April 2007

Monthly Archive

NASA uses WordPress

Filed Under General Nonsense

Interestingly this afternoon, I saw in the WordPress News an item titled “NASA on WordPress”. Matt announced that one of the research center of NASA has their official website running on wordpress. To see for yourself, just look at http://center.arc.nasa.gov and it’s even explained here

It’s definitely a very creative website and I liked their layout very much. For sure it was similar with other templates out there but NASA-Ames’; theme definitely rocks! At first glance, you wouldn’t believe that it is a wordpress site. Though it is not the first time that NASA used a free software (I knew of another NASA center using drupal), it is still interesting to know that they used WordPress.

Kudos to the WordPress team!

SoftLayer Downtime

Filed Under General Nonsense

This website has been down for several hours. I was so frustrated that I want to move into a new hosting company. I’m still looking around for a new one but I already have a shortlist.

This is currently hosted with HostingFest and I would say that their support services is really good. You can be assured of quick response on your query and the staff are very helpful especially Nasir and Dormosh. However, their data center has been experiencing problems and it has becoming more frequent. That’s the really sad part of it.

The latest about the problem is discussed at http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=598699 . This is the cause of the downtime this morning.

If you can recommend a new one, just post your recommendation in the comment box. Of course, I don’t want one that has their servers placed in SoftLayer.

Dumaluan Beach Resort

Filed Under Travel

It has been several months already and I still hardly written anything about my trip to Bohol. So as promised, here’s one review on the resort that we stayed in.

Accomodation

Well… I’m not a very picky person and I’m very easy to please as well. The cottage that we stayed is a twin-sharing suite that has basic necessities which is a large and spacious bathroom, refrigerator, a powder area, air conditioning and of course, beds! The cottage has a terrace with table and chairs. Pretty basic but hey, do I need a television in a vacation?

There are different type of rooms to choose from at Dumaluan that would suit your varied taste. You can even opt to get a room complete with television, bathtub, among others. But of course, you’ll have to pay extra.

They use generator as backup power and apparently, brownout is frequent that in the three days that we stayed there, they had to use their generator twice. The bad thing is, it broke and the management had to call in mechanics to fix the generator.

(more…)

Hacked by a Lunatic

Filed Under Technology

Just recently, this blog is down for almost a day because of a lunatic wanting to catch attention. He’s a Turkish script-kiddy that hacked this site.

So for you, here’s the attention you have been longing for. Some people may not want me to display this but hey, he want some attention so here’s some. Eat it, until you’re dead! May you rest in peace… in hell together with Satan!

hacker

For all others who reads this post and have their own blog/site, I recommend that you take the following steps to limit(note, just limit and not eradicate) the chance that your site is hacked.

1. Make sure that you change/set the chmod of your wp_config.php (wordpress) and configuration.php(joomla) to 644. Do this on other settings file that your script uses. I won’t tell you how but in case you don’t know, use your ftp client to do this.

2. Unless necessary (i.e, cache folders), set the chmod of your folders to 755 or 644 if you can. This is to prevent the hackers from placing files

3. Provide a blank index.php or index.html in every folder that you have. This is to prevent the script kiddies from viewing the contents of the folders.

4. Change your passwords(database and ftp) since script kiddies may already extracted them when they broke-in to your site.

5. Always backup your files and databases.

For those that are also hacked by the same lunatic, here’s you’ve got to do.

Joomla

It is only the configuration.php that was replaced. The script kiddy replaced it with html that points to his site. You’ll be glad if you have a copy of it from your backup. If you don’t have enough luck, download the configuration.php-dist and supply the correct settings and save it as your configuration.php

The other option is to reinstall Joomla into another db. After installation, point the database configuration.php to your old db. This is easier for some people especially if there’s no plugins installed but I still recommend to just recreate the file. However, having a backup is always the best and easiest way to put your site back online.

WordPress

Grab a copy of your wp-config.php and reupload it. If you don’t have a copy, get the file from the installation package and then update the files with the correct settings.

Just like with Joomla, you can also do a reinstall if everything fails. Just don’t drop your old database, though.

So, that’s just it for now and I hope you learn something on this experience.