Open-VPN on Windows Vista

Because I got a new laptop (Notebook Toshiba Satellite A100-599 Centrino Duo T7200, 2.0GHz, 1GB, 160GB, VISTA) with Windows Vista preinstalled, and I needed to use Open-VPN, I started searching for some info about how to use it. Download and install: Open-VPN GUI. Put your configs to C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\config. Add:

route-method exe
route-delay 2

to your *.ovpn file (client.ovpn) Run as Administrator (right click) C:\Program Files\OpenVPN\bin\openvpn-gui.exe. (If you don't run it with admin privileges, the TAP adapter won't work) And that's it..

North Korea and nuclear tests

I don't post this kind of stuff, but I couldn't help it. I was reading on Google News this headline:

U.N. asks North Korea to cancel nuclear test

Source: Seattle Times The reaction: Oh no! Not now!

Japan's newly elected Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday that the tests could come as early as this weekend. U.S. spy satellites have detected sustained activity at a suspected underground test site in the north. Abe will travel to Beijing on Sunday and Seoul, South Korea, on Monday to press for support in corralling North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

So, BigBrother is watching...

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a device would be detonated about 6,500 feet inside a mine near the border with China in the north of the country. North Korea has timed its military exercises to coincide with significant dates: it launched missiles July 4, despite international warnings. Monday is North Korea Workers' Party Day. [...] The Security Council statement said that a test would not bring Pyongyang closer to its goals. Rather it would "bring universal condemnation by the international community," the statement said. "The Security Council urges the DPRK not to undertake such a test and to refrain from any action that might aggravate tension," the statement added, using the acronym for the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Chief U.S. delegate John Bolton said that the council takes the threat seriously, and the United States is prepared to push for international economic sanctions. "If they do test it, it will be a very different world the day after," he said before the meeting. "There would be another nuclear power. This would be proof positive of North Korea having a weapon." [...] Russian diplomats said they were "very concerned" about the possibility of a test.

Ok, US will take actions, and use UN also for their goal... So, after Afganistan, I was expecting a move on Iran, and leave DPRK alone, for some time... but it seems they are acting on 2 fronts: Middle East

LONDON — The United States and five other major powers agreed Friday to take the next step toward imposing sanctions on Iran for failing to comply with a U.N. resolution to prevent it from subverting its nuclear energy program to develop a nuclear weapon, according to U.S. and European officials. Source: chron.com

and DPRK (above quotes) ... One wrong step from any of these countries and war is closer than ever. What is the really scary thing is that nuclear weapons are at stake. In Afganistan the situation was different, war for oil, US gets a better position on world oil market, and a place at OPEC table. And God help us when someone will push the trigger.

MySQL Front discontinued

I was surprised to see on Mysql-Front website this announcement:

MySQL-Front has been discontinued since MySQL AB forced us to remove this program from the market. Thanks a lot for all your help! Your MySQL-Front Team We hope the humanity will learn to work together instead of fighting another senseless...

Getting curious about this started to search on google... Lenz Grimmer clarified this for me:

Clarification: MySQL AB did not force the removal of MySQLFront Our web team informed me that we received a few comments from users about MySQL AB supposedly shutting down the development of the MySQLFront utility. I'’d just like to clarify that this was not the case at all we merely asked the developers to stop violating our trade mark as outlined in our Trade Mark Policy. As I wrote some time ago, our trade marks are a very important asset to us as a company and we need to take action, if our marks are being violated. We did not ask or force them to stop the development or to remove the program from the market completely– this was their very own decision. In fact, we actually encouraged them from the beginning of our discussion to continue the development of the product under a different name. The problem appeared resolved as the project was renamed to SQLFront and the old web site pointed to the new location - we regret that the developers decided to shut down the entire project shortly afterwards. We encourage and support every application that broadens the MySQL Ecosystem. Why would we want to completely shut off applications that support us?

Lenz Grimmer works MySQL AB as a member of the community relations team. The MYSQL AB Trademark policy provides the information related to authorized use of MySQL AB marks. The "problem" is caused by the usage of MySQL as a part of a commercial product name, that is not developed by MySQL. I still don't understand why they shut down the project and communicated that kind of message... Lack of funds and they found a way to close it and blame someone else? /Later edit MySQL Front development continues at Sourceforge under a new name HeidiSQL

Marketing on blogs

A Romanian online gift shop launched 2 days ago a campaign named “Blog this!” The main idea is to write an article on your blog which follows the rules: - the article must contain a link to Christmas Gifts category - the article must not look like and advertisement, but cannot be strongly negative nor defaming - after you publish the article send them an email with the link - the publisher must have at least 10 articles in his blog It’s a win-win situation. The problem is that one side wins more, other side less, exponentially less… This type of advertising can be included in the broadly defined guerrilla marketing, with some viral parts, also similar with a stealth campaign, buzz marketing & co (use of social networking – blogs, the prize – I doubt the actually paid for the ads they are offering, maybe it’s a joint-venture campaign )… The goal is obvious: achieve a better visibility for a category, create a buzz, get inboud links (from >100 blogs, with the condition to be indexed by google), increase number of visitors on the website, basicly promote the store using "word-of-mouth" and buzz. The effect: - in 2 days they got 27 winners ( and all the good or bad content and inbound links) - some good “Gossip” and buzz from Radu Ionescu, Zoso, Tudor Mateescu, Blogoree Blog and others It is nice to analyze the effect of the campaign in January 2007, maybe they will publish some figures… or not. At leat check google to see how many inbound links they got and from where, and position in google for some keywords (Christmas gifts :D ), number of visitors, referrals. What can I say more? it’s a campaign, and from the figures point of view I believe it is a profitable one. Moral and profit are not in the same league.

Adobe buys InterAKT

Adobe recently acquired the technology assets of InterAKT, maker of extensions for Macromedia® Dreamweaver® from Adobe. The acquisition further strengthens Adobe’s position as a leading provider of web design and development tools. For additional information, please read the F.A.Q. page on our website.

And the 1st question in FAQ:

Why did Adobe acquire InterAKT? A: Adobe acquired InterAKT to enhance existing product lines, including Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Flex. The new development center will also provide Adobe with greater access to and expertise in the Eastern European market.

Anyway, Macromedia should have done that before, but, I don't think they studied the market that well. Most InterAKT client were not from Romania... And InterAKT extensions for Dreamweaver are popular in central/western Europe and USA. As the announcement states, the direction will be continuing the production line for Dreamweaver extensions, migrate existing products to Adobe technology (myfeedz will use Flex)

We expect that most current InterAKT employees will remain with Adobe following the integration.

:) We will see about that... InterAKT had 32 employees So basicly as I see it: - Adobe work style will be implemented - personnel migration is inevitable, the company will grow, but some employees will leave (foreced or by thieir own decision) - primary focus: dreamweaver extensions and improve Adobe Flex, or just build components for Adobe Flex. - MX Kollection is renamed to Kollection, and they cannot "kill" the product, because of its customers, so I think it will be refactored to use Flex, sell it in the future. They should be able to "catch" some projects with the government, because until now, MCTI website was the only website developed by a company that knows what is doing, and not made by some kid at 7th hand... Updates will be available after I find more information.

GWT Beta Version 1.1

Well, Google Web Toolkit beta version 1.1 has been released. On July 21st they said that the next release will have:

• Localization Easily localize strings and formatted messages
• XML classes An XML library based on the W3C DOM
• JSON classes JSON is moving into gwt-user.jar, and it's much faster than the sample in 1.0.21
• FileUpload widget The much-requested file upload widget
• FormPanel widget Easily submit traditional HTML forms from GWT apps
• RPC optimizations Speed improvements and a more compact wire format
• JUnit enhancements Unit tests are much, much faster than in 1.0.21, and you can now test asynchronous things like RPCs and timers

Also, annouced that Maven is used for the building process. More features in current release:

• Automatic resource injection Modules can contain references to external JavaScript and CSS files, causing them to be automatically loaded when the module itself is loaded.
• gwt-servlet.jar Deploy this jar to add RPC to your servlet-based webapps without having to manually crack open gwt-user.jar to remove the servlet API classes.
• Javadoc-style API documentation By popular demand :-)
• An automatic mechanism to stop the browser from caching the .nocache.html file for your module.

I'm still waiting for a large scale app, built with GWT.

Phalanger - PHP Compiler for .NET

The original description is:

The Phalanger is a complex solution giving web-application developers the ability to benefit from both the ease-of-use and effectiveness of the PHP language and the power and richness of the .NET platform. This solution enables developers to painlessly deploy and run existing PHP code on an ASP.NET web server and develop cross-platform extensions to such code taking profit from the best from both sides. Compatible with PHP 5.0, the object model in Phalanger enables to combine PHP objects with the .NET ones. It is possible to use a class written in PHP from a .NET application or even to import a .NET class (written for example in C# or Visual Basic .NET) into PHP scripts provided that this class respects the PHP object model implemented in the Phalanger. The Phalanger is the only existing PHP compiler which produces .NET Framework MSIL bytecode.

Some benchmarks were posted on the website with Phalanger 1.0 Beta 3, PHP 4.3.11, and PHP 5.0.4 with and without Zend Optimizer, and some php based popular apps: Nuke and phpBB compared. The tests were done on a Windows machine. Anyway, looking at the benchmarks Roadsend seems interesting too. The idea is that PHP for .NET is a viable solution, and compiled php is an improvment.

Creole Trac - Ticket spam

Well, spammers get better, after blog spamming, trac is vulnerable. Creole is using trac for development, and while browsing through tickets, found this: Public comments and new tickets seem to be suppresed now for anonymus users. Example: Ticket: MSSQL driver errors Edgewall is working on a spam filter, which will be released with 0.10 Milestone Until then, disable anonymus content or you can try experimental spam filter. A quick fix could be:

DELETE FROM ticket_change WHERE author = "spammer_name";
--update  ticket version and milestone, which is altered
UPDATE ticket SET version = '', milestone = '' WHERE version = 'HEAD' AND milestone = 'MILESTONE_NAME';

Database administrator Job Role

Even though I said to myself that I will not post on this blog anything that will be praise to myself... After passing the Oracle PL/SQL test, I have achieved the Database Administrator Job Role: So, from now on you can trust me on administrering your database... The last test for this job role: Oracle PL/SQL Programming :)

Zend framework preview

Zend framework preview is out... after some quick fixes, the discussions started... Chris Shiflett wrote a tutorial for php|arch (in a big hurry it seems)... I consider the Model in an MVC framework a key component, while in this tutorial Chris uses a Database object, no ZActiveRecord ( I thought zend will find the Panacée for Active Record), no ORM library (Zend_Db_Table - Row Data Gateway, Zend_Db_Table_Row or any Zend_Db component). He explains that: "Because the database components of the Zend Framework are still relatively unstable, I use a class for storing and retrieving news entries and comments" ... Is understandable because this is just a preview release, but I was expecting more... The coding standards are not followed... (tabbed indented files, 2 spaces indented file)... It seems there is alot of work to be done.. Yesterday Zend Framework Preview 0.1.2 was released; important updates: unit tests and controller documentation :) For testing is used: PHPUnit2, not simpleTest, not Test::More... I hope that soon we will see a stable framework, that can be compared with Zope...

Brainbench BCIP - Web Developer

Brainbench confirms some of my skills (I know I'm modest too..), I got the job role: I did't have enough time to finish some database programming test, so Database Administrator job role is delayed.... Anyway, my other Brainbench certifications: Again I'm dissapointed by most Romanian employers that have no idea what Brainbech is. It was a nice feeling to see the top scores and my name among them... But, theese are just some orange images, and what is important is the experience and skills applied.

PHP 4 constructor and destructor

Here is a way to have constructor and destructor functions in php4:

/*
*
* Because php 4 does not have a proper OOP implementation
* here is a way to have php4 destructor and constructor
*
*/
class demoClass
{
// {{{ constructor
/**
 * php4 class contructor
 *
 * @return object
 */
function demoClass()
{
 //destructor
 register_shutdown_function(array(&$this, '__destruct'));

 //constructor
 $argcv = func_get_args();
 call_user_func_array(array(&$this, '__construct'), $argcv);
}
// }}}

// {{{ __construct()
/*
* constructor function implementation
*/
function __construct()
{
 //code for constructor goes here
}
// }}}

//{{{ __destruct()
/*
* destructor function implementation
*/
function __destruct()
{
 //code for destructor goes here
}
//}}}
}

Zend Certification Study Guide and Errata

Finally, after a week of waiting the Zend Certification Study Guide arrived. I was so eager to read it... Started reading the tests (I was really curious about the questions): chapter 1, page 15 first error: Discussed on phparch forum Jason Sweet cleared that out (printing error), but still, I believe it needed a better checking before releasing it on the market, and I bought the 2nd edition... After googleing, I found the Errata, and this discussion started by someone less patient than me... So, now I can continue my reading... And after that, I will take the test.

12th Brainbench badge

It's official, I know how to use Windows XP :D Well, I tested my skills in Computer Fundamentals (Win XP), and passed the test... Too many questions related to windows help system, I guess there were 10-12 question about how to use windows help, how to search, about the results and so on, and this is not my strong point, because I don't use windows help... Anyway, got this orange badge: Until now, my Brainbech Certifications, did not help me too much, here in Romania there are many employers that have no idea what Brainbench is... Sad

PySerial

A really nice module for Python that proved efficient and easy to use if pySerial... There are many devices that can comunicate with a PC through a serial port, so here is a script(listener) that uses pySerial to catch the output from such a device and store it in a file. Can be ajusted to handle a faster output from serial port...

import serial

#open second serial port, 0 for the first
ser=serial.Serial(1)

#loop forever
while 1:
  s=ser.readline()
  fileLog=open('serial_log.txt','a')
  fileLog.write('%s'%s)
  fileLog.close()
ser.close() 

Brainbench Certifications

I've completed some Brainbench tests: 11 Brainbench Certifications, 3 Master Level: The others are:

• Programming Concepts
• Web Development Concepts
• E-Commerce Concepts
• Apache 1.3.12 Administration
• MySQL 3.23 Administration
• Javascript
• XHTML 1.1
• CSS2

Transcript ID#: 5167304

Will see how this will add value to my resume... Anyway, just wanted to test my web developer skills, and it seems on on the right path. This was an intro for the next test I want to take, Zend Certified Engineer, but I'll have to prepare financially for this one...

After Brainbench games, Romania got 3rd place... Not bad... I'm glad I could contribute to that.

On CSS

Nandini Doreswamy published on alistapart an article on Bulleted Lists: Multi-Layered Fudge. The idea is to create 2 side by side paragraphs and each one to have a bulleted list: sample Nice idea, I'm thinking about using something similar in my next design for this blog. This can replace the current static position that I applied. Continuing on CSS, on Digital Web magazine I found an article in which Karen Morrill-McClure writes a review on The Zen of CSS Design, a book about the designs found on csszengarden.com. Actually, I find this book for beginners in CSS, those who want to understand what CSS can do and why use such design. The two articles that are posted before this one, are interviews with the author's. Seems this week is dedicated to that book :). On mezzoblue is mentioned the book articles triade.

Busy week

This week has been a very busy one for me. I supposed to go to Constanta on Sunday, but I had some technical difficulties: took me more than 20 hours to make 4 mini-Dv from a Sony Camera VCD's. Never thought It will take so long... Well, after that, I had to assemble a PC and the motherboard jumper FSB was set to 133, the processor (Duron 900 :) ) is working on 100, so I had a hard time figuring the problem (after testing memory, resetting BIOS I solved it). I put some 512SDRAM on it and it loaded faster than my own (this PC was for my cousin - a nice present). When all was finished, was way to late to go to the train station. I woke up next morning, got the computer and went to the train station: destination Constanta - beach during wintertime. I wanted to take a 1st class ticket for a "rapid" train, but the cash desk lady recommended me to get a 2nd class ticket because the only difference is the chair color, and she was right. Actually 1st class wagons have no compartments, while 2nd class do [and the price difference is about 60% or more...]. Romania, what can you say more... Anyway, got to Constanta, went to the village where my cousin lives, I delivered the PC, installed it, everybody happy... So, I stayed for lunch and got the next train back. The folks there told me that 2 weeks ago, the snow was 2m high, covered their windows and doors, a helicopter came to bring them supplies. Only melted snow on the fields reminded of the polar climate :) Nice trip though. Next day, went to work and restarted my 9-23 schedule :). It's good from time to time to experience other things: I haven't assembled a computer for some while and I thought I'm rusty, but I managed well, learned how much time takes to make a mini-dv VCD.

PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC) was launched

On 31st January PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC) was launched. " Founded in January 2005, the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC) is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Members of the PHPSC seek to educate PHP developers about security through a variety of resources, including documentation, tools, and standards." [about] The website has a simple design, common to wikki style. You can see it just has launched: 1 article (Using PEAR's Text_CAPTCHA to Secure Web Forms, by Marcus Whitney), 1 project (PHP Security Guide 1.0 (English) HTML,docBook Lite [soon will be available as pdf]. Today is 6th feb. and still no update since 31st jan... I printed the security guide to study it, that caused my printer to run out of paper, I'll have to buy some more...

Securing a MySQL Server on Windows

Many users that install mysql database server, skip the process necesary for securing it. There are many users that still allow root login from any host (%), maybe still have a valid user login with no password. Here is an article from MySQL about Securing a MySQL Server on Windows