For those interested in posting movies in Flash format, RivaVX has a great free tool for encoding FLV (flash movie) files for distribution on the web. It took a 3 MB mov file of a rally car race and reduced it to 300 KB, and the sound / picture quality is pretty good. It uses FFMPEG and LAME for video and audio encoding.

I just updated from b2 to WordPress to get rid of the comment spam (thbbbt!).

I tried the script to migrate everything over, but it didn’t work, so here are the database statements I executed in MySql to get this done:

Move categories:
insert into (cat_ID, cat_name) select * from b2categories where cat_ID != 1;

Move posts:
insert into wp_posts (ID, post_author, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_category) select ID, post_author, post_date, post_content, post_title, post_category FROM b2posts;

Update wp_posts with correct information:
update wp_posts set post_status = ‘publish’, comment_status = ‘open’, ping_status = ‘open’;

Move post2cat:
insert into wp_post2cat (post_id, category_id) select ID, post_category FROM wp_posts;

Comments (after deleting the spam jerks):
insert into wp_comments (comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP, comment_date, comment_content, comment_karma) select comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_author_email, comment_author_IP, comment_date, comment_content, comment_karma from b2comments;

update wp_comments set comment_approved=’1′;

Seems to work OK for now.

This is a funny picture of what they thought home computers would look like in the future.

Not exactly groud breaking news, but I had need to listen to an ogg-encoded song today and not wanting to download another player just to listen to it, I stumbled on this project: QTcomponents at sourceforge. This is an ogg quicktime component so you can listen in iTunes to an ogg-encoded song.

Unzip the file to C:\Windows\system32\quicktime\ on Windows or /User/Library/ on Mac OS X 10.2+. Then start up iTunes and listen. Very easy.

To encode songs in ogg-encoded format on Windows or Mac, check out Xiph.org.

CFDJ has posted an article titled “Top 10 Web Security Tips” with a focus on ColdFusion. This is a good starting point, although I don’t agree with the implementation of everything in the article. A good read though. Here are the 10:

1. Have an Error Handler
2. Prevent Cross-Site Scripting
3. Remove Dangerous Characters
4. Prevent Fake Form Submits
5. Stop Unauthorized Data Mining
6. Validate Parameters and Prevent SQL Injection Attacks
7. Use Server-Side Validation to Back Up Client-Side Validation
8. Harden Your Logon Code
9. Prevent Timeout Client/Session Backdoors
10. Avoid Trojan Horse Uploads

For more information about general web application security, go to the OWASP’s website.

For those of us with Red Hat 7.x - 9 distros running in production, check out white box linux:
whiteboxlinux.org

Here is a review.

This is essentially a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 build for free, using only the RHEL source RPMs, and the errata from Fedora work with it as well! There is another distro that does this but I can’t find it right now. [Edited: Here is the link to CentOS, the other one.]