Last Day For Blogger

Thanks to my friend Ramon Thomas of Netducation for advicing and pointing me to the right source for documentation on why I should migrate to wordpress. I was really not in the mood to migrate to wordpress because I was quite comfortable with blogger until Ramon really hinted if I have my blog on my domain, I could bring more traffic to my domain and plus the numerous advantages wordpress has over blogger, in terms of a huge community behind it development because it is open source, large database of plugins, ability for myself to write plugins since I have the know how and the sweet of them all, the ability to migrate my blogger contents( that even pushed me more to head over for blogger ) which was something refraining me from migrating to wordpress, etc.

As you're reading this post now, my new blog is up and running with all my blogger contents and comments. If you keep track of this my blog, I advice you move over to the new one at addhen.org/blog. For this blog, I'm not going to maintain it anymore but will still be up for references.

On this note I say bye to blogger. I really enjoyed my blogging days with you. You really served me well and you still does but its unfortunate I have to say bye bye to you today. Bye blogger.

Vulnerability In Firefox 2.0.0.5

Came across this post and would like to caution people who uses Firefox's password management feature. It has been reported that is has a vulnerability which allows malicious website to steal passwords.

According to the post, if you let firefox remember your password, you are at a big risk from the flaw. I always see that feature as a security risk, no wonder I don't use it. I better rely on my current means of remembering passwords than browser based password management.

To me, not only mailicious website can steal passwords but malicious users of your machine too can steal passwords.

There is a discussion on going as to if that feature should be removed or not. To me alone, it should be completely zapped or made as an extention to be downloaded and used only if the user want to take the risk.

Using PHP curl to fetch post from del.icio.us

Been playing with del.icio.us's api to pull my del.icio.us ( very hard writing that ) post. php's curl made everything smooth. Below is the code. Feel free to comment on it.

$fetch_url ="https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?";
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $fetch_url );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD,"your username:your password");
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,5 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
$response = curl_exec( $curl );
curl_close( $curl );
header("Content-Type:text/xml");
echo $response;


Translating The Easy Way With Google Translate

It amazes me anytime Google brings out a product, they just do a wow and impressive stuff. Today I got notified by a colleague of mine at the office if I know about Google Translate , my hungry for new products from Google, I quickly loaded the page before he could finish with his sentences, I was on the site already.

As traditional of Google, it was in beta. I played around with it to translate from English to French to test my lousy French. The most amazing of it all is that, it translates website too to all the languages available. It translated my site from English to French and it worked like a charm.

Now I feel, most translators will be heading for a new profession as this really works almost perfect. It amazes me how it just works and the most fascinating thing about it is, it is beta but so intelligent that, it just works. What I'm hoping for in the future is for it to have almost all the major local languages. I miss my Twi, Ga, Ewe, Hausa, Swahili etc and I know others too have missed theirs. Google you rock!!

Bill Gates Is No More The Worlds Richest Man

For many years now, Bill Gates has top the world richest list but as of yesterday as reported by Techdirt and BBC, Bill Gates is no more the worlds richest man, he has been overthrown by Mogul Carlos Slim a Mexican's Telecom tycoon. Slim's fortune worth about $67.8bn (£33.6bn) and above, as against Bill Gates whose fortune comfortably remains at $59.2 billion. Slim is specifically into wireless telephones and this tells you that, the phone industry is about to dominate the world, as most people are fancy about getting a new feature rich mobile phones all the time.

This also shows that Microsoft's dominant days of the desktop are numbered and gradually counting down.

BTW, that is the photo of Mr Slim.

Upgrading Ubuntu The Shorter Way

Today I decided to upgrade my system from Feisty to Gutsy the next release of Ubuntu.

The normal way to do an Ubuntu upgrade from an old release to a new release is to edit the "/etc/apt/sources.list" then replace all old release name to the new release name in the file. Quiet tedious if you ask me, because if you've a long list in your sources.list file, then it means you are going to sit for quiet long to effect the changes.

For me if I'm using vim to edit the file, I do this :%s /search_text/replace_text/g to quickly do the find and replacement. After, I save the file and do the normal "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade", then get some coffee, watch it as it upgrades.Seems shorter eh?

Now I suffer no more long and tedious process, all I have to do, is just type these at the shell prompt.

  sudo sed -e 's/\ssearch_text/ replace_text/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade

As I'm blogging now, the upgrade is in progress.It is just sweet.I'm hoping nothing goes breaks though. Thanks to this post

I did a "man sed" to find about the "sed" command. sed is a stream editor for filtering and transforming text. It is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream. Notes taken from the man page. If you need more info about sed, then "man sed". If you know of any quicker way too, please include them as comment.

Googling For Specifics

Searching for stuffs with Google is really easy. All you do is just type in the search keyword or phase but there are more to it to fine tune your search to get specifically what you want. This is why I want to show you the power of the colon :. It might be old stuff to some people but hey there are people who don't know yet.

Say you want to search for specific file type, the syntax goes like this

 filetype: extension search term
 eg. filetype:doc how to blog

The above example brings out files with .doc extention relating to a topic on "how to blog"

The next syntax let you search for specific search term on a particular site you know of

 site:URL search term
 eg. site:www.addhen.org social bookmarking

If you want definition of a word

 definition:word
 eg. definition:blog
       or 
 define:word
 define:blog

Being specific on the search term, just add double quotes to the search term

 "search term"
  eg. "How to blog"

Okay that is it. These are what I know. If you know of others please include them as comments.