Daily Cup of Tech

I woke up this morning to the news that Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.  My first reaction was, “Why would a software company want to purchase a company that is primarily hardware based?”

There are a number of possible answers to this question.

• They may want to diversify their product lines in a difficult financial time.
• They may want to secure the Java software which is key to many of their applications and even their client.
• They may want to get their hands on Glassfish, an open source server development product by Sun.

I would like to put forth my own theory.  I believe that it is possible that Oracle has purchased Sun to get control of a major competitor to their database platform: MySQL!

Database Platform Used

MySQL is the defacto standard for a number of applications, most notably many content management systems on the Internet.  For example, Wordpress runs with MySQL on the back end.  According to Sun, MySQL has 25% of market share in overall database usage by developers.  If Oracle were to get control of MySQL, there are a number of scenarios that could follow:

• They could quit providing commercial support for MySQL
• They could quit development of MySQL
• They could force MySQL customers to Oracle
• They could incorporate MySQL into Oracle and release their own open source version
• They could carve MySQL off and sell it to another company

To be honest, I’m not certain that Oracle will do with it.  I do not think that there is anything to panic about at this time but I do think that this will be a situation that we need to monitor.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/20/will-oracle-kill-mysql/trackback/

I’ve found an awesome website that will help you secure your PHP/MySQL website by allowing you to break his!  Teach me SQL injection gives you the opportunity to hack into a typical website!

From the website:

Today I’ve given a SQL injection class at the VU University in Amsterdam. I’ve created a website that is vulnerable to SQL injection and I wanted to share this demo/assignment with you. Note that I’ve turned off magic_quotes_gpc to make life a little easier. The assignment is to find out my age. Whenever somebody has deleted the records in the database you can reset it. One hint: it runs on a PHP5/MySQL5 environment.Application: http://server.maussoft.com/~sqlinject/list.php

Reset DB: http://server.maussoft.com/~sqlinject/reset.php

Can you hack this application? Try to do it without looking at the source code. Prove it and post an URL in the comments that injects SQL in such a way that the application shows my age. For the pro’s: try to do the same on safe1_view.php, safe2_view.php and insert.html/insert.php. If you can do the same on safe3_view.php or safe4_view.php you are officially 1337 in my book…

Give it a shot!  You might be amazed with what you learn!

[Codingspace.org » Teach me SQL injection]

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/20/sql-injection-training/trackback/

My plan for this weekend was to go out and but yet another computer so that I can have a dedicated Linux box to work on.  I need to have Windows on my machines simply because most of the people that I need to support are running Windows and that is what I need to keep up to speed on!

But, I am also finding that a lot of the tools that I want to use are only available for Linux.  Since it takes quite a while to save up for another computer from the proceeds I make from Daily Cup of Tech, I have been struggling along with VMware versions of Ubuntu.

So, I was going to bite the bullet this weekend and take my kids’ college fund to go but a computer to put Linux on. As I was about to head out the door, I ran across something that might actually allow me to keep my kids’ college fund where it is!

Portable Ubuntu for Windows provides the user with the ability to install Ubuntu on a Windows machine and do pretty much everything that you can do on a regular Ubuntu machine!  And, you can do the install to a USB device so that you can take your Ubuntu with you and run it from any Windows machine you want!

From the website:

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is an Ubuntu system running as a Windows application.

This system is built with the Colinux Kernel, Xming X server and Pulseaudio server for Windows.

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a useful tool for when you need to use Ubuntu on an machine that has Windows as operating system.

I have just started to play with it but from what I have seen, it is pretty impressive.  Here are some videos of pubuntu (as they are calling it) that I have found which may give you a bit of an idea what this is all about:

[portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar]

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/19/run-ubuntu-as-a-portable-app-on-windows/trackback/

Pretty much every blogger who has written anything worthwhile has had his or her content stolen.  A direct cut and paste right from the website.  While I am not overly excited about this practice, I have a tendency to overlook it, especially if there is at least a link back to Daily Cup of Tech.

But, one of the things that I have seen people do is a straight cut and paste of the HTML code for the post.  While this is really easy for the “thief”, it poses a bit of a problem for me because if the HTML references any images, each time someone goes to their webpage, they are stealing the images from my bandwidth!

So, if you are going to steal my content, please take the images as well and leave my bandwidth alone.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/18/take-my-content-but-leave-my-bandwidth-alone/trackback/

Dropbox, one of my favorite free tools, has just updated their Linux package!  I am very excited by this because I can now run Dropbox on my non-GUI Ubuntu servers!

From the website:

Hi Friends!

We’ve been keeping this secret for some months while Megabuild (0.6.507) was in development. Now it’s finally ready! Here is the newest Linux package for Dropbox. In this package you can expect the following enhancements:

• Dropbox CLI (man dropbox at your prompt
• New Nautilus emblems (spiffy ones you see on the latest Mac and Windows builds)
• Dropbox no longer autostarts for every user from Nautilus, you can now start Dropbox from your applications menu!
• Jaunty compatibility out of the box (finally!)

For you Jaunty users out there who can’t stand a single level of indirection here are some direct links:

• Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit)
• Ubuntu 9.04
• The Source

Enjoy!

[New Nautilus Plugin + Official Dropbox CLI]

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/04/17/new-linux-version-of-dropbox-with-command-line-version-available/trackback/