Today I upgraded the RAM of a Mac Mini Intel (1Gb to 2,5Gb). As usual, I googled for a while to find a good tutorial to correctly dismantle it. Even if I’m not a video-tutorial lover, the best one I discovered was on YouTube. I like it also because it’s speech-less (only subtitles), so it’s easy to understand the steps also for not native english-speaking users like me 
Disclaimer:
This post doesn’t want to be an invite to hack websites. The admin pages linked by search engines in the “search suggestions” in the article are so easy to find that it’s, I think, exagerated to define this an “hack practice” (infact, many of them were already hacked and spammed by automatic bots). On the contrary, it wants to be an advice to webmasters and sysadmins to double-check their installations and security measures.
Search engines scan the Web. The entire web, and they often discover something that nobody should see.
This is one of this cases: a webmaster forgets to password-protect the folder where a critical admin tool like phpMyAdmin is, a search engine reaches the folder and it puts in its search index the link.
At this point it’s easy for everyone to discover these security breaches: with a very simple search on a search engine like Yahoo! you’ll get 196 results (November, 7th 2008), they bring to the administrative home page of phpMyAdmin from several domains, with root privileges. leggi tutto »
Today I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid, and suddenly… my Samsung SCX-4200 printer stopped working 
I recovered my notes from Ubuntu Hardy, where I wrote some operation to make the printer (and the embedded scanner) work. Unfortunately, the “trick” I took from the official Ubuntu forum (see “Samsung SCX-4200 scanner does not work on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron“) didn’t work anymore, so I spend some time to search for an alternative. And I found it! leggi tutto »
Vista’s “3D Flip” effect is really nice. Honestly, the entire new graphic of Windows Vista is beautiful… even if the rest of the operating system is disappointing 
Anyway, if you want to add this feature to your Windows XP… someone has done it: WinFlip is a little and free addon that is capable to re-create the same effect. Just download it and try!
I want to suggest a very good work from TredoSoft: Multiple IE Installer (aka MultipleIEs) is a free tool that installs all the previous versions of Internet Explorer (from 3.0 to 6.0) on a Windows PC, allowing Internet Explorer 7 users to use older versions of IE on the same computer.
It was very useful for me, because I have to test my sites on Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 but IE 6 is still popular, so I must test everything (at least) on these 3 browsers.
As a web developer I work everyday with FTP to transfer and update files on several web servers. The process is simple but boring: I’ve to download a page on my hard drive, edit it and then upload it back on the remote machine to test my modifications. These activities must be done with an FTP client like FileZilla, SmartFTP, WS_FTP…
Microsoft Windows can’t mount FTP servers on the local filesystem as network folders (you can do it only with computers that are connected in your local network), so it’s impossible to work with a local application (PhotoShop, Dreamweaver, Notepad++…) loading and saving documents directly on the remote server.
There is some software that is able to add this functionality to Microsoft Operating System, like the old Novell NetDrive, that is not freeware but is considered as abandonware by the same software house. Now Novell suggests to use a newer product like WebDrive, but it’s unfortunately a commercial software.
I Googled for a while and finally I found a solution.
MD5 (Message Digest 5) is a popular way to encrypt passwords (or anything else).
Its security is based on the fact that it is a destructive algorithm: if you MD5-encrypt a string, you’ll get an another 128 bit (16 characters) expression that is the unique checksum of the original string, and it’s impossible to go back. The result can be compared to the MD5 of another string (e.g.: entered by a user); if the two checksum are exactly alikes, the input received is correct.
This is a good way to securely store users’ sensible information (like passwords), making them not understandable by anyone but still usable to verify user authentication. leggi tutto »
I’m moving from home, so I had to change the home network configuration to let my father continue to connect… without my Netgear DG834G Wi-Fi router.
I connected my very nice Fonera to the old modem/router that my provider sent me a lot of time ago: it’s a Pirelli “AliceGate” device, with both USB and Ethernet ports… it can be used as a normal USB modem or like a router, but it hasn’t an integrated authentication system, so users must enter login and passwords from the PC to access the Internet.
So, I discovered che La Fonera can be configured to authenticate itself, and it’s really simple: just connect to it’s private network throught Wifi, and go with your favourite browser to it’s setup page (it’s default network address is http://192.168.10.1 and login/password are admin/admin), then go to “Advanced” section and enter these settings:
Internet Connection
- PPPoE
- User: your login (provided by your provider )
- Password: your password
Network settings
- IP: 192.168.1.254
- Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
- DHCP ON
Now switch your Fonera Off and On… and after a couple of minutes you should be have a working Internet wi-fi connection available
“Hello World” is the phrase that historically anyone uses when he starts to learn a new programming language: creating a first application that simply says “Hello World” on the screen is the starting point to become a real guru
It seems that the first “Hello World” application was written in 1966 by Martin Richards (Cambridge University), when he was developing BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language).
Here is a list of 101 applications in 101 different programming (or scripting) languages that do the same thing: a simple… “Hello World”. My favourite syntax is the BrainFuck one leggi tutto »
Microsoft Outlook Express, Mozilla Firebird and any other e-mail client are not the only applications that can send e-mails.
E-mailing was one of the first internet applications, and there are a lot of ways to use it; for example, (quite) experienced Linux users are able to send mails from a text-based console.
Let’s see three “different” ways to send an e-mail without using a traditional mail client:
1 – Telnet it
Linux users are used to access a lot of tools throught “command line”, but Windows people are not comfortable with terminal clients. Let’s see how to do it in Win XP:
a. click on “Start” button and choose “Run…”, then type “CMD” and press Enter.
b. type “telnet” in the command line window and press Enter, Microsoft Telnet Client will start;
c. type: o mail.myserver.com 25 <- of course you’ve to change “mail.myserver.com” with the one of your provider. Usually, the address is like “mail.nameOfYourProvider.ext” or “smtp.nameOfYourProvider.ext”; the port 25 is the standard for SMTP (sending mail) connections.
If the address is correct, you’ll see the welcome message of the SMTP server, something like:
220 ciaaol-d10.mx.aol.com ESMTP mail_cia_aol-d10.3; Mon, 04 Dec 2006 09:43:20 -0500
From this moment you’ve to type slowly, because the communication with server is in real-time, so if you make an error you can’t correct it with backspace
d. We’ve to send a little greeting: just type HELO ricky <- change with your real name or nickname.
You’ll receive a gently answer like:
250 FBCMCL01B05.fbc.local Hello [1.2.3.4]
e. We want to send a message to Mr. Brown, his e-mail address is brown@example.com. Our address is jack@example.net. You’ve to type:
mail from:jack@example.net
and then:
rcpt to:brown@example.com
f. Now we pass to the body of the email. Type:
data
and then type what you want… when you’re ok just go to a new line, type “.” (without quotes) and then ENTER. If everything works correctly, the SMTP server gives a confirmation message like:
250 2.0.0 Message accepted for delivery
g. Now you’ve only to go to the mailbox where you sent your message and receive it
2 – Carry it with a Pickup
Windows XP users can install, as optional component, the Microsoft IIS server (the same that are carried with Windows Server series, even if XP version has some limitation) that includes a Web, an FTP and an SMTP server.
Here I don’t want to present a complete explanation about how to install and configure IIS with Mail support (there are a lot of tutorials on the web)… anyway, if you’ve Microsoft SMTP server running on your system you can send e-mail directly throught it, without your provider’s SMTP.
In addiction, you should have this folder: C:\Inetpub\mailroot\Pickup
If so, you can send an e-mail in very funny way: create a text file with this text:
to:recipientnick@server.com
from:sendernick@anotherserver.com
subject:This is a test.
This is the body part of a sample text email.
Of course you have to change e-mail addresses and, if you want, message subject and body. Drag and drop this text file into the “Pickup” folder: it should disappear in a second.. and after a little time the e-mail is delivered. This is a very alternative way to send a message, isn’t it?
3 – The Batch way
Windows systems have an internal batch language, similar to the shell scripting in Linux.
If you want to automate a list of simple “things to do”, you’ve to create a plain text file, write some VBscript commands and save it with .VBS extension; when you’ll double-click on it, your computer will execute the commands, in the same order you wrote in the text file (“old” users will remember the DOS version of .VBS files: they were .BAT!).
We can use a .VBS script also to send an e-mail, specifing the SMTP server to be used. Here’s what to paste in the VBS file:
”As usual, change accordingly with your data, with particular attention to the address of the SMTP server: probably it will be the SMTP of your provider, the same you’ve in Outlook Express (etc.) as “outbound mail server”, “SMTP server” or something like this.
