Technology Insights

Update WordPress Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 2.X to Amazon Product in a Post Plugin 3.X

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If you use the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin on WordPress you might have either not upgraded yet or decided to not upgrade because the shortcode syntax has changed. You can get around not upgrading by updating the WordPress post content immediately after you upgrade the Amazon Product In A Post Plugin. Below I describe the version that I upgraded and the MySQL syntax used to update the shortcode syntax to display Amazon products in WP posts.

Technology Insights

MapPress WordPress Plugin – Change All Markers On A Single Map

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MapPress is a WordPress plugin that provides an interface to Google Maps and easily allows you to insert detailed Google Maps into WordPress posts or pages. We have a site that provides password auditing services called QD Tools and on the homepage there is a map that lists the city, state/province, and country of our customers. I have been using MapPress Pro for a long time because it offers lots of extra features and MapPress itself is such an awesome plugin I like supporting the developer. Anyhow the Google Map on the QD Tools homepage is has over 1,000 markers and continues to grow. I wanted to modify the default MapPress/Google Maps marker that was being used but there is no way in MapPress to retroactively change this so the instructions below explain how to do this.

Information Security

sqlscan – Backtrack 5 – Information Gathering – Web Application Analysis – Web Crawlers – sqlscan

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Need to query Google for vulnerable SQL servers and extract MD5 hashes? The sqlscan.py Python script is your tool then. If you are using Backtrack release 5 you will first need install Python 2.4.4 and then fix sqlscan.py by following the instructions here and here. Once you have sqlscan.py functioning without errors proceed to the example below.

Technology Errors

sqlscan Error: sqlscan.py:8: DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated

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Backtrack Linux is full of really great tools including SQLScan which is a SQL Scanner that provides the ability to query Google for vulnerable hosts and extract MD5 hashes from the results. Unfortunately sqlscan.py was written for Python 2.3 or Python 2.4 and has not been maintained to be compatible with Python 2.6 which is the current version of Python installed on Backtrack Linux 5 R3. Backtrack 5 R3 is based off of Ubuntu 10.04 which had a release date of April, 2010 so needless to say some packages are out of date. It should be noted though that there is a lot to be said for stability in your operating system versus bleeding edge capabilities and I am sure when the time is correct the Backtrack team will be releasing a new version of Backtrack based on a newer version of Ubuntu.

Technology Insights

Connect To Microsoft SQL Server From OSX

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If your daily driver is a Macbook or similar and you also manage a network that has Microsoft SQL Server running on it then it can be useful to login to those MSSQL Servers remotely. Even if its simply to view database layout or verify a service is running properly by actually connecting to it there is no doubt that having an easy method to connect to Microsoft SQL from OSX is beneficial. There are a bunch of JAVA based clients such as SQuirreL SQL Client or SQLRazor that are great applications but I personally use DBVisualizer or Navicat which are both described in more detail below.