Category Archives: Web Site Stuff

You mean what I say publicly can’t be used against me?

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I love this article … and I’m almost amused at the perspective presented in this article – Blogger Blocked at U.S. Border. 
A Canadian citizen was blocked from coming into the U.S. from Toronto
when U.S. border guards found references in his blog to being based in
New York. The blogger seems to be surprised that someone would hold him
accountable for what he wrote!

“One of them, a very sharp guy in fact, started to read every single post on
my blog. And it didn’t take long until he shocked me: ‘So you live in New York,
right? That’s what you’ve written in your [blog].'”

Derakhshan did, in fact, write that he was based out of New York—mostly
because it sounded “sexier” than saying he was based out of Toronto, he said.

But between his offhand blog comment and the fact that he was carrying a
Newsweek magazine sent to him at a New York address, the guards found grounds to
refuse his entry into the United States, for at least the next six months.

According to U.S. policy, as a Canadian citizen Derakhshan may be legally
entitled to stay in the United States for up to six months.

Canadian citizens entering the United States as visitors for business do not
require either a passport or a visa, although visitors are required to satisfy
border guards of their citizenship, according to the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection’s site.

“It was obvious the guy was trying to find an excuse not to let me in, and he
found something,” Derakhshan told Ziff Davis Internet News. “He found that I
said in the blog that I said I’m based in New York now. He said being based in
New York is illegal.”

Uh … excuse me, but it seems to me that Mr. Derakhshan made the
choice to be irresponsible with his writing … he publicly claimed to
be in violation of the law.  The “sharp guy” realized that not
only was this Canadian carrying a magazine with an address to him in
the U.S., but he outright claimed to be “based” in New York … in
direct violation of the law!

So what is the big deal?  You got what you asked for.  You were more interested in “looking good” (“Derakhshan did, in fact, write that he was based out of New York—mostly
because it sounded “sexier” than saying he was based out of Toronto, he said.”) and are now surprised at the consequences of your actions and words.

It is always amazing to me when people want to act surprised when they
get caught in their inauthenticities.  I remember being taught to
be very careful what I say … and to understand the consequences of
telling lies.  It appears that either he really was based in New
York illegally, or that his claims to look good have simply caught up
with him.

In either case, I love the idea of the border guards using Google!

The value of learning multiple languages

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Last night I was talking with a 13 year old who is creating some
impressive works in Photoshop.  He created some very cool graphics
for his Counter Strike clan web site.  I have to admit that I was
really blown away by what he created.

As we talked I asked him what he used to create the graphics, and that
is when he told me about using Photoshop.  I asked what else he
was doing on the web and he replied “Some Javascipt … and a little
PHP.”  Wow … I was surprised.  We talked about Javascript,
and although his knowledge was not incredibly deep, he had a good grasp
of the basics of the language.  I showed him some of the stuff
that I have been working on lately and he asked some good
questions.  We then progressed to talking about PHP, and he
explained some of the small things that he is learning there. 
Impressive.

What struck me today is the shift in learning to “speak” different
“languages”.  Decades ago, or even hundreds of years ago, it was
seen as important to learn to speak other languages from around the
globe.  People in non-English speaking countries learned
English.  Most of the schools here in the USA taught middle and
high-school students Spanish, French, German, and other
languages.  (I actually spent years learning Spanish … although
it is very rusty at this point!)  It always seemed to me that the
intent was to give me a leg up on interacting with people of other
countries and origins.  I have, from time to time, found value in
my Spanish learning.

Today it now appears that the future is more in “talking” to computers
and the Internet.  And so now it seems there is more value in
learning “computer” languages … then “foriegn” langauges.  As I
thought about this today, I realized that this is probably true. 
More and more people from around the globe are learning English, and
much of the Internet – and computer technology in general – is based on
English.  So where do children turn?  To “interacting” with
computers.  And so understanding the languages used by computers
is becoming more and more important.

Its fun to think about the evolution of computer langauges, and to see
the various roots of the popular langauges.  In addition, most of
the scripting languages are becoming so high-level, and the component
libraries so rich, that even a beginner at programming can create
powerful applications.  With the Internet as a platform, Web
Services, XML, RSS, and many other standards are emerging as the APIs
independent of operating system … or programming “langauge”.  I
can only imagine what a 13 year old, who today is learning Javascript
and PHP, might be developing in 5 or 10 years.  I know that it
will be fun to see!

New version of the RadioAtomBridge tool – v3.2!

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Tonight I posted the lastest version (v3.2) of my RadioAtomBridge tool for
Radio Userland
. This tool is a way to mirror blog posts from Radio Userland
to
blogs that are hosted at Blogger.com. The tool has been working
great over the last year, but recently Blogger.com changed their API
(wisely!) to require the use of SSL. I discovered this when my
tool failed and stopped working.

I spent the last several weeks making a number of changes, and cleaning
up the tool in general. There were several fixes that I wanted to
get in place, and I think that I have covered the majority of
them. The primary change was to allow you to specify using
SSL/TLS for the ATOM posts. This does require a download from
Userland of the Radio Userland TLS module … but it’s a free download.

I’ve done a good bit of testing, and have actually posted this article
with the tool. I believe that I have things working well enough
to release a build as v3.2 … so go and grab a copy and give it a
try! If you have problems, please post comments on the
RadioAtomBridge blog … I’ll look for them there!

Tagging in Radio Userland

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This is my first post using my new tagging tool within the Radio Userland

blogging application, using Mozilla. It really has been quite an
adventure in learning Javascript at a much deeper level … for
me. Radio has a WYSIWYG editor within it’s web interface that can
be used for writing posts, and there are two flavors (of course):
one for IE and one for Mozilla.

What I wanted to do is add a new toolbar button in the WYSIWYG editor
to allow me to enter a list of comma-delimited words, and have those
words converted to the proper HTML for tags … like the tags at the
bottom of this post. What an adventure!

I was actually able to get the code written and working for IE first
… but not exactly what I wanted. I wanted to have the tags
‘inserted’ at the cursor position, but could only get ‘append’
working. So the tags would always end up at the end of the
post. I then worked on the Mozilla version of this, and got
everything working perfectly! There was already some sample code
on how to do an ‘insert’ in Mozilla. Well … if I could do it in
Mozilla, then I had to find how to get the same functionality in
IE. The problem is that the Mozilla code (of course) would not work
with IE. In the end, it was three simple lines of Javascript!

win = document.getElementById(“idEdit”);
var sel = win.document.selection.createRange();
sel.pasteHTML(insertNode);

First, get the iFrame object that the user is typing in, then get the
selection range, then simply paste the HTML/text into that
selection. Simple! In fact much easier than the Mozilla
code that I was looking at. Of course, finding those three lines
was a real pain … until I found this great article at WebReference.
WebReference has always been an incredible site for reading and
learning about HTML, CSS, and Javascript. They came though again
with this article which finally gave me the details to resolve this
issue. Now I’m on to adding toolbar buttons to ease the way that
I insert images into a post. We’ll see how quick that goes …

What hacks and trojans are really about

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Few people seem to understand what all of these viruses and malware are really about.  Yes, there is a certain amount of spam that you get that is designed to then barrage you with pop-up ads … as though you would say “Wow, what a great ad!  I’m glad I get these pop-ups … I’ll have to go and spend money with these folks!“

One of the real business models behind all of this – the real people doing business in this space – are the ones that use large numbers of compromised computers at business and homes to launch DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) Attacks.  These attacks are used for good ol’ conventional extortion.  It becomes a very simple case of “Pay me, or your Internet presence will be shut down!”  The person who controls the compromised machines can easily “task” them to attack various web sites, at various times, and for various amounts of time.  Reading this article, you can begin to get the idea that large scale “Internet vandelism” can quickly grow into a profitable – yet illegal – business.  I recently read another article where a California 20-year-old had over 400,000 machines under his control as a massively distributed “botnet” that he could divide up and control as a virtual military force.  Yes … 400,000 machines!

A while back I had one of my Linux boxes compromised through a hole in a Open Source PHP application.  The attackers were able to install and execute a small script that pulled down and ran a larger script.  That one actually attached to an IRC server and waited for additional commands.  I found that they then sent a command to download a DDOS script, and would then begin to run it from time to time attacking various sites.  I discovered this whole scenario when I noticed that my DSL line would get swamped from time to time and isolated the traffic to that Linux box.  I actually had some fun before cleaning everything up.  I did patch the hole, but I modified the DDOS script to simply log information about the command and the target, but not actually generate the traffic.  It was fun to review the log and see that my box was being controlled by a compromised machine in South America, and that I was being to used – at one point – to attack an on-line gambling site.

This got me thinking a lot about what we don’t know that we don’t know about the whole world of the Internet, spam, viruses, and malware.  In addition, it reinforces the levels of indirection that can easily be created to hide the identity of the controller.  But not forever!

Hackers Admit to Wave of Attacks. With their ringleader on the run, two cybervandals own up to using an army of compromised PCs to take down sites for commercial gain. By Kevin Poulsen. [Wired News]

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Playing with Virtual Earth

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I have to admit that I really like Google Maps.  It’s an impressive web application, and has completely altered how I use maps – and send map information – to friends, family, and coworkers.  It’s now so easy to quickly locate something on Google maps, get the link, and send it.

As of yesterday I started to experiment more with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, and I now think that I found something I like even better than Google Maps!  I was listening to the Virtual Earth podcast from Where 2.0 and Stephen talked about the features that are there … many of which I hadn’t realized.

First, if you put in a query, it will display the results contained in the map you are viewing.  As you pan the map, the query results update.  You can use the compass for “game-panning” by clicking your mouse on the compass and holding the mouse button down.  You can also use the Tools->Scratchpad to drag and drop locations that you want to keep.  It’s then easy to e-mail these to a friend.

I’m going to continue to use both, and comment on which I like better.  I also am going to start to experiment with the developer APIs.  I have some ideas of some data that I want to place on a map.

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Apple and User Interface

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Anyone who has followed the entire life of Apple Computers knows that they have been involved in several User Interface disputes and lawsuits.  The whole desktop idea was born from a visit to Xerox PARC.  Now it looks like Creative Labs has quietly patented the way that music can be navigated using the ID3 tag information.

The interesting part is that the Apple iPod might be in violation of this patent!  It will be interesting to see what comes of this … I have to admit that I like my iPod!

After patent, Creative examines all options. Creative Technology is “evaluating all alternatives” now that it has received a patent for music player interfaces such as those found on rival Apple iPods. [Computerworld News]

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Experimenting with tags in Radio

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I sat here tonight and did some hacking on Radio again.  I’m working on my RadioAtomBridge tool, but I also wanted to add some new functionality to the WYSIWYG editor … making it easier to add tags to  posts.

I added a new toolbar button, and wrote some code that allows me to enter a series of space-delimited words.  Now I can simply click the button, and enter words and hit enter … and I get the tag that you see below!

I’m not quite done with it … but it’s working.  I want to change the icon of the button, and I was hoping to figure out how to insert at the caret position … something that I just could not get working within an iFrame.  Oh well … I got closer!

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