Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category
Protect-IP is For Those Who Cannot Adopt to Internet Age
For those who use Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Google, SOPA/PIPA is not news any more. I am not going to describe those again as you can find all about its good, bad, and ugliness by just searching for those two horrible acronyms.
Piracy is a problem for any industry I am not trying to defend it. But this is not how you fight it. And in my opinion this is not even the fight they should be fighting in the first place.
Fight Piracy With Availability
IMO piracy is the answer that internet age has found for inaccessibility. Lower the availability you will find piracy spiking. Just think about it. World is not just US,Canada and UK any more. Most of the population is outside those regions and they too have TVs and Internet. If you live outside US/UK/Canada region how long do you have to wait till you can watch the latest Episode of your favorite TV show or a movie legally. Most likely your local cable channels don’t has it or few seasons behind or you will have to wait till a DVD release. Most people are not that much patient.
Navigating through Linkoping with a dead GPS phone
Well! Yesterday was my 2nd working day in Linkoping with two other guys. When you come from a place like SL, its bit tough to find your way around. All the names of places sounds same. All houses looks same. There are separate roads to drive, walk and ride. Everything is little too systematic (like buses always come on time) :).
We decided to find our way from work place to apartment on foot on our own after work. When we get out of the office it was completely dark and temperature was near zero. We did not have a map with us, but being a long time Google maps user on a GPS enabled phone we were quite confident and did not even bother to ask for directions from anyone.
Moving WordPress – My Story!
Well! this topic is well covered here, and probably repeated all over the web. But I am going to write this post any way. Because my WordPress move went quite well. And here is how it was done.
Everything Starts with Taking a Backup
A move is as simple as a backup and restore. You back up your old host and restore it at your new host. That is all you got to do if your domain name/blog URL is not going to change. Backing up has two steps. You need to back up your database and you also need to back up your files. You don’t need t back up entire home directory or public_html folder. If you have wp-content folder backed up that’s good enough. Because that’s where all your Thames, plugins and uploaded files are stored. If you have access to cpannel this is a very simple task. Otherwise you may need to use one of those plugins which allow you to back up the database and files.
Buying Local is Overrated, At least for Web Hosting!
When it comes to buying services and complex products I always prefer buying from a local seller. This makes it easy to communicate and handle any matter that might come up when using the product or service that we buy. But in some cases the typical Sri Lankan customer relationship attitude make it a nightmare.
This happened way too often with my hosting provider. To be specific the X hosting provider. Not that this blog is some mission critical application, but when ever there is a problem with servers or downtime, a simple proactive mail from the host can save lot of time for customers. Instead they just make us panic and wonder what is going on. And in most of such incidents it takes ages to get a response from them.
Nothing Fix a Broken Electronic like a Good Old Bang!
How to fix E61:00 on youtube.
Remember that old TV your parents used to have, which simply refuse to work until you give it few good bangs. Well I thought you don’t have to do that any more with new 21st century electronics. Well! I was wrong.
My Cyber-shot started to give me this error called E61:00. Basically when you turn it on it fail to focus, and show a blur image on the LCD with the error code. And the error code means exactly that. It’s like the focus motor is jammed or something.
Fixing Flickr Thumbnail Photostream WordPress Plugin
“Flickr Thumbnails Photostream” is one of the neatest plugins available to display a random set of photos from a Flickr stream on your WordPress sidebar. I tried out so many plugins before settling with this one for my blog. It builds a local cache of information about your Flickr stream in your website database. As a result it performs faster. Cache does not contain a copy of images. And the plugin is very simple and easy to customize. Which was the main selling point for me.
It’s a wonderful plugin, but it has some issues. Biggest of which is, when trying to update local cache from Flickr, it often times out if your stream has more than 50 images, which is common for many Flickr users.
If you have already used this plugin, you know what I am talking about. “Flickr Curl Function failed to execute. Oops, there seems to be a problem accessing the Flickr information.” is not a very helpful error message 
. However in its community pages there is a partially working solution. With bit of time getting my hands dirty with PHP code. I managed to do a pretty much complete solution for the problem. And here it comes. By the way if you guys don’t want to mess with PHP or the plugin code of your sites, this is where to stop.
Nuclear Fusion in a Cookie Jar
World is running out of its energy sources. Most recent breakthroughs were simply efficiency improvements. Most renewable energy approaches such as solar, wind… are not capable of supplying for mainstream demand. Also most of them consume wast amounts of land and don’t even produce energy all day long. Nuclear fission is risky and ever decreasing in popularity. One main promise of future is Fusion energy. Which is expected to be lot more cleaner, safer and more productive than fission. However the world is long way away from having sustained fusion, as well as producing positive net energy fusion reaction.
Having said that, sometimes you come across bright sparks of hope in places you least expect. I was searching about nuclear fusion reaction recently after Japan incident and came across this. It’s a table top sustained fusion reactor by a high school kid. His reactor core is made using a cookie jar with some commonly available material. He calls it ‘Star in a Jar‘. Of course he has had some help.
Electronic Billing Proof, Anyone?
These days you need billing proof for everything. Good old days of opening a bank account with just your ID and money is long gone. I was lucky enough to have my first bank account and my prepaid phone connection that way. In case you don’t know, billing proof is a piece of paper which has your name and address on it. Without it, you don’t exist. But once I started to work and wanted to get a credit card and a post paid phone connection, it turned out to be a whole new ball game. Apparently I did not have any acceptable billing proof. In other words, I was a ghost.
How to do Facebook/Gmail like Page Loads/Updates using IFrames and JavaScript
You may have noticed how websites like Facebook and Gmail load/update pages on browser without actually reloading the entire thing. It can come handy in your own websites specially when you need to change a small potion of the content that is already shown in the screen. Or you need to change the data shown in the page without having to reload the entire thing.
This can be done easily using only a hidden iframe and some java script code provided that few conditions are met.
Basically following is what you need to do. You need to have a hidden iframe, to which you will load specific information from the server. Then, you need to have created div tags surrounding the regions of the visible page that you need to update. Each div need a unique tag id. You need to create another web page (not visible to user) which will have the information that you need to show. This web page also need to have div tags surrounding the different information that you need it to transfer from server to client.
For simplicity lets assume that your visible web page has one place which you need to dynamically update. We will mark that region using a div tag with id “placeHolder”. Your non visible web page/content source which has the information needed to be shown in place holder will contain another div with id “content”. Now what we need to do is to load this page in to your hidden iframe. And once that is loaded, we need to look for its div tag with id “content”. We need to copy the internal content of that div into our place holder div in visible page. While this process is being done in the background, we can show an animated image on our place holder until things are loaded.
Few Tips to Protect Your Site/Blog from Attacks and Other Mishaps!
When you run a website or a blog, it is partly your responsibility to keep it safe. There are many ways that a web site can be attacked. Some attacks focus on infrastructure such as network and servers, and some focus on the web application itself. When it comes to attacks on infrastructure it’s service providers job to keep the attackers at bay. Most providers do a good job at it, because otherwise they stand to lose lot of business and money in damages. One attack on infrastructure can take an entire service provider out of business if they don’t handle it well, because of loosing customer confidence.
Therefore most often when a blog/website is hacked or lost due to some other reason it is mainly the fault of person administrating it. There are several ways an attacker can get in to a site. For example they can hack in to the server or network and make their way to the sites hosted there. It once happen to the hosting provider of this blog. And thank god I still have my content. As I said that is something that service provider has to deal with. Here is a number of attacks modes that the web site admin has to deal with, and way to reduce the risks.
