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System Administration -
Techniques and Tools
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Thursday, 16 April 2009 05:18 |
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Note: This article is about VMWARE Server version 1, this may not apply to version 2 or later. A few weeks ago, I was working with some VMs, when all of a sudden my menus (File, Edit, etc.) and the toolbar disappeared. At first I thought I had somehow corrupted my system or something since I did not disable these menus on purpose. The only way to get them back was to go full screen and move my mouse to the top of the screen. I searched through all the options menus and did some Googling, but came up clueless. Until I went to close the VMWARE console from the taskbar, and I noticed an extra option for “show controls”. Low and behold, I was able to bring back all my menus. Looking at this “feature” now, it seems like a pretty good idea once you have your VM up and running; however, this is a horrible place to put the setting. It does not appear in any settings or configuration anywhere else. Also, I was unable to really troubleshoot this because I never refer to the toolbar and menus as the “controls”. Normally, I am working in VM with a much lower resolution than my host PC so I don’t care about the few saved pixels, but you may find it useful. The main reason I am writing this article is so you are aware and don’t freak out if you accidentally click on it (there are other programs which stupidly put controls in the taskbar or title bar…never do this if you are writing a program, its evil). Also, hopefully if this happens to someone else Google will point them here. This is however, a documented feature in VMware.
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Click here to read the full article...
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Security -
Enterprise Security
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Thursday, 08 May 2008 05:56 |
This section of HIPAA is concerned with access control. In the IT infrastructure of a Medical organization, proper access is essential for patient privacy. Furthermore, access must be restricted to a “need to know” basis to prevent leaks to unauthorized third parties. To this end, this audit seeks to a) make sure all access is restricted (that is to say requires some more of credential validation before access) and auditable to a unique single identity (group or individual) and b) to make sure that the user credentials (passwords, pins, etc) are strong and secure within reason. By enforcing the above aspects of HIPAA the organization can be sure that all access is secure and that patient privacy and confidentiality are maintained. This aspect of HIPAA is also important for legal issues that may arise from a lawsuit or employee misconduct.
The exact text for this section is:
Standard: Access control. Implement technical policies and procedures for electronic information systems that maintain electronic protected health and records information to allow access only to those persons or software programs that have been granted access rights as specified in Sec. 164.308(a)(4).
Source: CFR 45 - 164 - 312
You can view the embedded presentation below using the SlideShare applet below. The demo video form YouTube is automatically embedded for your convenience..
Some good references to get started with HIPAA:
If you would like more information, please feel free to contact me
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Web Development -
PHP
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Saturday, 08 May 2010 10:45 |
Introduction: What are Character Sets and Character Encoding?
While as humans we perceive words as a collection of letters or glyphs as full word representations (e.g., Chinese) computers store everything as a binary representation, including letters. Every letter is represented in binary as some numeric value which is constant within a character set. The most familiar simple character set is the ASCII Character Set, which covers most standard English letters and numbers. However of course, other letters exists as well as diacritic marks and accents (e.g. β, ©, Ü, ŏ). When text is saved into memory/storage it is usually saved using one specific character encoding. Since the saved binary is actually just binary data it is possible to render text saved with one encoding in a different encoding. This is usually not intended and often results accidently and results in corrupt data display; however, because some character encodings storage values overlap it may not always be discernable.
ASCII is insufficient for coverage of all global alphabets and glyphs. Unicode provides a set of standards that include characters in multiple languages, and allows for multi-byte character representations. In ASCII all characters are of a uniform length (8 bit/1 byte); however, there are obviously insufficient possibilities to store all the characters needed for global languages. Of the Unicode standards, the most commonly used is UTF-8, which is the most frequent Unicode character encoding using on UNIX systems and the Internet.
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Security -
Security Awareness
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Saturday, 02 May 2009 14:45 |
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A solution to the botnet problem, in response to Aviram’s article I would beg to differ that there is no way to stop botnets. For the most part, botnets are composed of hijacked user PCs which are usually the most open to attack. Aviram is absolutely correct when he says that awareness is very important. Usually awareness implies that the user should have updated virus scan, not fall for scams, etc – be aware of the risk level they operate under and how that risk level is affected by their decisions. I propose a slightly more annoying example for the end user and the service provider: |
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Web Development -
Joomla
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Monday, 21 March 2011 16:56 |
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When visitors first land at your homepage, often you want to do something special. You may want to show a special message, change the header, or do a number of different things. Using the normal backend administration, you can set various modules to display based upon the menu item in Joomla 1.5; however, an empty module position may throw off your design. For example, if you have a three column layout, but only want to show two columns on the frontpage this can be problematic to setup each individual module position, and if you change, add, or remove modules this can be a real headache to implement. Furthermore, if you are developing a template for third party users, you really want to make things happen automagically.
Recently, I had to do a template conversion for a client that required various elements throughout the frontpage to be different. This involved not only making CSS changes, but also dynamically loading PHP and JavaScript code for only the homepage. After digging through the API, I have developed an effective method to determine if you are on the home or "default" page in the template and then to properly apply the necessary logic to make your final display. In preparing for this article, I can across a method posted on the official Joomla docs; however, this method relies upon a specific alias. The alias method is interesting, but it will be customized to only a particular installation, making redistribution difficult since there is no requirement that your homepage's alias be set to "home" as described in the tutorial. Instead, in the method below we will query the Joomla environment for a few additional pieces of information and use some PHP if statements to fine tune our layout control.
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