kittykayak

What’s so great about Addison Berry’s site rocktreesky.com? Well, aside from the Addison Berry commentary, the tag cloud at left contains this wonderful bit:

Hmmm, perhaps they do, perhaps they do.

I continue to get the calls from “Heather from Account Services — do not be alarmed, but this is your final notice” to reduce my interest rate, extend my auto warranty, etc. And they are now coming in on my cell phone as well as my home phone. I couldn’t remember whether I was already on the Do Not Call list, so I finally registered both numbers today. The fastest way to do that is to call 1-888-382-1222 from each phone you want to register. There’s an online option, but it involves waiting for an email from the FTC and clicking a link to confirm. The phone option is immediate.

Naturally, as soon as I completed registration, I got another call on my cell, alerting me “Don’t take chances by driving without a warranty!”

There’s an astounding amount of web space dedicated to others’ experiences with these calls, including:

• Who Calls Me
• Heather with Account Services
• Ripoff Report

Sadly, some of the stories are from people who were out of work so long, they took jobs with Heather, only to regret it when they realized she was such a fraud.

So far, the phone numbers my cell has recorded for these calls include:

• 614 761 1584
• 804 230 3457
• 973 989 5654

But the likelihood is that these are all faked. What I wonder is whether the calls are all coming from the same company, or if Heather inspired numerous other scam artists to try cashing in on the same idea. Perhaps there’s a motivational get-rich-quick seminar out there, where they hand out CDs of prerecorded Heather and her friends, and advise everyone in the audience to plug that into an autodialer.

Whoops, I did a bad thing.

We have this wonderful tool at work — a web application security scanner. It will find everything from SQL injection vulnerabilities, to filesystem write where there should NOT be filesystem write, to cross-site scripting problems! Great! Let’s run it against the test Drupal installation. So much better to find problems before we launch than after, right?

Trouble is, I thought I’d be clever by setting it to scan only but not attack, and gave it the Drupal administrator login and password. Well, it blithely went through the site attempting to look for hackabilities, and of course, it absolutely horked up the CMS. Nothing you’d immediately notice using the site, but it crippled site admin in a big way.

After a few hours of trying partial reinstalls and database restores, in the end it was obvious it’d be a lot cleaner to start over. Blow away all the files, drop all the tables in the database, and start afresh. Arghhh. This is going to take hours and days to reconstruct.

Nope. It went so fast. Things that took me two weeks to figure out the first time around, took no time at all today. I think I might actually be getting comfy with Drupal.

Part of it’s the hands-on with Drupal over the past few months, but a lot of the credit goes to good old RTFM. At first, I felt rather stymied there. For PHP questions you can usually go to php.net and find your answer pretty fast in the documentation. I haven’t found this to be the case with the Drupal site. Not sure if that’s related to the PHP site vs. the Drupal site … or my familiarity with PHP vs. my familiarity with Drupal. Finally I started looking at some actual books:

Using Drupal by Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Nathan Haug, and Jeff Eaton (the Lullabot people)

Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer

I also paid the 30 bucks to get the Lullabot Understanding Drupal video, which helped a lot. At first it seemed very content-free, and I do hope future training videos from them will be meatier, but by the end of it I realized I had a much better grasp of Drupal terminology and structure.

Yes, I will be running the security scan again … without credentials this time.

I’m oh-so-tired of the Yes We Did meme. I could forgive it on my friends’ Facebook profiles right after the election, but now it’s everywhere. I think many people believe we’ve already done all that needs to be done.

Yes, we did? Well, um, no, we didn’t.

All we did was elect a man who challenged us to make things better, and did we make things better? No. We congratulated ourselves on electing him.

We can do better than this. Yes, we can. Let’s make this our mission this new year 2009. It’s a difficult time in our own economy and a murderously bad time in many places like Gaza and Iraq and even on BART trains. There are small steps we can take in donating locally, and there are small steps we can take in communicating with our elected representatives to urge them to do what’s right. There are small steps we can take in volunteering for our local organizations that need help. Let’s resolve now: we will take those small steps.

Yes, we will. Are you on board with this?

Still trying to wrap my head around Drupal, I’m wondering about the difference between WordPress themes and Drupal themes. In my opinion, WordPress themes take over way too much of the power over what the end user can see — some themes support widgets, others don’t; some have their own templates for pages but not comments, or vice versa. Even the default Kubrick theme is hideous — full of PHP code overriding CSS styles (hello, where is separating content from presentation?). Just hope I don’t run into that again with Drupal … cross fingers … from everything I’ve seen of Drupal, this should not be an issue. I kind of think they try to do things right.

Separating content from presentation is good, but what also needs to happen is separating content from functionality from presentation. The whole way themes work in WordPress is to replace not only the default stylesheet but the default PHP scripts. Although the main WordPress engine is unaffected, the functionality the end user sees is controlled by the theme scripts.

I’d rather see all theming systems operate more like CSS Zen Garden, where themes are strictly visual design and layout, while functionality code could be a sort of Extensions Garden separate from the visual issues.

Or perhaps I’m being too picky.

There is an 87% chance my cat is plotting to kill me, according to HeyQuiz.

After the Prop. 8 vote, I’m checking out the California Constitution. I see here Article 1, section 7:

(b) A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens.

I’ve only gotten that far.

What I’d really like to know is why some measures require a 2/3 vote, while others require only a majority vote. How is it that changing something as fundamental as the State Constitution can be done with a simple majority, while local jurisdictions are required to get a much higher percentage of the vote to do such ordinary things as funding library services?

I believe amending the State Constitution is a much more serious effort than passing any given law or initiative. Certainly if anything should require a two-thirds vote, it’s a Constitutional amendment.

I’ve been working on a Today at the Library script to pull the current day’s events out of the library event calendar database (MySQL) and list them on a web page.  The initial PHP script works fine as a stand-alone page, but now I’d like to see if I can integrate it into our library news, which I recently switched over from a static HTML page to a WordPress blog.  In an attempt to work properly with WordPress, I’d like to avoid modifying any of the WordPress core this time, so I’m converting Today at the Library to a WordPress plugin.  First attempt didn’t go so well, but (pun alert) I’ll keep plugging along.

Clearly, it’s time for a definitive study on this truly important technical topic. Here’s the book cover (click it to enlarge). Now all we need is the book.

Cover kitty: I can has cheezburger

P.S. At least, that’s what I thought last December when I originally posted this. But now comes THIS!

Looking around Amazon the other day for books on content management systems, I noticed a slight difference in the spelling suggestions offered when I search for “Plone.”

Go to the top level, general search box on Amazon and type in plone, you get:

“plone”
Did you mean phone?

But if you go in Books search and type in plone, you get:

Books “plone”
Did you mean love?

This stands on its head my usual assumption about spelling suggestion for search results, which is that it’s an algorithmic match against a master dictionary. Amazon’s “Did you mean” seems to look for a match against terms in items that sell best … in that category.

The larger the universe of items searched against, the more it makes sense to tune the spelling suggestions to the subcategory the user is already in … sounds brilliant! In fact, one of the things I like about the Thunderstone sitewide search engine we use at work is that its master dictionary consists only of the terms actually on our site. I specifically don’t want it to suggest terms from the web at large, which was a pitfall I saw in the “did you mean” suggestions that appeared when I was testing the free Google site search (although I think Google may have since improved their offering).

Amazon, though, seems to have taken things a step farther and used more than Soundex matches to generate spelling suggestions limited to the set of items being searched.  Both “love” and “phone” should appear in any master index of either books or the general set of Amazon offerings, so the suggestions look like they must be using popularity at least as much as similarity.  Presumably in Amazon overall, phones sell better than “love” or “plone” items — but within Amazon books, books on “love” sell better than books on either “phone” or “plone.”

Either that, or some merry prankster in the Amazon programming department really loves Plone.

[Edit 10/29: Or could it be term frequency within the universe of items searched?  Probably the titles in Amazon Books are far less likely to contain "phone" than "love."  Perhaps there's no need for an Amazon-specific sales popularity measure.  Authors and publishers learn what title words sell, and title their books accordingly, so they've already done the popularity measuring work before Amazon ever receives the book info. Still ... all this does leave room for wondering whether incorporating popularity measures would, in fact, give better results, specifically for "did you mean" suggestions.]