Yes, for the second time in my life. First time it was still in my university years. In those times if you had internet access at home, you were priveleged. Companies were paying quite a lot of money to get a slow 28K dial-up connection, and internet providers were charging per minute, not by gigabyte. I set up access to the university internet connection via modem in our lab - I was running FIDO net node on the same machine. One guy (I later on found him) noticed that there’s a PPP connection attempt before FIDO mail software kicks in and successfully brute forced the password. I should admit that I didn’t bother that much when I was setting the password - it was not the default one, but pretty close. It was quite easy to spot the attack - phone line was busy all the time. What the attacker didn’t know is that the modem I used was a sophisticated US Robotics Sportster model with CallerID detection, so it was rather easy to trace the attacker.

But that was more than 10 years ago. Now I noticed that something is wrong when I started recieving a lot of comment spam from this blog. Captcha plugin was doing an excellent job before, so I decided to check what’s going on. Somehow all plugins were disabled. Re-enabling them solved the problem with comment spam, but then Goolge started generating weird excerpts for ivankuznetsov.com search results. That’s when I started digging deeper and discovered that a hidden div with advertisments was inserted into WordPress PHP scripts.

Dreamhost support was kind enough to point me to the description of the attack that was used to break my blog. This particular problem, as well as some other security issues have been fixed in the latest Word Press release - 2.5.1. Lesson learned - update software on time and make backups.

If you are using WordPress older than 2.5.1 I would recommend you to upgrade ASAP.

Easter weekend didn’t start well - I decided to upgrade Joomla on one of my sites to version 1.5.1 from 1.0 and upgrade just totally ruined the entire site - content was lost, template wasn’t compatible with version 1.5.1. At first I thought that the reason is Dreamhost’s automatic one-click upgrade that I used, but even after manual reinstall Joomla kept giving weird “Fatal error: Call to a member function name() on a non-object in helper.php on line 219″ error in Control Panel, and legacy mode for old template didn’t work.

(To be fare I should say that Dreamhost provides excellent value for money. If you are looking for a good hosting - use IVANKUZNETSOV promocode and get a $50 discount when setting up an account on Dreamhost)

A thought of reinstalling all modules and reconfiguring Joomla from scratch was simply too depressive, so I decided to try another CMS. As a Ruby on Rails convert and a strong believer in open-source ideology I decided to go for Radiant - open-source CMS written in RoR. It is still in beta (latest release is 0.6.4), but it is surprisingly stable and powerful. Take a look at the footer of www.ruby-lang.org - official Ruby programming language web site - it is powered by Radiant

Installation of Radiant was rather easy - thanks to this guide and my prior experience with RoR applications deployment on Dreamhost. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to actually create sites with Radiant - there are not that many tutorials available yet, so it is pretty much  “make by example”. Split into pages, snippets and layouts makes a lot of sense onse you get your head around it.

From my experience Joomla is an overkill for most of the small sites, and despite being WYSIWYG, it still requires a professional or at least a tech savvy to configure it. After Radiant is set up and configured it is no more difficult to add content there than to edit a wiki page because of its Textile support. But it is so much simpler and easier to use than Joomla.

I managed to restore the ruined site in a day’s time - fetched most of the lost content from Google cache, converted Joomla template into Radiant’s layouts and recreated the pages (well, it was a small site after all). First time I dealt with Joomla - I spent several days trying to figure out where are the settings that I actually need in the endless menus.

Radiant is clearly following “less is better” principle. If you want to try Radiant - there’s a live demo where you can do whatever you want with the content.

The long awaited Google phone turned out to be just an OS. What does it mean for us, mobile software developers?

Personally, I think this is great news. An open mobile platform is something that was long due to stir up the world of RIM-Windows-Symbian.

Android managed to get many things right from the very beginning, things that took several years for S60. While S60 initially took Microsoft-style approach to development community - with multi-level support, exclusive club membership with access to the source code, signing and licensing, Android is quite open and democratic.

When Google announced Android SDK - my first thoughts were - it’s a smart move to release SDK before devices are available. Google’s name alone would be enough to attract developers and hackers to this new platform, so they can create a developer community by the time devices are shipping. Then Google announced developer challenge with $10mln in awards.

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Just a couple of days ago I was wondering when Nokia Internet Tablets will get an open source browser. So I was really happy to read today that a Mozilla based browser engine that shares the key components and extension interfaces with Firefox is available as a development version.

UMPC has a brief review of the browsing experiences with Mozilla on N800 (via ThoughtFix).

internetTablet blog reports that the new browser is:

• Built on top of the latest version of Gecko engine
• Has full ajax support (supports Google maps - street view and Google docs)
• Supports rss feed preview.
• Supports Firefox and Mozilla add-ons
• Allows to view SSL certificate details

Jonathan Green in his video post
Browser Comparison: iPhone vs. Nokia N95 and N800 compared performance of Nokia S60 web browser, N800 Opera browser and iPhone Safari browser.

Jonathan’s conclusion “my preference is for how Safari handles things over Opera” resonates with my own thoughts in “Opera Mobile vs. Nokia S60 browser - new browser war?“.

I’m wondering when Nokia will introduce open source browser in its internet tablets as well.

It was also really nice to see that one of the sites used in the browser comparison was Jaiku. Popularity of this application is growing by the hour.

Today, after a long court battle, breaking CSS protection in DVDs is finally made legal in Finland. Leading Finnish technology law firm “Turre Legal” was representing Mikko Rauhala, who intentionally set up website to discuss the technology of circumventing CSS protection, thus breaking new Finnish copyright law.

More on this subject in Turre Legal’s blog. Don’t miss an excellent article by Mikko Välimäki: “Keep on hacking: a Finnish court says technological measures are no longer “effective” when circumventing applications are widely available on the Internet”.

Thanks to ButtUgly for the link to Turre’s blog.

Two major questions are:
- is there a platform that is interesting enough for the developers to invest their time and learn how to develop for it, so that they can sell their skills and
- is there a platform that is interesting enough for the companies to monetize on the software developed for this platform.

When you come up with an idea for a new killer application, there’s always a question - which technology to use to maximize your user base and at the same time implement all desired functionality. Looking at the data here  (ok, data is a bit old, Symbian has since announced 100mln devices shipped) a reasonable approach would be to start with high-end S60 smartphones, targeting early adopters and technology leaders, and then start supporting mid- and low-end devices.

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Recently Jaiku has released a mobile client for S60 3rd edition, and I finally was able to try it out.

What is Jaiku? In short - it is a social networking service developed by a startup comany co-founded by Jyri Engeström. As Jaiku’s website states: "Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their presence."

Downloading and installing a mobile application was really simple. It all started with an SMS with a download link I recieved on my N95. Installation and configuration process were combined, so I just had to answer a few simple questions instead of having to navigate through the numerous settings to figure out if I am sharing something that I haven’t intended to. Implementation is absolutely brilliant, this is the example of how mobile applications installation should work.

Mobile application is really nice, it follows S60 UI guidelines and neatly extends them when necessary, so you don’t have to learn new tricks when using it. Jaiku mobile not only allows you to enter your presence state manually, but also collects and shares some information automatically.
It takes into account and shares your phone’s profile (silent, meeting, general), when you last used your phone, calendar information, location (which is tracked by cellid and you can name locations yourself, however countries are detected automatically) and number of bluetooth devices around. Privacy concerns have been taken into account as well - you can choose how much information you share, so that you will not be breaching corporate security rules by broadcasting names of all your meetings.

The service is indeed really good for casual communication and creating and expanding social networks, as long as you are active enough to use it regularily. I got few colleagues to install JAiku on their phones and multimedia computers, and I think everybody agreed that this is a fun way to keep in touch.

Since Jaiku enables you to browse friends’ contacts - it also taps into domain of  LinkedIn-like services and potentially enables building professional networks, provided that enough people in your profession are technically savvy enough to use it while it is still in beta.

I can see a great future in social networking services and merged with capabilities of mobile devices. Way to go, Jaiku!

P.S. A good read on mobile presence "Presence Red Herring" by Stephen Johnston.

During this year a very interesting trend has emerged. New and existing web services started creating  mobile java applications to optimise and enhance user experience on the mobile devices.

While mobile browsers are becoming more and more powerful, it seems not enough to have "minimap" or Small Screen Rendering or even OperaMini in order to get the same experience on the mobile as on the large screen of your home computer.

So a number of specialised applications appeared in 2006. A few examples of these applications that I use myself.

Gmail from Google

Widsets from Nokia

Google Maps from Google

RSS Agregator from NewsGator

The basic idea in all these apps is very simple yet brilliant - you have the same content, same settings, same functionality on your mobile or MC as on your PC,  but mobile UI is optimised so that it provides for faster access, less traffic and better user experience overall.

With the mobile phones and multimedia computers outselling regular PCs already now, and flat data plans becoming more popular, does the future of the web services lie in mobile Java?

(Via "The Butt Ugly Weblog")

Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE has opened its archives to public. Thanks to Elävä arkisto (The living archive) web site it is now possible to watch old TV news and news films and listen to the webcasts of old radio programs.

Really facsinating stuff. News coverage of 1976 visit to Finland by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, M/S Estonia disaster, opening of the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, Princess Diana death in a car accident, and a lot of other interesting audio and video documents.