TECHiE TALKS

Most of our time especially when we like surfing the or if we simply love computers or macs we usually encounter DVD’s but did you ever wonder what the labels mean? DVD-R or DVD+R? Specifically “8x DVD R Media”?

Before knowing what DVD-R and DVD+R means let us know first what a DVD is. DVD stands for Digital Versatile/Video Disc. A DVD-R is a write-once format and it is almost the same as the CD-R Media, once you’ve burned the data onto that DVD platter the data is permanent. The information on the disk can never be changes and will be there forever. This is the first DVD format released which is compatible to most DVD-ROM players. This was first used in a stand alone DVD player. The storage capacity of a Blank DVD-R is usually 4.7GB.

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Apache Tomcat is an implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. But what are servlets? What are JSPs? Servlets are memory-resident Java programs and Tomcat is running inside a servlet container.

Here is a definition from Sun’s servlet site:

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In the past few days I was solving a problem on a site and the problem was this; The site has an iframe virus, the site pings teleporn.net and most links redirect to ask.com or teleporn.net which is a banned site, the site was banned  because it installs a virus on your system without knowing it. This problem has bothered me most of the time because I am having a hard time where to fix the teleporn.net redirection. So how did I solve the problem? First thing was that I investigated every file that I have. And there I found out that a script was appended on the PHP and HTML files I have on the server. To have a picture how the script looks like, I have an image below:

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You just bought a shiny laptop for office and home you use or on business trips and vacation or go to down town and drop by on a wifi zone.  Then that would be a very big productivity you have there.  But how would you take good care of the only thing that is so handy and so useful for you.  Do you think cleaning it is good enough to make safe? If you are thinking this way then you better learn some tips on how to take good care of your lappie, it’s not that easy to have one Optimizing your laptop would be the main thing here.

First thing to learn is how to extend the battery Life of your Laptop. If you are out in the road and have no outlet on sight, how would you extend the life of your battery?

1.        Dim the display.  The screen mostly draws the most power of the laptop battery.  So set the lowest setting to preserve the battery’s life.

2.       Exit or Close unnecessary process.  If you have a lot of process going on your laptop without any use, I suggest you should close it.  If you have DVD’s or CD’s on you DVD ROM you should eject the CD so that it will not keep on spinning and keep on consuming you laptops battery.  If the Anti-virus is kept on scanning your laptop, you should stop it.  There are other times to scan you laptop when you have the cable plugged in.

3.       Enable Power-saver profile.  For windows XP users, on your control panel you have the power options where you can set your computer’s resources sparingly as possible to save more power to your laptop’s battery.

4.       Re-calibrate battery’s gauge.  You should re-calibrate the battery gauge of your laptop in such a way that you should set a battery life for your laptop to shutdown or set it in a time that the battery is near discharge, in this way your laptop will not cut off the operation permanently because it thinks that the battery is depleted and needs to be recharged. Read the rest…

MOBOT – Mobot is the term used for a Mobile Robot. A mobile robot consist of wheels that serves as the feet of a walking robot, sensors as the eyes, and a micro controller that serves as the brain of the mobot. Mobots can be made with robot kits, it can also be created by merely designing your own circuit and make it synchronize with your micro controller or mobots can be made by hacking toys and other devices that suits the function you need the mobot to perform. Mobots are created for fun, educational purposes and to help us on our daily activities by using kits and other ways stated above.

In the previous years the interest and development of robots/mobots in our school (MPSC now MUST) was not that high. Robots where made at those times but the use of hardware and computer peripherals was so limited and proper dissipation of internet access was confined that most of the higher years tried to code things as if they where coding everything.   Kits where not also available that time or it already existed but no information was relayed. Then came attempts on creating line followers but it lacks speed and accuracy and to some it was a failure. Last year 2008, mobile robots was implemented and started out as a competition. And as a prize a higher grade will be given. A standard track was created so there will be no bias during the presentation. All where fun to see that all your hard work is fulfilling. There are mobots that performed very fast and with small lapses on the track, there were also mobots that where very slow but was able to follow the line with an average accuracy of 99.99%. There was also a mobot that runs not so fast and not so slow  but with the lights that glow and the music that it performs while following the line makes it a hot mobot. No robot kits where used but it performed well with only a limited time for accomplishment. Read the rest…

Spyware is a malware that is placed secretly on a computer. It tracks the user’s behavior and reports information back to a central source.  Some types of spyware are simply annoying because they cause increased spam or unwanted pop-ups, but others can go so far as to threaten the security of your PC and personal information.

Spyware can act like a peeping tom or, at worse, a geeky thief. There a lot of things that a spyware can do, spyware can be installed on your PC without your consent.  Typically, spyware finds its way onto PCs by “piggybacking” onto a file, such as a computer game, a music file, or a free software program or it can be downloaded from the Internet when you visit a particular website. Pests such as spyware can often lurk silently on your computer until someone or something sets them off,  or until they are found and properly removed. Read the rest…

One problem in creating a PHP Session Authentication is that when you are logged in and suddenly logs out and click the back button you will be returned to the page where you kast visited.   Isn’t this a problem especially when you have important data in that page.  So if you have problem with this let me share a code that will surely eleminate the problem.  In this code there is no need for javascripts to disable the back button(what if js is disabled on the browser?).

The code uses session and when the user logs out the user is redirected to the login page and when he clicks the back button it will redirect back to the login page.  This is one trick for PHP Security Authentication.

#create a function to redirect the user to login page
#this should be on your php functions
function redirect($url){
	echo "<script type='text/javascript'>";
	echo "window.location.href='$url'";
	echo "</script>";
}

#this should be in your page where you authenticate the user
session_start();
$sql = mysql_query("select * from user
       where username=\"$username\" and userpassword=\"$password\"");

if(mysql_num_rows($sql) > 0) {
 $_SESSION['auth'] = true;
} else{
  redirect('login.php');
}

#so on the logout file there should be
session_destroy();
redirect('login.php');

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