Secure Your WordPress Blog Administration With Two-Factor Authentication
My Clippings September 10th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Secure Your WordPress Blog Administration With Two-Factor Authentication
WordPress is a very popular blogging service. It was recently hit by a disturbing vulnerability
that allowed attackers to reset the Administrator’s password. While
there is a patch for that vulnerability now, wouldn’t it be best to not
use static passwords? It is actually quite simple to add two-factor authentication to WordPress.
Turn a Radish into a Power-Up Mushroom in Seconds [Food Hacks]
My Clippings September 7th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Why not amuse and charm your party guests by garnishing a few dishes with these easy-to-make Mario-style Power-Up Mushrooms made of radishes? You might not get any extra lives, but there’s some serious geek cred in this food hack.
This project is fairly simple. What you’ll do is:
- Make a shallow cut around the circumference of the radish
- Make four cuts from the stem end to the line made by the first cut to create a square base
- Trim the base until it is cylindrical
- Make some very shallow, circular slices into the “head” portion of the mushroom to create the white spots
- Grab some dark food coloring and add eyes to your creation (Or use seaweed as the original creator does!)
Confused? Check out Anna the Red’s Bento Factory, a wonderful meal-themed blog for more detailed pictures and instructions, but before you go, tell us: Do you have any geeky or video game themed food hacks? Or perhaps some clever creations to amuse and entertain visitors? Share your tricks and include pictures if you can. Thanks, Jesus!
How to Make a Radish Mushroom [Anna the Red's Bento Factory via GameOvr via BuzzFeed]
WordPress under attack, upgrade your blog now
My Clippings September 7th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Filed under: Security, News, Blogging
Several sites are reporting that a major attack on WordPress blogs started yesterday. The latest version of WordPress, 2.8.4, is not vulnerable to this particular worm, so upgrading now could save you a lot of headaches. The worm creates a new, hidden administrator account on your blog, allowing whoever’s behind this thing to access the guts of your blog, databases and all.
How do you know if your site has been affected? Lorelle on WordPress offers two possible ways to find out:
There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as
example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.
Wordpress has acknowledged the attacks and encouraged users to upgrade their sites. WordPress.com users aren’t affected, as the whole system has already been updated to 2.8.4. If you’ve already been afflicted by the attack, start on the steps in WordPress’ FAQ.
[via Mashable]
WordPress under attack, upgrade your blog now originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: blockquote, email, Google, Inc., IO, php, security, way, WordPress
Movie Set to Premiere on iPhone and iPod Touch
My Clippings September 4th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Want to premiere a feature film starring some A-list Hollywood celebs? There’s an app for that. Or at least there will be, come Sept. 21. That’s the day Berlin Film Festival hit “Rage” premieres on the iPhone and iPod touch, where it will appear before satellite, DVD or online.
“Rage” is written and directed by British filmmaker Sally Potter, and is an episodic tale of a behind-the-scenes look at a New York fashion show. It’s shot to look like a schoolboy is recording events with his mobile phone over a seven-day period. The movie will be released in seven episodes, downloadable via a free application for the iPhone and iPod touch, and be available starting Sept. 21.
In case it takes star power to sway you, “Rage” boasts quite the cast list. Dame Judi Dench takes part, as does Jude Law. Other stars taking part include Steve Buscemi, Eddie Izzard and John Leguizamo. Nothing to sneeze at for something that’s going to be competing with fart simulators and novelty noisemaker applications.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, following the app’s release on the iPhone platform, “Rage” will debut on DVD in the U.S. on September 22, on satellite in the UK on Sept. 24, and online via Babelgum (who is also behind the iPhone app) on Sept. 28.
Of course, in this case, the iPhone’s preferential treatment is due largely to the nature of the film in question. It makes sense to premiere a film shot to look like it was made with a mobile device on a mobile device. But could this be the beginning of a new distribution model for filmed media?
TV and film already have launch day access to the mobile market, of course, via iTunes sales. But there’s a new breed of content that falls between that and YouTube-type independent productions. Xbox’s “The Guild” is a good example. These kinds of programs would benefit from a separate, app-based distribution model, taking advantage of iPhone OS 3.0’s new in-app purchasing feature to charge per episode. That way, they don’t necessarily need the backing of a major distribution partner, and they can provide show context, cast and crew information all from the same place users get their content.
How To Develop Websites On Linux
My Clippings August 29th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
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In this article we will look at tools that can help those of you who want to develop websites on a Linux platform, from powerful text editors to desktop and system features. How do you edit files remotely without FTP plug-ins? What are package managers, and why they are cool? In which Web browsers can you test your applications?
I wish I could cover many more topics: using the command line, basics of Vim, Nautilus features in detail, Nautilus scripting, neat command line tools, basic server configuration and many others. But if I addressed all of the issues that arise from time to time on the Internet, this article would turn into a small book. This isn’t an article on “How to do X or Y on Linux” or “How to use [insert app name here].” And we cannot cover more comprehensive IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans, each of which requires separate articles.
You probably already have some idea of how to find and install applications for your favorite distros. However, we will point you to the right place anyway to download, for example, scripts and plug-ins.
So, let’s begin!
1. Our Tools
Below, for your quick reference, is a list of tools that we will mention or explain in this article.
Text Editors:
- Gedit
- Geany
Browsers:
- Opera
- Mozilla Firefox
- Epiphany (with the WebKit engine)
- Chromium (for some other WebKit examples)
General and command line tools:
- FUSE
- SSHFS
- Vim
- Parcellite
2. Gedit
Gedit is the default and simplest text editor for the GNOME environment. The default installation already comes with some good resources, although not all of them are activated by default. It is bundled with some plug-ins; however, you can add many more plug-ins to make it a nice simple IDE. If you go to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, you’ll see which plug-ins are installed by default. There, you can configure and activate them. On the same screen, you can configure other elements of the text editor, such as indentation, line numbering and current line highlighting.
Tags: apache, Apple, Build, Chromium, css, email, Google, Information, IO, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, module, php, script, security, ssl, Ubuntu, video, VirtualBox, way, wind, WordPress, XP
How-To: Create Custom CSS Email Signatures on the iPhone
My Clippings August 21st, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Previously, I discussed how to create custom CSS email signatures for Mail in Mac OS X. This week, we are going to take a look at what it takes to replicate the same signature on your iPhone.
What You Will Need
- Your Mac
- Your iPhone (it needs to be jailbroken)
- PlistEdit Pro (or another application capable of editing plists)
- Coda (or another application for editing HTML)
Before We Begin
To use a custom CSS signature, we will be modifying a preference file on your iPhone. Simply using copy and paste within the new 3.0 OS will not maintain the HTML and formatting of our signature. Your iPhone should already be jailbroken and capable of mounting as an Apple File Protocol (AFP) share on your Mac. For instructions on this process, see here.
Step One
Once you have logged into your iPhone over AFP, browse to the following location:
/private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences
Copy the file com.apple.mobilemail.plist to your Mac. Go ahead and duplicate this file, appending “backup” to the end of the filename so you have a clean copy in case something goes wrong.
Step Two
Open your email signature that we created (see the original post here) in your HTML editor and copy the contents to the clipboard.
Step Three
Use PlistEdit Pro to open the file you coped earlier in Step One. Towards the bottom of the list, you will see an entry called “SignatureKey”. The value for this string will match your current iPhone signature.
Double click this value to highlight the contents and delete what is there. Now paste the HTML code for your email signature that we copied in Step Two. Save this file back to your desktop.
Step Four
Browse back to the Preferences folder on your iPhone. Copy our new edited plist file and replace the original on your iPhone.
Step Five
All done! Create a new email and you should see your HTML email signature at the bottom.
Limitations
Unfortunately due to limitations in the iPhone 3.0 OS, Mail on the iPhone only supports one signature. There are third party applications available on the App Store that address this issue, but I have not tested them with HTML email signatures. Hopefully in a future OS update, Apple will allow users to have unique signatures for multiple mail accounts.
Tags: Apple, backup, css, email, IO, Mac, php, Signatures, WordPress
Forget Tr.im: Start Your Own URL Shortener
My Clippings August 20th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
If the recent shutdown (and subsequent re-opening) of Tr.im showed us anything, it’s that URL shortening services are a fickle and delicate thing. There are countless services out there, sure, but there’s no telling when your favorite will cave under the weight of its own server fees.
As Lifehacker points out, however, “anyone who’s got $10 for a domain name registration, and a creative short URL idea, can host, monitor, and control their shortened links.” The site has a quick tutorial for Yourls, which helps users create short redirects using their own domains.
The app is a WordPress plugin that works with any domain hosting service that accepts that platform.
Sequel Pro 0.96 Released
My Clippings August 20th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Three months after Sequel Pro 0.95, the open source project team have released 0.96. The updated adds polish to the application, making working with it more and more pleasurable, if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable.
They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.
New Features
Sequel Pro now includes full SSH tunnel support built in to the connection manager (which has also got a UI facelift).
There is a new Relations screen that lets you view and edit foreign keys for a table.
Enhancements
By far one of my favorite new enhancements is the ability to filter the database’s table list. When the list gets larger than the displayed area, a filter box appears at the top enabling you to quickly find the one you’re looking for. I’ve been using this a lot already.
When running custom queries, the results used to be presented in a static table. Now you can sort the results on the fly by clicking the column titles. Even better, for supported queries you can edit the results directly.
Browser-like table history navigation has been added allowing you to go back to previous table views, which is great for flicking back and forth.
Significant Update
There are also plenty of smaller enhancements. Another favorite is the ability to select a record (either in the content view or after running a custom query) and then select “Copy As INSERT Statement”. This is so handy I don’t know why it wasn’t there before. There are plenty of small changes like this, and almost every part of the application has had numerous bugs fixed.
In addition to all the new features, enhancements and fixes, this release is significantly snappier, and I mean very noticeably so. The memory overhead is also greatly reduced. The developers have done some serious optimizing and the results have paid off. See the full release notes for Sequel Pro 0.96 for a complete list of changes since 0.95.
Why Small Business Owners Need a Mac
My Clippings August 19th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
Small business owners have it hard, especially in the current world economic climate. They have lots to do, not enough resources, staff, and time to get it done. For many small business owners, computers are only one more thing to worry about. It doesn’t have to be that way.
For the past few months, I’ve been in the process of moving from one side of the country to the other. Now that my family and I are settling into our new location, I thought I would share some stories of small business owner encounters I’ve had during my travels. From the end of April to the middle of July, I crossed the country twice by car, and three times flying. Each time, I was reminded of why a Mac is a great small business machine.
iPhones Everywhere, Not a Mac in Sight
During my travels, I met people from all over. Being a tech guy, I would immediately ask questions about what they did for a living, what types of tools they used, the problems their business faced, etc. Of course, for me, the most fascinating part was the software and hardware they used.
Generally, I would hear that they used Microsoft Outlook to manage their email and contacts, Microsoft Word or Publisher to manage their documents, and Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets. Basically, the standard issue PC purchase and Microsoft tools. Some were a little more advanced and used QuickBooks Pro or Adobe graphics tools.
The funny thing is that of the half-dozen or so folks I met, all of them (and yes, I mean all of them) had an iPhone to manage their information on-the-go. They would explain how they loved the user experience, the apps available (not to manage their business, just fun apps) and the cool factor.
Elevator Pitch
Of course, I would then ask why they didn’t use a Mac instead of their current PC. Most of the replies blamed a lack of initiative, the cost of switching, or a fear of change. The cost issue tended to be the less significant of the three. The biggest was the fear of change. Would their documents work? Would they have to change how they completed their daily tasks? What would they do without Outlook (other than have hours of their lives back instead of waiting for that molasses app to run)?
Tags: Apple, email, Funny, Information, IO, Mac, Microsoft, php, way, WordPress, XP
Sketch Book Makes Designing iPhone Apps Easier
My Clippings August 19th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
There’s a new tool available that’s designed to make life easier for iPhone developers, and its surprisingly low tech. It’s called the iPhone Application Sketch Book and it looks like just the thing to keep all those notes and inspirations about a new app idea all in one place.
The spiral-bound book is around 8 1/2″ x 11″ so it won’t get lost in the bottom of a laptop bag. There are 100 pages of design templates with lines at the top for jotting the name and other important details of the app. A real-size image of an iPhone is centered on graph-style paper with ample room to make drawings and notes about every aspect of the development process.
I caught up with the sketch book’s creator, Dean Kaplan, and was surprised to discover the impetus behind the book’s creation.
“I happened to be auditing the Stanford iPhone Programming course,” says Kaplan, “and one of the guest speakers discussed how he went about creating his user interface designs. Paper was one option he mentioned. Almost instantly the notebook idea light bulb went off. Other options of various computer programs were mentioned, but it always got back to paper and pencil. Subsequently, I did my own online survey that revealed designers prefer paper 95% of the time.”
Kaplan says once he got the idea to create the book, it only took about nine weeks until it hit the shelves. Depending on its success, he may create similar sketchbooks for the Palm Pre and Android.
The sketchbook is already a hit with some application developers. David J. Hinson, creator of popular iPhone apps like Cheap Gas (iTunes link) and Amigo (iTunes link), says he sees immediate value in a tool like this. “You can keep your notes and preliminary wireframes all in one handy little notebook. I was really intrigued and I think it’s a great concept because I’m constantly writing things on the whiteboard and losing track of my notes. It’s simple in execution, but spot on.”
Interested developers can pick up the iPhone Application Sketch Book for $14.99 at Amazon.
