Ed Finkler agrees with me

From Pro PHP Podcast:

Q: What do you think are the three largest failings of PHP and Security?

“I agree with some things that Terry Chay has said about this: that the things that tend to make PHP insecure also tend to be the things that make PHP easy to work with.”
Ed Finkler, PHP Security Expert, CERIAS

Thanks Ed. 🙂

Listen to the podcast. It’s a realistic assessment of the state of security in PHP.

[Some comments after the jump.]Continue reading

The Lunch 2.0 story so far

Lunch 20 @AOL.COM

LUNCH 20 @AOL.COM
AOL, Mountain View, California

Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G
f/4 at 1/25 second, iso 500, 12mm (18mm)

Summer is here and Lunch 2.0 is starting up again. There are two events scheduled already, and from two of my favorite Web 2.0 startups to boot!

The first one will be at LinkedIn. Which is important because their founder is on the board of the company that pays my salary. We’re the second entry in their newly-born corporate blog! Next step: get Mario to blog about my LinkedIn Haikus (they really work, honest!).

The other one will Ning on June 14. Little known factoid: Ning was our very first Lunch 2.0, even if they didn’t know it. (Ahh, back in the good old days when Lunch 2.0 meant sneaking into a company’s cafeteria and sticking our Lunch 2.0 flag in the ground… or fork in their cake.)

IMG_0563.JPG by Mario Sundar

Gina Bianchini of Ning and Reid Hoffmann of LinkedIn at Web 2.0 Expo. Two people dear to my heart. And it’s not because they’re hosting Lunch 2.0.

Oh, who am I kidding. It is. We love you guys! 😀

The what and wherefore of lunch-two-point-oh

Lunch 2.0 is about participating in an interesting conversation over a free lunch.

If you are interested in being a diner, going to a Lunch 2.0 is really easy. Just say you’re going to attend and our hosts will deal with the fallout. 😀 Afterwards, write about it in your blog, post some photos, or produce a video. (Send us an e-mail so we can link it.) While that’s not a requirement, it’s that sort of buzz is what pays the bills when our hosts have to justify this craziness to their corporate overlords. Or, if you are a corporate overlord, host one yourself…

If you want to host a Lunch 2.0, it’s really easy to become an “eatery.” Just send Mark or me an e-mail. We really want to eat your lunch. Honest! Mark explained our philosophy best:

Lunch 2.0, much like Web 2.0, is all about being open. We welcome any companies that are interested in hosting Lunch 2.0 events 🙂

C’mon Lunch 2.0 has got to be hipper than that moleskine that you carry around to keep your lo-tech creds up.

Lunch 2.0: Taste the buzz.

Warning: A long and inconsistent story ahead

Speaking of waxing nostalgic, I think it’s about time I finally post this article about the Lunch 2.0 story. The first time I tried to write this was in response to a query by FutureWorks back in October of last year. The second was in February to celebrate the first anniversary of Lunch 2.0. This will be the third attempt, so it’ll be a long one…

It’s about time I got my story straight about this Lunch 2.0 thing (or at least, my lies consistent). What follows is the honest-to-God truth (uh, sort of).

[How we created Lunch 2.0: The True Hollywood Story after the jump]Continue reading

The beauty of buckets

Some of the more astute readers of my last article may have noticed that it took 40 seconds to run the LinkedIn sync on my address book. That’s not really surprising. Sync is slow and UI needs to accommodate it. Plaxo does this by popping up a warning and detaching the sync process so you can continue using the site.

[More after the jump.]Continue reading

Plaxo gets its sync on

Speaking of Plaxo and LinkedIn, it looks like some people at my former company actually listened to the moral of the Underpants Gnomes talk and launched Plaxo-LinkedIn integration as a premium feature (as well as a Labs section).

I tried it out and the first screen I got was a rejection because Safari isn’t supported. This is actually heartening since it’s about time Plaxo started to release stuff that wasn’t perfect.

The next step told me things were a one-way sync, so it’s really just an importer. I hope that this is a problem with LinkedIn’s end. It shows a nice status animation in both the top right and a candystripe bar.

Plaxo-LinkedIn integration screen one

Note to self: steal the animation in the top right for Ajaxian applications. Note to Plaxo: it’d be nice if the status bar actually updated.

[More Plaxo Sync Platform review after the jump.]
Continue reading

It’s going to be ugly

My favorite productivity trick has got to be moving everything on my desktop into a folder to be looked at later and everything in my inbox into the ” refile” mailbox.

An empty desktop and a clean mail folder and all of a sudden you’re more productive.

I think the technical term for this is “pushing the reset button”, except in my version of it, there is no shutdown notification. (If I weren’t such a poser, I’d twitter it.)

I tried that today.

[The fallout after the jump.]Continue reading

Widgets, bitch!

I am the very definition of lazy.

Case in point: I pulled three all-nighters in two weeks in order to allow our widget partners to do the work of pimping my Tagged profile with

which is a round-about way of saying:

Before this I was working on infrastructure. The problem with infrastructure is nobody can see it. Widgets on the other hand…

(Both of the above widgets were created through our widget partner RockYou! which is co-founded by my sometimes Ultimate teammate, Jia Shen.)

[More widgets after the jump.]Continue reading

A little twitter told me…

I removed this rant from my last entry.

<rant>

I like to say Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 on the cheap. But that doesn’t mean we’re any less losers.

The only difference is instead of being about the New Economy, it’s about how the Old Media “just doesn’t get it.” And instead of talking about when our options are going to vest, we’re talking about what so-and-so had for lunch because of some Twitter SMS we got.

Fuck, we make fun of those people who pick up People while in line for the checkout stand, but at least it cost them nothing, unlike the $236.70 SMS charges we’ve racked up.

</rant>

Sometimes I think we deserve all the beatings we got in high school.

What people want

2 Drink Minimum” by 500hats
You’ll have to read until the end to find out why I included this photo.

Holly wrote recently that your most passionate users don’t necessarily build the best products. It’s really worth a read.

I think the problem comes from the fact that there is often a large difference between what people say they want, and what people really want.

Forgetting that this difference exists and being insensitive to a customer’s true desires is the source of many mistakes I’ve made and lessons I’ve learned.

What follows is an example of each of those things two things: a mistake and a lesson.

[Michael and me after the jump.]Continue reading