The Danesh Project

My trip to Cameron Highlands

I am from Cameron Highlands, leaved there my whole life and moved to the city about 6 years back. It was good to go home and enjoy the weather, food and the people there. If I could find something to do there in IT I would move back now.

The trip was fun but at the same time I felt sad to see my once beautiful hometown now being transformed into a tourist attraction. There are shops all over the place now like mushrooms, prices going up, buildings coming up all over the place blocking the beautiful views, camping grounds being changed to food stores and souvenirs shops, waterfalls disappearing and much much more……..

The only thing left to enjoy now is the cold weather and the clean air. This will not be for long, over the past 6 years the temperature has raised about 3 degrees. So, imagine with all the new destruction in the name of tourism  what would happen in the next 10 years.

O ya one more thing, Camerons once boasted that it was a favorite amongst foreigners but not anymore. I hardly saw any foreigners this time. They come for the nature, you take it away and they have no reason to come back. It’s all for the local tourist now. They come, mess the place up and leave. sigh………….

See come pictures from my trip on the next page. read more

WordPress 2.3.1 upgrade completed

Finally managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.3.1 today. Needed quite a few tweaks here and there but everything seems to be holding togather now.

Over the next week I’ll be fine tuning the functionality side of things so expect to see some errors. Learning the whole new Tags phenomenon now

For now these are the plug ins I have running on my shiny new WordPress installation.

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Cforms II
3. Defensio Anti-Spam
4. FeedBurner FeedSmith
5. Get Recent Comments
6. Google XML Sitemaps
7. My Dashboard
8. Related Posts (Will be replaced by Simple Tags)
9. Simple Tags
10. Sociable
11. Subscribe To Comments
12. Tag Suggest Thing
13. Ultimate Google Analytics
14. WordPress Reports
15. WordPress Reports Most Active Widget

New player to fight spam, Defensio

Defensio is the latest comment spam filtering service for blogs and web applications. Blogging platforms currently supported are WordPress, PixelPost, Umbraco, Drupal, Mephisto, Movable Type and TextPattern. Web applications can see integration through the following platforms, Ruby On Rails, .Net, Java, PHP and Python.

Currently, the only big player out there doing the same is Askimet. Askimet surprisingly was very positive about the new competitor on the block.

Quoted from them, read more here.

It’s hard to have a market with only one player.

Denfensio and Askimet both use centralized APIs to validate comment spams but Denfensio currently goes a bit further with some additional features.

• Spam quarantine sorted by spaminess
• Background color applied to spam comments to increase ease-of-identification
• Spam comments collapsed (and restorable) to allow for easy and efficient navigation
• Very obvious spam can be hidden from view
• Performance statistics provided to show how Defensio is doing on your blog

Defensio is a replacement for Askimet but I don’t see this happening anytime soon and Askimet has been around for sometime now. It’s going to be hard to get users to switch.

The latest plugin for Defensio can be downloaded here if you would like to take it for a spin. I’ve installed it at home today so it’s going to take sometime to come to a conclusion to see which path I will follow. For now Askimet works best for me.

Source : Defensio

Source : Askimet

Password protect single user mode

You forget your root password and get locked out of your own box. What do you do? Typically, you would reboot into single user mode and change the password there.

When booting into single user mode you will not be prompted for the root password. This is something every attacker knows and prays on once he has gained physical access to you box. So what do you do?

Firstly, a good sys admin knows not to forget the root password. Login in as root is never a good idea so using sudo is always advised. This still leaves the single user mode vulnerable, to secure it you will have to append the following line “su:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin” to your “/etc/inittab” file. Now, every time you boot into single user mode you will be prompted for the root password.

See sample below,

# password protect single user mode
su:S:wait:/sbin/sulogin

PS: Always remember you password, if you can’t then write in down in a safe place.

Demonoid goes down

The popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid was forced to go offline. This time by the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association).

Demonoid is currently down and below the quoted from there index page.

The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.

Source : Mashable