Category: Geek

In the process of switching connectivity to Speakeasy (needed faster upstream than my current provider could offer). They get nothing but rave reviews, but we didn’t get off to a great start – they gave the telco the go-ahead to drop my line before they had even shipped me a modem. Going from ADSL to RADSL so my current modem won’t work with their service. So tonight our line went dead and Amy and I get to go dial-up for the next 4-5 days. It feels kind of like driving Fred and Wilma’s stone-mobile with the hole in the floor so you can use your feet to push.

Ah well, it keeps things in perspective. Also a nice chance to test out OS X’s internet connection sharing feature, which is totally effortless and transparent. Turn it on in Sharing, set the client machines to DHCP, and tell the modem to dial when needed. “Just works.”

I’ve s-o-o-o-o had it with Aqua’s pinstripes. The more brushed aluminum apps I see, the happier I am. In theory, Apple employees should be as tired of seeing pinstripes as we are right about now. So you can mark this as my prediction for X 10.3 : A new default appearance plus additional UI customization options. Yes, I know there are 3rd party hacks for this kind of thing…

n.b.: The difference between a simple wishlist item and a public prediction is quantified as:

pi / (foolhardiness x huevos)

Amused by the fact that Kevin Mitnick’s web site has been hacked into twice already since his release a few weeks ago. Of course, the fact that his host was running unpatched IIS (for chrissake!) is not revealed until the second-to-last paragraph of the story.

Mitnick is pedestalized like he’s the great hacking guru of time, space, and dimension, but the fact is he’s been stuck in a time capsule for years and has much catching up to do to grok the current state of the art. Mitnick running a security company today is like bringing Michelangelo back from the grave and asking him to set up a CPU fab. The world has changed. Hacking has changed. The tools, environment, and culture of hacking have changed tremendously. He’ll catch up, but what a lot of egg on face. Yipes.

Unpatched IIS, for chrissake.

I am taking every opportunity to move domain registrations off of Netsol and onto Dotster. Currently trying to transfer betips.net to its new owner, but to do that, I need to retrieve a password. And to do that, Netsol’s password-retrieval system needs to be up and running. For the past 72 hours, I’ve gotten nothing but a “this service temporarily unavailable” message from them.

It has begun. Chris Simmons has been selected as the new den mother for betips.net. Just went through years of accumulation and cleared out a distributable version. Redirects, discussion boards, credits, database exports, dynamic content linked in from other sites (such as BeBits.com’s Tip of the Day), working through all the little details of domain transfer. This process is like getting ready to leave a home, or a town, or a relationship that isn’t working — leaving sounds great when you first think of it, but unbearably sad when the time actually comes.

“You’ll never miss the water ’till the well runs dry.”

Have been receiving occasional emails that people couldn’t get past the login screen of the simple contacts app that accompanied my web database development article for MacWorld. Turns out that some people have manually upgraded their version of PHP beyond 4.12, which Jaguar ships with.

Great, but the gotcha is that later versions of PHP have register_globals turned off by default. This is a bummer for development convenience (the transparency of variable access has been something I’ve loved about PHP) but essential for security — now you have to carefully specify where a variable is expected to have originated — cookie, url, get, post, etc.

The upshot is that if you upgrade PHP, you have two choices:

1) Override the new default by setting register_globals=on in /usr/lib/php.ini, or

2) modify all your web apps (The original announcement and explanation from php.net is here.

I’ve updated the sample contacts database to accommodate installations with register_globals=off, which is the newer, shinier, safer way to do it.