Author Archives: Tech Admin

Quick Update: Working on the Next Release of Amikelive Adsense Widget

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I have been away for a while from posting contents on this blog. I was a little bit occupied with exciting things at work. However, don’t worry. I don’t abandon the projects I started and am always trying to find some spare time to update them.

As you notice, there are errors with Amikelive Adsense Widget. It seems that the plugin has stopped working since Google updated their Adsense interface. I am now working on the fix and also complete some new features that I was working on but had to be temporarily stopped because of other activities. I hope I can post a new release at WordPress plugin repository this week.

Stay tune!

Quick Guide to Detecting Phishing and Avoiding Being A Victim

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Having talked about spamming, in this post, I would like to shortly discuss about phishing, a technique for identity theft, which in my personal experience, has become more rampant these days.

If it is the first time for you to read this fancy term, phishing is an attempt to steal somebody else’s sensitive information such as username, password, credit card details, and other personal credentials usually done by sending an email containing a false claim to the target. The content can be a threat, warning, and other form of falsified truth carefully crafted to encourage the target to submit his personal credentials. As you may have predicted, phishing was derived from “fishing”. The “fisher” is the person who wants to steal the information and the target is the “fish”. The false claim is obviously the “bait” used to attract and hook the “fish”.

Identity theft is disadvantageous and can sometimes become disastrous to the victim. Let us take a case of a phishing attempt from a sender who falsely claims as your email account provider. The message contains warning to verify your email account by supplying your user account id and password. If you inadvertently submitted the requested information to this site, you might have never imagined how creative the phisher is in exploiting this private information they stole from you.
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VMWare Customer Day 2010 Korea: Cloud Computing Adoption in Enterprises and vSphere 4.1

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On Friday, September 10th, I attended VMWare Customer Day 2010 Korea, which was held at COEX Intercontinental Hotel, Seoul. Even though it has been a while past the event, I would like to share some notes worth sharing, combined with my personal thought about substantial content found in the talks I listened to during the event.

As the event title suggests, the talks mostly covered introductory concept about cloud computing and virtualization as well as some promotional materials about VMWare products. This is coherent with the majority of the audience who came from the enterprises: IT staffs, ISV representatives, and company delegates. Three sessions were arranged for the whole event. The first session was a talk from Mike Sumner, the VMWare Asia Pacific SE Director. He talked about customer journey to IT as a service by riding the cloud and harnessing virtualization. Second talk about VMWare case studies was presented by Lee Mun-hyong, the Director of Channel and Alliance, VMWare Korea. The last session was delivered by Lee-Hyo, the head of VMWare Korea. He explained about vSphere 4.1 especially the new features in the release. The second and third session were presented in Korean so I only grabbed the general understanding and did not really grasp the details.

In his presentation, Mike talked about cloud computing as an emerging trend in the enterprise. He also explained key drivers and phases toward its adoption in the enterprises and an era of IT as a service powered by the cloud. He started with listing several IT challenges in the enterprise environment. The challenges he mentioned include the necessity to deliver more business value, the ability to move faster and stay ahead of the competitors, the competency to maintain secure and compliant environment, and the capability of maintaining a stable system. Legacy IT business model relies on infrastructure ownership and dedicated IT force. With the introduction of the cloud in the enterprise, CIO may consider the transformation from a pay-in-advanced system into a cloud-based, pay-as-you-go system.
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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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