Recent events such as the October 25th Singularity Summit in San Jose, California and the military favoring drones not just for spying, but for offensive tactics as well, not to mention the release of the G1, it seems that the age of our robot overlords may soon be upon us. My question is – when robots take over the world, will they have a sense of humor and make robots that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger circa The Terminator and Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith from the Matrix?
To say that my website sat vacant for three days this week would technically be incorrect. To say that my site was only visited by people interested in dressing as Joe the Plumber for Halloween and that no new content was added would be far more appropriate. Granted, the truth is a bit more long winded and so I understand why you would make such accusations, I just wanted to point out that it’s technically not true. To back that up, I’ve brought a graph.
So what have I been doing other than writing?
Coughing. First and foremost. At some point on Monday I started feeling rather crummy, and that general feeling is still hanging over me. I’ve been chasing the orange pill with orange juice, and that’s been a bit of a help, but for the majority of this week I’ve been in a bit of a fog.
Reconnecting. I started talking with an old friend over the course of this week. We’d been talking about collaborating on a long-form project of some sort for a while now. Well, yesterday we started tossing ideas back and forth and we’re currently hashing out the plot for a character-driven, smarmy and sharp screen play. Oddly enough, I’m not going to be writing this one with Sophocles (as I’ve written my three previous screen plays). As Justin lives in Oregon, and I live in Virginia, we’re going to give Zhura.com a shot, and see how that works out for us.
Writing. Just not for the internet. Okay, not for myself on the internet. All the writing that I’ve been able to do between foggy spaces has been for work. The volumes not as high as I’d like, but the fog that is my current cold is a bit heavy and inconsiderate to my needs.
I’m hoping that I feel better as the weekend pushes on, I’ve got an ever-expanding list of articles to write for here. See? I was thinking ahead this time.
Well, that’s what I jokingly refer to it as. In addition to this website, I’m also running a second blog hosted off site. Why? Well, the first and foremost reason was to generate links both in keywords and using the titles of each of my posts to the posts themselves for SEO purposes. But, as I started doing this, I realized that I should probably generate some original content for this blog so that Google doesn’t treat the site as merely a scraper. The question was what to write about what I was writing. Yes, I know, it’s all very meta.
The actual reason, pulled from the external blog, is this:
When I was at West Point (yes, as a cadet), I was one of 53 freshman placed on the accelerated English track. This meant that we skipped the standard English course and instead were placed directly into literature. In the course of that course, we encountered the obligatory section on poetry which was paired with a certain amount of discipline one would expect at a military institution. What, praytell, was that discipline? When we read the poems that we created, we were not allowed to comment on them. We were not allowed to make excuses, we were not allowed to explain. The poem was forced to live or die on its own. My true website will run in much the same fashion. This blog, however, well, expect commentary. Also expect runon sentences and comma-splices galore!
So there you have it. If things ever get too stuffy over here, you can check out the Director’s Commentary. As this is an experiment in progress, I’ll keep you abreast of the results.
Twelve days from right now the polls across America will officially be open. By that evening we will hopefully know the results of the election, and all partisan bickering aside, we’ll be glad to see it over with. This election session has been best described as a contact sport, and one in which several words were used to much that they robbed of all meaning. As a fan of words, and the meaning inherent, I propose that two weeks from today we impose a moratorium of no less than two years on the following words and phrases. If one of these words is needed during those two years, one must consult a thesaurus and find an alternative. After the minimum of two years, each of the following words or phrases will be brought up for a reinstatement hearing to determine whether or not they have rehabilitated enough to be returned into the normal lexicon.
In a recent (online for about twenty hours old at the time of this being published) article in Wired Magazine, Paul Boutin urges people to stop blogging. Why? He posits that blogging has passed through the trend phase and that it is now dominated by traditional media outlets in vague electronic disguises. The Huffington Post, the New York Times, even Fox News. These outlets have resources, they have professional writers, and most importantly, they have money. And Boutin makes a good point, check out Technorati – the top bloggers are all sloppily disguised online magazines. If you believe Boutin, your blog will get lost in the flood, overlooked by Google and readers alike. The camaraderie that once dominated the blogosphere is gone, or so says Boutin, and with it the avid reading of each others blogs and the all important act of backlinking has seemed to die with it.
Yes, the average blog has lost that “new tech smell” that saw blogs become a cottage industry so new and unknown that for what seemed like forever CNN and MSNBC would pull bloggers on air to interview them about stories. Yes, blogging has faded from the spotlight, replaced by microblogging and entrenched social networks. Yes, the major media outlets are all blogging too. But this isn’t any reason to stop.
Boutin’s suggestion was to move towards more specialized services – in particular Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. These services, he argues, do what blogs fail to do – they allow for the easy upload and sharing of multimedia and the rapid dissemination of ideas that once escaped the blogosphere. However, Boutin has over simplified a couple of serious points. First, all of these services can easily integrate into the vast majority of blogging platforms. Second, these services are specialized to the point where they do allow for much else. Flickr allows for photos (and if you’re a heathen, video), but not much in the form of elboration on said photos other than tags and a description. Get wordy and you’ll lose the effectiveness of your photo. YouTube is in the same boat is Flickr, only it’s restricted to video. And I’ve said time and time again how I feel about comments on YouTube. Twitter? Yes, I love this service, however, its primary strength is also its greatest drawback – character length destroys the ability to elaborate. Conversations that stretch beyond a quick series of replies are a pipe dream when you have more than a handful of people whom you follow. And Facebook? It attempts to integrate all of these, and does so with marginal success. But, Facebook’s uniform atmosphere doesn’t particularly allow for any of these tasks to be done well or with any measure of originality.
Guess which one is the blog
A blog, however, allows for these various, disparate services to be combined into one highly usable, highly customizable location. YouTube videos can be embedded, allowing for them to serve either as the focal point of an argument, or for an intellectual expansion. Ditto for photos from Flickr. Twitter serves both as a means of promoting one’s blog content, but also as a means of generating new content. I, for instance, place in my last twittering near the header of my website. In this, I know I’m not alone.
Yes, being a blogger is different today than it was back in 2004. The gold rush seems to have ended. The community that was the blogosphere has largely been overrun by the likes of marketers and spammers, killing the ability to have a post instantly linked to, generating back links, and in turn, PageRank in the eyes of the almighty Google. Today, simply having a voice is not enough. Your voice must also have a message. The modern blogger is equal parts writer and marketer, and today’s bloggers are promoting themselves as a brand.
Thus, the key to building a good blog is the same as building any other good website. Know what you want to say, say it well, and then position yourself to actually be successful. Today’s web has a lot more tools at it’s disposal than it did back in the Wild West of 2004. These modern tools – social bookmarking, RSS aggregation, social news aggregation, and everyman SEO – do a lot more good for a site than they do harm. The trick is knowing how to use them.
MVC, Model-View-Controller is a design practice theory that, according to Wikipedia, was pioneered by one Trygve Reenskaug in 1979 as method for developing object-oriented in a smart fashion. How smart? The development of any project is broken down into three separate areas, each of which can independently be changed without affecting any of the others.
Simple right?
Model – to put it bluntly, this is the raw data. For many websites, this is your database, the raw or stored data that is to be rendered into usable presentable content by the website. See updated section below
View – as the name suggests, this is the outward looking portion of a website or application, typically, this is the graphic user interface (GUI). Many developers are loathe to admit this, but the “pretty” is often how people judge an application.
Controller – the final, and arguably the most important part of the trifecta that is MVC, the controller aspect is what makes the application actually work. See updated section below.
MVC has recently come back into popularity in a major way due to two main things. First, would be OSX. When Jobs decided to scrap OS9 and all prior work, and instead borrow from the OpenSource community and his work at NeXT, it was determined that OSX would basically force programmers to use the MVC pattern when developing software. This was largely to allow OSX to dictate the View section, thus assuring a standard look and feel through all software running on Macs.
The other is the internet darling that is Ruby-on-Rails. RoR is, of course, everywhere based largely on the ease with which new programs can be made. Case in point is typically Twitter, which was purportedly built from spec in less than two weeks. While RoR doesn’t have any special abilities (that I’ve seen in my limited developers knowledge), because it forces developers to use MVC, mistakes which would ordinarily weigh down a development process are severely reduced.
Why take all this time to delve into the details of MVC? Because I’m firmly in the V category. Even though I’ve been building websites for several years now I’ve restricted my work to two main areas – designing static websites through a combination of CSS and X/HTML and templating various OpenSource packages (mainly WordPress and Joomla).
Just as I got into designing webpages because the built in blogspot templates didn’t satisfy how I wanted to present myself online, I am now in a position where the content management systems I use (WordPress for this site) isn’t adequate in it’s current form. Yes, WordPress is very extensible through third party plugins. The downside is that these plugins often don’t do exactly what is required or do more than needed. So, just as I did when I started learning basic design skills so many years ago, the V if you will, I’m now moving comfortably towards the C.
First up is the language of the software that I most frequently work in, PHP, and by extension, becoming more familiar with MySQL databases (that’s the M, for those keeping score). Why? In the end, it pays to be the entire product cycle when you’re working for yourself. Or to put it more bluntly, I’ll be more of an internet badass.
Update
Got a nice block of instructrion from aut0poietic which corrected some of the over generalizations I used in the definitions for Model and Controller. Here are more correct definitions:
Model: The model is not just the database, it’s the Data Access Layer. It’s typically an Object (capital O) that has been built expose a generalized API specific to the Application. A WordPress Model Object would have an API with methods like “getPost()”. getPost would return a Post Object that encapsulates the data.
Controller - It’s basically a traffic cop — directing messages back and forth. In a true MVC application, the Controller is painfully stupid: It does little more than send messages to the View when the Model updates, and the Model with the View updates. What it does contain is business logic, so that it sends the correct message, with the correct information based on business decisions.
And on why WordPress is not a true MVC pattern: Template files should be View, but instead it’s a mash of view and controller. The Loop *should not* exist in the View. The view should not reach out to the Model and get data, nor should it submit data.
As mentioned earlier, I’ve postulated that the YouTube comment might just be the lowest form of the written word. This tragic genre often lacks any sort of tact, substance, or quality, transforming it into the written version of the racist and homophobic rants that linger across headsets of Xbox Live games. While YouTube took a hint from an XKCD comic and instituted an audio playback feature, I think that a specialized version of the Miranda Rights might be more fitting.
“anything that you say can be used against you”
As the internet has moved into the much clichéd Web 2.0, it has become more social. Blogging, microblogging, podcasts, and videocasts have joined the more traditional bulletin boards, personal websites, and online publication to turn the internet into a giant conversation. As users become people, there seems to be an expectation of privacy attached to this new internet experience, as if the internet were simply a virtual café, and those of us online are simply engaging in a long, drawn-out, pub-chat. This analogy falls flat, however, when examined. The primary tenants of a pub-chats – relative anonymity, temporariness, and general privacy – are all lacking when it comes to the new, social internet.
No One in Anonymous
This fact most often comes up in court, which can recently be portrayed via the social engineering of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email password and the apropos guilty plea of a member of the loose-group Anonymous. Both of these individuals performed questionable deeds online – one the invasion of a private email account, the other a DoS attack on a Church of Scientology websites – but this does not mean that speech said online should be considered anymore untraceable. The same techniques uses to unmask these two individuals can easily be used to determine who, exactly, said what online. This differs greatly from a bar or public place, where identification is usually left to the inexact science of physical identification.
Yes, there are ways to mask one’s identity online. Proxy servers do a fairly good job of masking an IP address, and using multiple proxies is a good method to add layers to the obfuscation of one’s identity. However, ask David Kernell how well the proxy stopped the FBI from discovering his identity. The fact is, simply, that if what you say is severe enough, you can be found.
Nothing is Temporary
Conversations in public, unless recorded, have the luxury of dying into the memories of those involved shortly after the conversation ends. Conversations on the internet, be it on a message board, blog comments, or even the microblogging service Twitter, do not bear this luxury. Once something is published online it is, for all intents and purposes, permanent. Yes, blog posts and twitter messages can easily be deleted, but this deletion only takes place on the server where the content was originally posted. The computers of those who have visited the page and not deleted their cache, the cache servers at search engines, scraper sites, and the Way Back Machine at the Internet Archive all potentially have copies of the exact words, and the ability to influence these machines often falls outside of the power of the average users.
Little is Truly Private
Security-minded personal have a short phrase: security through obscurity – a quick way of saying that merely because something isn’t popular today, doesn’t mean that security flaws do not exist. These flaws merely haven’t been capitalized on yet. The same can be said about online content, no matter where it is posted. If politics and Andy Warhol has taught us anything, everything can become popular, famous, or infamous for very little reason and seemingly without warning. Don’t believe me? A week ago you didn’t know who Joe the Plummer was, nor did you know that he have a tax lien or two against him. The power of the modern search engine, as well as social news aggregation, means that the next big story is constantly being searched for, hunted down and waiting for exposure.
How to Handle Online Privacy
Yeah...like that
An educational test used in an attempt to combat peer pressure is to ask a simple question before performing an act: would I want this published on the front page of the newspaper? Refitting that adage for the internet age: how do I feel now that what I just said is appearing on the front page of a newspaper? Put bluntly, assume no privacy when posting online.
Information posted online, no matter how distributed or obscure, should be considered as done on the record. Yes, as in the newspaper “On the Record.” Why? Because it is. At least it is today. The internet is not a pub-chat. It is not a meeting between friends. It’s a giant, interconnected document in which we are all a part of writing. And it’s here for good.
Of course, this is just the current state. The internet will change, and I’ll get into the why and how in the future.
Ah, the internet. Thanks to a general leveling of the playing field, genres can split to their illogical extremes, allowing those with a very specific interest to connect with others that inexplicably share the same interest. In a lot of ways, it’s a product of the law of large numbers.
The end results are that what were once pure genres are hyphenated, cross pollinated, reborn, rebranded, and eventually you’re left with a great deal of bizarre and original things. Take for instance hiphop, and it’s largely internet-enabled offshoot nerdcore. Nerdcore takes the basic tenants of hiphop but replaces the subject with things that your average D&D fan identifies with. Bling and booty is replaced with anime rhymes and computer jokes (video). Iced out whips are supplanted by an homage to Star Wars’ Boba Fett and his ship Slave One (video). And that’s just the tip. In typical nerd fashion, the devil is truly in the details.
Of course, the internet allows for an almost infinite division of genres, quite literally defying any genre to reach its atomic, indivisible source. The ride to that source can be very interesting. And for your benefit we have Lit-Nerdcore. The genre is still small, a bit too specific, a bit too young. Bu there is Famous Last Nerds.
Famous Last Nerds straddle the line between comedy troupe and nerdcore, further blending the genres. But, they’ve been breaking into the literary field with their One Minute Hamlet (video, right click to download). Pushing further, we’ve got Wassup Holmes, a nerdcore take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s coke head, violin playin’, private detective extraordinaire.
In this day in age, Wal-mart get its fair share of lumps in the press. However, the behemoth that is Wal-mart does have what can only be described as a world-leading supply chain, the technology that moves products from warehouse to store shelf. The system hinges both on automation – when you buy a product, the register automatically orders a replacement – and predictive – meaning supplies deemed to be in high demand soon are shipped before perceived demand hits. Of course, that cold, fairly robotic system operates beneath the surface, transparent to the millions of daily shoppers around the world. What happens on the internet, however, is a bit more obvious.
Earlier this week a link was floated about the internet, coming to me on Monday via Jim Safley. The link was to the Walmart.ca page for Summer’s Eve Ultra Extra Strength Douche. The page was laced with mischief as the image of the product had been replaced with a heavy duty power washing system – the kind used to clean houses or decks, not feminine parts. The link was tossed around, and I myself started a shout thread on Rejaw.com about it.
As more eyes poured onto the problem a few things became apparent. This was not a script or redirect. This was, indeed, a page that existed on Wal-mart’s Canadian website. What’s more, by inspecting the link provided, the method of image insertion became apparent – Wal-mart Canada was calling each parts of the page independently – the item, the image, even the similarly suggested items and a call for the price.
Though this flaw was currently only being used for mischief and amusement, there did exist a potential for much greater damage to Wal-mart’s Canadian website. Please note that I am not a programmer, so my knowledge of such tactics are limited to having worked tech support at a major hosting company, but the potential that existed was that of an easy SQL injection.
What’s a SQL injection? It’s a method for an outside attacker to access a database (from personal experience those databases were almost always MsSQL 2005 or before) by inserting a command through a vulnerable area of a website. All too often, that area is the URL bar of a browser. The rise in 2008 of bot-driven semi-autonomous SQL injection attacks meant that many a hobbyist woke up to find their website overwritten with jibberish. Most large websites, such as Walmart’s Canadian site, took precautions or prevent this, or so we believed.
Thats a big douche
For most people, a SQL injection simply feels like a violation. However, the actual results are usually a database that is incorrectly stuffed with what amounts to junk. Some, the more devious, manage to inject a website with a degree of stealth, and thus a website ends up serving spyware or viruses to visitors who have placed inherent trust in the website. For these script kiddies, a major site like Wal-mart would have been a dream catch.
Wal-mart, to their credit, fixed their Canadian website with amazing speed, plugging the flaw in their database interaction with surprising speed. As of Thursday afternoon (and perhaps earlier) the flaw had been fixed. It appears that the Wal-mart supply chain might just extend to their websites as well.
Some of us, however, were quick enough to screenshot the flaw when it was still live.
Meet Joe the Plumber. Obama loves him, McCain loves him, and he’s the guy every American wants to be this Halloween.
How does one assemble a Joe the Plumber costume?
Unless you’re committed enough to shave your head, you’ll want to pick up a bald cap. The Woochie Bald Cap should do you just fine. Price? $9.99 plus shipping.
After that, you’ll need a dark grey t-shirt. Don’t worry, if the rest of October has been any indication, this t-shirt will be plenty warm enough on Halloween. Luckily these can be found just about everywhere. Here’s one with bonus points for the pocket. Price? $9.95 plus shipping.
To add to the costume, you might want to pack a plunger. Oh…
And you’ll need to have enough money to buy your job from your employeer.
Bradley Robb likes TV and books, and has an intense dislike for cinnamon. Once, Bradley stopped a Soviet T-60 with his middle finger. Bradley writes speculative fiction and edits Fiction Matters, and never really got the hang of talking about himself in the third person.