Mike’s Technology Blog

I didn’t know such a sytem already exists until I read a post from Linux.com talking about a Wordpress OpenID plugin. A quick read of the article what the plugin does - it basically converts your Wordpress authentication system into an OpenID authentication system. Sounds cool, but what is OpenID exactly?

Wikipedia defines it as:

OpenID is a decentralized system to verify one’s online identity. While it is not intended to prevent spam or create a trust metric, it solves the single sign-on problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity. OpenID users identify themselves with a URI or XRI which they own, such as for a blog or a home page. Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in.

The OpenID website defines it in more details but I would like to quote two paragraphs from them:

To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you’ve never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires. Once authenticated, your OpenID provider will send you back to the website with the necessary credentials to log you in. By using Strong Authentication where needed, the OpenID Framework can be used for all types of transactions, both extending the use of pure single-sign-on as well as the sensitivity of data shared.

Hmmm, sounds simple and easy to use. That’s cool.

and…

Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.

Well, I’d expect that statement from any project that uses the word “Open” but formally stating it on their official website is much more comforting.

To me, it sounds cool. Really, as it makes life simpler without me having to remember passwords. The need for a password collection is also minimized, if not totally removed, since each person will only maintain one identity for all websites. It’s pretty much like an online version of the National ID system used in many countries and being proposed here in the Philippines.

Upon reading it, one question quickly came into my mind - where are all the data stored? If they’re stored in one central database - then that won’t be a good idea at all since hacking into that one central database system is all it takes to compromise everything. Luckily, the OpenID guys appears to have thought of this as well. Here’s a hint from their website (OK, this is another quote from them)

The first piece of the OpenID framework is authentication — how you prove ownership of a URI. Today, websites require usernames and passwords to login, which means that many people use the same password everywhere. With OpenID Authentication, your username is your URI, and your password (or other credentials) stays safely stored on your OpenID Provider (which you can run yourself, or use a third-party identity provider).

In other words, your data is stored wherever you want them stored - either through a third pary OpenD provider or through your own system.  Sounds safe enough.  At least that keeps authentication data scattered giving hackers more headaches.

So far, so good.  I’l definitely look into this.  I might just convert this blog to use OpenID as soon as I get a good grasp on it (when that will be, I can’t promise. Hehehe).

You, what’s your take on it?

While many people say that “too much iPod” can cause hearing loss, a group of doctors on the other hand are using iPods to improve their listening skills.

The problem: Currently, a previous research shows that doctors get an average of only 40% in correctly identifying heart sounds. Now imagine if your doctor said that all is OK but there is really something wrong - he just didn’t hear it properly… Hmmm…

The solution: Train them to identify these sounds better

A new research involving 149 general internists listened 400 times to five common heart sounds during a 90-minute session using iPods. The result? The average score doubled to 80%. Now that’s a definite improvement.

Proficiency with a stethoscope—and the ability to recognize abnormal heart sounds—is a critical skill for identifying dangerous heart conditions and minimizing dependence on expensive medical tests, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Barrett, clinical associate professor of medicine and cardiologist at Temple University School of Medicine and Hospital. “It’s important to know when to order a costly echocardiogram or stress test,” Barrett said.

Barrett believes the skill of learning heart problems is best learned through intensive drilling and repetition, not by traditional methods, usually a classroom lecture or demonstration in medical school and then on the job.

Now I can begin to hear the sound of relief.

How small is the smallest pair of scissors that you’ve ever seen? An inch? A centimeter? Well, things just got a way lot smaller with what a group of Japanese scientists have made. They’re so small that you can’t use them with your bare hands. In fact, they’re so small that they’re used to cut molecules.

The scissors are just three nanometers, or billionths of a meter, long. This makes them more than 100 times smaller than a wavelength of violet light.

Just like real shears, the molecular device that researcher Takuzo Aida at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have designed consists of a pivot, handles and blades. The team presented their findings today at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in Chicago.

The blades are made of rings of carbon and hydrogen known as phenyl groups.

The pivot is a molecule dubbed chiral ferrocene, which essentially sandwiches a round iron atom between two carbon plates. The carbon plates can rotate freely around the iron atom.

The handles are organic chemical structures dubbed phenylene groups. These are tethered together with azobenzene, a molecule that reacts to light. Shining visible light on the scissors makes the azobenzene expand and drive the handles apart, closing the clipper blades. Shining ultraviolet rays on the shears has the opposite effect.

Quote from Livescience

Such a tiny scissors can have many uses and larger versions of it might even be attached to miniature robotic devices that can be sent into the body to remove tumors and treat other diseases.  Reminds me of the movie Inner Space.

Now, grandma, where did you put the scissors?

Drupal vs Wordpress - guess who wins? Comparing the two most popular blogging tools is something that is not easy.  I myself never used Drupal so I’m in no position of comparing Drupal against Wordpress. This doesn’t mean however that I cannot post about it - hehehe. Both Wordpress and Drupal are mature blogging applications.

I won’t really be comparing the two here.   Rather, I would be commenting on an article at Linux.com.  What the guys over at Linux.com did was use a preconfigured Drupal site from Bryght and a free site from WordPress.com to set up two similar sites.  From their, they started their comparison.   Here’s a summary:

• User Interface - WordPress Wins. Even though Drupal has more options, they could be arranged more efficiently.
• Design Customization - Drupal Wins. WordPress will satisfy many users, but if page design is of primary importance to you, then Drupal will be more satisfying.
• Creating Content - Tie for most users. If you have special needs, such as using international characters, then Drupal wins because of its customization.
• Handling Comments and Spam - Tie. If your priority is ease of use, then WordPress has an edge, but if managing spam is the priority, then Drupal does.
• Traffic Statistics - Drupal. Even if you don’t get much traffic, you wouldn’t be human — let alone a blogger — if you didn’t want to know as much as possible about how your site is being used.
• Application Extensions - Tie. Given the sheer number of WordPress plugins and Drupal modules, choosing one over another is impossible. Let’s just say that if you want a particular function, you have a good chance of finding it in either one.

Overall, when it comes to ease of use then Wordpress is the choice but if you’re looking for fine-tuned customizations and more control then Drupal would be better.

My personal experience with Wordpress is just downright amazing.  It’s easy to use, easy to extend, and even writing my own templates is pretty much easy.  I can’t say anything for Drupal though as I never really bothered trying.

Read the complete article here - Drupal vs. Wordpress: Which is better for blogging?

My spam box gets about 2000+ of spam mails everyday and all of them are the typical ones. Today however, I got something that made me laugh. To me, it appears like an invitation to join a spam list. I got an email in my inbox - it passed the spam filter - and here’s what it says:

This is a test message. If you want to unsubscribe and you don’t want to receive spam in the future please send me a blank email to mskiingj7@yahoo.com

It has no subject line and the sender shows “noreply@yahoo.com”

If I were dumb, I would have sent a blank email to the above address hoping that the world of spam finally ends.  But my guess is that if you send an email to that address, then you will just receive more spam.  This attempt is lame but I guess it still might work for some.

Duh!

My new laptop came with Windows XP preinstalled and though I am a Linux lover, I still decided to keep Windows and just install Linux on it on a different partition in a dual-boot setup so I can choose between Windows and Linux. I even managed to run Flash 9 on my 64-bit processor. There was one problem though. I wanted to share my Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim profiles between Windows and Linux. I knew it was doable so I started working on it. And guess what? I made it work and I’m now happy booting in either Windows and Linux and still seeing all my Firefox bookmarks, Thunderbird emails and account settings, as well as Gaim chat logs and accounts are all the same.

What did I do? It’s pretty simple actually. Again, the instructions below apply only for Debian Linux and its derivatives. Other distros can still use the same technique though.

Note! These set of instructions assume that you’re doing a clean install of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim. You will need to adjust the instructions a bit if you already have an existing installation of any of the three.

Important! Backup important data before trying anything.

Disclaimer! The author does not assume responsibility for any data loss or damage of any kind incurred by following the instructions below.

The Windows Part

Step 1. Install Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gaim in Windows then create your email accounts in Thunderbird and user accounts in Gaim.

That’s it.

The Linux Part

Step 1. Install NTFS-3G. What is NTFS-3G? Well, it’s an NTFS driver for Linux that allows full read/write support for NTFS partitions. To do this, just type…

apt-get install ntfs-3g

Step 2. Edit /etc/fstab and add the line below…

/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 ntfs-3g users,exec,rw,umask=000,nls=utf8 0 0

You may need to change /dev/hda1 to whatever your Windows partition is. Also, feel free to change /media/hda1 to whatever you like.

Step 3. Mount your Windows Partition

mount /media/hda1

If it doesn’t work, then you might want to do the following and try again:

modprobe fuse

Step 4. Install Firefox (Iceweasel), Thunderbird (Icedove), and Gaim.

apt-get install iceweasel icedove gaim

Step 5. Start each of these applications once to make sure that they create their necessary profile folders. Do not create any accounts on Thunderbird or Gaim

Step 6. Open a terminal window and do the following:

cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
mv profiles.ini profiles.ini-bak
ln -s “/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/Your Username/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/profiles.ini” .
ln -s “/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/Your Username/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles” .

cd ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/
mv profiles.ini profiles.ini-bak
ln -s “/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/Your Username/Application Data/Thunderbird/profiles.ini” .
ln -s “/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/Your Username/Application Data/Thunderbird/Profiles” .

cd ~/
mv .gaim .gaim-bak
ln -s “/media/hda1/Documents and Settings/Your Username/Application Data/.gaim” .

That’s it! You may now boot either in Windows or Linux and find your Firefox, Thunderbird, and Linux profiles exactly the same - sharing the same data.

Yes, they did it!  Scientists managed to store data in bacteria and if you think nanotechnology is cool then I’m sure you wanna check this out. Scientists at Keio University Institute for Advanced Biosciences and Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus developed a technique that allows data to be added to the genome of common bacteria.

Researchers said that upto 100 bits - that’s about 12 bytes - can be stored on each organism and they were even successful in storing the phrase “e=mc2 1905″ to the DNA of a common soil bacteria. The storage capacity may be little if you think of just a single organism but try to imagine the billions of bacteria all over the globe. A megabyte of data can be stored in only about 84,000 organisms.

The better part of this technique is that bacteria replicate themselves and when they do, they also replicate the data that was attached to them. Now this is self-replicating multiple backup systems - talk about redundancy! No more need to worry if you’re data was lost.

So what are the possible uses?  One thing that can be done is to store special markers to identify legitimate versions of pharmaceuticals.  Another use would be to use these bacteria in building a self-sustaining archival system.  Thing is, whenever data can be stored, you can start counting on bacteria and this particular method in the future.  After all, who ever thought 100 years ago that data can be stored in hard drives, CDs, and chips?

I can’t wait to buy my first 500GB backup drive made from common bacteria.

This article was derived from LiveScience.com

64-bit Flash Player 9 for Linux? Does it exist? No, it doesn’t but YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK. Yes, making it work on my Compaq Presario V2000 with an AMD Turion 64-bit processor running Linux was pretty easy. Here’s what I did (using Debian) …

1. Download the 32-bit Flash Player for Linux here - http://www.adobe.com/go/gntray_dl_getflashplayer
2. Extract its contents to /tmp
3. As root…
   1. cp /tmp/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
   2. cp /tmp/flashplayer.xpt /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
   3. apt-get install nspluginwrapper
4. As non-root
   1. nspluginwrapper /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Note that you may need to replace /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins with whatever your browser’s plugin path is… usually it would be /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins or /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins

Don’t forget to restart your browser afterwards.  Get flash player to run on 64-bit Linux ain’t that impossible after all!

I love Linux and though my new Compaq Presario V2000 comes with Windows XP Home, I still decided to install Linux on it.  The installation was pretty simple and after a few tweaks, all is working fine.

To make things simple, what I did was download a Linux LiveCD called Sidux.  A check at its download repository reveals an ISO for 64-bit computers like mine.  I downloaded it (took 4 hours with my internet connection), burned the ISO file to a blank 700MB CD and booted it.

The LiveCD worked fine on the laptop so I decided to push through with the install.

Here’s what I did:

1. Resized the Windows Partition (hda1) to make space for Linux.  I did this by using GParted which was included in the Sidux LiveCD.  GParted can be found by clicking KMenu -> System -> GParted.  I resized the Windows Partition to 30GB.  I then created an extended partition under which I made a 1GB Swap partition, a 10 GB Root partition, and the remaining I used for the rest of what Linux needs.  Note that I did not delete the ‘Recovery Partition’ (hda2) that comes installed with the laptop.  It might just come in handy in the future.
2. Installing Sidux to the harddrive was quite idiot-proof.  It was as easy as clicking the KMenu -> sidux -> SIDUX installer.
3. After Sidux was installed, I rebooted to see if all went well.  I checked both Windows and Linux and they are both working fine.

So far so good.  Now, here are tweaks that I made to make Linux on the Compaq Presario V2000 work.

1. Screen Resolution
   1. As root, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add 1280×768 to all the entries listed under ‘Section “Screen”‘
   2. Restart X
2. Wireless Network
   1. Download the drivers here - bcm43xx-drivers-64tar.gz
   2. As root, create the folder /usr/local/windrivers/ and extract the drivers in it
   3. As root, edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add blacklist bcm43xx at the bottom.
   4. As root, type ndiswrapper -i /usr/local/windrivers/bcmwl5.inf
   5. As root, edit /etc/modules and add ndiswrapper at the bottom
   6. Reboot
3. Volume Buttons - I followed the guide here.

Thus far, my installation of Linux on the Compaq Presario V2000 works perfectly.  Oh by the way, if you’re interested with my laptop’s exact model, it’s V2607CL.  The specs can be found here -> My Refurbished Compaq Presario.

I hope this helped.  If you have questions, please feel free to post a comment below.

My refurbished Compaq Presario is one of Presario’s V2000 Series. The exact model is V2607CL and all I can say is that it performs oh so well! How did I get it? Well, it was given to me as a gift in exchange of a few ‘programming’ labor. I tried to take some photos of this “new” laptop of mine but my camera sucks so I decided to just go for photos available online. I tried searching for ‘large’ photos but the biggest I can get is the one on the right… promise, I’ll take a good shot of my laptop this week so you guys will believe me. Hehehehe.

Being a techie guy myself, I know you’re pretty much interested with the specs so here they are:

• AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology 1.8 GHz
• 512 MB DDR SDRAM
• 100GB Hard drive @ 4200 RPM
• 14in. WXGA TFT Active Matrix Widescreen Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Operating System
• Dual Layer DVD±RW/DVD-RAM Optical Drive
• ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M IGP Graphics Processor
• Altec Lansing Speakers
• 1 x Type I/II PC Card Slot
• 3 x USB 2.0
• 1 x IEEE 1394a (FireWire)
• VGA out
• Integrated Fax Modem
• Integrated 10/100 Network Card
• Integrated Wireless Lan
• S-Video out

How does it work? It works perfectly and flawlessly and I love it. Since it was just a gift, I had no idea how much it costs so I decided to search online and found out that it’s pretty cheap at only $600.

Thinking of buying one for yourself? Click here to Compare Prices!