This Widgetbox service looks very promising. It’s an online directory of web widgets for blogs or other web sites. Similar to Apple and Yahoo Widgets, except these are for the web.
Widgetbox also has a section where developers can submit their own widgets for others to download and use. They also have a feature that allows you to quickly manage widgets you’ve already installed.
Widgetbox is currently free and will probably always be. As the service matures, they’re likely to add more features that will be available only after paying a fee for that feature. It’s a really neat service, one that looks like it will definitely become more popular as word gets out.
Version 0.9.1 of the K2 WordPress theme has been released. I just upgraded and finished making all my little customizations. It’s a recommended upgrade as it fixes a number of bugs. This release comes almost 2 weeks after K2 0.9 was released.
I can’t wait for the final release of K2. I think we’ll see a number of schemes (themes) released once the final K2 is here. I am gonna buy a CSS book this weekend. Anyone got any suggestions?
Slackware 11.0 Release Candidate 3 is here!! The 2.6 kernel was moved from /testing/ to /extra/. What’s that mean? Not much really, other than it’s considered to be more stable since it’s now in /extra/.
The FEDERATED MySQL storage engine is the coolest thing EVER! Seriously. It’s already saved me from having to do a whole bunch of synchronization coding. I can only imagine how it’ll come in useful in the future.
So, here’s my situation. I have two mysql servers sitting behind a firewall at “location 1″. People at “location 2″ need to write some software to connect to both mysql servers at location 1. However, MyODBC gets confused when connecting to the same hostname on two different tcp ports, or so I’m told.
Anyway, since I was basically told that there’s no way to connect to two seperate mysql servers behind one firewall, I got to thinking. So, I set off searching google for method for mirroring data in MySQL and came across the FEDERATED storage engine.
Now, the servers at location 1 are on a VPN with the network at location 3, my location. So, my network (at location 3) can see the network at location 1 without the firewall getting in the way. Since that’s the case here, I can connect to the default mysql port, 3306, on both servers because I can see their LAN IP, where the people at location 2 can’t (no VPN).
So, we’ve got the network flow figured out, now we can go about getting the FEDERATED storage engine in MySQL working. First, you’ll need MySQL 5.x. I chose MySQL 5.0.24 as it’s the latest stable 5.x release.
To enable the FEDERATED storage engine in mysql 5, you must pass the –with-federated-storage-engine option when running configure. That’s pretty much all that’s required to start using the FEDERATED storage engine. Most linux distributions probably have a mysql 5 package that comes with the FEDERATED engine on already, although Slackware does not currently. Read more
So, this is a follow up to the last SSH brute force post. I didn’t realize there was such a wide selection of applications for dealing with this, but there is! The two best looking options in my opinion are Fail2ban and DenyHosts.
I’ve actually started using DenyHosts on two machines now, and it’s working very well. I chose to go with DenyHosts for a very simple reason. Community stats. I love stats.
Anyway, if you’re looking for something to protect against ssh brute force attacks, go with Fail2ban or DenyHosts, they’re still being actively developed. I can’t say the same for Breakinguard, as it appears to have been abandoned about 1 year ago. And like I said, DenyHosts does it’s job extremely well, I couldn’t ask for anything more.
