Alert: Oracle Weblogic 0-day

Posted: July 29th, 2008 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: Security | No Comments »

Read the advisory here:

https://support.bea.com/application_content/product_portlets/securityadvisories/2793.html

It appears that without a username and password that a remote user can exploit a buffer overflow in the Weblogic plugin for Apache, potentially exposing confidential information.   Time for everyone to patch their Oracle Weblogic installations!


Adventures in iPhone Land

Posted: July 27th, 2008 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: iphone | No Comments »

When the iPhone launched last year, I promised myself that I would wait until the 3G version came out before I took the plunge. You see, I use a pda (Palm Pilot TX) on a daily basis for such things as checking email, reading ebooks (a lot), watching the occasional video, tracking todos and maintaining a large list of text files (think ‘memos’ on steroids) Besides the pda, I also carry around a 20GB ipod photo for listening to music and podcasts during my daily commute, which can end up being nearly two hours round trip on very bad days. And of course, I always always always have my cellphone with me no matter what.

So there is a certain logic in yearning for a convergent device that rolls all of the necessary functionality into just one, shiny little object. I wouldn’t need to lug around three different devices (all with separate charging needs, no less) and lighten my load, so to speak. I’ve kept a close eye on the iPhone developments over the past year (including the whole ‘jailbreak’ thing) but after seeing how quickly the new 3G version sold out, I realized it would probably be a few months before I finally got my hands on one.

Read the rest of this entry »


Displaying an HTML table from MySQL data

Posted: July 23rd, 2008 | Author: Jeff | Filed under: misc, software | No Comments »

Here’s one from the 2003 archives:

Did you know that PHP could interface with a MySQL database? Well it can, and here’s how! The code below illustrates just how easy it is to produce a nice table with headers populated with data culled from a database. One little trick I like to use (and have used for a very long time) when displaying table data is to alternate the background color. This makes it a bit easier to read the data (at least it does for me) Notice that when the table is initialized (<table><tr bgcolor=\”#afafaf\”>), I define the background color. Later as the code iterates through the lines of data, I test to see what the current backgound color is, and then reverse it. Not rocket science, but it spruces things up just a bit. I have been using a heavily modified version of this code in several places, whether it is for displaying log files or pulling intrusion reports from a Snort database and it has worked quite well. Any comments or improvements are always welcome!

<?php
$link = mysql_connect("database_host", "user", "password");

mysql_select_db("database_name", $link);

$qry = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM table_name", $link);
echo <table><tr bgcolor=\"#afafaf\">;
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($i = 0; $i<mysql_num_fields($qry); $i++) {

echo "<td><b>" . mysql_field_name($qry, $i) . "</b></td>";

}

}else{

echo "<td>No entries found in the database</td>";

}
echo "</tr>\n";
if (mysql_num_rows($qry) > 0) {

for ($j = 0; $j<mysql_num_rows($qry); $j++) {

if ($bgcolor == "#ffffff"){

$bgcolor="#cccccc";

}else{

$bgcolor="#ffffff";

}

echo "<tr bgcolor=\"$bgcolor\">";

for ($k = 0; $k<mysql_num_fields($qry); $k++) {

echo "<td>" . mysql_result($qry,$j, $k) . "</td>";

}

echo "</tr>\n";

}

echo "</table>";

}
?>