(Photo: nDevilTV)
I've been following the recent news about CrunchPad, and for all of our disappointment, it's been discontinued due to a "misunderstanding" between the guys from TechCrunch and Fusion Garage, who were developing this together.
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 12:06 PM - Categories: Linux | Technology
I have been doing some housekeeping on my VPS, and decided there's a few ports that should only be accessed by certain IP addresses for security purposes.
My VPS uses Linux, so I had to find a way to somehow changing my iptables settings to block the specific ports to every IP address, except for the ones I specified.
It's pretty straight forward, and here how you can block a specific port to everyone except for some IP addresses (the instructions are for Centos 5.5, but should work for other distros without problems):
Open our iptables settings file:
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 6:20 PM - Categories: Linux | VPS
(Photo: tutchiio)
I'm only writing this blog post because I usually try to keep my VPS up to date, and usually one of the things I have to do to accomplish such thing is updating the Java version.
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 12:00 PM - Categories: Website Optimization | Linux | General Techie Stuff | Technology
Yesterday the Google team posted an entry on all their blogs about a new operating system that is to come. They are going to call it Google Chrome OS.
The blog entry doesn't really give away a great deal of details, but it states that this new OS will be open source, and be as lightweight as Google Chrome (the browser) is.
I have to be honest and say that initially I was very reluctant and sceptical about using Google Chrome, and it took me a while (about 6 months) to finally give up and give it another try.
In fact it's been proving to be very stable, and really much faster than Firefox now. I still use Firefox on a daily basis, as it's got all the plugins I need, and some of them are really necessary for my workflow, and I don't know what I'd do without them.
Back to the OS announcements, I have a very "crude" impression that this is like another Linux distro, but with a Google's face. I saw this comment on twitter this morning and really agreed with it.
Obviously I might be completely wrong and precipitated here, as I've been on Chrome's release, but that was the impression the blog post left on me.
Also I wonder if it's a way of Google saying "You tried to compete with us on our biggest tool, now we try to do the same on yours". What I mean here is that Microsoft recently came up with Bing, which is a search engine aimed to compete with Google's own search engine, and now it might be payback time.
Also, I really have a feeling that making it open source is not an act of kindness at all, as Google themselves said they will be getting help from the open source community to work on their OS. The reason why I think it's just an act of kindness is the same reason why I think most open source projects (or at least some of them) do. They can get people to do things for them that they can't really do.
I'll give an example. Let's say Windows has a very nice feature that Google Chrome OS doesn't have. It would look bad, and sometimes be illegal for Google to go on and copy it. Of course people do it all the time, but wouldn't it be more "graceful" if somebody else implemented this feature and signed his name? That way you can be exempt of every possible retaliation, as you're only responsible for the core functionalities, and the ones you release, but you can't really keep control of versions being released by "unscrupulous" third parties.
That's more or less how I think things work, but obviously again I might be totally wrong, and this is only my sole opinion and point of view.
I really love Google and their products, and really think they have a great potential, and have some of the brightest minds, so by no reason they would need to copy anything or be competitive in an unfair way. I can really say the same about Microsoft, but still, that's me.
On a side-note, I would like to say that after *only* 5 years in beta, Google Mail has finally reached a point where it's no longer beta, and has its final version. It's really funny and feels weird that they suddenly went from beta to final, as the email software has been stable for almost 4 years now.
The same happened to Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. It's as if they suddenly realized that they forgot to remove the word beta of their logos, and did it all in one go.
I'd like to invite people to have a nice discussion and express their feelings on the comments about this whole Google Chrome OS vs Windows vs Linux.
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 9:00 AM - Categories: Misc | Linux | General Techie Stuff | Technology
I have seen people asking this question more than two times now, so I decided it's about time I write a blog post about it. In ColdFusion it was really easy to solve this problem, as CFIDE is a physical folder, so you could simply move it away from the webroot, and it wouldn't be accessible to the entire world.
On Railo it's a bit trickier, as the admin and server folders are virtual directories, hence you can't simply "move it away". Obviously it's password protected, so people won't simply have access to it and screw up with your configuration, but a more will powered person could easily brute force into it.
I have to reinforce here that a really will powered lad would probably break into anything, or even log into your server and make it a real mess. It's always good to have this false security sensation though, so I'll post here how I do my own security.
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 10:41 PM - Categories: Railo | Linux | VPS | CFML - 101
This is really for my future reference, but I thought someone would bump into that any time. I'm configuring a new CentOS 5 server and for my surprise it didn't come with yum installed.
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 4:03 PM - Categories: Linux | VPS
This is gonna be pretty much a rant about my terrible experience with the so acclaimed Chrome, released yesterday. As soon as I heard the "buzz" about the new browser, I was excited to have it installed as soon as possible. Yes, this kind of thing sounds like a great treat for us geeks IT Professionals. Before I start to name things, it's important to mention that Chrome can just be installed on Windows platform at this very moment. I'd say it's not the most wise decision, but they should know what they're doing at this moment! Now back to my story:
The Deal:
I have three different operational systems at home. My living room's computer is a Mac, so it runs MAC OSX, and I didn't feel like installing Windows on it (why should I?), hence no Chrome .
The Flop:
Then I have my laptop, which happily runs Ubuntu on it, and I also didn't feel like dual-booting any windows on that, also no Chrome then.
Well I then remembered that I have VMWare installed there, so I could benefit of my old Win XP Virtual box to get a taste of the latest technology in browsers.
Right, downloaded "the beast" and when trying to install:
"Error: Your system does not support Chrome's installation"
Son of a b***h!
The Turn:
Time to go to the last resource. "The computer in the guest room". Blow off the dust, find an UK to EU adaptor (think the other one I have is on the George Foreman) and fire up!
Got a whole bunch of %^&$£$^*&^%£$ and an annoying "dee" sound.
Ok, time to unscrew the side cover and check the ram memories, there must be something wrong with the memories. Last time I installed the wireless card and had problems on initialization. "Yes, it's definitely the ram, I'll... ahh screw it! I'm gonna go to sleep"
The River:
Right, nothing could go wrong, I arrive at the office, and before I even check my emails, I run to Google and finally download "the beast". So far so good, looks like I ain't even opening Firefox today, as people all over the world say they are doing "the switch".
Double click on "ChromeSetup.exe", nothing can go wrong now:
5 minutes past:
Yeah, it's taking a little bit too long... Ops.... a new IE window tried to open. Weird, it's not even my default browser. Looks like I have a problem I really thought it was strange when I downloaded the .exe in a blink of an eye, but didn't really check the file size. Right, so my fears have just come to reality, the file is just an executable (474 KB) downloading all the contents from Google's website. The guys working for Google didn't really think that in some companies (specially government ones), people need to access the internet (open world) via proxy. The smart developers write the program in such way that it will ask the user for login and password, or give 'em the option to download a "standalone" version. Java updates also have two kinds of installation, "online" and "standalone".
I'm not really sure, but I think Firefox also does that.While Chrome: Error 0x80042197.
Something to do with my firewall, as their brilliant browser assumes that your proxy settings are related to your login on the network
The Verdict
Yes people, it's been a real pain to install Chrome, and I think I'll stick to Firefox for a while. It's been very loyal to me along the past few years with all it's plugins, dodgy updates and security flaws, but still, it's the best browser I could ever find / live with. Let's hope for a better future, where software developers think about at least two or three options "outside of the box" and Tesco or Maynards sell winegums sorted by colours (I hate the yellows)
comments - Posted by Marcos Placona at 1:11 AM - Categories: Misc | Linux | General Techie Stuff
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