Hot Dorkage

I have been an admirer of Guy Kawasaki for over 20 years, since I first saw him in person at a local Macintosh user group back in his Apple days.   I liked the way Guy talks straight without any of what he calls “bull shiitake.”   I remember reading and using some of Guy’s Guerilla marketing techniques articles way back in the 90’s.  So when I got a chance to get a free copy of his book “Reality Check” in return for clicking some buttons that told me I would be tweeting ads for Alltop, Guy’s newest online venture, I was all over it.   That’s me being transparent and admitting I did not pay for the book.  I did not make a promise to review it, however.  I’m doing that because I want to.
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7 is better than Vista? We…eeell, that’s kinda like death being eaten alive by fire ants is “better” than death by being shot by a water pistol until your flesh rots.

Well, it had to happen. It is amazing that I’ve been using Wordpress so long without getting into its guts. While hacking on the Tweet this plugin ever so gently, I started to get the feel for how WP plugins work. So I wrote a couple myself. The first one is  serious old school, as it’s modeled on some older plugins. The second one actually uses more object oriented methodology, and so should be easier to read, maintain, and hack on.

But I’m sure most of you don’t care about that as long as the plugins work. And probably you are wondering what they do. Continue Reading…

A while back I was lamenting that table comments in MySQL  get overlooked, and did a post on it, both how to create them, how to update them, and how to view them.  The fact that my table comment post remains quite popular indicates that mySQL hasn’t SEO’d their pages on it thoroughly enough, and people are obviously looking for information on it. So… I thought I should follow with a column comment post. As a matter of fact in mySQL you can also comment at the column level, and probably should whenever the function of a field is not obvious.
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Why should you care about a vulnerability in SSL? What is SSL anyway? Well…..if you never bank online or buy anything online, you’ve no cause for concern. But if you do, please at least read the takeaway action item, OK?

The whole ecommerce sector relies on the secure sockets layer (SSL) for encryption of transmissions and security certificates for trust.   See the earlier Hot Dorkage post Credit Card Security Online for a simple explanation of how encryption and trust are meant to work hand in hand to keep you safe.

Recently, however, with the aid of  some power hacking, an exploit has been discovered in SSL.  Continue Reading…

Used with permission

I’m hard at work on Zend Framework, so don’t have much original to say today, except that I did discover a new cartoon strip called AbstruseGoose.com. It is a la XKCD. The drawing is a little better, but that’s not saying much, as you know if you are familiar with XKCD. However, people who appreciate abstract, geeky humorare not likely to be bothered by this minimalism. Goose characters are primarily talking circles, representing heads, but they get arms, bodies, etc. if they need them.

Utterli seems like a lot like Twitter at first glance. The difference is that you can post voice messages, video, or stills directly to it from your mobile.
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