Entries by Solomon K. Chang

By Solomon Chang

Nessus is a vulnerability scannner. Despite being proprietary, it is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems. It accomplishes this by maintaining its own database of every vulnerability known to its contributors (for specific mainstream Operating Systems), with each vulnerability rendered into executable scripts. After selecting the vulnerabilities you want to test for, you simply launch... and wait. Nessus then returns a report of any backdoors, admin passwords, etc. that it has found, as well as helpful links to instructions on how to patch them.

Nessus is meant to be a security-testing tool that you deploy against your own machines before you put them on the public internet. It is not meant to probe other people's machines, although this is very commonly the case. Solomon will briefly discuss other security tools and common probing techniques, as well as protecting yourself against probes.

When he is not teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts 101 at Hogwarts, Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator four stories underground in an organization he is not allowed to talk about, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

By George McKinney

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time." -- Wikipedia

Using a web camera, the Adobe Flash player, and open-source tools, it is possible to generate animated 3D objects in real-time. This Augmented Reality presentation utilizes the Papervision3D project and the FLAR Toolkit. We will also address Collada, which originated from Sony, and Google Sketchup. These are two tools for generating 3D objects that are free.

General Electric corporation showcased Augmented Reality in a recent marketing campaign for its Smart Grid, renewable energy program. http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

About George:
George McKinney is a web developer and marketing strategist with Hookstream.com. George enjoys manipulating bitmaps and coding assembly language. He received his MBA from the University of Southern California and his BA in History from Stanford University.

There will be no meeting in April. It appears all the major industry conferences are happening this weekend, and the Tom Bradley Center needed this time slot. We will resume our regular meeting on May 16th. Have a good weekend!

By Jorge Garifuna

Elgg is a white label, open source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well.
Elgg was originally started by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, who subsequently founded Curverider in order to provide Elgg-related services. It has been under development since 2004.

Version 1.0 was released on August 18, 2008. This version was rewritten from scratch and included many powerful features including: a new data model; import / export; support for OpenDD) and more.

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Global Inc. which offers a multitude of Website services for organizations, businesses, entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig at the end of last year and has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer maillist questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.

See you all at SCALE!