Author Archives: Tech Admin

Sample PHP Application: A Simple PHP Command Line-based File Generator

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PHP is a great scripting language to build web applications. Reckoning my first exposure to the language, I have been tinkering with PHP for some years by now. Despite the sluggish improvement and development towards a more architecturally robust, more feature-rich, and less quick-and-dirty programming language recently, I still love coding bytes in PHP. Some people may think of PHP as the language for programming the web quickly. Write some HTML, embed some javascript, add some CSS, put some PHP code, and voila… a dynamic web page is created. I won’t praise how good PHP is for developing a web application. Several companies may have done that. Name Facebook and Yahoo as examples. With some optimization to native PHP codes, both companies have shown how to use the language to cater to millions of users and run a serious business.

In this post, I’d like to highlight another feature of PHP, the command line interface (CLI). In my personal experience, PHP CLI can be an alternative to some administrative tasks. Linux users may have been familiar with shell scripting for carrying out system management and configuration tasks. So, why must PHP? The answer is portability. The same PHP code should work not only on Linux but also on Windows. Some critics may argue that other languages may also have answer for portability. I concur to that criticism while at the same time emphasizing PHP as another viable option.
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Fedora Quick Tip: Resolving Permission Denied Issues in HTTP and FTP services with getsebool and setsebool

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If you are running Fedora Linux as a server, one issue you frequently encounter is strange permission denied error message triggered when you are accessing one of the available network services run on the server. There are a lot of network services to mention, but HTTP and FTP are two good examples of such services. Assume you are trying to access FTP server on your Fedora box. You type the IP address of the server and then supply the username and password. Voila!!! You thought you would be immediately logged in. But instead of seeing the files in your home folder, you are shown an error message. The error message may vary, from something like “Login incorrect for user blah” displayed by Midnight Commander, “500 OOPS: cannot change directory: /home/blah” from Total Commander, to other error messages shown by different FTP client programs.

If you are 100% sure that you supply the correct user and password information, why couldn’t you get in? Let us assume that you have root access to the server so that you can remotely troubleshoot from the console. This post will give some guide on how you can solve this problem based on common configurations of a Fedora server.
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Fighting Against Spam Comments, an Endless War for Blog Owners

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I have been experimenting with comment settings in this blog to observe how willing spammers leave undesirable footprints aka spam comments on the blogs. Someone might have said that spamming is as pervasive as the web itself and it grows as the web evolves and reaches more audience. Still, having a hindsight experience in analyzing spam comment trending and behavior will be beneficial for me and also other website owners and bloggers especially when they are considering a loose commenting policy on their website.

Interaction in social web sites

As the web evolves to be more social, we can also observe higher level of interactivity on the web. Not only quicker page load, better content presentation, and improved system interface is interactivity characterized with, it also includes a simplified way of interaction among the website or web application users. In a bigger picture, interactivity encompasses user-application interaction and user-user interaction. If we talk about user-user interaction, we may think about creating such a user friendly platform for them to interact and communicate. Specific to blogging, user-user interaction can take form as commenting on the posts and also other user’s comment.

Now, here the question comes. If we can provide our users a friendly interface for interaction even for first-timers, can we expect for more quality interaction? And my personal answer to this is it depends on how good we are in implementing the website growth strategy. The first thing on which attention should be put thoroughly is the content. “Content is the king” is an undisclosed truth that tops the strategies towards website growth. I have been analyzing the growth of this technology blog by comparing number of posts in a certain month with the incoming traffic (user visits) for the corresponding month. I found two cases where traffic was higher than the average. The first case is the month with quality post(s) that drew users’ attention regardless of the total number of posts in that month. For the second case, it is the month with more posts, regardless of the quality, compared to the average monthly number of posts.
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Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.6 To Be Released at the End of August

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It is very exciting to notice that Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.5 has reached around 1450 downloads after a month and one and a half week. My brain calculator says, there are around 35 daily downloads for the plugin. The number, despite still far from giga numbers, is frankly beyond my expectation. It is since the plugin is very simple by nature and the codes were created from scratch and tested for less than a day.

I would like to extend my gratitude to users who have been using this plugin on their WordPress blogs by continuing the development and improving the features. Amikelive Adsense Widget 0.6 is now on the way to the public release. One incremental feature in this release is streamlined Adsense configuration of the widget. On version 0.5, users have to manually copy and paste several Google Adsense parameters into the form. While I personally think that this does not require much time, some busy users out there may feel happier if this process can be simplified. And yep, I hear you. The configuration will be as easy as flipping your palm.

This version is scheduled to be available on downloads at WordPress from August 31st, 2010. So, stay tune!

Technical Paper: Energy-aware Security Management Utilizing Adaptive Security Mechanisms for Wireless Sensor Network

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Energy has been an important subject these recent years. While some people are advocating more efficient and sustainable use of energy through the green energy movement, some scientific and engineering fields should include efficient energy usage into the equation in order to provide an effective solution. One of these fields is wireless sensor network. Wireless sensor network is a subdomain of distributed system. The network consists of distributed nodes that communicate one another wirelessly. As the name entitles, nodes are equipped with sensing capability (humidity, temperature, air pressure, etc) and these sensed data should be delivered to a collecting point, which is usually named sink node, to be processed later. Unlike traditional network that is connected to sufficient power-supply, nodes in wireless sensor network (other than sink node) are usually restricted to energy-constraint. The nodes are mostly powered by battery packages and due to the placement of these nodes in topographically challenging area, frequent battery replacement is undesirable. Thus, it is imperative to involve efficient energy usage in the design.
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