Then, I went to domains section to see which domains own the most space,  the sum of space from all domains is not equal to the above number (of course, just a relative number).

Then I login to root shell, and check the size of each folder by this command:

du -hs [path/to/directory]

And, I found that “/usr/local/psa/PMM/var” occupy more than 5Gb. Then I looked into that folder, and it stored temporary folder, which were used for the last migration process, so just delete it, and now I have more space for my hosting easily.

This technique could be applied for any Plesk based hosting, not only MediaTemple.

Actually, I intended to upgrade my hosting for more space, but I was hesitating because I just need 2 - 3 GBs for my new site, it is not worth to spend more monthly. And now, I have more 5Gb without spending more. So the lesson, is you need to look into some directories such as temp, log … in many cases, they occupy a lot of my bhosting space.

Let ’s compare with YouTube:

I think, YouTube should find a way ti improve its video quality. Nowdays, the broadband connection is so popular than ever, the users’ needs are higher (like me, he he). That ’s why, many sites like hulu.com, fancast.com and veoh.com are growing regardless YouTube is supported by the number 1 webware company, Google.

“What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables — and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. But often, you can’t.” - Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software

Let take a look at another way of thinking:

“Gates is probably getting out of technology at the right time. Funnily enough, it’s not really a business for nerds anymore. Gates was at the center of the personal-computer revolution and the Internet revolution, but now the big innovations are about exactly the things he’s bad at. The iPod was an aesthetic revolution. MySpace was a social revolution. YouTube was an entertainment revolution. This is not what Gates does. Technology doesn’t need him anymore.” Lev Grossman, Time Magazine Author

This topic is really an interesting to me. I think that both of Joel Spolsky, the CEO of Fog Creek Software and Lev Grossman are not wrong. However, does it make sense to compare Microsoft, a desktop-based application company with others (Google, MySpace, YouTube …) internet-based company? I am an addict of web 2.0 application. I can’t imagine how my life goes on without Google, BaseCamp or WordPress. Grossman talked about the revolutions, but does he recognized that the biggest revolution still belongs to Microsoft Windows and Office. Is there any technical person, who has never used any kind of Microsoft‘s product? The fact that Microsoft is losing on the online battle, but it is still invincible to the desktop-based market. Linux are really good (I love Ubuntu), Leopard is outstanding and attractive but almost people can’t live without Microsoft software.

My conclusion is that if you intend to run an internet-based company like MySpace, you may not be an amazing technical guy (but, you still need to understand fundamental knowledge about programming), the thing you need is an extremely out-standing idea with some luck additionally. If you intend to produce desktop-based applications like VMWare, Lotus Notes … You really need to be a master of programming and software architecture to be successful.

Nowadays, there are hundreds kinds of codecs and file formats. Be an internet worm, I enjoy searching and downloading a lot types of media to enjoy, from music video lip, funny clip to a whole movie. Then I tried various kinds of media player, from free to commercial to find a perfect one. Guess which one I will recommend you ? No one actually, but I will present you a list of the best, and of course, as usual, they are free.

I won’t put three popular ones Windows Media Player, Real Player and Quick Time into my list. They are still doing their jobs very well, however I am always eager to find others to try. Now, enough chat, let’s go.

1. VLC Media Player

This is too popular, and I haven’t much things to say about it. Basically, it is lightweight, support almost media files. More than that It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. Its biggest advantage is cross platform support. I have known it when I installed the KLite Codec package. At the beginning, it was not my favorite at all. However, day by day, it has been improved in both of functions and user interface as well. It is always appear in both of my desktop and laptop.

Available OS: Windows, BeOS, Linux/Unix,Zaurus,BSD,Solaris and etc
Homepage

2. GOM Player

One of the out-standing feature of this media player is “codec finder”. So, you don’t need to worry the sort of codec for your media content. The GUI is simply beautiful with a very convenience playlist and many other features, which you often have in a commercial product. I usually use it to play downloaded media. The most useful function, you may concern, is that it could play, even a broken AVI file. When downloading, or copying from somewhere, my media files could be broken, then the GOM Player is my hero.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

3. Miro

One of the most wonderful and powerful media player I have ever used. Except that it could support almost video format, it can play thousands of built-in channel TV, and be added more daily. The most interesting features, personally I love is that it help me to download any torrent file and YouTube video easily. The door to the media world is open widely with Micro. I could spend the whole weekend to play around with this.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

4. JetAudio

I have used and fall in love with Jet Audio for a very long time. This is the first media player I known when I started using Windows 95. I still remembered, at that time, when I turn on the computer, the first application I run is JetAudio. It is unbelievable to know that a program like JetAudio, could be free. You can play DVD, CD, Audio CDs, other media files even rip and burn your favorites music with its built-in engine. It has various kinds of modern and beautiful skins for your choice.

Available OS: Windows
Homepage

5. MPlayer

This player plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, Ogg/OGM, VIVO, ASF/WMA/WMV, QT/MOV/MP4, RealMedia, Matroska, NUT, NuppelVideo, FLI, YUV4MPEG, FILM, RoQ, PVA files, supported by many native, XAnim, and Win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies..

The advantage is that it supports many kinds of output drivers such as: X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, AAlib, DirectFB, but you can use GGI, SDL (and this way all their drivers), VESA (on every VESA compatible card, even without X11!) and some low level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and ATI), too!

More than that, the most important thing is that it could be run on many platforms, from a window machine to a game cube.

Its poor design GUI is the big minus point if I vote for it.

Available OS: Windows,Mac,Linux/Unix,BSD,Solaris,AmigaOS4,ReactOS and etc
Homepage

Do you have known any of other ones ? I am always eager to try something new, then I may make a top 10 media player instead of 5. Just kidding !

This is not really so challenge project, the only issues is that we can’t figure out which elements exactly to process. We also join the brainstorming progress with the owner, to identity the segmentation which this hotel target. Base on our ideas, the hotel should be a friendly, warming one, a kind of boutique hotel. Its name is Lavender, a beautiful flower, which has a enjoyed smell.

The most interesting idea in this project is that we make some tags and put them into the catalouge instead of printing them in one side like usual. Each tag will be an introduction for a service in the hotel. Sometime, we could generate awesome ideas, but the client may not approve, however in this project, my client love this idea very much.

At any way, let take a look at what we’ve done so far.

The client has been very satisfied with our outcomes, that ’s our happiness in every project. Hey, if you have a plan to travel to my city (Ho Chi Minh), please visit and come this hotel and enjoy our design, he he.

As we can see, the structure of the homepage is completely different, compared with sub-pages. The client has approved the design, and we cant have enough time to rewrite the new CMS for this project. We have only 1 week to process everything from PSD layout, to CSS/xHTML and implement this into Joomla.

At the beginning, I intended to make two templates, and then assign one to homepage and one to sub-pages. However, this way is not applicable. Then, I tried to use jQuery framework to detect homepage and subpage, and then edit the lay-out by javascript code. Again, it is not recommended either.

Finally, I concerned more to Joomla modules, and figure out another way. I am not sure this is the best way but I have not much time to consider when I have spent 3 days to tried others.

Firstly, I create the index file as usual, but it only contains the header of the site (navigation bar only). After that, I create 5 modules, which are 5 kinds of page in Andy ’s design, then load them into the index file, like this:

Next, I go to Joomla Administrator, create 5 new modules. You could name them whatever you want, just remember to which will be put in it.

Now, let’s create new module. In this example, I will create the homepage module. I won’t discuss in details how to create a module. You can easily find it on Joomla site. The key thing here is that we need to put this line:

This will display the content such as article, products from virtuemart, static contetn …

The progress may be clear till this step. Let me summarize. First of all, I create an index.php file, which contain everything in common, include the navigation bar, javascript, css, footer … then I will load each module, which has different structure into the index by using these lines:

Next, I need to create some static content, which my client want. The important thing is to put them into the mainmenu. Why ? You may know in next step.

Nearly finished, but we still have one thing to do. Still in Administrator area, after upload module we have just created, I need to set it to only display in the content I want. For example, I will set the module products is only loaded in Products section. Joomla will depend on the menu to decide load or not a module.

One by one, I do repeat for each module. I am still discovering a better way, and may let you know in the near future. Any way, take a look at the old and new lay out in this project

Truly, I have not much experience in this scope. All I often do is to chmod files and folder carefully. At the beginning, I was really confused, didn’t what should I do to find the exploit and stop the attack. Start a security course ? No, it ’s too long. Find some books to read ? I tried, but not easy to understand for a newbie.

Fortunately, I had received a nice support from (mt) and some friends. So, in this article, I want to share some experiences in this issue to protect your server.

1. Config your php.ini

safe_mode = On [This is optional, many open sources applications will not run properly]
fopen = Off
disable_functions = “apache_get_modules, apache_get_version, apache_getenv, apache_note, apache_setenv, disk_free_space, diskfreespace, dl, highlight_file, ini_alter, ini_restore, openlog, passthru, proc_nice, shell_exec, show_source, system”

2. Config your .htaccess

Add these more lines to your .htaccess file:

SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^libwww-perl*” block_bad_bots
Deny from env=block_bad_bots

3. Look after your host

Use zgrep to check your log. Example:
zgrep “?*=http://” /var/www/html/*/statistics/logs/access_log*| awk ‘/Dec/ && /libww/ && $9 !~/^4/’
The hacker usually make use of perl-libww to include the script, so run this command, you could figure out.

Exploit files are often uploaded on tmp directory, so try to remove them by these commands:

find /var/tmp -user apache -exec rm -Rf {} \;
find /tmp -user apache -exec rm -Rf {} \;
find /var/spool/samba -user apache -exec rm -Rf {}\;

4. Database security:

You should create one user for each databse for each application. By doing this way, even one of your sites is attacked or stole the database, others are still remained.

Then, try to back up your all databases, at least, weekly

5. Take care your web applications:

Last but not least. ALWAYS UPGRADE YOUR APPLICATIONS, especially when you are using open source application such as joomla, wordpress, drupal … Many exploit are discovered and informed to the community. Hence, the bad guy can make use of them to attack the old version.

Absolutely, 5 steps above are just very very basic fundamentals to protect ourself from some script kiddies, they may be useless, against a real hacker. If you have any experiences in this matter, I am very pleased to discuss in order to improve our knowledge.

The receiver will get a beautiful designed card, which stores information to create the package above.

Actually, this kind of hosting package is not really a cheap one, but you will be satisfied with many advanced features such as webmail system, control panel and support. It is very suitable for a beginner or small business. To me, this is a very nice marketing idea.

I have been with MediaTemple (mt) for a while, and really satisfied with its features, especially support team and knowledge base. I am always able to find the help from (mt) when necessary. You can take it here.

I often use PHP for my web project, so the linux server is always the best choice. However, the hired server doesn’t always have enough stuff, and sometime we need to install more and we need to put those things manually. This progress is really risky, and with just a small mistake, you could even destroy the server. I have tried VMWare to install Ubuntu and Fedoracore, but I am not really satisfied with “virtual” things. So, I make use my old machine (P4 1.8, 512 MB Ram). I put Ubuntu Server Edition on it. I just spend only about 15 minutes to get everything (SSH, SSL, MySQL, Apache, PHP … ) ready. The latest experience is really great, I have installed successfully eAccelerator, and it helps me to reduce the server load about 1000% (before ~10, after ~1 ).

For developing, Apatana is the best application, I got a lighting speed to write and debug xHTML/HTML/CSS/PHP code. All of them run on the real environment with enough elements such as mod_rewrite, eAccelerator ….

The only inconvenience thing is that the connection in my country is slow, and it took me a long time to upgrade the packages.

In the past, I can’t use computer without Windows, but nowadays, a whole day with Linux would be great. I am still learning more about this wonderful operating system though, a little bit late.

Step 1: The designer will make a draft for the lay-out of website, so do the architect, he draw a draft for the construction of the apartment. The difference is that the designer does on Photoshop, meanwhile, the architecture works on AutoCad.

Step 2: Both of them need to discuss with the customer and get his/her aprrove for their drafts.

Step 3: Then the customer will require the functions (such as contact form, shopping cart ….) for the website, and the owner of the apartment will suggest infrastructure (such as electronic lines, network, TV cable …. ). In this step, depend on the requirement, the functions of the website and the infrastructure of the house could be very complex. The web designer, at this time needs a team to complete, and the architect needs to ask the 3rd party or sub-contractor. They are still similar, right ?

Step 4: Till now, everything seems to be OK but no, both of the designer and architect will receive the complaints, additional requirements from their customers such as AJAX enhancements, PayPal integrated for websites and Wireless networking, intelligence devices for constructions. Yup, the most difficult time is here, in some case, the web developer need to rebuild the whole website to satisfy the new requirements and the architecture need to demolish some area of the construction also. Both of them would get stress and tired during this period.

Step 5: Yeah, they could finalize in this step and receive the payments from the customers or not (just kidding !).