Category Archives: Digital Identity Management

Posting to WordPress from Onfolio

Posted on by
Reply

After spending years doing all of my blogging from Radio Userland, I have slowly migrated to more current tools. I’m really sad about this, as Radio Userland is a very powerful tool. It has taken me a while to recover, and I am still not able to do all things blogging that I was able to do with Radio.

One of the powerful features was the blog aggregator. I really like to read my feeds as a “newspaper” view, with all of the posts in a time ordered list down the page. What made this even better was that when I want to blog about something that I just read, I would then click a “post” button and Radio would take me to a page where I could author a post, and the contents of what I was just reading would already be included in the bod of the post. So with this combination, it made it very easy to read thousands of posts per day, and blog about the ones that I found interesting.

Moving to WordPress has been a great experience, however I wanted to find my solution for an aggregator … a new reader to allow me to efficiently read and blog like I had done with Radio. Craig Burton told me about Onfolio, and I went and grabbed a copy to check out. Onfolio is a nice plug-in to the Microsoft Windows Live Toolbar for IE. The more that I started to play with Onfolio (and I’m not even using a lot of it’s research tool features!) I really found that I like it’s aggregator and blog reading capabilities … even more than Radio. I’m now back in the mode of reading hundreds and thousands of post per day … easily. The one thing that was missing was the ability to blog about a post that I was reading. Now Onfolio has the feature … but when configuring it in the preferences dialog, there is no option to “Blog to WordPress” from Onfolio. I did see that they had an option labeled “Custom Command Line” however until last night I wasn’t sure how this might help me.

I now have a solution … and here is how to use Onfolio to post to your WordPress blog:

  1. In Onfolio, go to the Preferences dialog, Blogging options.
  2. Set the Blog Provider to be “Custom Command Line”
  3. In the field provided, for the file and path to your blogging client, enter the following “command line”:

    http://{your_blog_host_name}/wp-admin/post.php?text=$ITEM_HTML$ &popupurl=$ITEM_URL$&popuptitle=$ITEM_TITLE$&onfolio=1

  4. Replace the {your_blog_host_name} with the actual host name of your blog.
  5. Make sure this is all included on the one line with no spaces.
  6. That’s almost all there is to it!

Uh oh … now why do I say “almost”??

Well, there is one last thing that you have to do. It seems that Onfolio wants to post escaped HTML to the URL … so this command line will work, but the text that appears in WordPress, ready to blog about, is now escaped HTML text and looks pretty funny … and is useless. I tried a lot of different things, before I resorted to hacking the WordPress code slightly to fix this issue.

If you are using “hosted” WordPress, I’m not sure if you can do the following … but if you have access to the WordPress files on your server, you now need to go to your WordPress installation and do the following:

  1. Edit the file /{wordpress install directory}/wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php
  2. Search for the following line:

    <?php echo user_can_richedit() ? wp_richedit_pre($post->post_content) : $post->post_content; ?>

  3. Change it to be:

    <?php echo user_can_richedit() && !isset($_GET[‘onfolio’]) ? wp_richedit_pre($post->post_content) : $post->post_content; ?>

  4. Save the file.

What this does is to tell WordPress that if the posted data has a variable set that is called “onfolio” then don’t use the escaping … but put the HTML into the body of the post. Done!

Now when you are reading a post in Onfolio, and want to blog about it, you simply click the “Blog this item” or use the Control-Shift-B hotkey … a browser will launch to your WordPress “Write Post” page, and the content of the Onfolio post that you were reading will be in the body of the post ready to be referenced.

With this latest addition, I’m almost back to where I was with Radio. I can now efficiently read all of my favorite feeds, and blog about the posts that I find interesting. I really do like the way that Onfolio allows me to read and sort the posts … easily getting through them all. Expect to see me now resume my habit of posting about posts that I read … I have a way to do it again!

Software Version Complexities

Posted on by
Reply

Today I had an experience that caught me off guard. I recently purchased a Cingular/AT&T Broadband adapter for my laptop. I do really love it … well … after I got it working.

One of the initial issues that I had was that the CD ROM that came with the Cingular package was *WAY* out of date. It dated back almost 12-18 months, from what the technical support person told me. When I bought the card and went to install, I never thought to check if the CD ROM contained current software … I just put it in and ran the installer.  That was is huge error on my part as the old drivers caused all sorts of problems with my laptop.  Three days later I was back up and running … with the new version of the software that I downloaded from the Internet.

Well, my problem today was that every now and then the broadband card would lock up.  It would just stop working.  I couldn’t “disconnect” or “reset” the AT&T software either.  I found that if I ejected the card, and then re-inserted it things would again work … for a while.  After going through several days with this routine, I started to wonder about the firmware in the PCMCIA card.  I did a little searching on the Internet, and sure enough found a Sierra Wireless 875 firmware update program.  I followed the instructions and ran the program … which proceeded to update my firmware from v1.0.0 to v1.7.8!

What really amazes me about this whole situation is the poor software installation design and coding, along with the pitiful state of AT&T automated support systems.  As a software architect, and also a business owner, I am always looking for ways to improve customer experiences, decrease support costs, and automate everything that I can.  In this day and age I can’t believe that AT&T isn’t looking to do the same things!

Anyone who runs Windows has experienced Windows Update.  Now I know that lots of people will bitch and moan and whine about Microsoft, however I will argue that Windows Update – which has been evolving for almost a decade – is a marvel of automated software updating.  If you stop and think that Microsoft can drop a patch out to their servers and update millions of computers across the globe in a matter of hours or days is pretty incredible.  And for those people who want to complain about it, the key here is that any software developer could add a comparable or better solution to their software at any time!

In my mind, the AT&T installation CD ROM could have asked me if I wanted to have it check the Internet for newer versions.  But it didn’t.  It also could have – upon installation – checked the firmware on my card, and let me know that there was a suggested update for the card.  But it didn’t.  Every time that I put the card in and run the AT&T Connection Manager software, it could see if it had checked for updates in the last day or week, and automatically check in with their servers and let me know there are new versions available.

In this day and age, most computer users are getting very familiar with the automated update programs … even Dell has instituted a very impressive one that I now have on my new laptop.  In the last couple of weeks it even told me about a new version of the BIOS for my laptop … and handled the download and installation.  A while ago I launched iTunes … and it told me there was a new version … and handled the update.  And yes … Windows told me about some new patches and automatically downloaded and installed them.

I’m always shocked when I see a company that employs talented product management and software developers who seem to have no clue about how to integrate this automatic update functionality.  AT&T?  Sierra Wireless?  You have to be kidding me … I even had clicked the little menu item about checking for updates … but couldn’t decode the landing page I was taken to.  No … I do not want to read a web page about updates … I want you – the software developer – to simply implement some code that checks with my machine, and then your servers, and lets me know there are updates to apply.  I then want your software to nicely handle the update … and yes, even tell me to reboot if I really have to.

As for their business?  They would probably see less technical support calls (two from me … one lasting almost an hour!), more customer satisfaction (I’m still a little pissed off about what I had to go through!), and even get a bunch of analytics about their user base, what versions are out there, when they are using the software, etc.

I believe that as we continue to embrace technology, and software continues to evolve, the winners are going to be companies that create products that are easier to maintain and that provide an improved customer experience.  If you are a software developer, you might consider how you can reduce the software version complexities … or make them go away completely!  It’s all very possible.

What to do with Wireless Freeloaders … and the dangers of “open” wireless

Posted on by
Reply

I came across this web page – upside-down-ternet – today while looking for some other technical information. I thought that this was great … just way too creative!

It seems that this guy found out that some neighbors were using his open wireless network. Now I have thought about this before … and thought of many of the security issues. For example, did you know that when you use someones open wireless network, they can “sniff” all of your non-SSL secured usernames and passwords from your applications? If you do not use SSL for your e-mail application, and you were using my open wireless network, I can get your e-mail account username and password. In fact … I have done this in the past. Likewise, any website that has you login and does not use SSL to secure it, is passing your username and password back and forth in the clear!

Anyhow … what this guy realized is that he could lock down the wireless, or have fun with the neighbors! The first thing he chose to do was redirect all of their web requests to a kitten website. So no matter where they tried to go on the Internet, they would end up at the kitten site.

His second ploy is even better. What he realized is that he could re-route all of their web browser requests through his own “proxy” … without them even knowing! What he played with was modifying the images on all of the web pages they viewed. His two examples are flipping all of the images … or blurring them!

The real important thing to realize here, is that when you choose to jump onto someone’s open wireless network, all of your Internet traffic is being routed through their network, and maybe their servers. If the person who owns that network is smart, or devious, there is a good chance that your communications are being monitored, recorded, or modified. You might want to think about it …

Desert Rocks Music Festival in Moab

Posted on by
Reply

Last Sunday and Monday I headed down to Moab, Utah for the Desert Rocks Music Festival.  It was really an amazing experience.  Some friends invited my girlfriend and I to join them to see a band – Kan’nal – out of Boulder, Colorado.

We all piled into their Winnebago on Sunday afternoon, and we took the 4+ hour drive down to Moab.  The event was out in the desert about 13 miles south of Moab at Area BFE.  It was a beautiful site, and the weather was great … not too warm.  We arrived as one of the concerts had just finished, so we broke out the BBQ and got dinner going.  As the sun set (which was incredible) we got our act together and wandered down to watch the Fire Dancers, and then head over to the main stage to see Kan’nal.  I was impressed … they rocked!

For those who missed the concert, in June you can go and see Kan’nal at the Salt Lake City Arts Festival.  I’m going to make sure to be there … it was an amazing performance.

Monday was the typical return trip … we got some sleep, hung out a bit, and then joined the masses of traffic returning to the Salt Lake City area.  It took a while, but was well worth the trip.  I’m thinking of going next year … and maybe even contributing to the Desert Rocks event with an outdoor light show … we’ll see!

The Benefits of Broadband

Posted on by
Reply

I’m finally there. I wasn’t sure exactly when I would take the leap … but I did a few weeks ago. It wasn’t without problems … but I’m glad that I made the move. I finally bought a Broadband card for my laptop, and service from Cingular/AT&T.

I have long been a user of wireless. I bought my first Xircom gear in ~1995, just prior to the Xircom management buyout that formed NetWave Wireless. I think that I spent ~$2000 for an access point and two cards! In 1997 as a Novell employee I began working with the folks at NetWave on potential applications of wireless networking … and this was all pre-802.11 standards! All of this culminated with the demonstration of my research at the 1998 Novell Brainshare where we covered the Salt Lake City Convention Center – the Salt Palace – and surrounding area (~5 city blocks) – with wireless Internet access. I’ve never gone back. I love Wifi … and it is great to see it everywhere. Well … almost everywhere.

This is the issue that I found. Wifi isn’t everywhere … or sometimes when you find it the cost is just too great. A month or so ago I found myself at the airport … for about two hours … and the Wifi access was $10 for the day. I thought about it, and chose to find out exactly how much the service costs these days. I had seen Phil Windley using broadband from Verizon, and he really seemed to like it. As a Cingular/AT&T customer, I figured that I would check out what they had to offer.

I visited the local Salt Lake City Cingular store, and the deal was a Sierra Wireless 2G/3G PCMCIA card for $50 (after the $100 rebate), and the service – with unlimited bandwidth – was $60/month. I was in. I bought the card and the service, and headed off to install and get things working. I will say that I didn’t expect what happened next.

When I went to install the card in my laptop I didn’t even think to check on new versions of drivers. I popped the CD into my drive and installed what they gave me with the card … v5.4.1 drivers. When I rebooted … and inserted the card … BLUESCREEN. Ugh … the drivers were crashing my laptop. I was able to boot into “Safe Mode”, but I then spent two days debugging and interacting with technical support to find out that the latest drivers were v6.2.10, and that there was a conflict with the McAfee firewall that I was using. That mess started on Friday, and by Monday I was recovered and up and running. And now? I’ll never look back!

I have done some speed tests, and fairly consistently get ~1.5mbps down, and ~300kbps up. Several times now I have been getting speeds even faster! It is amazing to me that for $60/month I am now able to get megabit speeds almost any where that I go.  Over the last week, I have found myself in several places where I had no Wifi access … and plugged in my card, and jumped on the net.  The unlimited bandwidth enables me to not even think about how often I use the card, and what I do when on-line.  The speed is good enough for me to run all of my standard business applications.

I’m sure that I’ll do more testing, and might have more feedback, however so far I am happy and impressed with what is possible.  Broadband is now bringing the Internet to you – at an affordable price – in even more locations than ever before.  I now have multiple levels of fall-back to stay connected and in communications.  I’ll have to see when I do my first blog post from a moving vehicle (not while I’m driving!), and also see how many different strange places I can blog from now.  It also gets me thinking about getting out my wearable computers again … I had some fun ideas for mobile games … hmmm …

My thoughts on Twitter … or ‘Opt-in Stalking’

Posted on by
Reply

I do love communications technologies. Communications is the foundation of effective organizations … communities. There are so many ways that we are able to virtually extend the various communities in our lives. If you reflect back on society 200 years ago, you can see how communities of people were limited to physical locality. There was no effective means of staying in contact – in anything close to real-time – with anyone more than a few miles away. With this communications infrastructure, there was simply no way for global distributed communities to exist.

Now … flash forward to 2007. Twitter appears on the scene. We already have the Internet and cell phones. E-mail and Instant Messaging have been around for over a decade and are now completely entrenched in society. Instant Messaging has even bridged to cell phones where many of the phones in use can also login to the various Instant Messaging networks. Oh, and blogs of course are everywhere. I am now able to communicate and keep in touch with all of my global virtual communities. People who I have not seen in years … who are not physically close … are still “close friends” as we have stayed in touch via IM or now Skype. Of course we also read each others blogs.

I was very skeptical of Twitter as first … not sure if I liked the idea of it. But just like any other new communications technology, I quickly began to see a pattern that I liked. When Twitter is used with friends, we can begin to gain insights into their lives.  Phil Windley and I have talked about this, and we both seemed to notice a similar pattern … we are gaining new perspectives of friends and co-workers who are using Twitter to post short updates about their daily lives.  I learned that Phil Windley takes bike rides, and also works on his yard.  I found out that Phil Burns is into hiking up the mountains in the area, and also ran his first 5k.

When I began to look at Twitter in this new light … as a way to allows others to know what you are up to on a daily basis, this began to expand a new dimension in my relationship to my global virtual communities.  The messages that I am getting on Twitter are significantly different from the e-mails, IMs, and blog posts that I am reading … these twits are crude updates about what these people are doing at various moments during their day.  When I began to see this, I realized that what Twitter has created is a globally distributed “opt-in stalking” system!

Anyone can now create a simple way to be stalked … by almost any anonymous individual with access to the Internet.  Twitter allows the stalked a variety of simple ways to update the world with where they are … or where they aren’t!  Twitter also provides the new generation of stalker to monitor the goings on in any Twitterers life.  People twit that they are out at a club, or home watching TV.  They will twit about going on bike rides, and when they are at school.  Stalkers now know when people are not at their home … hmmm, time for a burglery?  They also know when they are out at some other public place … hmmm, time for a confrontational visit?

Don’t get me wrong … I’m actually a growing fan of Twitter … however I have started to see a lot of things that I like and don’t like about the service.  It’s great as it is … and there is a lot of room for improvement.  I’m actually working on an alternative system with some friends … we’re pushing to get a beta out the door by June 4th.  It will provide some similar functionality, but also some new enhancements that can provide some privacy and control over who hears what.

In any case … I am a big fan of this new form of communications … of having a new way to learn more about people who are virtually in my life.  I have long proposed Lemon’s Law of Effective Organizations:

The effectiveness of an organization is directly proportional to the quantity and quality of the communications within it.

Twitter is yet another form of communications that can contribute to the breadth of possible communications.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you ought to!

Radio to WordPress Migration … finally!

Posted on by
Reply

After using Radio Userland for the last 6+ years of blogging, I have finally completed my migration to WordPress.  Well … mostly.  I’m still working out the kinks, and I’m still working on my new WordPress2Blogger bridge which will mirror my posts – based on categories – to my bloggger.com blogs.

Overall, it was a real pain.  I’m not looking forward to having to do this again.  I had some time to work on it over the last couple of weeks, and had actually done most of the ground work.  I am thinking that I’ll outline some of the steps and issues that I ent through to accomplish this.

  1. Export the Radio database to a RSS.XML file.  To do this I first located a tool for Radio called the backLogAllRSS tool written by Steve Hooker.  After installing it, I found that I actually had to hack the code … it turns out that any post that did not include *any* category would not be exported to the RSS.XML file.  (If you really want my hacked tool, contact me … I’ll post it someplace!)  Once I figured that out, and had hacked the code, I then exported all of my categories, and made sure that the Auto paragraphs options was *not* checked.
  2. Edit the exported RSS.XML.  When I got all of my posts exported, I then had to do a global search and replace on one thing … the apostrophes.  Radio had escaped them all to be “'” and for some reason the WordPress import did not return them to being an apostrophe.
  3. Import into WordPress.  I ought to mention now that I only learned about the code hacking and global search and replace after numerous failed imports.  Well … they worked, but what I got what not formatted properly, or has the escaped characters.  Or … lots of posts were missing because they were not in a category.  By about the 8th or 10 import I was finally getting close.  I was using the RSS Import capability, under the Import menu in WordPress.  I actually thought I was done.  Until I noticed that the dates and times on all of the imported posts were wrong!  It turns out that although the Radio tool exports all of the posts with the proper data and time adjusted to GMT … and labeled as such … the WordPress RSS Import seems to ignore the “GMT” designation and just assumes that you are importing from your time zone.  So now I had to hack the WordPress RSS Import code to add the proper offset of seconds to each post being imported.  Again … if someone really wants my WordPress RSS Import hack,, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

In the end, it was an interesting exercise.  I’m actually going to do it again, since my father is still using Radio and I’m now going to migrate him over to WordPress.  I’ll see if there is anything that I left out in the steps.

One thing that I have to admit is that I truly enjoy the breadth of plug-ins for WordPress!  I’ve already found useful ones like the “delete post database” plug-in … this one is very helpful when you import 6+ years of posts and the formatting is all screwed up!  I also found a great Tag plug-in, and then a good basis for my upcoming blogger.com plug-in which worked with their old API.

I’m sure that I’ll learn more … I’m just glad to have it done!  Now, I just have to learn how to get Onfolio to post to WordPress … I like the aggregator, and want to use it to post!

SCO vs. Novell … the Copyrights.

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight I read through the following filing that I found on the SCO web site.  It is “SCO’S MEMORANDUM in Support of its Motion
for Partial Summary Judgment on its First, Second, and Fifth Causes of Action
and for Summary Judgment on Novell’s First Counterclaim“

Wow!

In this filing, there is testimony from a whole list of Novell executives – who actually negotiated the deal with SCO – who all testify that they *did* sell the Copyrights to SCO.  When I read through this, I can only sit here thinking about what the current Novell management team was thinking … and what they will ever be able to pull out to refute this evidence.

In addition, this filing contains testimony by a reporter who states that Chris Stone told her he was going to announce that Novell never sold the Copyrights with full intention to damage the SCO stock price, and impact shareholders.  Amazing if this is true … to think that an executive would do this and believe that he could get away with it.

Although all of the press wants people to believe this is all over … it seems that there is still a lot of life left in the SCO lawsuits.

Need a professional Alibi?

Posted on by
Reply

Amazing … but I guess that anything goes in this day and age.  The Alibi Network … a professional organization that will cover for you and create an alibi for anything!  You need a “virtual buddy” to answer calls for you, or make them?  You need a phone number of the “hotel” that you are staying at where they will answer and say anything that you want?  You need to fake where you are calling from?  Read their FAQ and they even give an example real-life alibi.

What truly is an indicator of the level of integrity in our society is that these guys are in business, and probably doing very well.  It floors me to see the direction that so many people would choose to take in their life.  Stunning.

Brain / Machine Integration Continues

Posted on by
Reply

Nice . .. we are getting closer and closer to neural implants to augment the operation of the brain.  These first ones are oriented towards memory.  I wonder when we’ll be able to get additional memory added via this technology.  Anyone for a memory upgrade … for their brain?

The Memory Hacker. USC’s Center for Neural Engineering researchers have developed a chip that can communicate with brain cells, a first step toward an implantable machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

… [KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News]