do you ever admire them having their own home based business? Well, if you do and you don’t know how to get started, here’s a good tip for starting your first home based business.
The Internet has opened up a whole new dimension in our lives. We are able to communicate face to face looking at each other across continents, able to share information with a click of the mouse and etc. Many people has turn home based in this century to conserve earth resources like gas, time and to reduce company expenses. Many businesses also go home based to minimized operating expenditure.
Many people like to have home based business because of minimal capital involvement, flexible working hours, don’t need to meet clients, business across countries’ borders, and you are the boss! Just to name a few. The benefits of having your own Internet home based business have no limits. It is time to discover yourself the benefits of home based business.
What kind of business is good to start you off?
How about phone card affiliate program? USPrepaid.com offers you an attractive package to start you off with a website of your own domain name. Sign up is very simple:
- Think of a catchy unique .COM domain name.
- Sign up at USPrepaid.com.
- Setup your website.
- USPrepaid will provide you some training.
- Market your site.
USPrepaid offers over 850 phone card brands with commissions up to 50% but mostly about 22%. Your operating expenses are the $74.95 one-time setup fee and monthly subscription fee of $19.95. There is minimum risk as you don’t have to pay a huge capital upfront. When you have made some sales, your commissions will be paid with cheque. But if you are not residing in the U.S., your commissions will be paid in the form of traveler’s cheque (in U.S. Dollar) via Fedex.
USPrepaid will provide you training for setting up your site, checking inventory, sales and profit; selecting products and setting up prices and all you need to run your Internet home based business. USPrepaid will also design your website and it will be up within 72 hours!
If you are thinking of starting up a low cost home based business with minimum risk, USPrepaid’s phone card affiliate program will be a good start for you.
Kazehakase – The Web Browser
Kazehakase (風博士) is a web browser created for Unix-liked system with Gtk+2 libraries and is heavily based on Gecko rendering engine.
It supports multiple tabs, RSS and periodical auto update which is useful for monitoring come websites without AJAX.
The web browser is named after the short story Kazehakase by Japanese author Sakaguchi Ango.
Mobile Marketing
Have you ever received a SMS or MMS for marketing some products or services on your mobile phone? I have received many recently. Many are not local origin.
Technologies such as Internet and mobile phone services such as MMS and 3G have opened up a whole new dimension of marketing channel to businesses and corporation. A new marketing strategy called mobile marketing is increasingly becoming the most popular marketing tools. Businesses can deliver marketing content directly to the palm of targeted consumers.
A survey has found that more brands are ready to spend larger proportion of their marketing budget on mobile campaigns in the very near future. About 71% have projected to spend more than 10% of their marketing budget in mobile marketing campaigns in the next 2 years. The survey have also indicated about 10% of consumers receiving SMS marketing have requested for more information on products and services grew from 32% in 2006 to 58% in 2007. More survey details can be found here.
How do you perform mobile marketing? First, you need to have mobile marketing software. GoLive! Concierge is a industry leader in mobile campaigns management suite. Setting up your campaigns with the software is fairly easy. You can provide services such as: subscription, ring tones and wallpapers download, SMS voting, Text-To-Win, reminders, polling, auction, chat and much more; to your targeted recipients.
GoLive! Mobile is also having an in-house design team to provide your company WAP Site Design or Mobile Website Design. You can host your content with GoLive! Mobile’s WAP Site Hosting or Mobile Website Hosting plan. If you are looking for a complete suite mobile marketing products and services, GoLive! Mobile is the right place to look into.
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