Now a Flickr PRO
Posted by Nazly on Thursday, 31st August 2006 11:23:24 (GMT +0530)Yesterday I upgraded my Flickr A/C to PRO. Earlier I thought the limit in the basic free version is only the 20MB per month upload limit. But when I reached 200 photos I found out that my later photos started to vanish when I uploaded the new ones as there is a display limit of latest 200 photos. Unfortunately Flickr processes their on-line payment through Paypal and worst case is Sri Lanka is not in their list of countries to make an on-line payment. The alternate is to send payment via money order. I'm so much used to making on-line payments and really didn't want to go through all the pain of manual methods. Writing to the forums in Flickr didn't help my course though finally decided what I should do. There is a great option in Flickr where someone can buy a Flickr PRO A/C for another person. So I told my friend abroad to get me one. And he did
![:)[Smile]](/smiles/icon_smile.gif){kind=icon}
. So that solved my problem in five minutes. Flickr being a Yahoo! company should consider about choosing payment method that everyone can use as I know there are lot of people who want to upgrade to PRO but finding it difficult because of this problem. Their application is by far the best for sharing photos over the web. Hopefully they will come up with some alternates for paying on-line by the time my A/C expires.
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CAPTCHA on my blog
Posted by Nazly on Friday, 25th August 2006 12:01:23 (GMT +0530)I have added the CAPTCHA on my blog when posting comments to avoid SPAM comments. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" which is used in Web based applications to only allow human beings to submit data. Though I was aware of CAPTCHA it was Christian Wenz's tutorial session on "Web Application Security Bootcamp" during the ApacheCon Asia 2006 that influenced me to add this feature on my blog. So when you are posting comments you just need to enter the verification code you see in the image.
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Driving Licence at last
Posted by Nazly on Friday, 25th August 2006 10:31:58 (GMT +0530)Atlast I got my driving licence yesterday after one year since the day I passed the trial test. I was riding my motorbike with the temporary licence which I had to extend the validity period a couple of times coz its valid for only 6 months. I'm glad that I atleast got it by now otherwise I have to extend it again end of this month.
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Ubuntu Dapper - XserverFailover
Posted by Nazly on Tuesday, 22nd August 2006 23:02:30 (GMT +0530)I came home after work in the evening and found out that the X Server failed to start after booting my laptop. The log didn't give me that much of a clue though I tried to update my xorg.conf using this command
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
But that didn't help and was wondering what could have gone wrong. It was working well till I shut it down without any problems when I left work today evening. Suddenly I realised that I installed some updates via the Update Manager and it was the xserver-xorg update that I installed. Good thing I didn't update it on my desktop which also runs Ubuntu Dapper Drake. When I checked the Ubuntu Community blogs I found out that there is a problem with this update. And the best part is I found the solution for it and fixed it as well. If you haven't updated it please don't do it for now. If u have done already here are the links where I found the solution.
Latest Dapper xserver-xorg upgrade might break the xserver
This is how I fixed it since xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb was not uploaded to the Ubuntu Servers.
HOWTO solve the problem
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Forfeited Test in 129 years
Posted by Nazly on Monday, 21st August 2006 10:43:24 (GMT +0530)It was the most unfortunate thing to see a Test match being forfeited. The 4th and last Test Match between England and Pakistan was forfeited and England were awarded a win. England who have already won the series ended up 3-0 in the series after this forfeited Test. This was mainly due to the incident that took place in the 56th over of England's second innings. The umpires Hair and Doctrove had to change the ball due to ball tampering. But the worst happened after tea when Pakistan remained in the dressing room in protest at this decision.
Read More of this story from the below links.
Test forfeited: England win
Pakistan forfeit Test amid farcical scenes
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SAF Games 2006
Posted by Nazly on Saturday, 19th August 2006 12:30:31 (GMT +0530)SAF Games 2006 is being currently happening in Sri Lanka. Yesterday was the opening ceremony which was held at the Sugathadasa Stadium. Was googling to find the schedules of the events and found this website www.tomorrowsrilanka.com. I guess it is the official website for the SAF Games 2006. Planning to go for the Swimming events which starts today at the Sugathadasa Indoor Stadium Swimming Pool to reawaken my past. I miss the days I used to swim in that pool during 1993-1994. I was around 13 then and was trained under late Mr.Rizvy Zain. Unfortunately had to give up my five years swimming career due to problems I came across in my right ear which seems to be giving problems still.
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Web Application Security Bootcamp
Posted by Nazly on Thursday, 17th August 2006 22:55:06 (GMT +0530)It was the final day of the ApacheCon Asia 2006. Today there were two tutorial sessions split into four tracks. In the morning session I took the 'Introduction to the Apache Web Server' by Rich Bowen where he gave an excellent piece of tutorial on basics and beyond basics of the Apache Web Server.
The second session was the one I have been waiting was on 'Web Application Security Bootcamp' by Christian Wenz. It was one of the hot topics IMO where most of the Web Application developers tend to avoid the fact of securing their Web Applications. The session covered XSS(Cross Site Scripting), SQL Injection, Session Hijacking etc.. The best part of Christian Wenz's tutorial was that he showed us a live demo on how all this could be possible by cracking a Web Application that was poorly coded without considering the security issues. Then the countermeasures on how we can write secure Web Applications that would be secure against these type of attacks. I gained a lot with this tutorial. Some of the types of attacks I was already aware of, but I started to think twice after the live cracking he did on the Demo Web Application.
So that was the end of the ApacheCon Asia 2006 which was a great success. I'm really proud to be a part of it and it being held in Colombo, Sri Lanka. There is a Geek-Out event this weekend where all the geeks get an opportunity to have some fun at Kitulagala. Unfortunately I will miss out this event due to some schedules that I can't cancel.
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ApacheCon Asia 2006 - Day2
Posted by Nazly on Wednesday, 16th August 2006 22:21:14 (GMT +0530)So it was day two of the ApacheCon Asia 2006 or I would rather call it day three coz it started on the 14th with the hackathon. Day started off with the session by Dr.Sanjiva on the topic 'The World is Flat in Apache'. The sessions after that were broken down into two tracks where I took the Apache AXIS sessions. Samisa's session on 'Embedding Axis2/C in Your Application' had some basic examples how Axis2/C can be embedded into PHP. One of the sessions after lunch was replaced by Rich Bowen's 'mod_rewrite' session. I gained a lot in this session coz I have been used to play around with it sometime back.
The day ended with the panel discussion which was then followed with the award ceremony, cultural show, cocktail etc. And there is more tomorrow where Tutorial sessions will take place in four tracks. 'Introduction to the Apache Web Server' by Rich Bowen and 'Web Application Security Bootcamp' by Christian Wenz are my two obvious choices as most of them being Java based tutorials. Got some time to talk with Christian Wenz about his tutorial session tomorrow and he mentioned that it won't be language specific though his examples will be in PHP which is good news for me
![:D[BigGrin]](/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif){kind=icon}
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ApacheCon Asia 2006 - Day1
Posted by Nazly on Tuesday, 15th August 2006 22:55:23 (GMT +0530)Today was the first day of the ApacheCon Asia 2006 which is the first ever ApacheCon in Asia. It was great to be part of the history and we all should be proud that Colombo, Sri Lanka was chosen to host this great event. ApacheCon Asia 2006 is the main event amongst few other events of FOSSSL'06. Ken Coar, the Director of Apache Foundation briefed about ASF in his Welcome Session. After the keynote address the sessions were broken down into two tracks. So I made sure that I listen to the sessions that I'm keen on listening to. Since there are more Java stuff it didn't really create any conflicts.
The first sessions was on AJAX and PHP by Christian Wenz. This was one of the key sessions I wanted to listen. The session covered in-depth of AJAX and how it works with very simple and basic JavaScript code. And he also spoke about the frameworks that are available. He showed couple of examples which used Sajax. Sajax is a very good toolkit IMO but I prefered libajax over Sajax. But libajax was not in his list. So bit surprised. This session was followed by Emmanuel Cecchet's session on Building Highly Available Web Applications which covered on how Sequoia can be used to build highly available multi-tier web applications. During Lunch got the opportunity to have talk with the geeks and hackers around. I did skip the session after lunch but was a part of the talk with Russ Nelson with his gadgets where Bud, the local gadget expert was also present. Rich Bowen's session of WebDAV was also something new for me and its something I gotta try it out after getting back to work (may be next week). The last session was Lightning Talks and I was keen to see whats gonna happen on that session. And it was really a cool session indeed where individuals were given 5 mins to present a 5mins talk on a topic they selected. It was a fun session all the way. It was a mixture of informative and fun talks. So that really ended the first day of Apache Con Asia 06 though there was a BOF session after that which I was not really interested in. So waiting till I get there tomorrow
![[Wink]](/smiles/icon_wink.gif){kind=icon}
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Two years of blogging..
Posted by Nazly on Friday, 11th August 2006 16:17:37 (GMT +0530)It has been exactly two years since I started to blog here. I first started to blog @ Codewalkers.com but the blogs there had to be taken off for some reason. Then I started my own blog and prefered coding the blog system on my own as a hobby project. I slowly added features to it and made sure to keep it very easy to use from my end. I also made sure to keep the look and feel very simple as well.
It has been two years of fun blogging about things that interests me. Will try to keep my blog live as much as I can. Hopefully you all had a good time reading my posts and gained something out of it. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions to keep my blog up and running.
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Flickr photos on my blog
Posted by Nazly on Friday, 4th August 2006 16:22:21 (GMT +0530)As you would have noticed I have added a section called 'Recent Photos' on the right column of my blog. That shows the recent 5 photos that I have uploaded to my Flickr Photos. To grab my recent photos I'm using phpFlickr, the API kit for Flickr API.
PHPFlickr is so easy to use and has some very basic examples on how to play around with it. PHPFlickr requires PEAR HTTP_Request package. If caching is needed the PEAR DB package is required as well. I'm using caching in my case.
You will need to get an API key from Flickr before using the Flickr API. You can get it from here.
Here goes the code.
Display my recent photos
<?php
require_once("phpFlickr.php");
#Replace <api_key> with your API Key
$f = new phpFlickr("<api_key>");
#Enable phpFlickr Cache
$f -> enableCache("db", "mysql://user:pass@localhost/db", 1800);
#Find my NSID
$nsid = $f->people_findByUsername("nazly");
// Get the friendly URL of the my photos
$photos_url = $f->urls_getUserPhotos($nsid);
// Get the my recent 5 photos
$photos = $f->people_getPublicPhotos($nsid, NULL, 5);
// Display Thumbnail pics
foreach ($photos['photo'] as $photo) {
echo "<a href=\"".$photos_url.$photo["id"]."\">";
echo "<img border=\"0\" alt=\"".$photo["title"]."\" ".
"src=\"".$f->buildPhotoURL($photo, "Thumbnail")."\" />";
echo "</a>";
echo "<br /><br />\n";
}
?>
Display my photos that belongs to specific tag(s)
<?php
require_once("phpFlickr.php");
#Replace <api_key> with your API Key
$f = new phpFlickr("<api_key>");
#Enable phpFlickr Cache
$f -> enableCache("db", "mysql://user:pass@localhost/db", 1800);
#Find my NSID
$nsid = $f->people_findByUsername("nazly");
// Get the friendly URL of the my photos
$photos_url = $f->urls_getUserPhotos($nsid);
// Search for photos
$photos = $f->photos_search(array("tags" => "ubuntu",
"user_id" => $nsid));
// Display Thumbnail pics
$i=0;
foreach($photos['photo'] as $photo){
echo "<a href=\"".$photos_url.$photo["id"]."\" target=\"blank\">";
echo "<img border=\"0\" alt=\"".$photo["title"]."\" ".
"src=\"".$f->buildPhotoURL($photo, "Thumbnail")."\" />";
echo "</a> \n";
$i++;
// If it reaches the fifth photo, insert a line break
if ($i % 5 == 0){
echo "<br />\n";
}
}
?>
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