Simple Cloud Works

WordPress celebrates 10 years!

Joseph Luis — Tue, 28 May 2013 22:54:17 +0000

Click the picture above for a look back from one of the co-founders, Mark Little, or here for the love letter from the other co-founder, Matt Mullenweg.

WordPress started as a blogging platform 10 years plus 1 day ago. Over all these years, it has grown up to be a powerful content management system (CMS) that allows you to create a full website beyond its blogging functionality. Actually, some have said that it’s the largest CMS in the world, powering 18% of internet’s websites.

In case you haven’t noticed it, WordPress comes in two “flavours”:

WordPress.com - a free-hosting web platform that saves you the step of installing its software in exchange of having some limitations in its functionality and formatting. Limitations that you can pay to remove
WordPress.org - which is the hub for all WordPress. There you can download the engine so you can self-host it, find plugins, themes, support … and much more

So today we say…

Congratulations WordPress!

At Simple Cloud Works we are happy to be part of such an amazing community of WordPress users and developers!

Are you interested in building a website with WordPress in any of its flavours? Simple Cloud Works can help you!

Fixing Vulnerability in WP Super Cache and W3TC Total Cache WordPress Plugins

Joseph Luis — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:07:10 +0000

It’s not really news that two popular WordPress plugins for caching pages , WP Super Cache and W3TC Total Cache, had a vulnerability that allowed to do arbitrary, remote code execution on your website, in other words, a security hole.

The good news… updates are available for WP Super Cache and W3TC Total Cache to fix their vulnerability.

This case is a reminder of the importance of keeping software updated. I know sometimes software updates break things and change configurations but, on the balance between those troubles and security problems, I prefer to deal with the first ones.

How to delete a long list of spam users in MediaWiki

Joseph Luis — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 06:57:44 +0000

If your MediaWiki site has been spammed with tons of automatized account registrations (and it’s not new that captcha could not be enough to stop spammers) one preventive response is to install the ConfirmAccount extension. This extension disables direct account creation, requiring approval by admin users.

But how do you delete the long list of spam users that has been created?

Another extension comes to the rescue: User Merge and Delete. Once installed you can choose to merge the spam accounts with the Anonymous one and delete them from the database… one by one.

To delete a long list of spam accounts we can follow Viswaprabha’s crude but ingenious way to “automatize” the use of the UserMerge extension.

1.- First let’s get the following:

Install the UserMerge extension

Install in Firefox the Web Developer Add-On

Python interpreter

Install in Firefox the DownThemAll! Add-On

The trick consists in using the Web Developer Extension to get information from the UserMerge form. Information that we will concatenate with a list of spam accounts to produce a simple web page. In turn, the produced html page will be used by the Firefox DownThemAll! extension to instruct UserMerge to delete the spam users.

2.- We use the Special:ListUsers page of our MediaWiki to get a column-list of the spam account’s user names. This can be done, for example, copying, pasting and filtering the users list in a spreadsheet. Be careful not to include the legitimate users!

3.- Now, logged in as an admin user of the wiki, we go to the Special:UserMerge page using Firefox. Once in that page, we select in the tool bar of the Web Developer extension Forms > Convert Forms Methods > Convert GETs to POSTs. Then Forms > View Form Information will open a page where the information we need is the session token that is unique to a browsing session (e.g. 2c05d520d9b202235c03e8fe8ll8khB)

4.- We then use a Python script to concatenate the generated list from step 2, let’s say in a userslist.txt file, with the session token from step 3 and produce an html file. Here is below an example of such a script. Notice that to use it yourself you need to replace Your Wiki Domain and the token

#!/usr/bin/python
# Concatenate a list of users to produce URLs which delete them using UserMerge Extension for MediaWiki
# Usage: python concatenate_UserMerge_MediaWiki.py userslist.txt > userURLlist.html

import sys

input = open(sys.argv[1])
count = input.readlines()
g = len(count)
input.close()

print ""

input = open(sys.argv[1])

for k in range(g):
line = input.readline()
print "\""+"http://(Your Wiki Domain)/index.php?title=Special:UserMerge&olduser="+line+"&newuser=Anonymous&deleteuser=1"+"&token=2c05d520d9b202235c03e8fe8ll8khB\\\""+">User URL Link"

input.close()

print ""

The usage of the script above, named for example concatenate_UserMerge_MediaWiki.py, is:

python concatenate_UserMerge_MediaWiki.py userslist.txt > userURLlist.html

5.- Our last step is use the html page generated above with the Python script, e.g. userURLlist.html. When we open this file with Firefox we should see a page full of links, each one of those representing an instance to instruct the UserMerge extension in our wiki to delete one user. To effectively visit each of these links and execute UserMerge we use the DowThemAll! Firefox extension on the, e.g. userURLlist.html page. It is important that for this step you are still logged in within the same session of step 3

As the download of our links progresses, the spam accounts will be deleted by UserMerge.

Apart from UserMerge, the other tools used for the steps above can be replaced with alternatives to generate the list, the web page with links and to visit those links. Any suggestions of your own? Your comments below are welcome!

Social Media 101 for individuals & organizations – The Basics

Joseph Luis — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 02:22:20 +0000

Presentation for Board Leadership 2013 – Edmonton

Download (PDF, 2.64MB)

Personalize your public LinkedIn URL address

Joseph Luis — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 20:51:10 +0000

Would you rather tell someone that they can find your profile in linkedin.com/in/bob instead of linkedin.com/pub/5/89/a895677&?

Here is how to personalize and shorten your public LinkedIn URL address:

Log in to your LinkedIn account
Under the Profile tab of the top menu bar select Edit Profile
Once there, notice that almost under your picture or avatar (in the box with your summary) there is an Edit link besides your LinkedIn address. This link will take you to a page where, on the right-hand side, there is a box with a link to Customize Your Public Profile
Click this link and there you go … a pop up window should open where you can edit your public profile URL and have a personalized, shorter LinkedIn address.

A note with respect to changing your public URL. If you have been given to others the original public URL given by LinkedIn when you created your account, this URL will still re-direct to your new personalized one. However, if you change a personalized URL for another one, this new one will take precedence over the previous personalized one (and without changes to the original). For example, let’s say you chose “nancyb” as your customized public URL but then later you changed it to something else. e.g. “”nancybal”. People who bookmarked you as “nancyb” will not find you with that URL. Which shows us that it is worth to spend some time to choose our personalized URL the first time!

Convert MPEG/AVI video to animated GIF

Joseph Luis — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 05:40:08 +0000

Image credit: Frank Starmer

Today a friend asked me how to convert an MPEG video file into an animated GIF file and I would like to share here our findings.

In Linux (e.g. Ubuntu) you can use the FFMPEG and ImageMagick tools to do the following:

Convert an MPEG file into an AVI file

ffmpeg -i video_origin.mpg video_final.avi

Convert an AVI file into an animated GIF file

ffmpeg -i video_origin.avi gif_anime.gif

Now, if you get the following error after the last step

ERROR: gif only handles the rgb24 pixel format. Use -pix_fmt rgb24

you can do what it’s suggested and re-run the last command like this

ffmpeg -i video_origin.avi -pix_fmt rgb24 gif_anime.gif

Note: It matters to put

-pix_fmt rgb24

where it’s indicated, otherwise you may get an

Option pixel_format not found

message.

At this point you may have ended with a fairly large GIF file. Here is where we can use ImageMagick to reduce its size using

convert -layers Optimize output.gif output_optimized.gif

If your final gif file is still too large, an option may be to select only one segment of your original MPEG file to convert it into an animated gif. For this you can do, for example:

ffmpeg -i source.mpg -ss 00:00:13 -t 00:00:09 out.mpg

Here, we are seeking to the 13 seconds position and set the duration of the segment to 9 seconds.

Finally, perhaps you want your animated gif playing in an infinite loop. We can use ImageMagick convert command:

convert -loop 0 -layers Optimize out.gif outloop.gif

For Windows, there is the following software that looks promising for achieving our objective: Movie to animated GIF converter

For Mac OSX, here is an example of a commercial software that offers to do what we want: Xilisoft Video Snapshot for Mac

What is your solution of choice to convert MPEG/AVI video files into animated GIF files?

How to Detect, Fix & Protect your Computer Against The DNSChanger Virus.

Joseph Luis — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 04:02:32 +0000

This July 9th many personal computers may lose their internet connection due to the DNSChanger virus. Why is this? How will this happen?

On July 9 the FBI will shut down the temporary servers it has set up to keep victims of the virus connected to the web. Image credit: Intego

The virus changes the addresses of the service (DNS) that associates information with websites. One effect of this change is, for example, the alteration of your web searches, making them point to malicious websites. Actually, an infected computer/router will lose their connection to the internet not because of the actions of the virus but because of the actions of authorities to stop the virus!

If your computer/router is affected, losing connection to the web on July 9 will happen because the FBI will shut down the temporary servers it has set up to keep victims of the virus connected to the web. Before that happens, you can easily …

DETECT if your computer is infected by simply going to one of the websites that have been set up to this effect. If you are in Canada go to the DNSChanger Malware Checker or here for a list of other countries’ websites.

If you are affected by the virus you can find information about …

how to FIX your computer on this link, where you can also find advice on
how to stay PROTECTED.

More info about the DNSChanger virus on the Public Safety Canada website and on CBC News.

Fixing “Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running”

Joseph Luis — Wed, 30 May 2012 07:04:23 +0000

I bumped today into the following message in a Windows 7 computer: “Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running”. After some web searching I found a simple way to fix this. According to Paul Woods the culprit is a corruption in the following file …

c:\windows\softwaredistribution\datastore\logs\edb.log

if you rename or delete that file (as your solution ultimately does) then reboot the pc, auto updates will resume.

This file keeps track of the update history and status and if the status cannot be determined then updates won’t run. If the file does not exist (deleted or renamed) it is recreated and it is assumed that updates have never been run.

Paul was in turn inspired by Michael’s Notes and posted his findings in the comments section.

Update Sept. 25, 2012: See comments below for extra details.

Safe file sharing, syncing and online backup

Joseph Luis — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:43:32 +0000

Ever needed to have access to that file in your computer … when you are not close to your computer?

Or recover a corrupted file … when you don’t have your external backup disk handy?

Or perhaps you needed to share with others that file that email managers consider too big to handle.

Well, there are many online tools on the cloud that help you to achieve all of the above and sometimes more. Perhaps the most popular of those is Dropbox and that would be because of its simplicity. To set up Dropbox you can start opening a free account that gives you 2 GB of cloud space, download their app to your computer (Windows, Linux and Mac available) and select a folder (a drop-box) where all the files that you want to

backup
share with other people
sync with another of your computers/mobile devices

will go.

As a friend pointed out to me the other day, you could even have files and folders syncing outside of your Dropbox folder with some extra steps.

However …

With all its beautiful simplicity, the main criticism to Dropbox is its lack of encryption in the transmission of your data. This means that if someone ever intercepts your data, they can read it and use it as they please.

Fortunately there is a solution for Dropbox lovers conscious of their data!

If you are concern with the private transmission of your information through Dropbox you can add BoxCryptor to it (or Cryptkeeper if you use Linux). They work wonderful together!

Or … try something new!

For example, open a free account with SpiderOak which has encryption integrated and where you can choose which folders to sync. Or a free account with Wuala, which is so secure that you you don’t want to loose your password … because not even their staff can retrieve it.

Or tell us … what is your solution for secure file sharing, file sync and online backup?

By the way, if you decide to try SpiderOak or Wuala let me know and I can send you an invitation that will increase your default free storage. I have already maximized mine.