Big Damn Heroes

I’ve mentioned before that I love my iPhone. Smartphones with hardware keyboards are harder for me to use because the fine muscle control required to push down firmly on a tiny nub makes my hands shake even worse than usual. The iPhones tap-and-swipe interface, on the other hand, makes things relatively easy… no pressure == less muscular activity == less shaking.

But there’s always been one nagging issue with the iPhone, relative to my tremor: its size. The thing, lightweight form factor that everyone else loves so much turns my hand into a trembling, shivering claw when I try to use it one-handed. It probably seems counter-intuitive to people without ET –especially in light of what I just said about muscle activity– but when it comes to holding stuff, small, delicate items are a real pain in the ass. Most of us take for granted how much control it takes to hold something gently until you wake up one day and “gently” has become a matter of concentration.

Anyway… for reasons having nothing to do with ET, I picked up a Mophie Juicepack Air the other day. It’s a case/battery-pack combo that doubles the battery life of the iPhone while also providing it with a bit of protection. I’m constantly letting my phone run low, and I already had it in a semi-bulky case anyway, so I figured it’d be worth it.

What I didn’t realize is that, by doubling the thickness of the device and adding several ounces of battery and plastic to my phone, the whole thing would become so much more comfortable to use. Yeah, it’s no longer as sleek and beautiful a device as it once was, but I use my iPhone constantly, and having it feel so much more secure in my grip is a blessing.

If you’ve got ET and a Jesus Phone, definitely look into Mophie’s wonderful little add-on. It does everything it claims on the box, and then some.

Today, my wife stopped by a station to fill up the truck… and it rejected her Shell card. She told me about it this evening, and I began to investigate.

My first thought was that I hadn’t received a “payment due” notice from Shell in a month or two. From a company constantly hounding its customers to switch to paperless billing, this seemed odd. A quick search through my email confirmed that I’d received nothing from them since January.

Next stop: logging in to the site. Right up front, they insist that I fill out new security questions. “Fine,” I think, but not for long. Soon I’m reaching new levels of irritation.

One of the questions is “What’s your ____’s middle name?” I provided the answer, an extremely common name shared by millions of people. The app promptly errors out, informing me that “Answers must be at least four characters long.” Are you kidding me? That’s the name! So I try a different question: “How old was your father when you were born?” Given that my dad (like most men) fathered his children long before he reached 1000, I assumed it would be okay to give the expected two-digit answer. Oh but no… error! I had to spell the number for it to be accepted. Who did the QA on this shit?

So I finally make it into the system proper, and find that I’m way overdue. Needless to say, this is not the kind of thing I want happening in a credit-tight economy. Despite having set up email alerts with them years ago, they hadn’t given me a heads-up of any kind.

Clicking around, I find the alert management section of the site… and discover that they no longer even know my email address. All alerts are turned off. WTF? Right there on the page next to a “paperless statements are awesome!” ad, they’re telling me that they don’t even remember how to contact me with vital account info!

But hold on… it gets better! ‘Cause I also have a Citgo card, and like Shell, Citgo outsources its online accounting to Citi. Guess what I discovered? The exact same thing happened to my Citgo account! All alerts turned off, my email address deleted.

At this point, I’m reminded that, years ago, I was a regular user of the Mycheckfree service. It collected all of my online bills into a central interface and made keeping up with everything a breeze. Until, that is, almost every bank-owned business pulled out of Mycheckfree, demanding that everyone use their individual, dedicated sites for account management. When things like this happen, I bitterly ponder how these companies (many of whom are directly implicated in our economy’s current decline) screwed up my customer experience to save themselves a few cents per transaction, only to screw me again and again years later.

Frakkin’ lovely.

I’m finally watching the announcement keynote, and I want to give a positive nod to Apple’s “free is always free” App Store policy.

Yeah, I know it would be nice if a user could download a free demo and then upgrade it to a paid version in-app, but Apple is spot on in recognizing how quickly that could degenerate into a wave of angry users wailing “I didn’t mean to buy it! I was just trying it out!” Far better to play it safe and make users confident that they can try out a freebie without getting themselves into trouble.

Besides… the “MySuperApp LITE” convention seems to have caught on enough that it is probably unwise to change things now.

My primary machine is now running Vista 64-bit, my first experience with a non-32-bit Windows environment. Observations so far:

• 4GB of RAM makes Vista downright zippy.
• The 64-bit version of iTunes (I didn’t even know one existed) is a huge improvement over its little sister. Way, way better at handling large music libraries, iTunes64 has made me reconsider my boiling hatred for Apple’s music app.
• Mozilla doesn’t have a 64-bit version of Firefox, and Ye Olde Firefox 32 is a touch buggy when it comes to Jscript. Nothing that amounts to a deal-breaker, but some definite annoyances.
• Matching my results with iTunes, pretty much any data-intensive, memory-gobbling app that has a 64-bit version seems night-and-day faster.
• Had some problems installing the latest version of Logitech’s SetPoint 64, ended up using the preceding iteration for now.
• Quicktime in Firefox seems a little hosed… transport controls refuse to appear, although video plays just fine.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the setup. The inconveniences haven’t proven to be too bad, and I find the speed increases in native apps more than compensate for the occasional Firefox quirk.

The average person on the street may have no idea how huge this is, but it’s a big, big thing: the stimulus package’s implementation instructions require each government agency that spends stimcash to provide an Atom/RSS feed detailing who received the contract, the amount, and so on.

For each of the near term reporting requirements major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports agencies are required to provide a feed preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

from the Initial Implementing Guidance for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

Each agency has the freedom to either stuff the feeds with raw data or just link to static HTML, so it isn’t a perfect system yet… but wowza! Talk about making life easier for amateur journalists and watchdogs!

(hat tip to Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

After a couple more weeks of experience with PluginCommander for WordPress MU, its limitations are becoming clearer. To be specific, some WP plugins just don’t like it; they’ll throw a fit when attempting to activate them via PC, dumping a seeming endless array of errors on the page.

So while I’m still using PC for those plugins that can be reliably auto-activated during blog creation, I’ve turned to Plugin Filter when giving individual users access to potentially problematic or premium plugins. PF allows me to turn back on the stock Dashboard Plugins menu (which, let’s face it, is a smoother experience than the PC replacement) while still restricting users to activating a limited set of safe plugins.

To make PF work, just drop it into mu-plugins, and then open each of your restricted plugins in a text editor. Look for the line that reads something like:

Plugin Name: My Random Plugin

…and change it to:

Plugin Name: My Random Plugin: SiteAdminOnly

From that point on, only the site admin (you) will be able to (de)activate that plugin. Of course, every time you upgrade the file(s) in question, you’ll need to make this change… but it’s a relatively simple tweak that takes just a few seconds.

Okay, so there is one little problem with PC that can really drive ya nuts when dealing with certain plugins. I first noticed it while playing with the WordPress.com Stats and Google Analytics for WordPress: both place the links to their config pages on the main Plugins page in the WP admin. And since one of the primary reasons to use PC is to turn off that all-or-nothing Plugins page… I was kinda stuck.

So after a bit of Googling turned up nothing of value, I decided to poke around within the plugin files themselves and see what was up. This wasn’t a particularly appealing activity, since I’m a Coldfusion guy with only the slimmest grasp of PHP. Turns out, a fix is pretty easy.

For example, inside googleanalytics.php, I found a line that began:

add_submenu_page('plugins.php'

All I had to do was change that bit to read:

add_submenu_page('edit.php'

…and the link popped right up under “Manage” in the admin. A similar tweak to the Wordpress.com stats.php fixed it, too. Now I can allow blog owners their choice of statistical plugins without having to let ‘em run wild with everything else.

UPDATE 2008-01-23: The rearranging of menus in WP 2.7 meant that I ended up moving some of my modded plugins to places other than the (now non-existent) “Manage” page.

My still-young relationship with WordPress MU just got a lot more satisfying: I discovered Plugin Commander.

One of the first things a WPMU newbie is likely to encounter is the messy reality of the WordPress plugin ecosystem and interface. On the positive side, there are countless plugins out there; on the negative end, WPMU 2.6 makes managing user access to those plugins a complete pain in the ass.

(No offense intended to WPMU’s lone shepherd, donncha, who can’t be expected to get everything right all by himself. And I say this from experience, brother.)

For example: yeah, you can find a plugin for every taste, but most of them weren’t designed with multi-user environments in mind. Take TypePad AntiSpam… it’s a great plugin that provides spam monitoring services for blog comments, and unlike Akismet, it’s free for all uses. But there’s no MU version, so it has to be enabled for each user. And what if a new competitor enters the race someday, and I want to change horses? Answer: I get to trudge through and make the change for each and every blog I host. Not fun, nor practical for more than a handful of blogs.

That’s where Plugin Commander enters the game.

• It allows me to mass-activate/deactivate a plugin across all active blogs with a single click. So switching to NewAntiSpamThingie would be as simple as installing the plugin and hitting a link.
• I can set certain plugins to auto-activate upon the creation of a new blog, meaning that TPAS can be ready to go for everyone right away. (They’ll still need to procure an API key, but one less step is always good.)

PC also has uses beyond day-to-day drudgework-avoidance. In a stock WPMU environment, blog owners are either given control over plugins, or they’re not; this despite the fact that some plugins are complicated, potentially problematic beasts in the wrong hands. The Commander to the rescue!

• Just switch off the stock plugin controls at the Site Admin level and use PC’s ability to toggle user control of individual plugins on or off. Suddenly, blog owners can only manipulate the limited set of plugins that are deemed safe.
• And yet, as Site Admin, I can still activate any “hidden” plugin for a blogger with the specific needs and experience to warrant access.

If I have a criticism, it’s that PC doesn’t pop up an “are you sure?” dialog when triggering a mass (de)activation. Can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve been known to do admin chores in the wee-hours when my eyes are getting bleary and my clicking-finger is getting heavy… it would be nice to have a little insurance that protects me from myself.

But outside of that… excellent stuff!

And so the adventure begins.

I wrote my first blog hosting app in 1999. Poor thing was a barely-there knock-off of Blogger, but it got the job done for my users. A few months later, I integrated it into the forum app I developed in ‘98, allowing every forum member to have a blog connected to their account. The two apps weren’t tightly coupled; they only shared a user database and a frameset, really. But it was a big first step.

In 2001, I launched the beta version of what would become JournURL, a complete hybrid discussion/blogging community platform, and 2003 brought the formal, general-purpose release. JournURL did all the stuff that people associate with a forum (threading, profiles, and so on), along with all the blogging staples of the day. It also perched on the bleeding edge in a number of areas… syndication feeds for everything the system produced, FOAF, Friendfeed-style import of external feeds, posting/reading via email, granular permissions for shared categories, “snap off” threading that allowed control over thread drift, collaborative blogging, EXIF and ID3 data extraction, and a lot more.

Unfortunately, even after a (very) brief spurt of launch publicity, my contemporaries at Blogger, Livejournal, and SixApart saw their user counts swell while mine stagnated and eventually evaporated.  I sucked at PR on virtually every level, and stubbornly refused to seek outside funding. Everyone else grew their development teams, while I convinced myself that I could Do It All Myself. I was wrong. And because I had built the app using Coldfusion instead of something like PHP or Perl, open-sourcing it to get extra help just didn’t seem like it would be worth the effort.

So as the years have passed, it has become increasingly difficult to motivate myself to keep working on JournURL, and I’ve begun to feel that I’ve been letting down myself and my handful of remaining users. I’ve wanted to return to more frequent and extensive blogging, and the ol’ workhorse’s writing interface was last refreshed in 2005… it took the dawn of 2009 for me to realize how long we’d gone without upgrades and modernization.

Enter Wordpress MU. I installed it a few days ago and began tentatively exploring its capabilities, requirements, and limitations. As should be expected, I’ve discovered things I like, things I don’t, and a number of things that flat-out confuse me. It isn’t the perfect realization of community blogging that some folks have suggested, and the setup and user experience is inconsistent at best… I’ve gotta say, getting a detailed look at WP has made me feel a lot better about how much I was able to accomplish on my own. But nitpicks and quibbles aside, with the right massaging and plugins, WPMU may just be the blogging platform that takes me and my users into the future.

Expect praise and bitching as I continue to play with it and migrate people to this new environment. Should be interesting.

Ah, corporate assholes… you’ve gotta love ‘em.

Microsoft Exec 1: “Y’know, we’ve built this OS with a staggering number of security holes. 500,000 machines running our software were compromised in a single wave last week.”

Microsoft Exec 2: “We kinda suck at our jobs, don’t we?”

MSE1: “Word. So, whaddaya think we can do about it? Anything?”

MSE2: “Shit, man, I dunno.”

MSE1: “Wait, I’ve got a thought. I’m just spitballin’, but what if we build a USB device that can be plugged into a Windows box, immediately cracking passwords and other security measures!”

MSE2: “You’re a fucking genius! I don’t know how it could be any better!”

MSE1: “I do! We give these things away to the government! Any government! Free! It’ll be awesome!”

MSE2: “My mind, it is blown. Let’s go to Starbucks and congratulate each other.”

Time to give Hardy Heron another look, folks.

Microsoft | Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime | Seattle Times Newspaper

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer’s Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.