How Do I Keep Myself Updated

At first, I want to write ‘How Do I Keep Myself Well Updated Despite The Fact That I Live Twelve Time Zones Away From Many Things That Are Dear To Me Without Wasting Too Much Time and Being Perceived as Stalker’. However, two years in Singapore Management University had taught me two important lessons (among many others):

1. keep it simple (read: do not bulls*it too much)
2. Stop at #1 and if possible, make it simpler

So there goes the wonderfully long title… read more

Wordpress Hardening: A must do!

Ok maybe the term ‘hardening’ is not exactly right since it is usually done on a more complex system. Nevertheless, after the incident where my blog is hacked by unknown attacker or two, I become a little bit paranoid. Thanks to Holy Shmoly, there is somewhat a definite guide on how to ‘harden’ your wordpress site.

The latter part of the article is a bit… technical but try to do at least the ‘Secret code’ part and ‘upgrade’ (preferably clean upgrade) and change ‘password’. I believe those three steps are sufficient for most of you.

Nevertheless, fell free to do all the steps mentioned (including installing IDS). I believe it will be an enriching experience.

In any case, random secret key generator can be found here.

Freebies to raise the bar for presentation

Admit it, many of your believe that competition is getting stiffer and fiercer in SMU. With increasingly bigger cohort and compulsory ‘C or below’ policy, I am sure people would like to get as much advantage as they could – including you. The same applies to presentation realm where students are constantly challanged to deliver top-notch entertaiment with stunning visual ‘omph’ thanks to the increasing proliferation rate of MAC among SMU students over the past few years. Fret not, here is some freebies to raise the bar for your presentation.

Lifehacker (one of the website) has seen from Macworld (another website) about free keynote objects that can be used to spice up your presentation. The freebies is given by iPresentee (second another website – wow… see how complicated the relations between websites nowaday).

The package combines 100 easy to use and attractive objects and  the background of all objects is transparent and can be used on any colored background. Each object can be tampered in any way possible. And yes, it is compatible with Keynote, iWeb, Pages, Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.

Keynote Objects [iPresentee via Lifehacker via Macworld]

Yay… Modified Theme!

After a long period of hiatus, I guess it is time for my blog to get a well deserved minor facelift. Thus, I spent few hours during my office hours to do a little bit of housekeeping here and there. By the way, while modifying blog and its theme may not be the best activity to do during office hours, please spare me. I was quite bored.

Some stuff that I did today…

Installed the latest version of ‘Unnamed’ theme. Yes, I kind of like the theme and upgrading from 1.0 to 1.23 is really worth it (just like upgrading from Wordpress 2.1.5 to 2.5.1). Unnamed is one of my favorite theme for its simplicity … and for some weird reason… its slider.

While I love pictures and colors, ‘Unnamed’ by default is simply too plain.

Thus, like what someone has said: “if there is no way, lets make one”.

First I realized that the header can be modified from option page in term of height , width and image. So I increase the height to make it look slightly fatter – this is also so I can add a more decent picture. Yet I am still experimenting so there might be a chance I reduce the height once again. I put the decent image of Singapore river there.

Then I rearrange the widgets to give more space. Basically trying to put all the not so important stuff into the sliders.

Take note I do not want to put category or archives into the sliders because they are simply too long.

Moving on, I began to ponder : “Would it be nice if there is a widget that could display a photo or two?” before checking all the possible widgets that can help me achieve the desired result. Apparently I became greedy and wanted a widget that can show random picture – preferably in Ajax (just like www.smukionline.com)

Not just that… I also wanted the header image to be randomized. So every time people come, they will see different picture.

Apparently I could not find widgets that could serve all that I want – Either not meeting the requirements or simply broken or simply cannot be positioned in the places that I want.

So I began to surgically modify the theme to suit my needs. Looking to all possible places where I can get the desired result. Being PHP-idiot, I am really thankful to all people who have put numerous PHP tutorials on the net (which can be googled of course).

The result may not be too professional but at least I got image randomizer for header and image container on the sidebar of my blog. I intend it to be a Ajax-ified slideshow but oh well… that can wait.

Creating your second MSN account

As I have mentioned in previous post, it pays to get a good and decent MSN account. However, what happened if your MSN account is not the exactly the most professional looking? Well… I have discovered several options you can have.

Make a new account and import your existing contact people to new account. Dump the old account

Just google ‘creating new windows live account’ and ‘exporting and importing msn contact’

Make a new account and keep the old account. Add necessary contact the more professional account manually. Use Messenger Plus! To run two account concurrently.

Google ‘messenger plus!’

If you use email OTHER than @hotmail.com / @live.com / @msn.com as your live ID, go to account setting and click ‘change’ (see picture)

I forgot the sequence but you could easily find it in. In short you can change your abc@def.com live id into 123@456.com easily. I would not recommend you to change to @hotmail.com / @live.com / @msn.com though for reason I will mentioned shortly.

If you use @hotmail.com / @live.com / @msn.com, create a new live ID and use TrueSwitch to seamlessly migrate to another @hotmail.com / @live.com / @msn.com live id account.

Notice that Microsoft will not allow you to use another email as your live id. Once you are in their domain, you will be trapped there forever. Smart. Penalizing their loyal underlings for being loyal.

https://secure5.trueswitch.com/winlive/

Happy migrating from your old msn account.

Oh… this is my 100th post up to date