Disable SSH login, allow FTP in Ubuntu

In our IT 210 class, we need students to be able to upload files to a web server using FTP but disable SSH login to the server. To do this in Ubuntu, edit

/etc/ssh/sshd_config

and add the line

DenyUsers stud1 stud2

Then restart SSH using

$sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

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Philippine Computing Science Congress 2012 Report

I attended the recently concluded PCSC 2012 at De La Salle University - Canlubang last March 1-3, 2012. The conference site is available here. Although I did not submit any research paper in the conference, I decided to attend anyway just to get a feel of the state of computing science research in the Philippines.

There were two invited talks by professors from the National University of Singapore(NUS) and one from a researcher in US. The first invited talk was about the use of Graphics Processing Units to speed up computations in computational geometry. The second talk was about Support Vector Machines (SVM). The last was on Natural Language Processing (NLP).

This year, the conference featured "Turing Talks" to commemorate Allan Turing's 100th birth year. Distinguished professors from UPLB(Dr. Albacea), UPD(Dr. Caro), ADMU(Dr. Saldana), and DLSU(Dr. Azcarraga) delivered the talks.

The researches presented covered areas in Algorithms, Complexity Theory, Image Processing, NLP, and Information Systems.According to the program committee, there were 60 paper submissions but only a few were accepted for oral presentation. The best paper was Data Association for an Adaptive Multi-target Particle Filter Tracking System from ADMU.

Overall the conference was very nice. Regarding the state of computing research, there is still much to improve. Also, sad to, say my research area on systems is not well represented in the conference. The closest was a poster presentation from ADMU about location estimation based on the frames passed over a wireless network.

The best part of the conference, however,  was when I won a Lenovo from the raffle!

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Using "apt-get update" behind a transparent proxy

$sudo apt-get update -o Acquire::http::No-Cache=True

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On the Role of Faculty in a Research University

Research-Driven Academic Growth and National Relevance of UP by Dr. Gisela P. Concepcion
Some key ideas:

• Research mentoring is important
• Being a faculty involves teaching, research, advocacy and extension work
• Publishing research results and patent applications is a top priority
• Submit papers to international journals for pre-review
• Levels of scientific activity:
• innovative, creative, trailblazing
• iterative, modifying science
• routine, protocol science
•  Research in the Philippines must now move on to the molecular level
• Review Technology Transfer Bill
• Come up with a scientific advocacy
• The Dean shall provide
• Minimize administrative work of young faculty to be able to focus on research
• Every young faculty should have a major specialization (in his field) and a minor specialization (collaborative)
• An enabling environment must be present to be able to encourage research
• Procurement process of equipment for research must be revised
• Research must be aligned to public issues (flooding, climate change)
• Allocate 10-15 percent of MOOE for tests
• Be opportunistic
• Advocate the concept of "volunteerism" in research
• Conduct expectation settings for research: senior faculty, junior faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students, administrative support
• Improve oral and written communication skills

The Importance of Conducting Research in the University by Dr. Ida F. Dalmacio
Some key ideas:

• Review Republic Act 9500
• Develop "Centers of Excellence"
• Her main motivation for research is to develop her laboratory by obtaining funding to procure equipment
• There must be an industry partner to drive research in the academe
• Data gathered in research is the ticket to publications and research funding
• Professional fulfillment is one of the motivations for conducting research
• "Think big, start small, act now"

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OpenVPN and Squid for the Holidays

Christmas vacation has started. For some of us who would like to do some work from home, Virtual Private Network(VPN) is the solution. In this entry, I'll describe the OpenVPN setup I made on an Ubuntu 10.04 Server.

The main requirement I'd like to address is to be able to connect to the office network (10.0.3.0/24) to which our development server(10.0.3.5) is attached. This development server is not public. Also, I would like to be able to access the online journals (ACMDL, Elsevier, SpringerLink,IEEE) which require IP address authentication.

The physical server is an Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz with 512MB RAM and 
40GB disk space. It has two NICs, with one connected to the DMZ(public IP)  and another to the office network(with IP 10.0.3.252).

I installed Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS then followed the steps here to install OpenVPN. Although, L2(Data Link) is described in the tutorial, I implemented L3(Network) which I think is simpler. After which, I added a static route in the office router (10.0.3.254) to allow the VPN clients (10.8.0.x) to access the office network.

ip route 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 10.0.3.252

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National Academy of Science Technology 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting Experience

Scientific conferences delight me. I attended that 32nd Annual Scientific Meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology last July 15, 2010. It was my first time to attend the event. Professor Jaderick P. Pabico asked me to present our poster entitled: A Cellular Automata Approach for Wide-Area Simulation of Runoff and Flooding:  The Case of the Laguna Lake Catchment.

The gathering was a big time event. There were a lot of Filipino scientists present. Several speakers, who are NAST Academicians and National Scientists, gave talks that address the progress of our beloved country in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. The awarding ceremony was very inspiring, particularly the Outstanding Young Scientist (OYS) award.

I am proud that our institute is home to an Outstanding Young Scientist (Prof. Jaderick P. Pabico) and a NAST Academician (Dr. Eliezer A. Albacea)!

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