A new Plaxo log-in

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

Today I signed into my Plaxo account and was met with a pleasant surprise:

Plaxo-AIM signin

Plaxo-AIM signin, originally uploaded by tychay.

The new thing that wasn’t here before is that you can theoretically use your AIM account to sign into Plaxo. (I say “theoretically” because you have to link your Plaxo account to your AIM account and this can’t be done yet.)

I know most of you are thinking, “Well he makes the damn website so of course he knew this,” but the reality is that I’m not involved with the Plaxo-AOL deal, have not coded this new log in screen, and had only given one suggestion for the log-in screen.

I bring this up because it is a really good page.

Update: The AOL/AIM binding/login stuff is now live to coincide with the beta 6 release of Triton. You can now bind your AIM account to your Plaxo one.

Also, Joseph and Huy have added more NLP madness in the Plaxo login. It’s now super smart.

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Conference Gnomes

When I was generating the movies for my OSCON talk, I left in a little easter egg that was too hard to notice. Doing little things like this makes things a little fun when you are bored with the tedium of making hundreds of builds for your talk. I decided to get a screenshot in before all the task items get marked as overdue.

Conference Gnomes

Conference Gnomes, originally uploaded by tychay.

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Karma catches up with Jack?

Trent is reporting that MacMice has shut down.

I’ve alluded to Jack Campbell’s abusiveness and deceptiveness before. One thing I never understood about the Mac world was their willingness to give this guy the benefit of the doubt. Granted, you shouldn’t hold a man’s criminal record against him, but it should bias your opinions. I mean how many time does the community need to be clocked on the head to realize that enough is enough? MacTable, MacWhispers “rumor site”, Griffin/DVForge, his verbal abusiveness and lying on multiple comment boards, Kensington/DVForge, and finally this marketing stunt.

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Corporate tutorials

D70 Photography Kingdom

D70 Photography Kingdom, originally uploaded by silverkeys.

I noticed on Mark Goldstein’s excellent Photography blog. that Manfrotto launched some online tutorials in conjunction with Web Photo School.

Here are the tutorials.

Though I have been drooling over their monopods and Caitlin uses their tripods and heads, I’m currently a Gitzo/Really Right Stuff guy. On a quick skim it seems they are using Manfrotto products in the examples but parts of it are relevent to anyone with a halfway decent tripod.

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Why I need an “abject stupidity” category

CNN:Police try to control the crowd rushing to get cheap iBooks.

So what sort of braintrust in Henrico thought up this clusterfuck?

Here is my favorite quote:

“It’s rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer—and laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes. But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event—it almost has an entertainment value.”
—Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County, to CNN

“rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response” You knew it was going to be bad which is why you required proof of residency and changed the date.

“laptop computers that probably have less-than-desirable attributes…” STFU. You already had to issue a redaction because you said these iBooks were always broken and Apple wasn’t repairing them according to contract when the real reason you wanted to switch to Dell is because of MS Office (a totally valid reason).

“it almost has an entertainment value” Porquoi? What is so entertaining about your neighbors getting injured and peeing their pants?
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Pirates of Silicon Valley DVD

Pirates of Silicon Valley DVD

MacMinute clued me in to the fact that Pirates of Silicon Valley is coming out on DVD. I recorded this movie when I last had cable (back in 1999) because I was out the days it aired. I enjoyed this movie, and because of it’s high geekfest quotient, right up there with Real Genius.

I think Dave still has my videocassette of it. I had forgotten I had recorded it until a few years ago when I saw part of it with him. We had great fun watching all the 1999 dot-com boom commercials that were aired on TNT along with it (too bad the DVD doesn’t have that as a special feature.)

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More libertarian hypocracy. Why big business rules…

From a comment on Mark’s blog:

I don’t remember who said this, but recently I read something interesting about business

mom and pop kind of business, do what they want and offer it to you. (meaning if you like it, they will have your business, if you don’t like it, they won’t. but they do what they want.)

big business machine, do a lot of research and offer what their customer really want.

That’s a nice maxim if it wasn’t for the fact that it is complete bullshit.

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PHP Security, the oxymoron

Well now that some of you have met me from OSCON, you are probably thinking to yourself, “What’s the deal with your blog? There is no PHP in there, you poser.”

How true.

I better start writing some stuff, before they kick me out of the “all-star PHP line up”.1

I think that when most people hear “PHP” and “security” used in the same sentence, it seems about as out-of-place as, say, putting “Rasmus” and “Terry” in the same sentence. Basically this thread summarizes how most people view PHP security.

I suppose the first thing I need to do in order to defend the honor of PHP is say that these losers have their own agenda: foisting Java or dotNet as “real” and “enterprise”2, or perhaps they’re just sore because PHP book sales are going up at their expense.

Nothing works better than a good ad hominem, I always say.

Well I suppose for the three of you left unsatisfied with my deconstruction, I should go through the tedious task of addressing the actual complaint which boils down to:

  1. “PHP has the worst security history of any language.”
  2. “PHP shoves a mess of shit into the global namespace” (or other assorted digs on register globals).
  3. “PHP doesn’t have the concept of a prepared statement.”
  4. “PHP security cures (magic quotes, safe mode, stripslashes) are sometimes worse than the disease.”

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Posted on by tychay 37