Yes yes, I’m an ogre for not feeling compassion for fellow human beings. I should think before I speak, I’m not being PC enough, whatever. What I think makes the earthquake situation in Haiti – correction – the international aid that’s flowing into the earthquake stricken Haiti that’s being championed as some sort of “chance to pull together” for all, regardless of political or other agendas. Since I’m Canadian, I’m most concerned with the promise that the federal government made to match all donations by Canadians. The fact that our current Governor General is of Haitian descent doesn’t really help placate my concerns.

However, over and above all of these other legitimate self-serving concerns, I’m quite distraught about the fact that all of this aid is not actually going to have much positive impact on the lives of these people in the long run, even if it is morally justifiable. The people of Haiti were (for the most part) living in poverty before the disaster, in a country devoid of transparent systems and decent infrastructure. After all of the aid arrives and the earthquake victims consume all of their bottled water and Canadian bacon, or whatever it is that we’re sending, how will their lives change? What’s to stop the donations from being diverted by corrupt officials for uses other than originally intended? I for one don’t support the donations; if those people weren’t worthy of donations before the earthquake, I don’t think they’re any more worthy after; the corruption index for Haiti is rather too high to be able to entrust the Haitian government with large quantities of supplies and money. It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that donations will perpetuate the state of poverty and misery that the majority of people in Haiti are already in, rather than alleviating the problems.

Happy 2010,

I am semi-”giving in” on the whole Internet advertisement thing – but not totally. If you’ve been reading my posts with any degree of regularity, you’ll know that I really, really, REALLY don’t like internet advertising, and I go through reasonable lengths to ensure that the ads I see are minimal. However, hosting services do cost money, so putting some ads on verStory seems to be the best option. I just whipped up a quick revenue sharing plugin (however the “sharing” part is still in the works, thus you’ll currently only see Google ads on my blog and not on all hosted verStory blogs). At any rate – I want the authors of the other verStory blogs to also be able to make revenue, so – once complete – the Google ads on verStory will be half verStory ads and half the ads of authors of given blogs. I also want to build in some really good positional configuration, so that users can customize the degree of ad visibility, but we’ll see how things go.

Finally, the only way that I can justify this insertion of ads, is to bring attention (again) to an excellent Firefox plugin that will completely block ads (at least the ones that will be on verStory):

Adblock Plus

Another interesting phenomenon is the monetization that seems to have occurred with WordpressMU in general. As far as I can tell, the site is pretty much useless unless you register for a “premium” account, and most authors of WordpressMU plugins have stopped hosting them and (I assume) joined the WordpressMU “premium” dev team. Whether or not I’ll look into that or simply release my plugin for free once it’s complete, I’m really still not sure.

Anyhow – again – happy New Year, and Season’s Greetings, and whatnot

Christmases as of late have seemed to arouse a lot of nostalgia (I’m guessing it’s the lack of turkey dinners). Anyhow, recently had the urge to listen to a couple of old favourites from my highschool years by KMFDM. KMFDM has a huge mass of songs that are kinda “meh”, but a surprisingly large collection of amazing songs as well. Youtube quality of course, but have a listen and consider downloading on iTunes or such:

Anarchy (God and the State remix)

Save Me:

I, like (I suppose) a lot of webdev people, haven’t been formally educated when it comes to tech stuff. I most struggle with server stuff, although I’m certainly getting better, and can *usually* figure stuff out, given enough time and perseverance. The latest issue is an example of something that, while not taking me too much time to figure out today, I could imagine myself a few years ago becoming frustrated and giving up on whatever project it was I had in mind. Being a reasonably benevolent global citizen, I’ve decided to share the solution.

The problem:
- want to install WordpressMU on local machine for dev purposes
- the WordpressMU installation page specifically states that you should use “localhost.localdomain” instead of simply “localhost” or “127.0.0.1″ as the “Server Address”
- WordpressMU doesn’t like port numbers in its URL/URI
- apache server (WAMP) was initially installed/configured to run on port 8080 instead of port 80

As far as the first bit, specific to WordpressMu in this case, I found a page on “maketecheasier.com” to be very useful, to summarise:

- run notepad as administrator and then open up the file “hosts” in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc” (you may have to select “all files” instead of “.txt files” or whatever in notepad in order to see the file).
- add lines “127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain” and, for example, “127.0.0.1 testblog1.localhost.localdomain” to the file (as many lines as needed for test blogs on your WordpressMU dev site), and save
- assuming that your WAMP server is configured to run on port 80, you should be good to go

Unfortunately, in my case, my WAMP server was configured to run on port 8080 instead, owing to that when I installed it, it complained and told me that port 80 was in use. I had had this issue before, and just assumed that this was a Windows specific issue – but this is incorrect. The culprit, in my cause, was Skype. I’ve actually blogged / researched about Skype recently for unrelated issues, but it turns out that Skype initially tries to work on port 80, and this apparently causes a conflict with a WAMP server running on port 80. The solution is pretty simple – turn of Skype before starting your WAMP server (you can turn it on after your WAMP server has started up), and all will be fine).

If you’ve already got some random configuration files for some other dev sites on your WAMP server configured with port 8080 instead of 80 (or no port) – don’t worry – you can just add another line in your httpd.conf file, something like:

# Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or
# ports, instead of the default. See also the
# directive.
#
# Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to
# prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses.
#
#Listen 12.34.56.78:80
Listen 8080
Listen 80

And there you have it. As usual – if this post helps you – please just take the time to leave a comment.

Cheers, and happy dev work

So, I was trying to download Skype the other day (from inside China) and I got silently redirected to the TOM Skype page (I wont link to it here because TOM Skype is malware) from the normal Skype domain name. My anti-virus browser plug-in started screaming “you’re at a malware site!” and this led me to do a bit of research about TOM Skype. Here are some interesting pages regarding the business partnership that TOM has with Skype:

• Nart Villeneuve’s blog post regarding his findings regarding TOM SKype
• Summary of findings regarding TOM Skype
• McAfee SiteAdvisor Page for skype.tom.com

There is a lot more information on the net about TOM Skype and how terrible it is – just use Google if you want to learn more. To quickly summarize the negative characteristics of TOM Skype, I’ve made a point form list:

• chat messages of TOM Skype users as well as others who are using non-TOM Skype and communicating with TOM Skype users are monitored and stored (possibly insecurely stored at that)
• advertisements (some not suitable for children) are displayed to TOM Skype users (no advertisements are currently present in the non-TOM version)
• there have been reports of trojans being bundled with the TOM Skype software

To make this all the more ridiculous, as of this writing, this is Skype’s privacy policy regarding the sharing of customer information:

Skype’s current privacy policy

This is quite ridiculous and is hugely contradictory to Skype’s promises of “safety and security”. Skype then has the gall to make amazingly disingenuous statements such as this:

https://support.skype.com/en-gb/faq/FA74/Does-Skype-contain-any-malware-or-spyware

Why is there no mention of TOM Skype?!?!? I was originally under the impression that only TOM-Skype compromised user privacy, but it seems that normal Skype is also not safe or secure. Here’s a nice little gem that I found in the privacy policy:

Your information may be stored and processed in any country in which Skype and its group companies maintain facilities, including outside of the EU. In this regard, or for purposes of sharing or disclosing data in accordance with this article 4, Skype reserves the right to transfer information outside of your country. By using Skype software, Skype’s websites or Skype products you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country. As Skype continues to develop its business, Skype might sell or buy subsidiaries or business units. In such transactions as well as in the event Skype or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, personal information of Skype users will generally be one of the transferred business assets. We reserve the right to include your personal information, collected as an asset, in any such transfer to a third party.

which, given the knowledge of TOM Skype, and then combined with:

Skype will retain your information for as long as is necessary to: (1) fulfil any of the Purposes (as defined in article 3 of this Privacy Policy) or (2) comply with applicable legislation, regulatory requests and relevant orders from competent courts.

there is basically no reason why anyone who has even a rudimentary desire for privacy to ever even consider using Skype. Basically, I’m pretty sure this means that, although Skype might not directly use your information or messaging history for nefarious purposes, they’re free to sell the information to subsidiaries (like TOM) that basically will use and store your information however they please. I’ve actually purchased “Skype credit” and now I’m going to send them an email requesting a log of any time my personal information or messages have been shared or stored, as I feel that I’m entitled to some level of customer service given that I’ve given money for my service (I’ll post transcripts – as I’m assuming they’ll refuse). I’m particularly disgusted with Skype, as in the past I’ve suggested to others to use Skype because it’s “secure”. Shame on this company for letting down its users.

Microsoft warns of banned Xbox 360 consoles for sale on eBay

The comments section here is quite interesting; it illustrates that a large number of (presumed) Canadians are seemingly unable to comprehend the definition of the word copyright. I think that, in light of this apparent ignorance, as we approach a time in which essentially everyone is connected to high-speed internet at all times, a fundamental change in the way that we pay for software rights is bound to occur. We have already seen some examples, such as with the game Company of Heroes, for which an internet connection is required to play the game at all (even single player). More strikingly, in China (where software piracy is rampant [not to mention other piracy]), the popular game World of Warcraft is essentially free (I think it costs ten Yuan or something ridiculously trivial, and it might even include a time credit, in order to get users “hooked”), but users have to pre-pay for playtime.

In the future, I think it’s possible that almost all software will perform a license check before starting (and perhaps periodically while running), and users may be subject to a use based charge, although the software itself might be free. Companies might be able to combat the piracy of say, an office program (which, if pirated, could create documents independently), by having the software that a given client is using first grab a key from a server. Then, only documents that were created by genuine versions of the office program could be accessed by other genuine versions, or shared. Of course, this all would require many agreements between software firms in order to work, as certain office programs would have to be compatible with the files of others, but I’m confident that some sort of “ISO” type standards organisation could handle such a task. It certainly will be interesting to see how accurate this prediction turns out to be in, say, ten to fifteen years.

Back when I set this site up, I rarely encountered a theme worth mentioning, but this one is certainly worth checking out:

Atahualpa Theme Download Page

The classic verStory theme (that my blog is currently using as of this writing) is based on, I think, Kubrik, or something like that. When I feel inspired, I’ll probably make up some better images and just switch over to Atahualpa myself. My friend Ekki (ekki.verstory.com) is already using it on her verStory site that’s about climate change and vegan environmentalists, or something.

Also – my birthday is coming soon. Twenty four years on God’s great Earth. Happy birthday, me.

I looked around on “The Google” (as our late GW would say) to find a non-nonsense walk through on setting up SSH tunnelling w/ Firefox, and although I found a few pages that, when combined together, got me set up, I didn’t see one that was near foolproof from start to finish. Thus, my gift to the internet is this.

Steps for SSH Tunnelling and secure web browsing with Firefox:

Note: oddly enough, you need a working SSH server login in order for this to work.

Tunnelier:

• Open Tunnelier (download page)
• Open it up, enter your SSH server details on the first tab
• Click on the “Services” Tab
• Check the “Enabled” box; you’ll see “Listen Interface” should be 127.0.0.1 (your computer) and “Listen Port” should be 1080
• Click the “Login” button

Firefox:

• Open Firefox (download page)
• Type “about:config” in the address bar ( and then press enter, obviously )
• Filter for “socks”
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks” to “127.0.0.1″
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks_port” to “1080″
• Set the value of “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” to “true”
• Select “Tools” -> “Options” -> Click the “Network” Tab
• Select “Settings…”
• Click the “Manual Proxy Configuration” radio
• HTTP Proxy, SSL Proxy, FTP Proxy, and Gopher Proxy should be BLANK
• “SOCKS Host” should be 127.0.0.1 on port 1080
• Click “OK” and whatnot, and give it a try – should work assuming you’re connected to your SSH server

OK – that was easy, no? Happy safe and secure tunnelled browsing!

So – I was setting up a WAMP server with the most recent CVS version of our site, and for some reason CSS wasn’t working at all – internal or external, in both Firefox and IE8. I searched around for a bit and found the usual PEBCAK issues on Google, and then just started removing things to see what might cause the issue. Answer: Yahoo Analytics breaks CSS on my local dev server – no idea why, and frankly I don’t have the time to look into it.

The offending code is (basically) as such:

<!-- Yahoo! Inc.
var ysm_accountid  = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";
document.write(some stuff);
// -->

Removing that from your template/html file should fix the css woes you may experience during development (assuming that your issue isn’t caused by something else, of course).

Yet another reason to choose Google over Yahoo, in my opinion. Google Analytics is leagues ahead of the competition and they don’t release the documentation for it in a fifty page beast of a PDF file. So – a heads up to all on this rather odd issue with Yahoo Analytics – it’s certainly not an obvious one. If anyone knows the reason for Yahoo Analytics causing this issue, please let me know, as although I’m not intolerably curious, I am reasonably curious.

I just recently got my new laptop (Acer Aspire 8730 for CAD 900!) and it’s excellent despite being a behemoth. Anyhow – I decided to take a new approach to work stuff, so instead of installing AppServ as I’d formally used, I decided to go with WampServer – and I’m glad that I did. WampServer essentially does what AppServ did for me, but I like it more already. It incorporates some stuff like cURL without additional fuss, and it apparently makes it easier to switch between PHP versions. Honestly – after having used WampServer – even for this short amount of time – I see absolutely no reason to use AppServ, but I certainly don’t think AppServ is necessarily terrible. I encourage you to check WampServer out if you’re doing any PHP development work.

Anyhow – I also am just starting to realize the full benefits of Eclipse and the advantages and convenience that it offers, particularly with respect to CVS. It finally clicked that I could just point my Eclipse workspace to my WampServer directory, and then checkout my CVS project there while adding the config files to .cvsignore. This would seem really intuitive, but it always seems to be these “obvious” things that end up taking up copious amounts of my time.

I’m also generally focussing on getting better at using CVS and knowing proper development practices – I found an excellent article that does a good job of explaining branching with eclipse that you might want to check out. We have a new workmate as well, and she’s experienced with development practices, and hopefully some of that will rub off on me in the weeks to come as well.

I know it may seem that all I write about these days is work, but I’ve really been quite busy apart from a long weekend in Shanghai recently. I’ll try to get some non-work blog updates posted soon