Savannah W-ITS

Worth a look – note that the tool at gapminder.org is available using free data sets.  A few features (view the 2 minute demo):

view data over time
zoom
view details
each bubble is a country
each color is a region

There are a number of additional resources & videos on the site – worth some exploring.

So, what does [...]

VirtualBox Security Tools – testing or installing Live CD images as virtual machines
I noted that this seems to be a popular approach for VMWare images and decided to try a few tools out using VirtualBox.   As with any such ’security solution’ you should carefully evaluate the tools that you allow (or the OS builds that you [...]

Moving your Wordpress site to a new URI?  If so, you will need to update the database entries that are specific to your new URI.  Some solutions to making global data changes:
Solution A – pre-import data massage

export the SQL data from the current site
make changes via a ’stream editor’ like ’sed’ (replace all instances of [...]

I have not found a simple way to batch import  image files into Worpdress – I have a few thousand images myself so finding a ‘good solution’ would be welcome.  
The out-of-the box Wordpress image-import solution does allow for ‘batch’ import of images via the Flash uploader; there is a limit to the [...]

As previously posted if you have a small web site (i.e. fewer than 20 pages) then manually copying your pages and uploading your images/media might be the best & simplest solution to moving to a Wordpress solution.  If you have more than pages & media files than you care to manually upload then you might [...]

Unfortunately there is no direct path (I did not find one) to migrate a Drupal 4.x site to Drupal 6.x (current version) – note that most likely you would face the same hurdles with any other CMS where you are making large version ‘jumps’.  Note that I previously explored Drupal and I am not an [...]

I recently found that some users could not access this site due to what seemed to be ‘false positive’ matches in the mod_security rule base.  In this particular instance the rule was one for ‘backdoor’ or ‘trojan’ access attempts.
For now, I disable the rule (or set it to log only) and I decide to see [...]

Hmm, imagine this – The C-HACK! of 2009
Update (2/7/2010) – it will be interesting to see ‘the facts’ for this event – A post by Bruce Schneier (1/23/2010) on the CNN web provides some additional thoughts, i.e. Are we doing this to ourselves? (Do our national policies increase the chances that these types of events [...]

GEO Blocking network access – blocking specific IP blocks (GEO-blocking – do you really need those connections from Asia?)
CAVEAT: The flow of packets through your system is fairly complex – I am limiting this discussion and I encourage you to RTM as well as the tutorial referenced in below…
There are a number of approaches to [...]

What are your shoe’s like?  Comfortable? How do your feet feel in a garden of needles where you are endlessly/randomly pricked?
Isn’t my ISP supposed to protect me? Hmm – yes & no.   Your ISP provides connectivity and attempts to allow the connectivity without intruding  – privacy concerns loom – how is the ISP supposed [...]