Tuesday, August 1, 2006

WebCT Impact 2006 Conference Presentation

We are one of the first few universities who have migrated from WebCT CE4 to CE6/ Vista4 soonest as the product was released. Together, we presented "Lessons Learned : Migrating From CE4 To CE6/ Vista4" in the WebCT Impact 2006 Conference. Here are the slides from our university:



Wednesday, May 3, 2006

Signs That Your Machine May Be Compromised

Here are some of the signs to look for which may indicate your machine is being compromised.
  • Your web site is being defaced, or have javascript inserted that send users to another site.
  • Your machine is listening on some new or unknown ports.
  • The logs suddenly become much larger than what they usually are.
  • The logs are not logging any thing.
  • Disk space utilization of your machine suddenly increases.
  • Network utilization of your machine suddenly increases.
  • Your machine runs unusually slow.
  • Someone reported that your machine doing some kind of attacks on theirs, or spamming, or hosting copyrighted movies, etc.
  • Google search for "viagra site:yourwebsite.com" or other keyword. Result came out positive, but you did not post those pages there.

Monday, May 1, 2006

Virtual World, Real Money - Her Second Life is Good!

The front page of the current issue (May 1, 2006) of Business Week caught my attention.



It talks about a Chinese entrepreneur is making real money out of the Second Life virtual world. The entire article can be found here:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm

This virtual reality thing is not just a game anymore. There are lands out for auctions, bidding price start at USD1000. There are all kinds of products selling inside the virtual world. There is even currency (Linden dollar to USD) fluctuation.

And you wonder... why would someone pay over a thousand dollar for some pixels on the computer screen?

The days of one way internet is gone. This or the next generation don't just logon and read something. They want to engage in doing something. The games, tools or web applications (however you want to call them) allow them to do so. They empower the people, engaging them, enabling them, allowing them to be creative, and to interact. Just like the wikipedians, the "players" are all very passionate in what they are doing. And the value of the application is the community.