Be careful of MSN virus img1526.zip

Tonight, one of my friends sent me a message and a file img1526.zip on MSN. The message said that My mom just died :( This is the picture of car crash.. I felt strange and typed some words to confirm this. My friend did not response. So I knew that it was a virus and declined the file. Later, I called my friend and confirmed that the message was fake and her computer had been infected by virus. Just one minute later, I received a request of same file from another friend with a different message saying I got some pictures last week. I think you like em.. Hah, the second friend had just opened the file and got infected.

I guess this is a variant of so many MSN virus, which send you a file like pic.zip, photo.zip. Although Microsoft enforced virus scanning in the latest Live messenger, you should never trust a file transfer request without immediate confirmation from your friends. haha

MAMP: Install Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL 5 on MacPro

I used MacPro with MAC OS X Server 10.4.7 (gcc 4.0) as our web server. The machined is shipped with Apache 1.3 and MySQL 4 installed. If you want to know how to use them, you may look at Apple's Web Hosting Help. However, I decided to install latest Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL5.

I downloaded and installed the latest MySQL Community Server 5 manually first for some reason. Then, I had to install Apache and PHP.

Before the installation, you'd better stop the running httpd and mysql server if they are there.

At first I tried to use FINK to accelerate this procedure. In FINK, PHP5 has no stable release yet. During the installation, there are some problems but can be solved as suggestions here. But when I tried to compile PHP5 to support the manually installed MySQL, I repeatedly get this this error:

apxs:Error: Activation failed for custom /sw/etc/apache2/apache2.conf file.. apxs:Error: At least one `LoadModule' directive already has to exist..

Finally, I unintalled Apache2 and PHP5 from FINK and decided to manually install them. The latest version httpd-2.2.4 and php-5.2.3. I found a good tutorial on MAMP installation and following their suggestions on installation if Apache 2 and PHP 5.

Everything looked OK except one strange problem: I cannot use mysql_connect() function to connect mysql, although I was able to connect the mysql server through Terminal by mysql -u root -p. I spent much time on searching the Internet and finally found that the bugs are in /etc/my.cnf. Notice /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock in that file, although mysql_config showed /tmp/mysql.sock, which was the configuration that I chose during the installation. After correcting /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock to /tmp/mysql.sock and restarting mysql server, the problem is solved. So remember to check if the output of mysql_config --socket is the same as the socket variable in your /etc/my.cnf.

Now you should be able to access http://your_domain(localhost, or your IP address, or domain name). Write some test files to test if you can use PHP and MySQL.

To make the default web page directory as the Sites for every user, check if you have something like the following in your httpd.conf or other .conf files:

<IfModule userdir_module> UserDir Sites UserDir disabled root <Directory /Users/*/Sites> AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec </Directory> </IfModule>

Restart Apache server. Now you should be able to access http://your_domain/~username. If access is denied, check if the following configuration is in your .conf files:

<Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all </Directory>

If it is, adding '#' at the beginning of each line to comment it out. Remember to restart Apache server again.

How to install Adobe Acrobat Reader in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

I tried to use the package for Linux from adobe.com but failed. Then I found somebody addressed this problem already. The following 4 commands may solve the problem:

$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | \ sudo apt-key add - $ sudo wget http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/sources.list.d/feisty.list -O \ /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install acroread mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins

The details is at this page.

Secure your web experience

Instructions for browser settings

How to run Internet Explorer securely

How to run Apple's Web browser securely

My experience with bibliography manager

I need a bibliograph manager. My requirements are very clear: 1) web interface; 2) multi-user access; 3) search function is important; 4) comments; 5) better be able to import BibTex format; 5) better be able to generate EndNote and BibTex format; 6) better to be written with PHP so that I can tailor it easily.

I searched a little bit and found some freewares. Below is my experience with some of them.

Refbase - not successfully run

Uncompress the tar.gz file. According to the INSTALL, I changed the database name, username and password in db.inc.php. Since I don't have root access on my web server, I manually created the database and then run the SQL setencens in install.sql file. As the results, tables are created and an initial user user@refbase.net with the password start> are created. Login as user@refbase.net, the first thing is to change the default password. The authenication method is different with the PASSWORD function provided by MySQL. Then created some users.
Some references already exist in the database. The problem is: limited format (no procedding or conference entries; details link cannot work; import function cannot work.

BibAdmin - which is used by INRIA, working well so far

Easy to install and run. It can be used for your publication management or reference management. In parameters.php, I set $pubs_type_biblio = false; for reference management. Then, I found every of my requirements are satisfied here. Only small justifications needed.
BibAdmin provides simple and easy-to-use interfaces. I particularly like their import function of BibTex format text. It works perfect. I noticed that they use md5 as their crypt method for password. I was cheered up with this software and would continue to use and polish it.
A bug for comments was fixed
The bug is that you cannot change access of a comment. A "no permission" warning was given.
Fix: Change function get_com_query() in fc_comments.php file. Change empty($access) to empty($access)||$user.
Change default value of Status for new authors in add.php: change default value of indexed field of bib_auth table to Not an member.
Change default value of Access for comment in add.php: Change default $acc_com value in fc_records.php to 0. It was used to be -1, which means the default value is Me Only.
Change default value of Access for comment in show.php: I want to change to default value to 'Group' instead of 'Me Only'. Function get_com_form() is used to print comment formm here. In the function, the access method is set to 'Me Only' by default. To change it, move the condition empty($access) from the OPTION of 'ME' to the option of 'GROUP';
Fix HTML tag bug in comments: I tried to use HTML tags like [a] and [b] in my comments. But that comment cannot be displayed correctly. I found that BibAdmin try to put all the content of the comment in a javascript sentence like this: [a href="javascript:deletee('link', 'id', 'rich comment', 'user', 'type'); return false;" onclick="deletee('link', 'id', 'rich comment', 'user', 'type'); return false;"]del[/a]. Since rich comment may include double quote, it will result a display problem. We can use String.fromCharCode() method to replace the double quote. Since this delete prompt is not important, we can just delete the content of comment in the parameter list of javascript function.
How to change the size of comment box: All you need is to edit a line in fc_comments.php. Search Comment: and edit the following textarea tag.

A more complete guidance for HTML

For beginners, I would like direct you to W3schools' HTML Tutorial. W3schools is a place where you can find good tutorials for most of web technologies.

For advanced programmer, you may want to read the Specification of HTML 4.01 and the Specification of XML 1.1.

I also collection some interesting knowledge about HTML.

• Define an expression in HTML. Although I cannot find any standard describing this. This works in IE 6 but not in Netscape 7 and not tested in Firefox yet.
  Click Here to test if you are using IE
  The code is as below.

  <div id="mycode" expr="alert('hah!')" onclick="eval(document.all.mycode.expr)" > Click Here to test if you are using IE</div>
  

  You can even execute your script stealthily when the document is loaded. This is often used by malicious code to be executed stealthily. Since IE is more tolerant for those codes, IE is not as secure as Netscape and Firefox.

  <div id="mycode" expr="alert('hah!')" style="background:url('javascript:eval(document.all.mycode.expr)')"> 
  

A more complete guidance for JavaScript

Here I try to collection a complete guidance for JavaScript while I am working on that. First of all, JavaScript is not and unrelated to the Java programming language! Search a little bit, you'll find a lots of articles on that.

For beginners, I would like direct you to W3schools' JavaScript Tutorial. W3schools is a place where you can find good tutorials for most of web technologies.

For advanced programmers, you may want to look at the Core JavaScript Reference and the ECMAScript Specification, which is the standard for JavaScript (Netscape) and JScript (Miscrosoft).

I also collection some interesting knowledge about JavaScript.

• The for and event attributes of the script tag can associate the code with the event. The following example defines JScript code and associates it as the onmouseover event handler for the img element that has the identifier MyImage. But this can only work with IE 6, not Firefox 2.0 on my computer.

  <script for="MyImage" event="onmouseover" 
  type="text/javascript">
      // Carry out some work, e.g.
      alert("hey!")
  </script>
  ...
  <img id="MyImage" src="sample.gif">

• You can also set the background of an element in class "bar" by executing a JavaScript.

  <style>.bar{background-image:url("javascript:alert(’JavaScript’)");}</style>
  

• The example above indicate that JavaScript can also be used as a protocol as ftp and http. For example, you can enter the following url in the address bar of your browser to see what happend.

  javascript:alert("Hello World")
  

  The script will be executed and an alerting box will pop up.
• String.fromCharCode() write Unicode characters. You can get Unicode values (be prepared to download a 33M file.
• When you put a block (say, with id="id1") inside a [select] block, you cannot use document.getElementById("id1") to get the object of the block. Solution: move the block out of [select] block.
• Get text of a span block, use innerHTML property.