Category: Technology

WordPress 2.8 is Here and Upgraded

Here I am at it again. Hopping directly into the new WordPress release as soon it hit the mainstream. Unmindful of things that could happen to my blog if something’s not right, or bugs that’ll definitely appear, or any of my plugins could break. I even forgot to deactivate the plugins first before proceeding with the upgrade.

The fact remains, I am a loyal WordPress user. And I loved the innovations introduced throughout the years in this favorite web platform of mine. Nevermind the bloated issue, as long as it’s working. (Just like my attitude towards Ubuntu. Yes, it’s bloated. But it works out of the box.)

Anyway, the new release offers some more enhancements. And I can’t wait to be the first to try those out. Check out the release announcement here, or watch this video: Continue reading WordPress 2.8 is Here and Upgraded

My Yahoo! Account was Hacked

Yahoo! Messenger Logo

Lately, some friends were complaining about how they were receiving spam messages from my Yahoo! account via Yahoo! Messenger (YM). It was not something new as I myself received some from other friends in my contact list. It then occured to my mind that maybe my account was hacked.

Then, yesterday I couldn’t login to my YM account anymore from my favorite desktop client, Pidgin. It tells me that logging in from the web with the same account may diagnose the problem. Continue reading My Yahoo! Account was Hacked

The Most Celebrated Video Scandal of 2009

Perhaps you reached this page hoping to get maybe even a glimpse of the video I’m talking about. Well I’m sorry to disappoint you but you won’t get to watch any video here nor get any link to the videos.

Anyway, in the recent developments, Dr. Hayden Kho expressed his apology and regret over the whole scandal in an interview by GMA Network. I wonder though, did he regret for recording the video beyond the awareness of his partner or for failure to have discovered beforehand about truecrypt?

TrueCrypt is a software application used for real-time on-the-fly encryption. It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or a device-hosted encrypted volume on either an individual partition or an entire storage device. It supports Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (using FUSE) and encrypted volumes can be made portable. The version for Windows Vista or XP can encrypt the boot partition or entire boot drive and has the ability to create and run a hidden encrypted operating system whose existence is deniable.

You may want to read about my earlier post, “Auditor and Technology; Importance of Data Security“.

Okay, don’t get me wrong. I believe that recording a video of your sexual act beyond the awareness and consent of your partner is plain “retarded-ness” at best (I mean there could be worse descriptions). And failure to secure and encrypt those stupid videos is a grave blunder.

Dreamhost Shared Hosting Servers: No WordPress Mu

Dreamhost could probably be the most popular web hosting company out there right now, with their aggressive marketing campaigns via coupon codes, their unlimited webspace and bandwidth, up-to-date server and program software and hardware, and a whole lot more features they have in the table. Add to that their cheap price.

I availed of their geocities promo lately, and got two years free domain and hosting for free.

But here’s the big turn-off. Just lately a notice was posted here saying:

NOTICE
WordPress MU is not allowed to be run on our shared hosting servers. If you intend on running this under your account, you are required to be on a Private Server.

Continue reading Dreamhost Shared Hosting Servers: No WordPress Mu

Geocities Will Close; Adios Geocities

Geocities, a free webhosting company owned by Yahoo! closes its doors to new account registrations, and total shutdown coming later this year:

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time. [Yahoo!]

Continue reading Geocities Will Close; Adios Geocities

When WordPress is Getting Bloated

It has been discussed in some forums, blogs and in the comments:

There are certainly features in WordPress that I don’t particularly use. And I believe a lot of users are not using them as well. Yet, these features are in the core, and we can’t even avoid them.

Continue reading When WordPress is Getting Bloated

Has Akismet Really Been Smart?

I don’t know about you but at least in the last six months I received comments obviously are spam past through Akismet anti-spam filters. Even the akismet stats, I don’t think they’re telling the truth about how many spam they missed –the ones I manually marked as spam. The numbers are just definitely way off the count that I everyday mark as spam.

The missed spam –these are comments that all have to only say, “they liked my website”, “I have the best website”, “they’ve subscribed to my RSS feeds”, and sometimes asking “they can’t understand how to subscribe to my rss feeds”, without adding any single value whatsoever to what my post was about to which they are commenting. They are usually coupled with strange names and url’s or domain names that looked really bogus (e.g. insurance, some medical drugs, etc.).

I love your website.

So do I, now what? Do you want me to visit yours? No way!

I enjoyed your website.

Really? I hope you enjoy more!

Or maybe, the reason these comments go past the Akismet filters is because other people just simply approve them for their own blogs without second thoughts. And Akismet is left confused, don’t know what to do with the same ip address, name, email address, and website url.

Yeah, I’ve seen some comments like these published in other blogs.

Maybe the blogosphere has become too crowded that rendered anti-spam filters like Akismet ineffective.

Some of the Most Expensive Domain Names

Sammy lists down some of the top domain name sales, excerpt follows:

Sex.com – Sold for: $14 million on January 19th, 2006
Fund.com – $9,999,950 – Sold in 2008
Porn.com – Sold for $9,000,000 sometime in 2007 (Update: OR $9,500,000 — Two different prices shown across many different sites/news reports)
Business.com – Sold for $7,500,000 in 1999 (Remember: This was pretty much a “business” sale with a developed name)
Diamonds.com – Sold for $7,500,000
Beer.com – Sold for $7,000,000
AsSeenOnTV.com – Sold for $5,100,000 in January of 2000
Korea.com – $5,000,000 – Sold in January of 2000
Casino.com – $5,500,000 – Sold to a private company in 2003
YP.com – $3,850,000 – Sold to YellowPages.com
Shop.com – Sold for $3,500,000 in 2001
WorldWideWeb.com – $3,500,000 in 1996
AltaVista.com – $3,250,000 (Saw this one but didn’t list it because I was sure it was because of the business built on it)
Software.com – $3,200,000
Loans.com – $3,000,000
eShow.com – $3,000,000
Vodka.com – $3,000,000 Sold December 2006

Continue reading Some of the Most Expensive Domain Names

Browsing the Net Through Your Email Client

There are instances, in office settings, that employees are allowed to have email but not internet access. In this case, webinmail will be extremely useful to bypass this prohibition in accessing “public” websites. By public, it means web pages that are readily available without requiring an account and login just like friendster and facebook.

To request a web page by email, send an email message to [email protected] and the url in the subject line. By sending a message to the same email address and leaving a word or phrase in the subject line (not the url), webinmail will return a rediff search result for such term/word/phrase. To use google, change the subject line to “google:query” replacing query with your query keyword.

One more good thing about this service is that the web page that’s sent to your inbox, the links in the page are already converted to “mailto:” to facilitate more convenience if you want follow up web page requests.

Click here to try it out.