Blogs

It tickles me to see my first hint, Secure your internet connection at Starbucks, published at MacOSXHints. That web site is such a fine resource for the Mac community. Glad to be an author there now ... It feels a bit like my first patch to Drupal which Dries committed in 2001. What a thrill!

Like my buddy Walkah, I always scan the internets looking for a better email client. Now I'm using GMail, and loving it. I made a few changes beyond stock Gmail which folks might enjoy.

• Google Desktop indexes my locally and lets me search it when offline.
• These Greasemonkey scripts are essential. They work fine in Flock or Firefox, and some have Opera ports as well.

I made one small change to the fine Gmail Macros script. To do a Mark all as Read, you usually to to Shift+X and then U and then R. That key sequence irked me a bit, so I reworked so you can just do W and then R.

See attachment below to see the changes. I'm open to suggestions for how to implement cleaner. It isn't too bad now though.

Google offers a solution for enabling users to chat with people who aren’t using Google Apps. You have to edit your domain records in a rather obscure manner. Here is the right configuration for register.com

I do a fair amount of development while seated in a Starbucks. I don't often drink the coffee or eat the food, but I do connect to the Internet using their fine HotSpot service. Up until last week, my Hotspot connection was a regular old unsecured Airport connection. That means that much of my traffic was sniffable by others in the vicinity. I didn't like that much, so I did a little digging. T-mobile offers Connection Manager software for Windows users which solves this need. Since I have OSX, this was of little use.

There was one sentence in the T-mobile security policy that suggested that a secure connection was possible without Connection Manager. So I called tech support and they were astonishingly helpful. The tech walked me through an Internet Connect setup which resulted in me connecting securely via TTLS. The process is a bit complex, so you might want to call them if you are unusre about the screenshot below.

Open Internet Connect and add a new 802.1x configuration as below.I I also had to do click the Configure button for TTLS and enter PAP as the 'TTLS INNER Authentication'. The other authentication methods are left as default.

Little known fact - I used to work for GE/Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin as a manufacturing engineer. So I really enjoyed this blog series about Manufacturing in China. Really interesting first hand diary about life and work in China. I've always wanted to manufacture my pet inventions, so maybe this will come in handy one day.

I finally got scared enough about my password situation that I took action. And I feel so much better. Like many of you, I used the same password on many many web sites. Even admin accounts on my Drupal clients' sites and my admin account on drupal.org. I always used a different password for my financial accounts, but thats not good enough. Sharing passwords across service providers is a really bad idea because ...

I received notice from two of my service providers that they were hacked and don't know if my pasword was stolen or not. One recommended that I cancel my credit card. Those vendors are wush.net and dreamhost.com. Ugh. So I was faced with the prospect of changing my password everywhere or just praying. I'm not religious, so praying was out. I changed all my passwords, and used a different password on each site. But I still only have to remember one password. The magic is in a bookmarklet provided by SuperGenPass. Now when I have to provide a password to a web site, I just click the bookmark and it fills in my password. The bookmarklet uses the site's domain and my master password and a hefty dose of md5 scrambling to generate a site specific password.

The skeptical engineers out there will quickly ask - "what about when you are away from your PC - you can't login anywhere". Well, this is an easily solved problem. I put up a web page on my own site which will tell me my password based on the domain I am logging into. I just put my master password and ebay.com (for example) into the form and it spits back my password. Then I copy and paste into the login form at ebay.com and I am in. So traveling is no problem at all.

This system added no hassle, and much more security. I highly recommend it.

It fills me with joy to see my musical heroes, the Grateful Dead, relaunch the Grateful Dead official web site on Drupal. I adore their music, and the Drupal communty. What a match! It feels great to see my workmanship on sites like Greenpeace and Cancer Survivors Network. But this one rattles my nostalgic core. Feeling good right now.

Last week, my latest project, New York Observer, relaunched their newspaper site on Drupal. I finally published a writeup to the Drupal showcase forum. I shared a few tips from the build of the site and initial comments to my writeup are quite positive. This is one of the best looking Drupal powered web sites that I've ever seen. The technology behind it is pretty elegant too. Read the showcase announcement.

Much respect and thanks go to Barry Jaspan who was my partner on this project. He understands Drupal to a remarkable depth considering he has been using it for only 1 year. Furthermore, the range of his programming talent is remarkable. He has ninja powers in the areas of security, html/css, and data migration to name a few.

Our tireless workers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote a proud poem for these holidays. These folks deserve to rejoice. It really has been a losing battle for the past 6 years.

An Overdue Visit

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the nation
Friends of Freedom knew it was a special occasion.
Lady Liberty stood taller just off the shore
Her torch shining brighter than a few weeks before

But it wasn't the flame turning her cheeks all rosy
It was thoughts of Snowe, Feingold and Nancy Pelosi
And leaders from every side of the aisle
Who would soon bring the Bill of Rights back into style.

The Amendments had all hurried out of their beds -
Which was no easy task, they were nearly in shreds -
And they rushed to the window on papery feet
As a jolly old man flew right over their street.

"Could it be!?" they inquired as the roof shook and trembled
And they crept toward the mantle, peaceably assembled,
Just as someone emerged from the chimney with flair
In a shiny red suit, with a shock of white hair

And a top hat, and pants all in red, white and blue -
"Wait a minute," the Amendments exclaimed, "Who are you?"
"Don't be frightened my children," he said, "it's no scam.
"You can't have forgotten your old Uncle Sam!"

"Holy crap!" said Free Speech. "Stop right there!" yelled Bear Arms
And Privacy cried "Who shut off the alarms?!"
The Fifth remained silent, but Uncle Sam said
"We've been having some trouble, but Freedom's not dead."

The Amendments were cautious. "It's just been so long
"We've seen Liberty lost, we've seen so much go wrong.
"The President's trying to mangle and warp us,
"The Fourth is in tatters, so's Habeas Corpus!"

The old man sat down - he had had quite a ride -
But he told them "Don't worry, the Law's on our side,
"'Cause the nation's fed up and more people are crying
"For Justice and an end to illegal spying,

"And secret abductions by the CIA,
"And laws that would take women's choices away,
"And Gitmo tribunals and secret detention,
"And other intrusions too numerous to mention - "

"Not so fast," said a grinchity voice from above
And Don Rumsfeld pushed past the Fourteenth with a shove.
He was covered in soot and he looked kind of scary.
It seemed like his Christmas had not been so merry.

The Amendments said they weren't happy to see him:
"You tried to throw all of us in the museum!
"You've done so much the Constitution forbids!"
"And I would have gone on, but for you meddling kids!"

Uncle Sam told him "Rummy, your plans just won't do,
"So we've got a brand new timetable for you!"
And as Rumsfeld retired and crept into the night
The Amendments cried out "Have a good secret flight!"

From the distance they heard him reply with a snort.
"Bye-bye, Rummy!" they answered, "we'll see you in court!"
Uncle Sam rode the chimney up out of the room
And, like Frosty, he said "I'll be back again soon."

But they heard him exclaim "Oh, and just one more thing!
"This year, when the holiday bells start to ring,
"Try to honor religion. Honest faith can't be wrong.
"It's America, can't we all just get along?

"So, on Christian," he cried, "Muslim, Hindu, and Jew!
"On Quaker! On Shaker! And Atheist too!
"On Buddhist! On Taoist! And to show we're not chickens
"We'll file a few lawsuits defending the Wiccans!

"Your belief is your right, so get out there and savor it.
"Uncle Sam's not a preacher, and he doesn't play favorites!"
So this holiday season, whatever you do,
Warmest wishes for Freedom, from the ACLU.

I'm a bit late in celebrating my own 5 year anniversary with the Drupal project. You can see from that URL, that I have made 166 pages worth of commits to the contrib repositiory since then. And submitted hundreds of core patches as well.

My first major contribution was a series of core patches for the Distributed Authentication system in core. Dries had already a working version, but I generalized it by adding the authmap table.

During those first months, I struggled badly with setting up PHP, and generating patches, and understanding the code. Newbies - I have felt your pain. We all have, really. My greatest insight into the workings of Drupal came when I setup a debugger. I like Komodo. I encourage new (and old) developers to do this as a learning exercise, if not as a daily development tool. It is so useful to watch Drupal process a request. It is like watching art in progress. There is also a deep comfort in understanding the whole request cycle.

Thanks to the whole Drupal community for being as great as you are. Sometimes people ask if my freelance consulting work is lonely. It isn't lonely at all, with all the great chatter and ideas that you all generate on the mailing lists, on chat, and at conferences.