Archive for December, 2010

Emarketing & E-commerce study materials (Emarketing Reader, Search Engine Marketing, SEO Guide) for download

Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010

I’m preparing myself for my E-marketig & E-commerce exam part of the EMarketing & E-commerce module I follow in Arnhem Business School.

The study materials for the Emarketing exam are very basic and give some very basic information related to E-marketing & E-Commerce, however the readings has some good points. The electronic documents related to the E-marketing were available for a download from HAN Scholar (The University electronic documents study resource).

Since the documents lacked any copyrighting I thought it’s a good idea to share the documents for the public here in my blog, that some other followers of the Emarketing discipline either in Arnhem Business School, can benefit from them or any other students following the same course.

Here are the Emarketing related resources:

1. Emarketing Reader – The basic study documents for the E-marketing course in doc file and EMAR_Reader in pdf
2. SEO Guide doc file – a very basic guide for Search Engine Optimization
3. Basic concepts behind Search Engine Marketing – CPC, CPP, Site search engine submit, meta tags, web directories, Optimizations etc.
4. Powerpoint (PPT) Presentations archive for E-marketing, E-business, E-procurement, E-business Strategy
5. Emarketing & E-commerce comparison assignment student reports for 2 websites

all the files I have gathered throughout the study of E-marketing course are avialable here.

I hope this study resources will be of use to some future students in Arnnehm Business School or other university students following the same course.

How to change from default main menu text to another text in Joomla

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

To change the Main Menu link menu entry in Joomla, from Joomla administ rator I tried to:

Menus -> Main Menu -> Menus

I’ve changed the title but the change didn’t appeared in my Joomla based website .

I tried to change it directly in the source code of the website by looking for ‘Main Menu’ string with:

debian:/home/mysite/www# grep -rli 'Main Menu' *

but it appeared too complicated and after trying few string changes in few files I decided to drop this kind of approach.

A bit of investigation online led me to how to achieve what I was trying to dire ctly from Joomla.

Here is how. In Joomla administrator move to:

Extensions -> Module Manager

In the list you will the Module Manager appear under the list Module Name , therein you have to click over Main Menu text and change it to whatever you like to.

The new text you entered will appear on the joomla website immediately, enjoy.

How to build website sitemap (sitemap.xml) in Joomla

Monday, December 20th, 2010

A joomla installation I’m managing needed to have created a sitemap.xml

From a SEO perspective sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz are absolutely necessary for a website to bewell indexed in google.

After some investigation I’ve found out a perfect program that makes generation of sitemap.xml in joomla a piece of cake.

All necessary to be done for the sitemap.xml to be created comes to download and install of JCrawler

What makes JCrawler even better is that it’s open source program.

To install Jcrawler go in the joomla administrator panel:

Extensiosn -> Install/Uninstall

You will see the Install from URL on the bottom, there place the link to the com_jcrawler.zip installation archive, for instance you can place the link of the downloaded copy of com_jcrawler.zip I’ve mirrored on www.pc-freak.net ,by placing it on https://www.pc-freak.net/files/com_jcrawler.zip

The installation will be done in a few seconds and you will hopefully be greated with a Installation Success message.

Last thing to do in order to have the sitemap.xml in your joomla based website generated is to navigate to:

Components -> JCrawler

There a screen will appear where you can customize certain things related to the sitemap.xml generation, I myself used the default options and continued straight to the Start button.

Further on a screen will appear asking you to Submit the newly generated sitemap to; Google, MSN, Ask.com, Moreover and Yahoo , so press the Submit button.
That’s all now your joomla website will be equipped with sitemap.xml, enjoy!

How to make passive FTP server connections working on Debian

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

If you’re setting a new server based Linux server and you want to have an FTP server which is located behind a firewall or some kind of routerI’ve myself experienced this on Debian Lenny powered server.

The exact kernel of the server is as follow:

Linux debian 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Thu Sep 16 15:56:38 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Until some time ago, everytime I experienced this kind of problem on a Linux router the fix was done through loading the kernel module ip_conntrack_ftp,however this kind of fix is no longer working for some reasons I’m not completely aware.
The Linux kernel has adopted a new kernel module:
/lib/modules/2.6.26-2-amd64/kernel/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_ftp.ko
Which until some time apparently takes care for the connection tracking of passive FTP connections.

Therefore to currently to enable the passive FTP connections to your FTP daemon on Linux you need to load and enable the nf_conntrack_ftp

debian:~# echo nf_conntrack_ftp >> /etc/modules

debian:~# modprobe nf_conntrack_ftp

Now your FTP passive connections should work fine.

Inception (2010) moview review (religious elements in the movie)

Saturday, December 18th, 2010

Inception 2010 movie coverI’ve watched the Inception movie after it was recommended to me by a number of university colleagues.
I was said the movie is great and really worthy to be seen. Thus I had a big expectations about it.
Inception is claimed to be a SCI-FI, though I hardly doubt if it really can be qualified as a sci-fi.
The movie’s main actor is Leonardo Dicaprio and probably this is one of the reasons the movie so highly praised.
I should say that starring Dicaprio is one of the only good things about the movie.

Inception includes a number of elements which earlier were introduced by the Matrix, so at times some scene feels a bit like the Matrix.

The concept behind the movie is so complicated that you can hardly grasp the idea.
Anyways probably the main idea is that a world has come to a point where a technology has been evaluated giving the possibility when attached to a person to enter his mind.
That’s how people from real life can enter the mind of a person who is attached to a tech device and can by actions within the mind alter scenes and thoughts of the intruded mind.
There is a lot of Mambo Jambo in the movie,computer graphics and scene montages are to be seen in many of its scenes.

Whenever a man’s mind is intruded through an inception, the only way for someboto wake up is to kill themselve.

The movie further shows a scenes where people are in various dreams and by killing themselves they can enter another dream where the cycle of inceptions is so complicated that maybe there is no exit anymore

The religious background of the movie is heavily influenced by Buddhism and buddhist ideas like “I create my own reality”
This is shown for instance in the movie scenes where people can built up their own reality.
As with many modern movies the Inception movie contains a reference to spiritual elements which are completely incompatible with Christianity and I would say under covered openly unchristian.
Some of the other elements the movie includes is mostly elements of modern psychology beliefs and practices.

The idea about killing oneself in order to wake up I found to be very bad and even promoting Suicide, since the movie presents suicide as an escape to another world.

Furthermore by reading some reviews in Wikipiedia I found the way movie was promoted was mostly through viral marketing, which also sounds quite bad.

To conclude I find the movie as a very bad one, from religious, philosophical and personal perspective.
The ideas presented in the movie are not that special. The Inception movie is really a bad movie in my view maybe one of the worst made ever so I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.
It’s really amazing that the movie still have positive reviews on a shit movie like this.

How to fix Cannot open local disk drive C in My Computer on Windows XP

Friday, December 17th, 2010

A friend of mine who is running a Microsoft Windows XP contacted me in Skype and asked me how can he fix a problem with his My Computer and Windows Explorer not able to open his C and D drives

Below is the screenshot illustrating the problem of Windows File Explorer unable to open the C: drive:

cannot open local disk drive c, choose the program to use to open this file:

After some quick search in Google I’ve found out that the problem is caused by some kind of silly usb stick (flash drive) autorun.inf virus.

This virus alters the way the Windows Internet Explorer works by adding some autorun.inf into the hard drive partitions, e.g. C:, D:, E: etc.

Solution to the problem actually appears to be quite easy and can be done in two general directions;

1. Using a specific cleanup autorun.inf program for instance Flash_Disinfector.exe

This method is quite easier especially for people who don’t know how Win XP command prompt and basic Windows terminal commands works:

To fix the Cannot open local drive C XP issue this way all you have to do is Download Flash Disinfector.exe and run it on your PC

If you don’t want to bother with binary .exe software which you had no clue what contains (e.g. the preferred method in my view to solve the cannot open drive C is done via cmd.exe

2. Through using Win XP’s command prompt atrib and autorun

– Here run the cmd.exe through:
Windows -> Run
type in cmd.exe inside the Run box, the Windows Terminal will popup:
Inside the terminal type in:

C:Documents and SettingsAdministrator> cd C:
C:> attrib -h -a -r -s autorun.inf
C:> del autorun.inf
C:> cd D:
D:> attrib -h -a -r -s autorun.inf
D:> del autorun.inf

Your problem should be solved.
Now make sure to secure your XP PC with some good antivirus software like NOD32 in order to prevent it from getting infected again with some kind of autorun.inf worm or some other terrible type of malicious soft.

Hope that helps.

Disable Eaccelerator logging to httpd-error.log on FreeBSD

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

For a couple of weeks I have the eaccelerator Apache caching system on my FreeBSD.
The installation was quite easy actually, all I had to do is install the /usr/ports/www/eaccelerator port and restart Apache.

Now few weeks after I’ve realized my file system is full

There was a couple of reasons for the overfilling of my filesystem but one of the major ones was because my /var/log/httpd-error.log was growing too quickly because eaccelerator was writting debug messages in the log.

I’ve nulled off the httpd-error.log which has already grown to 1G just for about 3 weeks time and also cleaned up some old logs which I haven’t for a year and a half already and now my file system full problem is gone.

However I decided to disable the eaccelerator debug log in order to save some space on my FreeBSD and prevent future file system full problems.

To disable the eaccelerator debugging on FreeBSD I had to do the following:

1. Add to my /usr/local/php5/lib/php.ini just one line of code

freebsd# echo "eaccelerator.debug = 0" >> /usr/local/php5/lib/php.ini

2. Restart the Apache server

freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart

That’s it now the annoying eaccelerator debug log is disabled and a lot of space which was lost on nothing is saved.

I wonder why the port developed (Ale) has left the default installation port installation to have the debugging enabled. If I have some time I’ll drop him an email to tell him about the issue.

My PHP/ MySQL Restaurant Reservation Form

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Two months ago, I’ve developed a contact reservation form in PHP. The form is really easily customizable and is straight forward to integrate.
I’ve developed the form for a small restaurant which was missing the feature on it’s joomla based website in order to be able for restaurant clients to reserve tables.

Here is how my restaurant reservation form looks like:

hip0's plain php restaurant reservation form

Later on I found there are plenty of possibilities to easily make a reservation form in Joomla but at that time I had no idea that custom contact forms can be prepared with Joomla, so I developed my own one from scratch in plain PHP and MySQL.

The form’s fields are in Dutch, because the form I’ve developed for a Dutch restaurant.
However changing the form text is really easy,to do so open the php file and modify it, according to your needs.
I decided to share here the reservation form in hope that it might be helpful to somebody out there.
The Reservation form is licensed under GPLv2 so you’re very welcome to distribute and modify it freely.

The form installation is described in the README file you will find bundled with the reservation form archive.

You can d Download my PHP restaurant reservation form here

Feedback on the form is very welcome!
 

Robocopyright ACTA / Or how important decisions about world’s future are taken in management meetings

Monday, December 13th, 2010

I was pointed by Dave to this nice fun video. It’s a remake of the very famous Robocop movie scene. Where a new way of police robocot is being introduced in a management meeting.

Some crazy guy substituted the original replicas with stuff related on the sad reality of the restrictions constantly being imposed on the Internet users.
I also find this movie to be a good representation on how important management meetings within enterprises works.
It’s a bit sad, but in reality business works in a similar way, so this video is a good representation on the unethical way business is constantly conducted nowdays.
Here is the funny video itself:

Sadly enough the video has also a lot of hidden wistom in the background if you think deeply on how stuff works in our modern societies.

I hope accidently some top managers would stumble on it and take some moral from it.

Install shellinabox web SSH shell service on FreeBSD

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Ever wondered how you can have a pretty web ssh shell on your FreeBSD?
I hope so, just until recently I was using the python script /usr/local/web-shell/webshell.py which allowed me to have a webshell to access my machine via SSH from a web broser.

The bad thing about the webshell.py was that it was especially prepared for Iphones and it appeared in my browser just in a small part of the browser window.
Another problem with the webshell.py script was that it doesn’t support work Internet Explorer.

So I heard from David about this ShellinaBox . Basicly shellinabox is another web shell software you can put into your server and access your server via HTTPS protocol directly through a browser.
This is pretty cool, what is even nicer is that there is already a port existing for FreeBSD, as I’m using FreeBSD in my home router that was exactly what I needed.

So here is how I installed the ShellinaBox nice small piece of soft to my FreeBSD system:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/shellinabox
freebsd# make install clean

Now it is installed next step for me was to set up the shellinabox to start up when my FreeBSD box boots in through the /etc/rc.conf bsd booting system:

To do so I added the following two lines in my rc.conf:

freebsd# echo >> shellinaboxd_enable="YES"
freebsd# echo >> shellinaboxd_port="8022"

Now as a last step before you have it up is to launch the shellinabox rc script:

freebsd# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/shellinaboxd start

In order to access the running shellinaboxd daemon on port 8022 you have to point with your browser to http://yourdomain:8022

That’s it login with your credentials and have fun accessing your shell via a browser.

This is very handy thing to use especially if your outbound SSH (22) port access is filtered from some ISPS or private networks.
Enjoy!