It happened once to have my word-press site down because somebody hack it. It was the first time to have my site down because somebody hacked it. the navigation on my site was not working probably. What make it bad is that I was not have any backup of my site. Having the risk of loosing my site’s content was like a nightmare for me.
The issue was basically the navigation was not working as well as if I try to use a valid URL it was not navigating to the correct page as well. Control panel was not accessible because of the same issue.
Then I start thinking what might bring the Navigation down. Then I start thinking what might be corrupted on my site. The good news I was using a customized theme so all what I did is deleting the theme I have on my site by using FTP client and restore it again. This solve the issue and I start putting strategy to backup my site and make sure to have a base to recover my site without even have any possibility of loosing my site’s contents. The mistake I have is having the theme folder with write permission for anonymous access. This security permission was required by a plugin. So I took that plugin out from my site and re-set the correct security permission on the theme folder.
Tips to Secure your Wireless network
these days almost everyone has a Wireless network (WLAN) either at home or at work. it is very nice to deal with WLAN as you are not have to set in specific place just to use the wire connecting you with your router.
the main issue with WLAN is any Wireless-enabled devise can connect to it not only your laptop or mobile devises. specially if your WLAN signal is accessible outside the boundary of your building. which means anybody can set outside and monitor your network traffic or even access internet using your WLAN. this is really scary !!
When I setup my WLAN network at home for the first time, I thought it is secured just because I have to provide passphrase (password) before I can access my network. after doing some researches I could find my network is not secured at all and I like transferring my data in front of everybody who can catch my network signal. I was accessing my bank accounts, providing my personal information, transferring files between different machines. this meant if anybody could successfully breakdown into my network, then I am officially dead!
so after I discover the fact that is my network is not secure, the first question I have what can I do to secure my network?. I can not go back to the Wired LANs. I could list 4 easy actions that you can do to make your network more secure:
1. make sure you are NOT using WEP Encryption:
WEP is stands for “Wired Equivalent Privacy” and this kind of encryption can be hacked within 30 Seconds, regardless of how complex your passphrase (Password) is. to solve this issue, switch and start using WPA2 encryption. it is much more secure than WEP and harder to be hacked.
2. Place your Wireless router in middle of your house or building:
This will minimize signal’s strength so that the WLAN signal will not be very strong outside the building boundaries.
3. ALWAYS use Firewall at your WLAN router:
Firewall will prevent intruder from accessing your Router administration site. Thus make the hacking possibility very low
4. Change the default SSID:
usually the default SSID indicate the brand name of your Router. this kind of info should not be publicly broadcast. thus just change it to something else. letting the hacker knowing the brand name of your WLAN router, make their hacking much easier.
I hope you will find these easy steps useful and this will make your network much securer than if you did not implement them.
My Experience with WordPress, Office Live and Google sites
during the last year I was using GoogleSites and MS Office live to host my site. I was spending lot of time just to implement things like RSS or enable users to comments on articles I am posting there. I trust MS and Google so I thought they are providing a good tool and will not find a better ready product at low cost.
after couple of days trying WordPress (free product), I found I was making a huge mistake by hosting my site on MS Office Live or Google sites. with couple of clicks I am doing things I was spending days to implement similar functionality at MS office and google sites.
I would strongly encourage you to try WordPress as platform to host your blog and I am pretty sure you will never say “I was mistaken by using WordPress”
Enable Remote Access for MS SQL Express Edition
By Default when you install SQL Server express edition on a machine you will not be able to connect to it from another machine by using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio or application. You need to do specific steps to enable SQL Server Express to accept connections from remote clients.
Recently I read a nice article posted to CodeKicks site about this issue, I would strongly recommend reading that article, to read it click hear
How to Change the Remove Desktop (RDP) Port
You can use "Remote Desktop Connection" tool to connect to other PC and mange them remotely. It is a great tool that is really helpful specially when are talking about outsourcing industry. I do not mean this is only helpful only in IT outsourcing industry, but what I meant it is providing a huge help on that industry because you need to work on windows based machines while you are setting in a different country.
For me, I exposed my personal PC at home to be accessible from public internet network in order to be able to connect to it while I am travelling or at work. But this means I am also exposing my personal PC for hacking risk specially when I am not having a very good secured network infra-structure at home.
Hiding the Remote Desktop port is one step is to make my personal hard to hack. The default remote desktop’s port is 3389. so I decided to change it to something else to make it harder for hackers to attack on my PC. Below is the steps of how to do it:
1. Click on Start menu
2. Choose Run , this will open the RUN dialog box
3. Type REGEDIT and click on ok, this will launch the Registry Editor for you
4. Locate the following key in the registry
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Current\ControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
5. Double click on PortNumber and choose "Decimal" option then change the port number there to something else, let’s say you changed it to be 3333
6. Click OK , then quit Registry Editor 
To connect to the PC, you need to type the port number along with PC’s name or IP just like blow examples:
1. PCNAME:333
2. 192.168.1.100:333
How to Know the Execution Time of SQL Statements in Simple Way
When client report to you a performance issue in certain area on your system, you start troubleshooting and tackling the issue. the performance bottleneck might be everywhere on your system, it might be on front-end, business layer, data access layer, … etc. The scope of this article is to check the execution time taken for certain SQL statement till you get the result out from the DB. this would very helpful if the performance issue is at data retrieval. after figuring out the performance bottleneck is at data retrieval, the solution might be as easy as adding index for some of table’s columns. but in most cases you might get into a trouble of changing the body of SQL statements to have better performance. so you need a tool to assess your changes. SQL 2008 IDE shipped with a built-in tool that I found so much helpful and made my life much easier.
if you notice there is a small icon on tool bar called “Include Client Statistics”, it is by default not enabled. if you enable it and try to execute a sql statement, you will get a new tab at the result panel. below is snapshot of the new tab on the result panel
Notice the statics between different trials. it will keep the statics up to 10 trials. The statics including with some visual graphics to let you note the effect of your changes weather it increase the execution time or it reduced it.
Try it and you will find it so useful!
Be Simple winner
"Be Simple winner" this is a phrase I heard from a friend of mine long a time ago. He was advising me in regards to couple of things. After thinking of it I believed it is totally a true statement. our discussion was about software development industry specifically but I believe this statement can be reflected to other industries as well, being a simple winner does not means to deliver a bad quality software that does not meet your client requirements. being simple winner means to develop a software that meets client requirements and not exceed the requirements to extra requirements that your client is not in need for it. You should not deliver something that is extra for your client and they might not get benefited from . This does not means to ignore the basic software requirements that your client did not ask for explicitly like security and performance requirements. actually ignoring such a basic requirements might make your product not useable at all and your efforts will ends up with a big failure because of ignoring these basic requirements.
Being simple winner is targeting to deliver software that will make your client happy and at the same time meets the project success factors like being within budget, deadline, high quality… etc deliverables.
Personally I believe being simple winner can be applied in all aspects on your life not only at work level.
Don’t Delete Negative Reviews/Comments
I had discussion with a friend of mine couple of days about negative reviews that somebody might have on their site. He was after convincing me to simply DELETE negative comments or reviews. His idea is simply hide that negative thing from being displaying on your website and protect yourself from it.
My opinion was totally against that. I believe I should keep negative comments just like keeping positive comments. There are many reasons that letting you doing that. Simply it is part of honest relationship between you and your readers/customers. It is a great chance to have conversation with your reader/customer and to get his feedback and if he/she has the correct opinion, then you need to fix that immediately.
What trigger me to write this article not only the conversation I have with my friend. The trigger is mainly an article I just read about the same subject. The author of this article is Lisa Barone s Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer of Outspoken Media, Inc. I strongly recommend to read this article.
How to Make your URL shorter
For many reasons you might ends you having a very long URL for certain pages, distributing the long URL might be an issue for you as people usually does not remember long URLs and they like having short URLs.
Today there is many websites that make your long URLs shorter and make your life easier. Personally I checked http://tinyurl.com site and it worked just perfectly for me. I am pretty sure there are more sites that are doing the same thing for you. But I am recommending this one for you.
Dealing with Time.. Be Careful!
Dealing with time is something crucial that we need to a pay very close attention to it. I like the aphorism that say " Time is like a river. You can’t touch the same water twice", This is very true statement and I am having it in front of me every single minute in my every day.
In my past days I wasted many days doing not useful things. I have a guilty feeling because of that and I hope if I can go back to fix that. But there is no Time-Machine that will get me back to that time to fix my mistakes. I hope if I can have a time-machine that will lead me to correct my mistakes I made in the past. I learned that in the hard way while I could learn it in the easy way if I listen to my father or teacher when they were telling me about an Arabic aphorism that says "Time life like a blade, if you did not kill it; it is going to kill you" meaning if you did not utilize your time in a very useful things, this will fire back on you after a while.
These days, I am trying to utilize every single minutes in my day and optimize my life for that. Well, I admit this is very hard but I would not make the same mistake as the old days. One thing that trigger me to write this article is a discussion I have with one of my family members about the impotency of time and how we should deal with it.He wanted to spend most of his time playing games and at coffee-shops. I was totally against this while he was trying to convenes me with his thought which I was totally disagree on them.
I believe you have to do funny things and spend time with family and friends but that does not means wasting the whole holiday days doing such a stuff. Playing Computer games , gambling , and spend the whole night with friends is not the best thing that you can do during holidays. For me, I need to balance between spending time with family/friends and reading and enhance my knowledge.
I would love to hear from you on this topic, Please share your thoughts on this topic by commenting on this article