NinfG is an open source grid middleware which provides a programming framework for grid-based remote procedure calls (GridRPC). It is a reference implementation of the GridRPC API (application programming interface), allowing programmers to create applications that can call procedures/executables installed on remote computers. In particular, it provides client library APIs that can be used to control the execution of remote executables, running these executables remotely when necessary.

NinfG 5.0 is the latest version of NinfG. Unlike previous versions where the Globus Toolkit is required, NinfG 5.0 can now work with non-Globus grid environment. One of its new features is the ability to use SSH to do remote procedure calls via the invoke server mechanism. This is very handy since most Linux systems have already SSH in the default installation, so there is no need to install additional packages to use NinfG. The following paragraphs outline the installation of NinfG on a system running Linux.

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Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol allowing secure data exchanges between two networked devices. It is designed to replace Telnet, which sends information over the network in plain text making it susceptible to interception or eavesdropping. SSH, on the other hand, provides secure communication by encrypting the data sent over the network. It is typically used to login to a remote computer and to execute commands remotely. Aside from this, SSH can also be used to securely transfer files using scp or sftp, forward TCP ports, SSH tunneling, among others.

The following is my outline on how to use SSH for passwordless remote login. Of course, this is far from being complete and some of the things below may not work perfectly with your setup. There are many howtos regarding this topic and you should be able to find the one that is appropriate for your system.

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Shindig is an open source reference implementation of Google’s OpenSocial and gadgets specifications. With Shindig, you will be able to host Google gadgets and OpenSocial applications in your own web site relatively quickly as it already contains code that you can easily plug into your server infrastructure to start hosting these applications.

Interested with OpenSocial, I tried installing Shindig in my home server. Currently, Shindig’s PHP implementation is far from being complete, so my interest is just to have a feel on how it works. To install Shindig, check its web site and follow the instructions there. The project does not yet support automated build infrastructure so you need to get Shindig from its SVN repository. For this, you need an SVN client. Fortunately, I have Cygwin installed in my Windows XP machine, so I only had to install subversion in Cygwin. This can be done by running the Cygwin installer, then locate the subversion package, select it, and install. After the installation, run a bash shell and you are ready to export Shindig.

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After changing my web hosting provider, I am faced with the task of migrating a couple of web sites to the new server. A couple of these web sites are phpWebsite-based. Unfortunately, the new server is using a version of PHP higher than 5, which is known to cause some problems with the version of phpWebsite (v 0.10.2) I am currently using. Left with no choice, I searched Google for available solutions. Luckily, the search results did come up with some possible solutions, although I could not find an official migration guide. So in this post, I will describe the problems I’ve encountered in migrating my phpWebsite 0.10.2 installation to a server running a PHP version higher than 5.

The first thing I did was to transfer all files and databases to the new server. After uploading everything, I also changed the configuration file (conf/config.php) to reflect the new server setup. This included changing the database and source directory settings. Then, the debugging part.

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To understand openID, you only need to consider the number of Internet accounts you currently maintain. Maybe you have one email account in Yahoo or Google, another account in Flickr for your photos, an account in YouTube for videos, another one in Friendster, Facebook, or MySpace for your social network, and many many more. For each of this site, you need to have a username and a password in order to use the provided services. As your online presence expands, keeping tab of all these accounts becomes more difficult. I have several so I know how difficult it is to remember all username-password combinations. This is the issue openID is trying to solve.

According to their website, "OpenID is a free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet." Ideally, with one OpenID you can login to all your favorite sites eliminating the need to maintain several usernames and passwords. Imagine the convenience of using a single username-password combination for all websites you would like to visit. Well, this is still ideal since not all websites have already adopted OpenID. Surprisingly, you may already have one without knowing it. If you have an account in wordpress.com, your OpenID is simply username.wordpress.com, or if you have one in flickr.com, your OpenID is www.flickr.com/photos/username, and several others. Check this site on how to get one. The interesting thing is that you can use your own website or blog as your OpenID identity. How? Read on.

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After months of inactivity, myGUIDE is now back with a new look and running on a different weblog platform. Yes, you read it right, I changed my blog platform from Serendipity to WordPress. This means that although I have migrated all my previous posts to WordPress, previous links will no longer work since Serendipity and WordPress have different link structure. Now if you’re looking for a particular post, you can still find it here. Just use the search box to locate it.

How did I do it? It was quite easy. Thanks to Windows Live Writer (WLW). But before taking this approach, be warned that this may not be appropriate for your case. This worked for me because myGUIDE is relatively new and has only a small number of blog entries and I’ve been using WLW to post entries to this blog. A Serendipity importer plugin is already available for WordPress. So maybe you’re better off using the plugin. But if you want an alternative approach, you can try this one.

The first thing to do is to create a weblog account in WLW to access your Serendipity-based blog, if you have not done it yet. Then setup another account in WLW to access your WordPress blog. After doing this, you’re ready to go. Simply read your blog entries, one at a time, from your old blog using WLW, then switch to your new blog, and click the Publish button to publish the entry you just retrieved. It is that easy! You can also use WLW to create the relevant categories in your new blog. You can even set the published date so that you can keep the original date of your posts.

But there are limitations to this approach. First, you will lose all your comments. WLW will not read the comments associated to each post.  Second, WLW sometimes will not download the images in the post. Instead it will just get the link of the image from your original blog and use this link in the new one. Thus if you’ll remove your old blog, the images will also disappear. Finally, if you have many entries, transferring all of them can take some time since you have to manually repeat the process of reading your previous posts from Serendipity then publishing it to WordPress. Luckily for me, I have only 15 entries so this was not an issue.

And that’s it!

I have a couple of websites running phpwebsite. In these websites, I used the Article Manager module to handle article submission. I came up with a guide to help users of these sites. I am reposting the article here, which initially appeared at the Philippines Today website. The article is as follows:

To submit an article in this website, you need to have a username. If you already have one, you can login using the Log In box, which can be found in the left column of this page. If you don’t have an account yet, you can get one by signing up here. You only need a valid email address where your login credentials will be emailed.

After logging in, click here or the Submit An Article link from the Main menu box. A page containing an empty article will be displayed. See images below. Enter the necessary information, such as the article’s title, summary, and content, and click the Save Article button at the bottom of the page to post your article. The home page will be automatically updated with the summary of your article posted at the top of the Recent Article… section. It is that easy!

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In case you haven’t noticed yet, Yahoo! now offers unlimited storage for Yahoo! Mail. This means that you don’t have to delete old emails to keep your Inbox under the storage limit. You can now keep your emails for as long as you like and enjoy limitless storage for attachments and photos. Well, that is, if you comply with their anti-abuse limits.

With an unlimited storage, the number of emails in your Inbox can increase considerably with time. Sorting these emails manually into different folders can take a lot of your time. In this post, I will outline how to use Yahoo! Mail filters to automatically perform this task for you. Like in the previous post, we will create an example filter such that emails from family members will be automatically stored in a “family” folder.

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Emails have become an integral part of our daily activities. For many of us, a day will not be complete without checking at least once our electronic mailboxes. And for those who are away from families and loved ones, life without an email is simply unthinkable.

Organizing emails can save you a lot of time especially when you’re receiving a lot of spam emails. For instance, all emails coming from family members can be stored in a folder different from the default Inbox folder. In the same way, emails from friends or from different mailing lists can also be separated into different folders. A bulk folder can also be created to store emails coming from someone you don’t know. Organizing your emails can also expedite the retrieval of previous emails in that you only need to search a specific folder rather than the entire Inbox folder.

To configure your mailer to deliver new emails automatically to different folders aside from the default inbox folder, you need to use filters or message rules as outlook express calls them. The step-by-step instruction in doing this in outlook express is given in the following paragraphs.

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According to Wikipedia, an IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique address that certain electronic devices, such as computers, use in order to identify and communicate with each other on a network utilizing the Internet Protocol standard. In simple terms, it is the address of a computer in the network, which you need in order to reach that computer. On the other hand, a MAC (Media Access Control) address is a unique identifier attached to most network adapters. It is like a name for a particular network adapter.

To get these information in Windows XP, you will need to open a Command Prompt. To do this, click the Start button on the Windows taskbar, then choose All Programs. Choose the Accessory folder, then click Command Prompt. Alternatively, you can also click the Start button, then choose Run. Type cmd in the text box that appears. In either approach, a Command Prompt window will be launched on the desktop. In this command window, type

ipconfig /all

This will display the Windows IP configuration. Locate the appropriate Ethernet adapter. The entry for the IP address is your IP address. This is usually a series of numbers separated by dots (eg., 192.168.0.253). The entry for the Physical Address is your MAC address. This is usually a series of hexadecimal numbers separated by dashes (e.g., 00-04-00-AB-23-CC).

In summary, to know your current IP configuration, launch the Command Prompt window (Start > All Programs > Accessory > Command Prompt), then type ipconfig /all.