Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Recently to “support Iran” people have been tinting their social media icons green. I know form of “protest” has a history. Originally it was done on LJ and Twitter to protest the service. This made sense, awareness was raised within user of the service and the owners saw that there was a protest going on. It was the social media version of protesting in the streets.

This has been repeated with several online protests, centered mostly around freedom of speech and access issues. Again this made sense, not everyone knew about these issues so awareness was raised. In theory these people wrote officials in government and registered their opinions.

Fast forward to today… election irregularities and people are rioting in the streets in Iran. People are tinting their twitter icons to “help the people in Iran”. I asked earlier on twitter: How exactly does a green overlay help Iran? Will Armadinajad say, “Now I see these green icons I’ll hand over power”? Are there people unaware of the situation in Iran? I really don’t see how changing the color of your icon, in this situation helps anyone. But I might be missing something so please, someone explain to me how it “helps”.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

So, earlier today I posted a number of baseball sketches based on some of my photography (and there are more coming). Since I have some people have been email me asking what the deal is and what it’s all about… here’s the story.

Recently, I’ve been playing with some of my baseball photos, doing some playing in photoshop and combining it with hand inking. The results, I hope, evoke some of the Americana of Baseball with a modern flare. I hope you find them enjoyable.

All the images posted will fit in 640x640 and are covered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, so use them all you want but please leave my credit intact. If you want something larger or printable please get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can work out. If enough people what hard copies write me if there’s interested perhaps I’ll figure out a way to pull it off. And, of course…

Share and Enjoy….

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

So, I’ve been up at Panera Bread a lot recently sitting at home on the internet can be depressing and the trek up to PB gives me a reason to walk for a bit everyday. To be honest it’s a bit of a community there, the same people show up most days, I get to talk to folks, it’s rather fun.

Over the last couple of days the performance on the network has been inconsistent. As people know that I’m a technologist they’ve come to me to figure out what was going on. I really wasn’t looking into it (it felt like network saturation, probably someone coming in and downloading the world), but the cause fell into my lap when someone came in, sat at the table in front of me, launched his machine, started his peer to peer software and everything ground to a halt. I launched kismet and wireshark and determined that someone was pulling down 2MB/s and had their MAC Address and IP address. I was 95% sure that it was my “friend” but I didn’t want to approach him unless I was certain. All of a sudden my sneaky side turned on.

Airpwn is a piece of software that allows someone to spoof wireless traffic so you can inject wireless packets and make it look like it’s coming from the access point. At hacker conventions a common prank is to use airpwn to replace graphics on webpages with different images (I’m looking at you RenderMan). (I know that's a simple explanation, if you really want to know how it works, feel free to google airpwn). Inspired by the pranks of Render and others I decide to pull down airpwn and set it up for a little prank of my own. I target his IP address and replace all the graphics on pages he’s surfing to with this:

He gets the message and looks around suspiciously. I give him a few minutes and he doesn’t stop so I up the ante a bit and inject this:

He jumps back a bit with this one as if he didn’t know he was being targeted. You’d figure this would get him to stop, but no he keeps downloading his files. I figure the problem is that I’m signing my messages so I figure I’d let him know who I am and that I’m willing to help:

Now the genius looks left and right but doesn’t turn around so he doesn’t see me, so I try to help him out:

He turns around, looks me in the eye. I give a wave (sorta like Vir waving to Mr Morden in Babylon 5). Turns back to his machine, packs and practically runs out the door (rather fun). I wonder if he’ll be back tomorrow.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Is it me, or does this tree look like it's sneaking down the road?

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

It’s funny, like a lot of people last night I stayed up until midnight to make sure I could grab my name in the facebook land grab. I have to admit, like being on line at the apple store when leopard was released, I wasn’t worried about not getting my name, I was doing it for the social aspect on FriendFeed and Twitter. As this was going on I got to thinking about facebook.

As I’ve been simplifying my internet presence, I’ve stopped listing services I really don’t use. On my site you can see links to twitter, friendfeed, flickr, linkedIN and facebook and I’ve removed links to the other 100 or so services I’ve signed up for and don’t use. Of the services I’ve listed, I really don’t like using facebook and I fear it’s because I don’t entirely understand it.

I’m not saying I don’t like chatting with folks and networking because I do. The level of discussion on friendfeed and twitter are what attracts me to those services. And I’ve really enjoyed finding and chatting with friends who I’ve lost touch with over the year and facebook has really helped with that, especially with finding those folks who really aren’t into technology. I don’t understand the facebook culture.

As a really good friend of mine said recently, why are they sending me digital flowers? I can’t smell them nor can I appreciate them.

Why do you send me “cause invitations”? More importantly, why are you offended when I’m not interested in your cause? I don’t mind hitting the “ignore” button, please don’t complain that I haven’t joined. I’m a constitutionalist I embrace your right to join causes for things you find important, I expect you not to be offended if I choose not to be part of those causes.

I don’t want to be your serf or knight. I don’t want to be a vampire, zombie, or klingon. If I did, I’ve done RPGs in the past and would get back into that.

How is it possible to be a fan of “I need to take a vacation”? I might be a fan of vacations or taking vacations but I could never be a fan of needing to take a vacations.

Why are you sending me a virtual beer… let’s hit the bar instead and get a real one.

Why, in the name of all that’s holy, would I want a pink unicorn for my profile? Is there something about me that says effeminate or prissy?

Again, I do see value in facebook. A month ago I had a lovely dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in over 20 years, that was worth it. I just don’t understand the culture and probably will never fully embrace it.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

While I was visiting with a friend this weekend, her teenaged son wanted to pick up some paint thinner. He recently was given a broken down classic Ford Mustang which he is restoring and rebuilding and he was told by the folks helping him that paint thinner would help him strip off the paint currently on the car. So we took him to the local Walmart and waited outside in the car while he went in to pick up what he needed.

A few minutes later he came out saying they wouldn’t sell it to him because he’s underage. I understood that, he’s a minor, I presume it could be used for graffiti or he could sniff the fumes to get high and there’s some local law preventing selling it to minors, like there is with spray paint. We headed in so his mom could tell the cashier it’s OK. Then things got odd…

The cashier wouldn’t take the boy’s money, he had to hand the money to his mom who handed it to the cashier. I felt that was a little overboard, but then it got worse. The cashier pointed out that she still shouldn’t be selling them the paint thinner since she knew he was going to use it. Procedure said that she should be calling over her manager and she could get into big trouble for selling it to them. I also felt there was an undercurrent that his mom was doing something wrong by letting him have it.

At what point did that become the responsibility of the people at Walmart? If there’s a policy or local ordinance stating that minors can’t buy paint thinner, that’s fine, he didn’t buy it, his mom did. I realize that it can be dangerous, but by having a parent involved in the process isn’t Walmart (or any store) transferring the responsibility of the purchase over to the parent?

When I was a teen I bought this without a problem in the local hardware store. The store owner might’ve asked what I was doing with it, probably to make sure I was buying the right stuff, but also to make sure I wasn’t up to mischief. I know on more then one occasion I was in there buying solvents and paints to use with models. I’m not sure how in 25 years we have gone from that to this. I do wonder however if it’s the lack of personal contact in the process. The hardware store owner knew me since I was a small child and had seen me in the store with my parents. I’m sure if he felt something was wrong, he would’ve called home and let my parents handle it.

Now a days, parents seem to be treated not as someone to handle the problem but an accomplice.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

I've been doing some hand fiddling with the Drupal comments file recently and have needed to rebuild the statistics and the tread field in the comments table. Where there are many scripts I've found to rebuild comment_statistics, there's little out there on rebuilding the comment thread field (which at first looks like a little black magic). I've built a script which walks all nodes and rebuilds both. (Parts of the script are mine, parts are lifted out of comments.module parts are bits of code I've found on drupal.org). I figured I'd post the code for it here (it's also the baseline for some code I'm going to post later in the week).

To be honest, I've lost track which lines are owned by which programmer, but all of it is either from the comments module or code I pulled from the drupal forum (If I find that post I'll credit it here). I'll also post the code over on drupal.org.

Originally published at Sean Reiser. You can comment here or there.

As I was leading up to turning 40 (which happened the other day) I decided that I wanted to go ahead and make some modifications to my web presence to make things simpler.

First off, nibbler is dead as a handle. I've lived for 25 years with it, it had a purpose long ago, but I haven't been nibbler for a long while and where I've known that people around me have pressured me to keep it. I figure if I can't be just "seanreiser" at 40, I'll never be able to be just me. If you look over on the right you'll see that I'm seanreiser on twitter, friendfeed, facebook and flickr. It may take some time to get to the rest of the web, but the major services have been updated.

Secondly, I decided to merge my 3 major websites (seanreiser.com, earlyreiser.net and greatexistence.net). There are good reasons why these sites were separate, at least at the time they were launched. seanreiser.com was always meant to be my one online presence, things just slipped over time.

When I started writing non-geek items like politics, I decided to start earlyreiser, mostly because I was concerned about annoying readers by having such different content. I was trying to separate my political views from my "geek persona". I've come to believe that might have been a silly point of view. I'm not posting anything so outrageous in either place that I'm ashamed of any of it. I never made it hard to find, never anonymized it (because there was no need to) and it was time to get rid of the artificial division and have it all live under 1 roof.

Great Existence was a different matter entirely. I was honestly concerned that I wouldn't have the discipline to post a photo daily photo when I started so I had it live elsewhere. In the future I think these nonstarter projects will just live here as well, as a tale on what works and doesn't work.

While I was merging content, I decided to merge content from a livejournal I had years ago and import all my flickr photosets as a content type. I've already posted an article on how to import flickrsets as first class nodes. I'll try to write up what I did to get the live journal content into here soon. I also took to opportunity to add podcast and screencast support. There were some technical issues on the old site, which I fixed in the port. I'll describe some of the technical changes in a future post.

So, now seanreiser.com is a central site for all my content again. You'll be able to get to content from the old earlyreiser.net and greatexistence.net URLS (you'll get 301 redirects, if that means anything to you). I'll be writing a post in the next day or so describing the technical changes I've made here and the lessons I've learned in the process.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

RMS was on yesterday's Alex Jones radio show. Just wanted to post the mp3 of him on the show. Share and enjoy

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Introduction

A friend was recently asking me about passwords. He’s heard some of my password rants in the past and was curious how I handled passwords. I’m going to lay why most people have bad passwords and what I do to get around those issues. I know my solution isn’t new or radical, others have done similar things before, I’m just publishing it as an example and to get people thinking.

Why Your Passwords Suck

Most people have passwords that suck. It’s not your fault, really you just don’t know how to make a decent password. Let me break out a few reasons why your passwords suck:

1. You use the same password on every service. If one service is compromised every system you use is in jeopardy.
2. Your password is some portmanteau of the service name and some constant word you use. You use “passwordtwitter” on twitter. If this is found out it’s a short trip to knowing that you use “passwordfacebook”, “passwordfriendfeed” and “passwordflickr”
3. You’ve come with some password scheme combining the names of your children / girlfriends / pets or their birthdays. Information that can be found in personal records or social engineered out of you.
4. You’re using dictionary words as your password. (Dictionary words are words that can be looked up in a dictionary). Dictionary attacks are common ways to attack
5. You’re using some substitution scheme with dictionary passwords. For example you’re using “1337 speak” and “password” becomes “p455w0rd”.

What’s Needed for Less Sucky Passwords

Here are the rules I use for passwords:

1. Passwords should be different for each system.
2. Passwords should appear random to people and computers.

You’re thinking “how can I remember a password that changes and appears random”. It’s simple build a system to generates them and can regenerate them at will.

How Do We Do This?

The solution takes advantage of hashing. To make it easy to understand, a cryptographically secure hash takes data, whether it’s a string or a file, mixes it together, uses some math and outputs a number. The number appears nice and random to both people and machines. Other then brute force it’s impossible to take the number and reverse it back to the original data. I could go on for a bit about MD5 and measures of entropy but I suspect that is outside the cope of keeping this easy to read. In this instance, the number is then put through an encoding process using letter and special characters to make it shorter and more readable.

The process is simple, you enter the site you’re using and a long passphrase you always remember. Through the magic of math a hard to guess password is generated.

Wait, Didn’t You Say Having One Password For All Sites Is Bad

Sort of. I was referring to the actual password. In the “passwordtwitter” example above. If I take “password” as the passphrase and “twitter.com” as the website the alphanumeric special options generates “)O~dM7iD5Q/j3Yb.9,|<” and the lowercase alpha generates “bfblwxcpbglfjsueiqtlmkrinosy”. As you can see I can’t look at that and know that the facebook password would be “%AFT|3QIR)nY`zgK]EOl” or “ardadyqjxrgfvgaltfgsncblpqxb”. As it’s difficult to take a hash and generate the source all is secure.

All that said let me be clear DO NOT USE PASSWORD AS A PASSWORD. The advantage to this system is that there is only one thing to remember and it can be any length. Choose something long, easy to remember and not easy to guess. A quote from a book, your favorite bible passage, a phrase like “I’m Sean and I’m a computer programmer who was born in 1969. There is nothing more useless then a single password to keep you safe. People who think useing password as a password should be shot.”

How can I do it

So there’s a website I built that I need go to when I need to remember a password and fill in 2 fields:

• My Master Passphrase - I suggest picking a line out of a book that you remember or some other long phrase. I’d avoid “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” since it’s so well known.
• Website - The website I’m using using eg: twitter.com, youtube.com

Then I select the character set I want to output:

• numeric - Only the numbers 0-9
• lowercase alpha - Only the letters a-z
• alpha numeric - The Letters a-z and numbers 0-9
• alpha mixed numeric special - the letters a-z, A-Z, numbers 0-9 and a number of special characters

There are a few reasons why there are several character sets available. I do suggest that where possible you use the alpha mixed numeric special password but there have been a few exceptions:

• My bank (and yes I did write this for me) requires a numeric only password.
• Many systems don’t allow special characters in passwords.
• If I plan on needing to share a password over a phone, I use the lowercase alpha.

You’ll notice that if there are fewer characters in the set, the password is longer. I could go into a long discussion why, but again it’s a little outside the scope of this document.

Security

I was asked why there is no SSL cert on that site. The reason is simple, all the work is done in your browser using javascript, no data passes to my server. And at the end of the day, this doesn’t need to run on a webserver at all. I encourage you to download the source unzip it on your harddrive and load passgen.html in any browser which supports javascript and it will work for you.

Guarantee, Warrantee, Assurances

OK, to make my lawyer happy: None. The software is made available for example purposes only. As far as I know the concepts here are secure but I am not responsible for any ill effects from the use of this software. If you lose data, forget your password, go blind, lose your girlfriend, or die in a tragic blimp accident over the superbowl, I am not responsible.

Share and Enjoy!

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Like many other geeks I saw the new Star Trek film over the weekend and wanted to write a quick review of it. The non-spoiler review is simple “Fantastic, it worked well on almost every level”. A more spoiler filled version follows the break…

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Really they’ll be spoilers…

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I mean it… you have been warned..

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Alternate Universes - Solving The Trekker Dilemma

When I first heard that JJ Abrams was directing a TOS era Star Trek film I was concerned that there he was caught between a rock and a hard place with the core fans.

If he decided to do a BSG style revolutionary reboot too many core fans would be upset. If there was initial uproar to Starbuck being a chick on BSG the reaction to radical Trek changes would be overwhelming, even stunt casting wouldn’t save it. Unlike a TV series where once could

On the other hand, if he decided to stay in continuity he would be forced into something like the New Voyages Fan Films that would look dated. Now I love the STNV films as fan pieces but I’d never want to see the TOS Bridge on the big screen, it’s a symbol of a more simple time. The same core fans would be nitpicking the combination to Kirk’s safe, and the shad of red that the third button in the fifth row of Sulu’s station. Somehow the story would be lost in these silly debates.

Being that alternate universes are established in Trek Lore (obvious examples include the mirror universe and the alternate universe created when Edith Keeler didn’t die). I think it’s fair to say 1 in 10 Trek Books contain a time travel / alternate universe theme so this is certainly possible. Refreshingly, the plot of this movie was not to restore the original timeline (a plot point in many Time Travel / AU Stories). Having TOS Spock involved in creating TOS:AU gave the necessary nod to the past without having to be a slave to it. A rather elegant solution.

Of course there’s a counterpoint to this take a look at Louis Trapani’s Is New Trek, New Coke? for his reaction.

Casting

For the most part, I think that the casting was perfect. I feel that Pine, Quinto, Pegg, Cho, Yelchin and Saldana all took on their roles rather wall and embodied the characters excellently. They became their characters. My first gripe. Karl Urban seemed not to be playing McCoy, he was playing DeForest Kelley playing McCoy.

Unfounded Concerns

There were 2 things in the film where I thought they were taking a wrong turn, but my fears were unfounded.

In the pre-credits sequence during the Birth and Death scene as the Michael Giacchino score rose I was immediately concerned that this should have been “Star Trek: LOST (in space)”. You could feel Damon’s influence in that scene as it felt like many of the Lost death scenes we’ve seen.

The climax also concerned me. As TOS:AU Spock was ramming Nero’s ship I realized that there was a potential that the TOS timeline could be restored, which would be rather stereotypical for a Trek story. Logically, I realize that no one would do that, the purpose of the movie was to jettison continuity there’s no way they were going to reestablish it.

Conclusion

Again all in all a great film, and the best thing they could’ve done with the source material. I found it an enjoyable romp with the feel of an updated TOS.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

This year I decided to give myself a bit of a digital spring cleaning. With the help of Artisteer, which I have previously reviewed, I have given most of my sites a new theme. The changes aren’t radical just a new fresh look. I’ve also built a few new sites.

The first new site is Great Existence, a site which shows off a photo a day. Where I post my photos on Flickr I feel the the better shots tend to get buried when I post my photos, so I created a site to show off 1 photo a day released at midnight. Over time I plan on featuring many of my favorite shots, I hope you enjoy them. I do intend to move all the photography content off of iSeanReiser onto Great Existence.

Between my blogs, the photo sites, my professional sites and social networks I am active in, I’m spread across the web and I wanted to have one place to point folks to. I’ve built play with keyboard which aggregates feeds and provides links to everyplace you can find me. The reason I did this on it’s own domain is a problem I’ve often had most of my life, no one can spell Sean or Reiser. (Sean, Shawn, Shaun; Reiser, Riser, Rieser, Rizer). If I’m someplace without business cards there’s a 25% chance someone will find me if I tell them to go to seanreiser.com. However playwithkeyboard.com is cute, easy to remember and descriptive. This site will become the site I use as a link from forums and other networks. I’m calling it my “digital hub”.

My next phase of Spring Cleaning is cleaning up who I follow on social networks. A post on that subject should appear shortly.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

OK, I’m a little late posting this (by a week or 2). I’ve been distracted by other things but it’s still worth getting out to you all.

A little over 2 years ago, I joined twitter, right after it’s SxSW explosion. After playing with it for a week I wrote a post mentioning some of the big starts on it like Dave Winer, Scobleizer, Leo Laporte, Adam Curry, Jason Calacanis, Evo Terra and Jonathan Coulton. I mentioned that John Edwards was using it and speculated that other politicians might. Where I thought it was fun, I created an alias to this which is simple twitter, indicating that I felt that would be my last post on the subject. Boy, was I wrong.

Last year, on my twitterersary I wrote a year in review (I have no idea why I wrote that as a list, so don’t ask). Some of the highlights include stressing how twitter is about relationships, and observing how I was finding out about news via twitter.

Now, it’s a year later, and I’m hopefully a year wiser. The biggest change is that twitter is not longer the Social Media Club, everybody is on twitter. Recently, on the same day both Barbara Walters and Martha Stewart were talking up twitter on their shows. Where I’m glad to see people are finding out about the power of twitter, part of me misses the exclusivity of it. Generally speaking I try and avoid things that Martha Stewart is doing.

We have seen our share of fail whales this year. Back in May, there was a tweetout to protest twitter’s performance issues. I’m not sure this did anything other then make people feel better about themselves. Ev and Biz knew there were problems and were working on this, this wasn’t a secret.

On the plus site the way I consume news has changed. In the past when some event happened I’d turn on CNN, now I check what topics are trending on twitter and begin following those hashtags. In many ways it’s a virtual flashmob people come together, exchange news, some from eyewitnesses some from people with knowledge and quite frankly, some BS. Yes I have to be my own filter but I’m finding that I’m getting more valuable information faster then I did from the networks.

Not only have politicians started using twitter, it’s being used frequently from the House and Senate floor. I find it interesting that members of both us letting us know what bills they find important and how they are using twitter to mobilize folks. In a related note, I’m pretty sure that Obama’s (or his people’s) mastery of Social Media was a large part of him winning the election. His use of technology really emphisized the age divide between himself and McCain.

There must be a one year itch on twitter because I did cheat on it a bit this year. I spent some time on pownce and plurk but always found myself drawn back to twitter. The people who interest me never post on pownce and plurk felt rather needy (if I don’t post once every 8 hours I’ll lose karma, oh, noes!). Twitter is just there, no games, and my people are always around if I take extended stays away.

Over the last couple of months tweetdeck has really changed how I use twitter. With tweetdeck, friends lists and hashtags, twitter becomes manageable again. I can have a list for my close personal friends and for the 2 or 3 topics I care about. When I’m feeling adventurous I can wade into the pool of everyone I’m following and engage with them. As I mentioned above when something of import is happening in the world I can begin to follow that as well.

People often ask why I follow people who I don’t want to watch moment to moment. It’s simple, there are people who I want to be able to follow when I have time, but as this is an attention economy I don’t want to use all my tweet time on. In addition, just because I don’t want to follow you second to second, doesn’t mean I want cut off your DM privileges. The ability to follow at a distance fixes that issue.

In closing, there have been a couple of stumbles in the twitter road this year but it’s been fun. Which is why I’m here. Enjoy!

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Recently there has been an interesting debate about Drupal’s user Experience and how it should be improved in Drupal 7. I was responding to that post and realized that what I was saying might be too verbose for a comment over there so I’m blogging my entire thoughts here and excerpting it on drupal with a link back. Actually, I fear this is too verbose for my blog, Were I normally post entries of 500 or so words, this is topping at over 1,000.

As I’m turning 40 this June, I realize that my days as a “young coding stud” are long over. It’s sad but true, except in retirement homes, the terms young and stud will never be applied to me again. I have however done a lot over these past 25+ years of coding and have seen a lot when it comes to the application development. My experiences with Drupal remind me of the first half of my career and this debate is similar to one I witnessed 15 or so years ago.

So, pull up a chair, sit down and listen to Grammpa Sean tell a story. It begins…

A Long Time Ago, On a Platform Far Far Away………..

xBase - Some Personal History

In the late 1980s, I started my professional career at Computer Associates, working on big iron in computer operations, help desk support and writing some JCL. Although CA was a powerhouse at that time, they focused on mainframe software. I knew the future of the industry was desktop computing. One day I found out that CA had purchased a company named Nantucket which sold a dBase compiler for PCs named Clipper. After a little positioning I got myself transferred to that team doing some support and some coding. Eventually I struck out on my own as an application developer writing apps in Clipper.

I know you’re thinking, “OK, What does this all have to Drupal?” I’m getting there… give it a moment, I promise.

Clipper and other dBase compatible compilers (FoxPro, Quicksilver, Flagship, Harbour and others all affectionally called xBase within that community) were interesting niche languages. The data and interface layers were rather linked together into a Mish-Mosh, which would give an MVC purist a heart attack but if you structured things properly you could develop and support applications quickly and easily. They abstracted many of the lower level language calls making it so a developer doesn’t have to write things like print drivers in order to get a job done. “Copy File.txt to LPT1:” would print a file (assuming that the printer was on LPT1:)

Because xBase sits somewhere between lower level languages (like C) and simple Desktop Database (like Filemaker) there was much confusion where it lived. There was a segment of hardcore developers who chose these platforms because they realized that could elegantly express business logic and quickly deliver applications to their clients. There was also a segment of people who were power users. They found that they could build programs through sheer will power. These might not be the prettiest programs but they worked and you didn’t need to understand the nuts and bolts of computer architecture to get them to running. The companies selling these language had issues that there were service dynamically opposed masters.

Any of this sound familiar to you? Ron Moore was right… all this has happened before and all this will happen again.

One year at a Clipper developer convention there was some contention between these groups. In one session, which featured a number of the product architects, there were 2 questions which stood out for me. Now remember this was the late 1980’s or early 1990’s so disk space mattered and the visual programming revolution really hadn’t taken off yet. We wrote code, pure and simple.

The first was from a big name developer:

A Clipper executable is huge! A Hello World program is over 300KB in size, a similar program in C would easily be only 1/10th of that. Can we expect to see something done to streamline Clipper apps?

The Dev Teams answer when something like this:

Yes, there’s a lot of overhead in Clipper Applications. The exe pulls contains many routines including screen, file, printer and database drivers. We would agree that if you’re trying to write professional “Hello World” applications, Clipper would not be the tool of choice.

A little later on someone asked:

When will there be a screen and database designer? Something that will generate code for me perhaps.

And the dev team answered:

We think that’s an excellent idea for an add-on product and would expect that a member of the 3rd party community to step up and look into that. If not we hear that Filemaker makes an excellent product for this kind of thing.

These 2 answers said “we know we’re a niche product and we plan on staying in that niche and build a better developer experience, if you need something outside of that niche feel free to enhance this product or look elsewhere”. At that moment it seems arrogant, but today I know that there are applications written in xBase languages still up and running 20 years later, so maybe this was the way to go. Sure, their front end have morphed into something graphical. They are now talked about in hushed whispers because what major bank wants to admit that their financial system is based on a 25 year old unsupported technology?

Drupal

Now you’re thinking, “Finally he’s going to talk about Drupal!”

Recently, I got to thinking about how I got into Drupal. I needed to build some tools to communication within a dev team, but didn’t have a budget. Since I couldn’t get a server for the project, I ran a LAMP stack in a VMWare appliance and setup a Drupal site. I needed a quick blog + wiki tool and realized that I had that out of the box with stories and book. Later on I needed to add OG. Any time I’ve had to play lead developer since then I’ve repeated these steps and have slowly fallen in love with Drupal (the second love of my Life, Clipper was the first).

Stepping back I quickly realize why I’ve fallen in love with this little drop. It sits in the same place, somewhere between Real Languages (like PHP, Ruby, etc) and End User Tools (like Wordpress). Because of this its a little niche and quirky. The community is the same mix of high end developers and power users. And, at the end of the day, the debates are the same because we’re serving the same 2 masters.

I can sense your patience growing thin, “Oh, this is great, but is he ever gonna talk about UX?” Trust me, I am, and I have been this whole time.

So the thread on UX is basically the same as the convention session from 20 years ago. I think the answer lies in that debate. Drupal 7 should be mostly about build a better development experience. From that easier to use admin tools can be built by the community at large.

Drupal and Wordpress

Often times in this process Drupal had been compared to wordpress as far as easy of setup and use are concerned. I’ve always found this comparison to be troubling. If you think about it, these tools are different beasts. Wordpress is a blagging platform that you can squeeze other things out of, Drupal is a development platform that happens to have blog built into it. In many respects we’re comparing Minivans and Mac Trucks. If people should are looking to blog and that’s it, they should be looking at wordpress. (I know this will get me in trouble). Why would you use a Mac Truck to pick up your kids from school (unless you’re the tetradeca-mom or have one really heavy kid). That doesn’t make Minivans a better vehicle, just better for picking up a reasonable amount of average sized children. I’ve often pointed out that it wouldn’t be a major task to write Wordpress in Drupal. The inverse isn’t true.

Drupal Terminology

OK, Drupal’s terminology requires some learning. Although, if you ever want to see a librarian drool tell them that Drupal allows you to implement proper taxonomies. The concept of a node is so deceptively simple that people don’t get it at first. And the blocks vs modules thing is always a battle with new folks. But anytime I’ve learned a new tool I’ve had similar issues. How many switchers have spent hours trying to figure out what the “Services” menu is on a mac? This is one area where we can improve and make life easier for everyone.˜

Drupal Setup

To be honest, now that I think about it, it surprises me that no one has written wizard-like install.php for drupal. Not just installation profiles but series of questions (Are you going to Blog, Do you Keep Pictures on Flickr, Home Many Static pages will you need, what are their names, do you want them in the menu, etc). The tool could then do the install for you. But I think that’s an effort that should be outside of core and D7. A separate distribution, perhaps?

Anyway I think I have gone on long enough on this. I’d love to hear feedback.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Was out to dinner earlier this week with a friend and a number of her friends. This friend, knowing some of my technology background, started sharing with me some of the experiences she’s had recently with her paypal account being hacked. She had been in contact with paypal and her bank and everything was being refunded which is the good news. While she was on the phone with her bank they suggested that she close her account and open a new one, which is probably part of her bank’s script. My friend was asking me if I felt there was a threat to her bank account.

I sat for a second, probably with a crinkled brow trying to picture the Paypal interface, thinking about whether her account number or credit card information would have been available to the cracker. I knew her address and phone number would be visible, but was pretty sure that Paypal kept all other information hidden. Before I could say that the person on my right said, “your bank is right you should change your account, it’s the only way to be safe”. I replied, “I’m not sure, I’m pretty sure that paypal obfuscates the bank account and credit card information in their interface”. She looked at me and then said, “it’s not that, you don’t know what was attached to the transaction so they could track it back.. They could track the transaction through the banking system based the the size of the transaction”. I sort of nodded because I knew where this was going and didn’t want to engage it any further. But my friend pushed on, “I’m curious how can they do that?”. “I don’t want to go into the nefarious activities of hackers” was the only response. I must admit to having to suppress a smile both because she didn’t know anything about my background (irony is funny sometimes) and partially because her delivery seemed to require an organ from a 1960’s soap opera, where’s Eddie Layton when you need him?

Before I break this down, I want to point out, for the record, that I have since checked, paypal does not expose your credit card or bank account information while logged in. Well actually, they expose the last 4 digits, not enough to be able to reverse engineer or brute force the account without raising eyebrows. If you’re not a tech, just so you know Paypal works as a proxy for your accounts if you are paying someone or they are sending you money, there’s no way for for them to learn anything out about you except that you use paypal and what your email address is.

So now my reaction. If you couldn’t guess from the title, the more I thought about this, the more I thought of Rob Rosenberger’s False Authority Syndrome and Bruce Schneier’s Movie Plot Threats.

The concept of following a financial transaction through the financial system sounds like something out of the movie Hackers. I can see it now, Z3r0 C001 and Ac1d Burn make a number of financial transactions against Agent Richard Gill’s account while L0rd Nik0n and C3r341 Ki113r use their 3D fly through the computer like a video game interface tracking the financial transaction like onstar tracks your Chevy.

While discussing this, she tried to speak with an air of authority. If it wasn’t for my knowledge I might have been inclined to listen to her some more because she was certain persuasive in her argument mostly due to her passion and certainty that she was correct. Where myself and my friend weren’t buying into it, others at the table certainly were. If there was

Of course, someone’s going to comment now and say “changing her bank account can’t hurt”, but that’s not the point. I’m not a fan of FUD intentional or unintentional. Often times because computers seem mysterious, people take the advice of anyone who sounds knowledgeable, I see it all the time. When you get technology advice, you should think about who’s giving it and why. You should try an understand the issue before you take actions proposed by anyone.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

There are 2 types of Drupal Consultants (yes I know these are stereotypes and many people fall in the middle).

The first type is the designer. The person who immediately know which fonts go together. They don’t need the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to identify colors, they know the hexcodes the same way average people know light from dark. A one pixel difference is a matter of life and death to them. It has often been suggested that Monet’s Waterlilies were a blatent ripoff of this person’s finger painting. If this is you, odds are Artisteer isn’t for you. You’ll be frustrated by the lack of options and control.

The other type is a developer. The person who eats code for breakfast lunch and dinner. He can’t tell the difference between red and green. He can’t draw a straight with a pencil and 2 rulers. In kindergarden his teacher, Mrs. Smith, would display his artwork in the coat closet because that was the room for all the “special artwork”. If perchance this is you, it might be worth an hour to take a gander at this tool.

Over the last few weeks I’ve heard about Artisteer, a tool that can automatically design and create Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress themes as well as static HTML and master files for an ASP.NET application. I was a bit skeptical, but as my artwork is still hanging in Mrs. Smith’s closet (she never would give them back to me, something about a psychiatrist’s evaluation), so I decided I’d give it a shot.

Artisteer is rather interesting. It has a number of predefined color pallets, layouts, typographies, graphics and other design elements built into it. There is a “suggest design” button which assembles all the design elements into a sample site. You can override any of these settings manually and ask for suggestions on any group of elements. For example, let’s say you have a Client’s Logo which gives you a color pallet and font family to work with. You can enter those and have Artisteer suggest menu settings, page layouts, backgrounds, button settings, etc. When you have something you like you hit export and have a shiny new Drupal Theme.

To be honest this isn’t going to replace a designer for that middle to upper tier website you’re working on and I’m not sure I agree with Artisteer’s claim that you can make “fantastic looking” themes, but I would say they are better then serviceable. The designs seems smart, if a little cookie cutter. I do see a number of uses for it:

• That small project with a limited budget where you can’t afford a designer.
• That project where the theme is still coming but you need to show off what you’ve done so far.
• Quick application prototypes.
• Anytime you’re saying “Darn, I need something to replace Garland in this but don’t have the time”

I wanted to spruce up this site, and I used Artisteer to do that you can see the results looking around. In under an hour I built this theme from scratch. In this case it is heavily influenced by the original design for this site (I have a thing for navigation above the masthead, and the color blue). Basically, I entered the colors and my masthead, selected a layout and scrolled though the other options until I found something pleasing. It got me about 90% of the way there (where stock themes usually get me 80% of the way). When it was done I still did some minor tweaks to the theme (I prefer that my tags go above the story, Artisteer forces them below), but I was up and running quickly.

Some notes on the theme:

• It will work with D5 and D6. There is code in the theme to use the right API calls.
• The code itself is rather clean from a PHP POV. I always worry when using code generators that I’m going to get bad code to work with.
• For some reason the Artisteer created a page-blog.tpl, page-node-add.tpl and page-node.tpl which were all identical to page.tpl so I deleted them.
• You can’t create regions beyond content and 2 sidebars. If you are looking for something fancier this isn’t going to work for you.
• Regions are fixed and not collapsable.
• Panels seems to be entirely foobared using these themes (although that might not be Artsteer’s fault, sneezing too close to Panels in D6 causes issues)

In closing, keeping in mind the limitations I’ve mentioned, I feel this is a great product for the artistically challenged. It will help move folks away from stock templates and into something more custom.

Originally published at iSeanReiser | Sean P Reiser. You can comment here or there.

Spoilers for the final BSG episode
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Connecting The Doctor and Admiral Adama:

( Read more... )

• The 4th Doctor was playing by Tom Baker
• Tom Baker married Lala Ward
• Lala's Second Husband is Richard Dawkins
• Richard Dawkins wrote about Mitochondrial Eve in Rivers out of Eden
• Mitochondrial Eve was Hera
• Hera was born on the Battlestar Galactica
• The Galactica was commanded by Adama