Author Archives: Tech Admin

Happy Easter (and finally some updates)

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Hi fellas,

How was your easter going? I hope it was great. This easter I got a lot of easter eggs (at least to eat them all at once) and It was really fun. I notice how the culture differs between countries and it’s really fascinating to see and live with the Korean culture, the whole new things which I never experienced before.

On the other way, I’m also a bit sad because this blog seems a bit abandoned. These recent days, circle of events occured and forced me to rearrange priorities. This doesn’t mean that I don’t care about this blog at all. I have a lot of To-Dos piling up in my reminder program and my notes. I hope and I do hope that the list will be checked one by one but I also realize that I have to be wiser and manage things and time more effectively. This has been issues for a while and I’m now still working on it.

Anyway, finally I’m now a student again. During the sabbatical, I had come to a conclusion that advanced studies might help in making me grasping the bigger figure of my interest. While this opinion might not hold true for every single person, in my case, I don’t regret this decision (or until this time, I haven’t regretted the decision). Sure, there is big difference between the academic environment and the industry. However, some experiences I got during my past work turn to be helpful in my academic study and I am now step-by-step identifying the bigger picture.

Hence, I’d also like to inform that the-state-of-being-a-student-again somehow inspires me to enhance the plan on what should I present to the community through my web page. This will reflect in streams of updates in this website. Other than my toys (read: PHP-based apps), I’d also like to put some white papers, ideas, or other kinds of work which could be helpful for someone out there. Certainly, I’ll also put copyright and licenses into consideration (especially when it’s related with other’s work) when publishing things on my site.

I also notice some comments here and stacks of emails in my inbox. I will read and provide sufficient reply following this post. So, we’ll get in touch soon.

The Gist of New Logo

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It’s been a while since I started working on my homepage and applications. It’s been a long run and it still needs more time before I’m confident that my application site is ready to be used and reviewed by the internet citizens. It has been fun though, because this time I’m about to bear and grow my own baby. So, this time I put aside the necessity of raising financial support from this project (but if it attracts financial bodies to chime in and leverage, the story may continue to another chapter). However, I was stuck on a part of the development process which prevents me from going further, the design essentials.

Speaking its visual emphasis, design has important role in constructing user’s perception and establishing identity for a brand or product. I believe that a design that is visually appealing -besides content and user experience- can bring intangible benefit for brand or product owner. “Appealing” may vary in terms and is probably subjective in nature. However, with such innate sense of art, one might measure how acceptable and eye-catching a design would be. Adding uniqueness and profound meaning behind the composition, the design can also develop certain level of association which in the end will help the process of branding.

Now, I’ll project this abstract theory in the process of redesigning my logo. Although I’m not that gifted in art and never took formal art course in the past, I realize that my previous logo is not eye-catching and tends to be lousy. Too amateurish, to put it in another phrase. I did need a new logo to better represent my online presence. Hence, I sat back in front of my laptop, wrote concept for the logo, and started fiddling with Photoshop. The change is not major when it comes to the presentation of the logo. What I changed was the composition of the color and how the characters are presented in the logo. And now, I dare to say that I have a better logo (although I still need to solve the ripple problem around the edge of transparent logo). Following this change, the favicon.ico icon has also been changed.

New logo

This new logo accentuates gold “M” in its oval region. I hope with such color, there will be more and more golden ideas and perspectives flowing into my hemispheres so that I can articulate them in quality content and creation.

Yes, This Blog Is OpenID Enabled

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I have seen comments flowing to my blog and it’s nice to see that some come from people who know what they are talking about and have been in their field for significant time (This means that they are pretty popular and have audience listening to their advices). Anyway, since the internet is shielded with anonymity and there is not such visible way to prove that it was the same person leaving the remark and not another Joe claiming the fame, a workaround needs to be arranged to address this issue.

Thanks to WordPress because there is OpenID plugin available so that it less time is consumed to develop a custom solution and the nitty-gritty of authentication problem is partially solved. Hence, if you’re stumbling on this blog and would like to leave some comments regarding the content of the article, i’d like to thank you while hoping you to authenticate using OpenID so that I know that the comment is authorized.

In the meantime, you can read my article about OpenID  which provides basic information about OpenID.

To Be Eternally Secure Is Nonexistent

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Once said that high trees are prone to swift wind. When it comes to managing website, increasing traffic in most cases leads to increasing security threats. Even though the website contains good content and is useful to certain niche or broader audience, no exact guarantee can be made that the site is 100% secure, fully shielded and armored and will never be compromised. Site owner will never know how much his site attracts undaunted cyber ghosts to come and test the site’s security.

Since internet is the biggest library, one can get information about security breach in certain application quickly in easy manner. Search engines provide all the information, either good or bad, and perform quick search for keyword. With sufficient knowledge of exploiting search engine, one can locate where the security breach is, find the target sites, and test the water until the site gets compromised. With such easy access to exploits and hacking tools, one doesn’t need to be tech savvy to manually find the security holes. It will be even easier when the target sites use popular open source solutions because all bugs and holes are documented.

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Adsense Widget For WordPress Sidebar: Updated Version

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I use Adsense widget for WordPress Sidebar from Mike Smullin in this technology blog. It’s a simple widgetized plugin and I really like its simplicity. I was never bugged by this plugin until today when I found strange behavior when using this plugin for WordPress > 2.3.1. If I updated other widget positions and then tried to click configuration values for this plugin, I got empty form. Initially, I thought the configuration values were not saved properly and somehow missing (although later I found out that the data was still saved in the database, it was just not displayed). Hence, I decided to do further investigation and spend some time to provide bug fixes.

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