Today I have just found that my colleague’s server was hacked by someone to run IRC bot. Cool! This server didn’t run any services except only SSH. It is very secure. Anyway, after investigating /var/log/secure, I found out lots of login failed attempts from unknown sources. Eventually, the last attempt was successful and he/she changed root password to something I didn’t know. Fortunately, single user mode helped me to recover the machine back to my control again.

Today I got very interesting message from MegaUpload.

All download slots assigned to your country (Thailand) are currently in use. Please try again later.

Only users with IPs in the United States, UK and Canada enjoy unlimited free download services. The number of slots made available to other countries is calculated based on that country"s contribution to covering our operation expenses. We can no longer afford to provide unlimited service to users from your country. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

In part 1, you produced media files suitable for DVD. However, it assumed you already have source files in AVI container. If you are having VCD or SVCD, what you have is MPEG1. Don"t worry. mencoder is a tool to help you convert any media files to AVI in a step as follow.

mencoder -ovc lavc -oac lavc -ffourcc DX50 ${VIDEO}.DAT -o ${VIDEO}.avi

If you are serious to blog, I don"t think you will like to use IE or Firefox to post your blogs effectively, me too. That"s why my third criteria is XML-RPC capablity. If you just want to blog, blog, blog, and blog, most of pure blog engine supports XML-RPC. For more detail, there are 2 XML-RPC APIs listed below.

1. Blogger Atom API
2. MetaWeblog API

Actually, you might see the extended version of MetaWeblog API in form of mt. Don"t think that it stands for MovableType, instead it is Meta. Blogger Atom API is the first innovative XML-RPC APIs for publishing data on website through remote interface invented by Pyra Labs (now Google). Anyway, it doesn"t support lots of features:

I got an asking for suggestion on an annoying network problem in a company. The problem is quite simple. The company is in a 4 floors building. ADSL router and DHCP server are placed at 3rd floor. Last year, there are 2 independent network for 4th floor and 2nd-3rd floors. This year the company want to consolidate network into just one so they bought 4 switching hubs for each floor and connected all switching hubs in daisy chain style network. Unfortunately, the network was so unstable. Some machines on 4th floor oftenly were unable to obtain IP from DHCP server.

Why Linux? There are lots of encoding tool for Windows including codec pack. Usually, I use Windows for playback and also desktop work. My Windows is not as fast as you think. It is just a laptop. I don"t want to use my laptop to create a DVD! Fortunately, I have many linux account. The linux machines seem to be slower than my laptop but there are more that one of them! That means I can create a DVD faster by encoding several tracks simulteneously on multiple hosts.

The key software is ffmpeg for encoding video in any formats into mpeg2 codec. It depends on only output format of your choice. NTSC or PAL. Widescreen or Fullscreen.