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Category Archives: School

Wish That We Have iTALC In The Labs

A very useful software that can be used and download for FREE at http://italc.sourceforge.net

What is iTALC?

“iTALC is a use- and powerful didactical tool for teachers. It lets you view and control other computers in your network in several ways. It supports Linux and Windows 2000/XP/Vista and it even can be used transparently in mixed environments!

In contrast to widely used commercial equivalent software, iTALC is free! This means you do not have to pay for expensive licenses or things like that. Furthermore the source-code is freely available and you’re free in changing the software to fit your needs as long as you respect the terms of iTALC’s license (GPL). Freedom in two ways!

Features

iTALC has been designed for usage in school. Therefore it offers a lot of possibilities to teachers, such as

  • see what’s going on in computer-labs by using overview mode and make snapshots
  • remote-control computers to support and help other people
  • show a demo (either in fullscreen or in a window) – the teacher’s screen is shown on all student’s computers in realtime
  • lock workstations for moving undivided attention to teacher
  • send text-messages to students
  • powering on/off and rebooting computers per remote
  • remote logon and logoff and remote execution of arbitrary commands/scripts
  • home-schooling – iTALC’s network-technology is not restricted to a subnet and therefore students at home can join lessons via VPN-connections just by installing iTALC client

Furthermore iTALC is optimized for usage on multi-core systems (by making heavy use of threads). No matter how many cores you have, iTALC can make use of all of them.”

MMA MOODLE Playground

If you’re a faculty member of the DLS-CSB Multimedia Arts Program (especially if you belong to the Web Track), I wish to invite you to test the latest version of MOODLE which is online at http://moodle.csbsdamma.org

Once you had created your user account, please take time to advise me via email ([email protected]) so that I may promote you as a Course Creator in the system.

Thanks & enjoy computing!

Finals Project Presentation & Defense Schedule

For all of my students, here’s the schedule for your Finals Project Presentation & Defense:

OFMULTI Section DU1 – 17 April 2007

WEBDEV3 Section DU1 – 18 April 2007

WEBDEV2 Section DU2 – 12 April 2007

WEBPAGE Section DU3 – 13 April 2007

Good luck! Course cards will be distributed on 20 April 2007 from 0900H to 1200H at the ML2.

Spywares at the Faculty Lounge

While waiting for some of my students who will consult about their Finals Project at the MMA Faculty Lounge this morning, I installed Spybot Search & Destroy on the second PC (from the door). Here’s what I got after running a spyware check:


Earlier (at around 0100H), cleaning my PC got me busy. I was wondering why everytime I plug my flashdisk, which I only use for class purposes, any Windows application will simply not launch. A further research revealed that my system was infected by the Agobot virus, which resides on my flashdisk.

How to know if you are infected with this virus?

1. Hold down the SHIFT key while you plug in your flash disk. Do not let go of the SHIFT key not until you see the removable hardware icon on the taskbar. It is also advisable to disable AUTOPLAY when checking/cleaning your flashdisk for the Agobot virus.

2. Launch the Command Prompt (shortcut, click on Start > Run > type CMD). Type the drive letter of your flashdisk followed by a colon. Example, if your flashdisk is mapped as drive H in your PC, simply key-in “H:” (without the quotation marks) and hit the ENTER key.

3. Now, you are already inside your flashdisk. Run the command “dir /ah” to show the files that are hidden. If you see NETSVCS.exe as one of the files, then your flashdisk is infected.

4. Since NETSVCS.exe is hidden, you may not delete it right-away. Do not attempt to use the Explorer in Windows to show and delete this file, as this will infect your system further.

5. The best thing to do is to change the attributes of this file using the command “attrib NETSVCS.exe -s -h” and hit the ENTER key. Now, you are ready to delete the file, just use the command “del NETSVCS.exe” and hit the ENTER key.

6. Do the same thing for the AUTOPLAY.INF file, as it may contain codes referring to the propagation of the virus.

7. Reboot your PC.

Problem Logging-in as Admin in PlainCart?

If you install PlainCart and access the administration page, you are given a default username, which is “admin”, and a default password behind the asterisks. Hitting the login button should bring you directly to the PlainCart Administration page. But what if you encounter this error: “Wrong username or password”?

Was it a flaw in PlainCart? The answer is NOPE! It has something to do with your webhost.

You see, PlainCart uses the PASSWORD function to encrypt sensitive data in your MySQL database, especially passwords. But some webhosts were configured in such a way that they no longer recognizes the PASSWORD function of encryption. A work-around will be to change the encryption method from PASSWORD to MD5. Quite simple. Here’s what you need to do?

1. Open the file “admin/library/functions.php” and locate between lines 39-43 the word PASSWORD(‘$password’). Change the word PASSWORD (not the variable name) to md5.

2. Edit the file “admin/user/changePass.php” and between lines 14-31, locate all of the instances of the word PASSWORD and change them all to md5. Be careful not to touch the $password variables.

3. Edit the file “admin/user/processUser.php” and locate between lines 50-58 the word PASSWORD and change them all to md5. On the same file, between lines 64-76, change all the instances of the word PASSWORD to md5.

4. You’re almost done. The next thing you have to do is to change the encrypted password in your database. Open the table tbl_user inside your PlainCart database (you may want to use PHPMyAdmin to do this task easier), click on the BROWSE tab, and edit the values for the record containing the username “admin”. In the user_password field, key-in your desired password for the “admin” username. Under the Function column, choose MD5 and save the data.

5. Head on to your PlainCart Administration page (yourdomain.com/plaincart/admin), key-in “admin” as the username and change the default password with the one you had just saved in the database table. It should make you access the Administration page of PlainCart.

If you got lost with my instructions above, please do not hesitate to email me via robert{dot}reyes{at}gmail{dot}com.

If you are helped by this tip, I will appreciate you sending me a US$2


My PlainCart Installer

If you are having problems with your PlainCart installation, whether you are a TurfSitePH.net client or not, you may use my very own installer package. If you already have uploaded PlainCart to your webspace, simply overwrite them with this one. Also, you may want to drop your database and create a new one using the SQL file herewith.

Download My PlainCart Installer

DLSU-BMS Microsoft FrontPage 2003 Seminar

Thanks to all who attended my Microsoft FrontPage 2003 Seminar for the De La Salle University Business Management Society. If you have concerns, please feel free to email me via robert {dot} reyes {at} gmail {dot} com. Thanks to the officers of the BMS for inviting me again as the resource person!

As promised, here’s the copy of the presentation file that I had used for the learning session. Enjoy!

(Pre) First Day of Classes

I will be handling one (01) OFMULTI (Tue), one (01) WEBDEV2 (Thu), and one (01) WEBPAGE (Fri) this term (which started yesterday, but my first class will only be starting tonight). Tentatively, one (01) WEBDEV3 (Wed) may also be given to me, that will make my total load to 12 units this term. Wow! Hectic schedule indeed.

Wonder if there will be any familiar face(s) in my class tonight. Perhaps, someone from my BASICOM class two terms ago.