Second Life is 3-dimensional online digital world mostly created by its residents. You can buy and sell land and artifacts of this virtual world with Linden dollars. However Linden dollars isn’t virtual. It can be traded for real dollars.

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PayPal provides an API to automate transaction processing. This is great for businesses selling electronic products. Automated transaction processing speeds up order processing and is somewhat expected from a large section of internet savvy buyers. However it has some caveats as we found yesterday.

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Use the command below as root after replacing new-login-name and old-login-name appropriately:
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My first Facebook spam:
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This WordPress blog was hacked for few hours on 24th December (nice Christmas present!) from Russia. The hacker exploited several WordPress vulnerabilities in administrative scripts to gain full access to the website (as permitted to apache user), including the ability to upload & run scripts, delete any file owned by apache user, view the file and directories etc. This is a full disclosure on the how the site was hacked and how I detected and removed the hack along with few comments on the state of WordPress security. I added a WordPress plugin and made modifications to prevent any such hacking attempts in future using WordPress. This is a must read for WordPress bloggers.

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First of I didn’t ask postfix to do NIS lookups. These warning messages started showing up when I commented out alias_maps and decided to only use alias_database instead. The fix was simple.

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I’ve got mail is a witty take on spam from Richter Scales. It is a 2007 CARA Nominee in Best Humor Song category. Listen to find how spam gives meaning in life, not to mention three additional inches and more.

A beautiful educational musical video based on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Stop the Fire”, explaining the process from conception to childbirth. It is made for MU med school class of 2010. The lyrics is below.

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strip_tags() in PHP has several problems. It doesn’t recognize that css within the style tags are not document text. It will not remove HTML entities or content within script tags. strip_tags() fails for invalid HTML. In short strip_tags() is not advisable to use except for trivial cases. The best solution I have come across is by uersoy at tnn dot net:
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I am pretty down with fever, possible viral. Yesterday night was 100% sleepless. Let’s see how it goes tonight. ciao…