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Full length Website Screenshot with khtml2png

Today I read that two bloggers has been recommending Webshots , a freeware application to take full length website screenshot in Microsoft Windows and is unavailable to users of other operating system such as GNU/Linux, *BSD and Solaris.

khtml2png is a free software application which can also take full length website screenshot like Webshots does, except it works on unix like platform such as GNU/Linux and flavors of BSD.

The software depends on libkhtml (from kdelibs KDE project) to render website and ‘convert’ from ImageMagick to create the actual screenshot.

Originally the software can only output screenshot in lossless PNG format, but the latest version however is able to support as many output format as ImageMagick support including jpg, gif, png and bmp to suit your needs.

Please refer to khtml2png website for sample website screenshot produced by khtml2png.

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Get Ubuntu Repositories on DVD

Having Ubuntu Repositories on DVD is handy if for some reason you can’t get connected to the internet or your connection slow to download favorite application.

There’s an Indonesian website which offer Ubuntu repositories (main, restricted, universe, dan multiverse) on DVD, which means that you would not have to be connected to the internet in order to download application anymore.

All you need to do is to download the DVD images using jigdo, and find the means to burn those DVD. Then to use the DVD, you only have to enter this line at the terminal :

sudo apt-cdrom add

Which Ubuntu will prompt you to insert the DVD (in no particular order), wait until apt -cdrom finish scanning the repo and repeat this step for each of the DVDs.

Finally you can browse all the application inside the DVD repositories by browsing Synaptic, and install them.

The downloads can be obtained at http://wiki.ubuntu-id.org/DistribusiDvdReposUbuntu . Please refer to the Jigdo tutorial if you don’t know how to use it in order to download the DVD.

Have a nice day.

[tags]ubuntu,linux,debian,jigdo,repository,repositories[/tags]

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youtube-dl – handy for downloading youtube videos in Linux

Every once a while you may come across youtube videos on the internet, this service enable easy? video sharing among internet users. However, youtube seems to discourage it users from downloading the videos to their computer.

This? is rather annoying because you’ve to bookmark the video url in your browser in case if you want to watch it again, plus having to wait for the video to download to your computer. The video will be in Flash Video format FLV, which can be played using Mplayer or any compatible Flash Video Player you can find in the internet
Thank god there’s youtube-dl , a small utility written in python which ease up downloading youtube videos. The tool is easy to use with the only requirement is only the python interpreter which can be immediately found in any modern GNU/Linux distro.

Once you downloaded? youtube-dl, all you need to do is run it :

python youtube-dl http://youtube.com/watch?v=yEiML_9NNYA

Of course there’s some video’s in youtube meant for 13 years and above users, so youtube-dl has an option to specify username and password too.

python youtube-dl -u yourname -p mypasswd http://youtube.com/watch?v=yEiML_9NNYA

Because youtube-dl was written in python, it can be used in any operating system platform provided the platform has python interpreter installed including Windows, Mac OS X or any Unix-based platform for that matter.

You can download youtube-dl from it’s creator website.

[tags]youtube,flash,flash videos,flash video,video,sharing,linux, flv,windows[/tags]

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GetGnuLinux.org – Informational website about Linux

GetGnuLinux.org is an informational website about GNU/Linux operating system. The website is simple and easy to navigate and written to accomodate non-technical people. The website answer questions such as “What is Linux?”, “Why not Windows?” and how to switch from Windows to Linux in “Making the Switch”.

The website explains the advantages and disadvantages of using GNU/Linux operating system in in layman terms to help people make decisions whether GNU/Linux operating system is right for them or not. The website also has an FAQ section which answers common questions about GNU/Linux operating system and free software.

I like the way GetGnuLinux.org website was organised with simple layout and theme,it emphasis simplicity to the web users.

[tags]linux,gnu/linux,advocate,free software, open source,opensource[/tags]

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Install Mozilla Flash Plugin in Ubuntu

I get questions about installing Flash plugin for Ubuntu some of the time, and here’s a quick howto activate the plugin in any Linux distro. Assuming you use Ubuntu :
First, download the flash plugin from Adobe website, click the Download Now button

From Desktop, goto Applications->Accesories->Terminal, type

tar zxvf ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_7_linux.tar.gz

You’ll see a list of files extracted. Then type,

install_flash_player_7_linux/flashplayer-installer

Answer a few questions, then the screen will tell you that the Installation was successful.

Close your browser, and start it again. You should have your Flash plugin support in Mozilla Firefox browser right now.

[tags]flash,firefox,mozilla, firefox plugins, macromedia, adobe,ubuntu,linux[/tags]

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owasp php filters – help sanitize php variables

Internet is full of spam bots, autosubmitters, malicious users and worms that can compromise the security of your website at any given time, therefore you should be suspicious of any data you receive via GET/POST variable in your system.

Among the nasty things that could happen to your system when you don’t filter your data is, SQL injection, Script Injection, Email abusing and Remote Execution the attacker could deface your website or even wipe your entire database if you’re not careful with it.

One of the way to filter your data is to use preg_match to write regex rule for the variable that would be accepted.

However I find writing preg_match sometimes can be tiring, and that’s why I use owasp php filters to simplify the work for me. It consists of one function sanitize(), that take the variable that you want to filter and an option.

The option may be any of this value PARANOID,HTML,INT,FLOAT,LDAP,SQL,SYSTEM and UTF-8 that filters the type of data accordingly. For example if you want your variable to contain only floating-point number, then you can code it like this :

< ?php

require('sanitize.inc.php');

$var=100.50;

$float = sanitize($var,FLOAT);

?>

I isn’t much, but surely it will simplify your php coding a bit more, the other option is self-explanatory save PARANOID, which means that the variable will contain only alphanumeric character after sanitize.

SQL is handy if you want to include the variable value inside an SQL statement, this will avoid the risk of the notorious SQL injection which will affect the security of your data.

you can download OWASP PHP filter here

[tags]php,security,filters,mysql,sql,sql injection,injection[/tags]