Isles Tech

No thanks, OpenDNS

2009-05-21T14:59:00.003+08:00

Okay, it is not really right to be blogging during office hours, but it is my break time. And I am not using company resources except for the network connection. :)

I've been checking my GMail account for (yes) work-related concerns, but of course, GMail shows you all your messages, not just the work-related. So I came across Kevin Paquet's Pinoy Teens Online FeedBurner message - I recently subscribed to him when I realized that I had not really been keeping track of one of the brightest bloggers this side of the country. Earlier, I noticed that kevinpaquet.com showed domain parking ads. Since we are contacts at Facebook (not accessible from school again, no thanks OpenDNS), I sent him a chat message about the matter and I was informed that he just actually put up those domain parking ads purposely.

Pinoy Teens Online mentioned us in their latest post, and I wanted to check on the actual site - even though Kevin thoughtfully provided the entire text of the post via feed, it is always better to read what is on the site, and you can comment too - but look what comes up:

No thanks OpenDNS. Nudity? Pornography? Hey Kev, what do you have there, the Hayden Kho and Katrina Halili scandal?

How to set up a two-PC network

2009-05-07T08:17:00.000+08:00

There are at least two ways of setting up a two-PC network, if you just want to play games with your brother using the desktop PC and you using the laptop.

The easier but more expensive way is to use a router or a switch. Enabling DHCP on the router would then assign different IPs to the computers; the only thing you need to remember is to set the default gateway to your router's IP address (usually 192.168.0.1 - this is the address you type on the address bar which allows you to go to your router's configuration).

The more difficult way, but is less expensive because you don't have to buy a router is to use a crossover cable. This is simply a LAN cable with some wires interchanged. You can go to your nearest computer supplies store which also do services and ask them that you need a crossover LAN cable of a certain length. This is not something which you can buy right away, at least not in Cebu City. This is so because not so many people requests for these; only the very geeky (or cheap) ones do. Then you have to manually configure the network. Assign different IPs to the network cards of each PC, and use the IP address of one as the default gateway for the other. For example, if the network card in PC1 has the IP address 192.168.0.1, and that in PC2 has the IP address 192.168.0.2, then the default gateways are as follows: 192.168.0.2 for PC1 and 192.168.0.1 for PC2.

How to set up different network profiles in Windows XP

2009-05-07T08:02:00.002+08:00

So I finally got myself a laptop. At our boarding room, I play network games with my brother; he uses the desktop PC and I use the laptop, via an adhoc two-PC network. At my girlfriend's boarding place, I've installed a router which connects to the Internet and assigns a unique IP to my laptop automatically. At my workplace, I have to connect using a preconfigured IP and gateway.

Unfortunately, there has never been an easy way to change from one network profile to another in Windows XP. So I have to do everything manually.

Windows Heaven's suggestion does not seem to work from my end.

Thank goodness I've found the NetSetMan utility via LifeHacker. Now I can set different profiles at will. The free version of NetSetMan allows up to six profiles, pretty well above what I really need.

Irony

2009-04-18T10:40:00.001+08:00

Laptop cannot detect and connect to wireless connection

2009-04-13T22:49:00.002+08:00

I'm in my girlfriend's provincial house (Hilongos, Leyte), where they have a non-conventional wireless connection (by non-conventional, I mean you have to specify the IP and gateway addresses). It took me some time to figure out that to enable my Internet connection, I have to enable selection of non-preferred network. To do this, go to Control Panel > Network Connections > Wireless Network Connection > Wireless Networks > Advanced. Make sure that the "Automatically connect to non-preferred networks." is checked.

ODP application

2009-03-08T19:15:00.002+08:00

I've applied to be an editor of the Open Directory Project, for its Philippine education category. Wish me luck :)

Tip: Choose a password which is 7 or 8 characters long, and has at least one non-letter (either digit or punctuation). Took me three tries.

UPDATE: Application denied :(

How to increase forum signups by using information hiding

2009-03-08T18:21:00.002+08:00

If you are looking for a teaching job in the Philippines, you should probably head to the Jobs for Teachers sub-forum of the Education in the Philippines Forum at http://eduphil.org/, or go to the more specialized Teaching Jobs Search Forums at http://educjobs.net - I administer the former, while the latter is administered by my co-teacher at PAREF Springdale School, Mr. Archie Sacay.

The problem with this kind of forums is the fact that most users would go there, get some information (specifically, jobs available and contact information of the schools) and then leave, leaving nothing to the forum administrator(s) who spent resources compiling the information. The obvious remedy would be to disable guest access, and force users to register and activate an account before allowing them access to the information. The problem with this approach is that the information that you would not like unauthenticated users to see could not be seen by Google either. So your site does not get indexed, and you do not get visitors. (The alternative technique of cloaking, that is, providing different content to GoogleBot when it visits the site, and the register-first-to-access-info if a human visitor does the same, is admittedly black hat, and frowned upon by many webmasters, although I know that many are using that technique. If you are caught doing this, Google could potentially exclude you from their index.)

So what's the solution? My idea is simple: hide some of the information. That is, if a guest accesses the page (and by guests, we would include GoogleBot), he will only see some of the information, perhaps the job openings, and the school (at the very least that is what I implement at EduPhil). But we hide some of the information, say the contact information of the school. Of course, if one already knows the school, it should be easy to get the contact information online, as long as the school has a website or some information about it online. Otherwise one will have a problem. And if the administrator would really like to be cruel (I don't want to), he could leave out the name of the school, and include it in the hidden information. Still further ideas would be to limit the information seen by number of posts, time spent on the forum, etc. but as of now that is beyond my programming skills :-)

Anyway, to implement this in MyBB (which is the forum software used at EduPhil), one would need to create a plugin. I based my code on Dragon Fever's Hide Links from Guests plugin but unfortunately the license of that plugin states that I cannot offer a modified version of the plugin for download. Just a hint how to do it: the preg_replace at the end of the file will be replaced with a preg_replace for a given block of HTML that you want to hide. In my case, I would put the information to be hidden in a block of HTML inside (for an example, look at the source of this page). If the user is a guest, unactivated member, or banned member, the hidden information will be replaced with some other text.

How to use first bolded words/phrase as WikkaWiki title

2009-03-08T05:06:00.002+08:00

One of the things I love about MediaWiki is the ability to use the first bolded word or phrase as the page title. Since MediaWiki is too slow for shared hosts, such as the one hosting the Encyclopedia of Philippine Education, I could not use MediaWiki, and instead I opted for the less resource-hungry WikkaWiki. With WikkaWiki, the default title is the first word or phrase which is made into a header. In order to change this behavior, we have to change the file lib/Wakka.class.php. Find the following code snippets:

function PageTitle() {
$title = "";
$pagecontent = $this->page["body"];
if (ereg( "(=){3,5}([^=\n]+)(=){3,5}", $pagecontent, $title)) {
$formatting_tags = array("**", "//", "__", "##", "''", "++", "#%", "@@", "\"\"");
$title = str_replace($formatting_tags, "", $title[2]);
}
if ($title) return strip_tags($this->Format($title)); # fix for forced links in heading
else return $this->GetPageTag();
}

We have two things to change:
1. The ereg value - instead of the one given, it should be ereg( "\*\*([^=*\n]+)?\*\*", $pagecontent, $title)

2. The $title should be then be $title = str_replace($formatting_tags, "", $title[1]); // take note of the [1], from [2].

How to redirect domain.com/index.php to domain.com using .htaccess

2009-03-03T18:33:00.002+08:00

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index\.php(.*) $1$2 [R,L]

If you want to redirect index.html as well, you can have

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule (.*)index\.php(.*) $1$2 [R,L]

Never underestimate unregistered visitors

2009-03-02T15:52:00.002+08:00

It's almost the anniversary of EduPhil.org, the Philippines' first (and so far only) independent online forum for teachers, parents, students, policymakers, and stakeholders of Philippine education. I had been a bit disappointed with the number of active posters in the forum; there had been only a very few of us, and these past few days, some of the more active posters have spent less and less time at the forums.

I installed a MyBB plugin which would tell me, in the index page itself, how many members and guests there had been in the past 24 hours. The numbers were a bit of a surprise for me: for today, there had been 172 users: 167 guests and 5 registered. Look at the disproportion.

The information shown by the plugin is very useful for me, since it would force me to think of ways to get the guests engaged and get themselves an account at the forum.

MyBB won't do SEF URLs

2009-02-28T12:36:00.002+08:00

It took me some time to figure this out. In some servers, using the default .htaccess file provided by the MyBB download won't let you do the search-engine friendly URLs. In this case, you should add the following line:

RewriteBase /

(Note: The MyBB installation at EduPhil.org is at the root.)

MyBB thread number of views won't update

2009-02-27T16:32:00.003+08:00

The profile design plugin is responsible for this, if you can make it work at all.

How to remove MyBB archive mode, and why it's a bad idea

2009-02-26T19:33:00.005+08:00

UPDATE: More than one month after I reenabled the archive mode, my number of pages indexed at Google dropped by 200. I'm removing it again.

A few months ago, I removed the archive mode from my MyBB installation at EduPhil.org because I taught that it was causing duplication of content in what Google is seeing at EduPhil. The process is actually very simple:

1. Remove the link from the footer (Admin > Templates & Styles > Templates > Expand Default Templates > Expand Footer Templates > footer).
2. Delete the archive folder. (You must log in to your host.)

While editing the templates of the forum today, I realized how "dirty" the inside code of its page looks like. What the MyBB team wrote about the archive mode sounds very true:

Lite (Archive) mode is a search-engine friendly mode that allows search engines and screen readers to easily read the forum. The Archive mode only allows 'reading,' and so one must access the 'full' version of the forum in order to post messages to the forum.So therefore it is a bad idea to disable the archive mode. I am putting it back by linking to it from the index field, and recreating the "archive" folder.

Tip: If you deleted the archive folder, you can copy a fresh "archive" folder from the MyBB download.

Tip 2: You can rename the archive folder to some other name, i.e. "light" or "Ro

Directory of call centers in the Philippines

2009-02-23T09:59:00.002+08:00

I am creating a directory of call centers in the Philippines. It is not yet complete (and I doubt if it will ever be) but it already covers Baguio, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Davao, and Eastwood Libis. I will be adding other locations soon.

E-democracy in the Philippines

2009-02-19T06:23:00.002+08:00

I am currently coordinating an online petition to the House of Representatives of the Philippines to pass HB 4734 (full text), their counterpart bill to SB 2408. If passed as law, these two bills would give a nine-thousand-peso increase to the monthly salary of public school teachers in the Philippines.

Surprisingly, it took me some days before I was able to contact a staff of Hon. Luzviminda Ilagan, GABRIELA party-list representative, requesting for a copy of HB 4734. In fact, I had to write to the webmaster of the Congress website, saying that I am doubting if the emails from their contact forms are passing through. (Probably the email to him did not pass through too, since I haven't received any reply yet.)

I resorted to finding a "personal" email address of the representative, to be able to contact her. (Quotes around "personal" since apparently it was one of her staff who answered my query.)

My point is, e-democracy is not yet that advanced in the Philippines. But, if properly channelled, these online means of communication (email, social networks, forums, etc.) can be a viable tool for political action. The first step, perhaps, is for our cause-oriented groups to present themselves online - I have yet to see a known offline cause-oriented group with an active Internet forum.

My friend Kevin Ray Chua beat everyone in the Philippines in using the Internet for online campaigning for 2010 (see his Mar Roxas for 2010 blog).

Inquirer malware? (according to Google)

2009-01-31T22:44:00.002+08:00

Google thinks that this Inquirer contains malware:

Forum administrators in the Philippines

2009-01-16T19:29:00.002+08:00

Apparently there is no forum for forum administrators in the Philippines. This would be a good venue to share tips and tricks on running forums considering the Philippine context, although my reason for looking for one right now is banning a certain steven21 who keeps on spamming at our EduPhil.org forums.

Apparently this guy is also present in other forums, e.g. Tubag Bohol.

The super admin password in PHP Fusion

2009-01-12T19:44:00.002+08:00

I finally settled on PHP Fusion as the portal of choice for a new web site I'm trying to create. It took me some time to understand the reason for the extra admin password.

How to append content of a file to other files in directory

2008-12-02T19:35:00.000+08:00

Append contents of append.txt to all *.html file in current directory.

cat append.txt | tee -a *.html

Disable media warning in MediaWiki

2008-11-26T20:32:00.001+08:00

To disable the message "Warning: This file may contain malicious code, by executing it your system may be compromised.", look for the check at includes/ImagePage.php, specifically for "mediawarning". Around this, you should see the following check:

if ( !$this->displayImg->isSafeFile() ) {
$warning = wfMsgNoTrans( 'mediawarning' );
$wgOut->addWikiText((some HTML text here distributed over a few lines));
} else {

You would like to remove this check; delete the entire thing and also the closing brace of the else's brace in the last line above. In MediaWiki 1.13.2, the if check above starts at line 440.

Revival of Tagalista Watch

2008-11-26T18:03:00.002+08:00

I'm resurrecting my Tagalista Watch blog. I'm broadening its goals to include fighting against Web sites which automatically sets your language to Tagalog when it detects that your IP comes from the Philippines.

Upgrading MyBB (too big a hassle)

2008-11-24T19:36:00.003+08:00

With a lot of things to do but finding time to waste still, I checked the internals of the Education in the Philippines Forum, a forum on Philippine education which I manage. I logged in to its administration console, which greets me with the notice that I last checked for updates to MyBB more than two weeks ago. More than two months, to be more exact.

So MyBB 1.4 had been released. It has a lot of cool and nice features, and I want to update to it right away... But I still have to do these things:

1. Backup the database (simple; provided in the admin panel).
2. Backup the files.
3. Download MyBB 1.4.
4. Upload and unzip MyBB 1.4 to my host.
5. Put back the changes to the template which I have done.
6. Check for errors.

I am stumped at steps 2 and 5. They're just too much of a hassle right now, and I won't update yet. :)

web.archive.org is a proxy/anonymizer service

2008-11-21T15:08:00.000+08:00

See for yourself:

Hmmm...

GMail offers themes

2008-11-21T06:56:00.002+08:00

I always start my day by checking out my mailbox. Some people think that that's counter-productive, but I have years of habit behind me ;-). While checking out my GMail account this morning (via Firefox, because Konqueror won't load GMail), I was surprised to see that they are offering me themes to choose from. GMail apparently loves me, since Google said they will be "rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days", and yet I already have it enabled in my account.

OpenDNS caveats (rehash)

2008-11-20T16:38:00.005+08:00

So finally the powers-that-be in our company figured out how to block certain websites via OpenDNS. Obviously we're already using OpenDNS as our DNS server.

I think that outside the system administrator and his company in our school, I was the first one to broach the topic of OpenDNS among the teachers, and how useful (my evaluation at that time) it would be to limit Internet access to legitimate sites. We've even tried using it in my brother-in-law's Internet cafe, and we are still using it in some units because Globe Broadband's DNS server is sometimes unreliable. However, my long use of the system alerted me to one big flaw of OpenDNS:

The default behavior of Firefox (and other browsers, I think), if the target of a POST could not be reached, is to keep that data in some place, so if you do a refresh, it will be reposted. However OpenDNS does not tell Firefox that the network is unreachable, instead it gives the browser a custom page not found message - a soft 404. The user is of course alerted to that fact, but for Firefox the transaction was okay, and so it discards the form input.

In other words, you lose whatever you are typing if in case the server on the other side times out.

Now, I'm just wondering why Project Wonderful is blocked, when obviously useless sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and YouTube are not.