ALIVE @ Samford University

Viva Las Vegas! After a three day drive that included quick visits to friends and family along the way in Texas and Arizona as well as brief visits to the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam at night (very cool!), and finally to Las Vegas, I arrived just in time to showcase my Ajax Performance Monitor Toolkit. The kids love the pools here at the hotel including a wave pool and lazy river.

My presentation went well, and there seemed to be interest in the toolkit and porting it to work with other server-side scripting languages. Download the powerpoint slides (3.28MB). If you are interested in trying it out, you may also download a preliminary version of the toolkit (644KB) with a very limited amount of documentation.

July 14th, 2009 | Tags: conference, web engineering | Category: Software, research | Leave a comment

The Samford Unviersity Virtual Supercomputer is coming soon! Today I gave a demonstration/presentation about the non-dedicated cluster I am building on campus. Eventually, it may grow into a supercomputer, but for now I am quite happy with the direction it is taking as a computational resource for campus. The Powerpoint Slides from my presentation are available, and I will post information about getting involved in the project to this site as the semester continues.

April 14th, 2009 | Tags: parallel, suvs | Category: research | Leave a comment

Tonight I am attending the executive committee meeting of the Alabama Academy of Science, where I am the editor for electronic media (i.e., I am in charge of the organization website). Tomorrow I will be chairing the Engineering and Computer Science presentations at the University of West Alabama in Livingston, Alabama. I did not submit a presentation this year, but I am looking forward to the six presentations from researchers across the state. The list of presentations is copied below and available on the Alabama Academy of Science website in the final program.

• A method for semantics-based conceptual expansion of ontology. Liping Zhou, Dezheng Zhang, Xin Chen, and Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
• Design and fabrication of a research flight simulator. Harold Zallen, and James J. Baird, Jr., Joint Research Project with Malone Group International and Auburn University.
• Extracting coexpression relations between genes using grammatical parsing. Richa Tiwari, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
• Jibu: a tool for efficient and reliable concurrent programming. Srinivasarao Krishnaprasad, Jacksonville State University.
• Kinematic structure and evolution of the 9 march 2006 Mississippi/Alabama bow echo. Calvin M Elkins, University of Alabama in Huntsville.
• Metamodel recovery system using grammar inference. Qichao Liu, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

March 25th, 2009 | Tags: Add new tag, alabama academy of science, research, service | Category: research | Leave a comment

Update - Apparently it was about May of this year when there was a large surge in ssh password attacks. I believe that my computer became a target sometime after that. Here are some good articles reporting on the situation:

This may not be news to many of you, but my new home development machine is under attack! This isn’t your typical script kiddie HTTP attack, but rather a full-blown SSHD password guessing attack. Unfortunately, I did not take screenshots of everything as I detected the attack (which has been going on for about two weeks now) but I do have a few screenshots to help describe the timeline of events:

1 - I opened process explorer (an excellent replacement for the Windows Task Manager) to investigate my current cpu usage and running processes. The screenshot above doesn’t show it because I didn’t take a screenshot at the time, but what drew my attention to a possible attack was multiple sshd.exe processes appearing and then disappearing (brightly colored in red to indicate that the process was marked for destruction). My immediate instinct was that somebody was making connections and attempting to guess a password!

2 - I then instinctively (i.e., immediately and as fast as I could) opened a command prompt and typed the command netstat -a which shows the list of active TCP connections. Sure enough, there was a number of connections to static-217-133-194-98.clienti.tiscali.it

3 - Next I decided to see if the event viewer had recorded any activity. Wow! Over 30,000 events relating to sshd activity. The screenshot above shows the very first event recording a break-in attempt. On the evening of November 25, I switched my hardware firewall to redirect all port 22 SSH requests to my new computer. The next morning at 11:55:19 AM, the first attack commenced and proceeded to send a new username/password login attempt every 8 seconds for just over 1.5 hours ending at 1:19:19 PM. The attack sequence generated 2489 entries in the event viewer. You can see that the entry records a failed password guess for non-existent user root. The attacking computer then tried a different password before switching to a new user account ftp. Again, this is a non-existent user account. Then the user tried a second time with this user account before switching to another account: sales.

More »

December 11th, 2008 | Tags: hacking, security | Category: research | Comments (2)

After a late start, we made it into Gatlinburg, TN just after 1AM. We got to drive through light snow falling, and see all the beautiful Christmas lights with hardly any traffic on the roads at all. Now it is on to the very serious business of wrapping up my presentation that I am due to be giving in exactly 12 hours. I am close, but not quite finished with my primary experiment. I should have it wrapped up soon and will update this post with a copy of the powerpoint once its ready.

Update - the presentation went well! Here are the powerpoint slides:

Investigating the impact of Ajax on server load in a web 2.0 application powerpoint (3.1MB)

November 21st, 2008 | Tags: conference, powerpoint, presentation, travel | Category: research | Leave a comment

I have been a long time user of bibliography search engines such as citeseer, the ACM portal, IEEExplore, etc… but I have always turned to standalone software applications such as Endnote and JabRef to manage the articles I find. This summer I created my own web-based annotated bibliography tool and just barely got it off the ground before the need for it subsided. Now, tonight as I am organizing my references for an upcoming conference presentation, I just discovered a tool that surpasses the tool that I created and adds a social networking element. The website is called CiteULike (screenshot below) -

As far as I can tell, the only way to group entries in your library is by creating a special “group” where any registered member can join and post entries or by tagging each entry that you want to belong in a category with a special keyword. I have opted for the latter approach as I only want articles that I post to be in my reference library. The screenshot is showing a post that I just made. The site seems to be pretty response and there is an active bookmark link that you can add to your browser toolbar to quickly create a new bibliography entry from the page you are currently viewing.

November 20th, 2008 | Tags: tools, web 2.0 | Category: research | Leave a comment