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I had been thinking of updating my site theme for a long time to support new features provided by Wordpress. But since i could not get much time i asked one of my friend to do it. Here are some of the new features , according to him -
It is bascically the k2 modified to look this way.There might be more features , but the above one would i think allow me to get back to people better.
I had done soem work on JTemplate some time back and written about too. Since lately im not getting time to work on JTemplte , im releasing and alpha release .
More details here – http://www.ngcoders.com/php/jtemplate-joomla-tempaltes-on-drupal.
This is meant for people who are comfortable with Drupal and know what they are doing.
Rest Reminder is a small utility which i wrote long time back to monitor computer activity and reminds me to take rest after every 30 minutes. I wrote this because once i start working i forget about everything else and this lead to dry eyes, irritation etc.This is the second version supporting Multiple monitors, Alpha Transparent block screen and Vista Compatible.
Unlike most such utilities this is free. You can specify after how much time of activity you want to take rest and for how long. And how long of inactivity will reset this time. This also comes facility to lock screen quickly or when there is a certain inactivity period.
Usage is very simple , Download and extract the program and then run the RestReminder.exe . After that configure the settings and press Apply to save changes. Press the close/hide button and let it go in the task bar.
Last week after taking a break from VS+ i built a small mashup i was thinking of sometime now. Its basically top sites list based on keyword and traffic. It quite simple and i myself have started using it to find sites.Go check it out !!! For example you are looking to do some cooking and looking for top cooking sites in the US, or maybe top lyrics sites or maybe just looking to download some illegal movies 
. You can find out new websites which you might have never heard of on popular topic … which u might actually use.
Site is in beta and i am working on it in my free time , if you have ideas and suggestions please feel free to let me know.
VideoSwiper Plus is now online, it is a set of premium services for the original VideoSwiper. This site adds a few important required services to videoswiper making it even better.
Last 5 – 6 weeks been working on it and learned a lot. As this deals with Video’s on a web , not only checked out a lot of Video Scripts but also had to do encoding , thumb nailing etc of videos. Also found out that most Video Scripts out there are badly coded and have bad databases ( No one ever heard of normalization ?? ) . It is based on BaseApp and build on it was fun.Anyhow it was a nice experience , So if you run a Video Site do check it out.
As Joodr is based on Drupal 6 , Neither Nodeprofile or Bio can be used for profile system. So basically I had two options Content Profile and the core profile.module . Both have their own advantages and disadvantages.
So after some digging around and looking how it works Joodr will be using a profile as node system using content profile. The main reason for me choosing this is how the data is stored when using core module and when using profile with CCK . I found profile with CCK is much better. There are other reasons too but overall for a SNS to be as scalable and configurable as possible content profile would be better, for smaller ones core profile should do just fine.
So i will be finally using content profile as profile module for Joodr.
I have a XBOX 360 for some time now, last week after a month out of 1 yr warranty it showed the feared Red Ring of Death (RROD). I had heard many horror stories about it . As I had never had actually dealt with Microsoft India before I was pretty pessimistic as my experience with after sales services with companies in India is pathetic ( actually its really bad ).
So I called up Microsoft and after a few verifications i was assigned a replacement. The replacement arrived within 3 days and to my surprise it supported 1080p unlike my old one which just did 720p. So am pretty happy about my free upgrade and great after sales service provided my Microsoft.
So if you are planning to buy a XBOX 360 in India do go ahead and do get yourself a XBOX live connection , thats what makes 360 shine above the other consoles which collect dust in my house.
Jtemplate is the first step towards Joodr,It aims at allowing usage of vast number of premium joomla templates with drupal with minimal effort. It is basically a set of Drupal Module and a templating Engine based on phptemplate. The idea is to allow the use of Joomla templates on Drupal as good templates for drupal are missing, drupal templating is expensive and few premium template providers who are there charge really high.Currently you just need to upload the template to the themes directory and just create a dummy template_name.infofile in the directory and the rest everything is taken care by Jtemplate.
Currently a lot of work is still remaining but here are a few features -
Anyhow will be releasing the download soon , am looking for people to help me improve it for now.As everything does not work 
.
You can check a demo here – http://joodr.org/demo/ . The demo is running plain Drupal 6.5 with Jtemplate installed. The template is from rocketheme , with no changes or editing done .
Here is an alpha release as im not getting time to work on it , this is meant for people comfortable with drupal and know what they are doing.
Upload the site structure in the zip file and enable jtemplate module in the admin. To create menus use joomla like names mainmenu,footer,usermenu etc for drupal menu name. Also make the default drupal theme as admin theme from settings.
I have been building sites for a long time. and have user both drupal and Joomla , even built a lite version of Joomla called Limbo CMS long time back. They are both quite good CMS’s. Given the two I would choose drupal any day for myself ( though would never recommend it , cause its still not easy to make it do what u want ) , but am no designer and drupal templates are a big let down, though not hard but templating drupal is just a pain. And template wise Joomla simply is Awesome ( the quality of premium templates available is just so good ) , and its easier to work with for not so technically inclined.
And i have been looking for a good social networking script since last year , and having looked far and wide from paid scripts like phpfox,handshakes,socialengine etc to free ones like Dolphin(not really free),elgg,phpizabi,Joomla+CB. Most of them are really bad and nothing i would build a big site on , its just that bad. There is hope in hosted platforms like ning,socialgo,colletivex but they are hosted , never recommended for anything serious. The only good social networking platform out there is Drupal – has everything i need from scalabilty , security , documentation etc . But again the base install requires hours of tweaking to make it look anything like a normal social script.
So my after taking a few months off from freelancing , ive decided to work on a new personal project called Joodr. It aims to be something like ning but free, based on drupal so that its as flexible,scalable,secure and use Joomla 1.5 templates so your sites look awesome without much effort. The name Joodr i simpley got from Joomla + Drupal , though its a basically a customized install profile of Drupal.
Work has started so keep reading for further updates !!! And if you have any ideas and suggestions let them flow.
Recently one of my sites was hacked , It was a closed source web application. I came to know next day when i saw changes made to some settings for my web – application. Anyhow here is how i tracked down what was wrong , might help some one in the same mess i was in.
The first thing i noticed was that Administrator account passwords were changed, So i instantly knew something was wrong.
Since i usually store main settings in a file for faster access , i just opened FTP to look at the time stamp associated with the file. This showed me the last modifed date of the file and an approximate idea when the hacker changed the details.
Next step was to dig up the raw access logs from CPanel , After downloading the access logs for that specific file i opened them in PSPad ( My fav editor ) . Logs are not small of busy sites so you will be looking at a very large amount of data.
But i knew specific url which can be used to change the settings so i just did a Ctrl-F and put in the url with a POST prefix , as a form has to be submitted to change settings . This gave me a few instances of that URL with POST request.
Now looking at the time stamp i was able to find out when the hacker did the settings change. Means I had the IP.Doing another another CTRL-F on the IP and pressing list put all the hacker logs in another window , which makes its easy for us to go step by step at his efforts to crack the system.
After going from the start i noticed after certain URL he suddenly had got access to the admin section , And once i put in the url myself, i knew what the problem was.
And so it was fixed.
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