Category: Geek

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Geeks vs. Nerds

Curious about the difference? First definition for “geek” in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary:

1: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake

In contrast, “nerd” originates with M. Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss:

The American Heritage Dictionary in fact credits Dr. Seuss as the originator of the word nerd, which made its first appearance in his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo: “And then just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo a Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!”

So that clears that up.

Music: King Curtis :: Ridin’ Thumb
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Phishing Quiz

How good are you at identifying phishing scams? Interesting quiz at siteadvisor.com showing screenshots of 10 real sites and their phished counterparts side by side. I consider myself pretty well versed at picking out the tell-tale signs, but only got 8/10. What’s really scary is the fact that the quiz called me a “guru” for getting that score – which means that 20% of phishing sites are good enough to fool pretty much everyone (although the screenshots from the two I missed didn’t show the URLs, which is probably the most critical clue, though even those can be made to look convincing, or wholly spoofed in various ways).

How’d you score, and what threw you off?

Music: The Meters :: Chug Chug Chug-A-Lug-(Push N’ Shove)-Part II-(w Meters)
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.command for OS X Shell Scripts

For the next version of gpx2txt, I was looking into AppleScript wrappers and other methods so users wouldn’t be required to run Terminal.app, when I discovered that under OS X you can rename a shell script with the “.command” extension and it’ll run with a double-click. Works a treat – no path issues even. Next version will be much more user-friendly.

Music: Manu Chao :: Luna y Sol
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New WordPress Sites

This is becoming (for me) the summer of pushing the envelope with WordPress – bending it to become a full content management system, rather than just a blogging tool. Between work and home, have been converting a couple of sites over the past few weeks – one from an old-school static site, and another from Movable Type to WordPress.

landwater.com represents the environmental and historic preservation law firm Rossmann and Moore – I’ve been working with them since forever. Their old static site (originally designed by baald, who comments here sometimes) has stood up to the years amazingly well, but it was time to move on. Now in WordPress, office assistants there can finally update the site without having to learn Dreamweaver or FTP. I love the way WP pages can become children of other pages. By nesting them, you get a hierarchal URL structure automatically, and can use the workhorse wp_list_pages() function to generate structured HTML lists, which in turn can be styled as CSS fly-out menus. Throw in the My Page Order plugin and non-tech editors can rearrange the hiearchy (and thus the menu system) via drag-and-drop. So elegant.

At work, have been on a mission to get all Movable Type sites converted to WordPress by the end of summer. The first of the two largest projects is pretty much done. North Gate News Online is the publishing arm of J-200, the journalism bootcamp all first-year students endure. The site has been a CPU-sucking Movable Type hog with a hideous design (my fault!) for years; as of today it’s majorly multimedia-enabled WordPress site with its own podcast feed (nothing there yet). This is a soft-launch; all the tech is ready and waiting for the next crop of J-200 students. OK, we’re showing too much roof, but the design is leaps and bounds beyond the old site. Using a ton of plugins to handle Flash, QuickTime movies, embedded audio, image pop-ups, etc. But most impressive is WP-Cache, which gives you the static page performance of MT combined with the dynamic page behavior of WordPress. Poetry.

The biggest WP challenge of the summer starts on Monday – total rebuild of China Digital Times, which has much more sophisticated needs. Looking forward to the challenge.

Music: Leo Kottke :: Blimp
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beer.pl

Jaw-dropping for geeks, probably an utter bore for everyone else. Download this perl script to a machine with perl installed and run it from the command line. Whoop-dee-doo, right? Now, open it up in an editor. Holy mother of Shiva. As mneptok says, “Some people have too much time on their hands.”

Music: Tom Waits :: Get Behind The Mule
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WhatTheFont?

Pretty cool: A client wanted to use a font exactly like a font they had spied in another site’s banner image. I had no idea what it was. Got thinking there must be some kind of font recognition service out there. I was thinking like a forum of fontography fanatics you could pay to analyze an image for you. Googling “What’s that font?” took me to myfonts.com/WhatTheFont, which let me upload the JPEG image directly. Seconds later, it had broken the JPEG up into constituent letters and asked me to fill in the blanks for the ones it couldn’t guess. Two seconds after that it spit back 14 possible matches – and the first few hits were dead on.

Of course, the top suggestion turned out to be a $240 font they were ready to sell me on the spot. But the second suggestion was so close as to be virtually indistinguishable. And available free.

Is there nothing that infernal interweb can’t do?

Music: Frank Zappa :: The Gumbo Variations
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The Truthiness of Inkjet Printers

If your inkjet printer says it’s out of ink, don’t believe it for a second (until the ink goes faint on the page). Most printers lie like a rug, claiming to be out of ink long before they actually are. Epsons are the honest-est, reporting “empty” when down to about 20%, while some Kodaks report empty when only 36% of the ink is gone. Not to mention the problem of multi-cartridge printers claiming to be out when only one color has run dry.

It’s the old “Give away the razor, sell ’em the blades” (Gillette in days of yore) thing, aka the “Give away the camera, sell ’em the film” thing (Polaroid in days of yore). Only razors and cameras didn’t lie about the need to replace consumables like printers do.

Which is one reason why we only use a b/w laser at home, and send out for color prints when needed. Inkjets only look cheap.

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PHP Inside Image Files

Interesting new hack in the wild – embedding PHP (or other*) code inside an otherwise valid image file. And why would anyone do that? Think of a site that allows users to upload avatars or icons or other images, then displays those images back to the public. If the site isn’t taking sufficient precautions during the upload and display stages, a hacker could create an image file with PHP embedded in the byte stream, then name their file myfile.gif.php. A site that then sloppily displayed whatever images were uploaded to it would then display the image inline, and its embedded code would be executed.

The kicker is that even if your site is doing common checks to verify that it’s dealing with a standard image file, such as running the getimagesize() function on it first, those tests may yield a false positive, since the first n bytes check out just fine. You need to verify the filename extension as well, and not serve images from a directory that’s PHP-interpreted. Other suggestions in the article at PHP Classes.

* There’s no reason this same hack wouldn’t work with .ASP or .NET or ColdFusion sites as well, or with image formats other than GIFs.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: Rings
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Why Safari?

The video demos of new features in OS X Leopard are pretty chill — OK, more than chill — some of them are downright amazing. But I’m trying to wrap my head around the release of Safari for Windows.

With iTunes for Windows, it was a slam dunk – you can’t sell iPods and tracks to people who can’t reach your platform. But with Safari, it’s not so clear cut. What are they selling? Ostensibly, it’s about giving Windows developers access to the browser that will be running on the iPhone. But I’m not buying that that’s the whole reason. Developers are just too small an audience to warrant the work it must have taken to do the port, and to support it going forward.

There’s the old “gateway drug” argument – give Windows users enough tastes of Mac elegance – and in this case a faster browser than anything available on Windows right now (Apple claims Safari 3 is twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, and 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2) – and eventually they’ll wander over to take a closer look at the whole enchilada*. But how many Windows users are going to care? Those who care enough about security and extensibility to try another browser are already using FireFox, and Safari doesn’t have FF’s thriving plugin landscape going for it. Speed alone isn’t going to cut it.

So… they’re going to end up with a tiny percentage of developers and geeks running Safari on Windows. And this benefits Apple how? Maybe I’m wrong – maybe the need to provide a platform for Windows iPhone developers is reason enough, but somehow that doesn’t ring true. I think there’s another shoe ready to drop, lurking stage left.

* Update: I wrote that bit about “elegance” before seeing any reviews of Safari/Win after it was released into the wild. Now that the opinions are starting to roll in, I think it’s safe to say that this beta was released long before it should have been. By all accounts, Safari/Win so far appears to be a steaming pile of $%$%!@ with little to recommend it.