Software Findings

A never ending chase

The war between virus writers and anti-virus writers seems to be never ending, rather it is becoming more sophisticated. One security expert in an anti-virus company told me that virus writing is now not a field of hobbyists but it is now a part of organized crime and is well funded. It is obvious as no hobbyist can devote full day writing a sophisticated malware and keep releasing variants.

While this chase seems to be never ending and no fool-proof protection to deal with this crime, a limited hope is left with user-awareness. Users who don't have professional connection with data-security in one way or the other, often neglect it. This user base becomes the prime target and also the source for further infections. Unknowingly this type of users work as a fuel for the fire.

Today, each and every user is connected to the digital world in one way or the other. Until and unless we start taking care of our digital assets by keeping ourselves informed with the digital security tips and technologies, there is no way out. As I said before, you are unknowingly becoming a source for further damage. 

Catchy names bluff users

It was the year 1993 when I first started using Anti-Virus products and actually came to know what this class of software do. At that time, only a handful of products were available to deal with a known handful of malwares. A normal user would just go to a computer hardware shop and demand for a virus removal tool to meet his requirements. Often, users would just name the viruses and asked the vendor to provide an Anti-Virus product. Almost all the Anti-Viruses were capable to deal with the limited viruses in the wild.

From the year 1998, the cyber crime story started changing. Virus authors became more equipped and wrote more polymorphic variants. To deal with these types of malwares, Anti-Virus companies modified their product and we started to hear the term "heuristics". After some years, the term "heuristics" became even more prevalent and became a marketing weapon for the vendors.

Anti-Virus companies started using terms:

How to call a PHP file using JSON and show result-set instantly?

Example Scenario:

Assume a scenario where you are showing some records on a grid. User can select any record from the grid and you want to show more details of that record in the HTML controls on the same page. You also don't want to refresh the page but want to use AJAX in some way to enrich user experience.

Below I am going to show you how you call a .php file (that contains code to retrieve a row from the database) and return the result-set instantly to display on your web page. Using JSON, it is very easy to implement this and with a couple of steps you can give your user a rich desktop-application like experience.

[Cool Tool]: OpenJS - Javascript Calendar Widget

I wanted a tool through which I could free myself with date verifications. I wanted to restrict user input to yyyy-mm-dd format. There is a cool tool available and is very simple to use also. Just add the javascript library and the css file, and there your calendar widget is ready.

Whenever the focus is on the Date input box, the calendar will popup.

This tool and its usage instructions are given here.

[PHP/MySQL]: Creating RSS feeds from database result-set & connecting to Twitter.

Sometimes you require to create your own RSS feeds to enable user to subscribe to them. In my case the client wanted to display job details on his website. Everyday, someone from his office, types in new job vacancies and these get displayed on his home page. The list has following columns:

• Date
• Company
• Designation

This client desired RSS connectivity with this list so that his website can automatically send new tweets to his Twitter account as soon as new vacancy details are saved in the database.

First, I am showing you how to connect to a MySQL table and thereby creating RSS feed page with the result-set.

Why resuming scan may sometimes fool you?

Most Anti-Virus programs has an option to Resume Scan from the point where you stopped the scan. To make it more clear, lets assume you started a full-system scan to check your system for viruses. While the scan is in progress you decide to finish off some work on your PC and you want to stop the scan because it is slowing down applications. You stop the scan and after a while you decide to start again. Some Anti-Virus programs provide you an option to resume the scan from where you stopped. Suppose, you stopped the scan when it had finished 30% of the entire scan job. With Resume Scan option, you can continue scan after 30% without starting all over again. But this is the moment when you might get bluffed sometimes.

ProStores widget bug.

Since the last couple of days I am tweaking with the ProStores widget on my TypePad blog. If you want an e-commerce website running within a couple of minutes and want to integrate your store with your TypePad blog, you can make use of the ProStores widget.

My company wants to start a shopping portal and I am in the team that is responsible for getting things done. We evaluated many store fronts like Volusion, Actinic etc, but we finally settled for ProStores because we wanted our official blog on TypePad and TypePad offers you a widget through which you can show a mini-store, a quick-shop-window like thing, on your blog.

While everything worked fine and we were able to setup our quick-shop-window, the widget has some issues with Internet Explorer. The store-front is visible and works fine on Mozilla Firefox, but the store is unavailable on Internet Explorer.

I contacted both TypePad and ProStores. TypePad asked me to contact ProStores. When I contacted ProStores, they replied that it is a bug in their widget and they will soon fix it.

Anyway, the bug will get fixed, but I must say ProStores is a quick and easy way for setting up an e-commerce website, specially if you are a TypePad blogger. The themes however are not intuitive, but the core architecture is good, as it is now owned by eBay.

A cool open-source WYSIWYG editor.

I wanted a WYSIWYG editor that is capable of adding rich-text capabilities on TextArea controls of my web page. I also wanted a feature in that can convert the rich-text to HTML format. I tried widgEditor, but didn't like much. After Googling, I got an open-source WYSIWYG editor named openWYSIWYG and it served my purpose very well. It has a variety of options. You can either choose small toolbox or enable all controls of a toolbox. Enabling ALL, gives you a lot of tools similar to a word-processor.

You can see more about it's usage here.

Installing Linux on top of Windows XP.

I wanted to install Linux without disturbing my existing Windows XP. I chose Ubuntu flavor as many guys on the net suggested me as it is the most preferred desktop version and has a wide community support. I found a very good tool named Wubi, which is a great tool to run Linux installation on Windows like any ordinary setup.

Before running Wubi, I created System Restore Point of my Windows XP and took backup of all my projects, to be on the safer side. After that I executed Wubi setup, and there on-the-fly my Linux installation was complete within a couple of minutes.

I have never seen such a smooth OS installation in my life, seriously. After a couple of minutes of download, Wubi restarted the machine and there I could see the dual boot option. As I selected Ubuntu, some more files were downloaded and Ubuntu was ready to work.

[MySQL]: How to bulk insert into a new table and skip errors?

In my post "When I became victim of MySQL InnoDB/MyISAM conflict...", I wrote about the problem I am facing with the table engine unexpected changes. I also wrote about the alternative that I planned.

To resolve the issue, I renamed my old table and created a new one based on the old structure. For this I used query:

CREATE TABLE billitems SELECT * FROM billitems_old;

Secondly, I wanted to transfer all the records from the old table to the new one.I wanted to keep inserting rows without aborting on any errors. Thanks to "Shylent", a poster in a forum for suggesting this solution:

insert ignore into billitems select * from billitems_old;

I attempted this code but, because of some reasons, MySQL still generated error:

Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (stockist.billitems, CONSTRAINT FK_billitems_1 FOREIGN KEY (BillNo, BillDate) REFERENCES billdetails (BillNo, BillDate) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE)

MySQL was still not ignoring errors. U.Shastry suggested this solution and it worked:

SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
insert ignore into billitems select * from billitems_old;
SET foreign_key_checks = 1;