You know you are getting too much press when...

…some of the source code for your homepage is leaked and, well, anyone cares.


Facebook Source Code Leak Raises Security Questions
Examining the leaked code reveals vulnerabilities in Facebook's applications that could be exploited, a developer said.

By K.C. Jones
InformationWeek
August 14, 2007 02:25 PM


Facebook source code has been leaked on the Web, and that's raising some serious issues about the site's security and data privacy.
Source code from the social networking site's main index page appeared on a blog called Facebook Secrets recently and remained there Tuesday. The blog does not contain any other postings.

"A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook Web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured Web server that was fixed immediately," a Facebook spokesperson said Tuesday. "It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way."

Still, developer Nik Cubrilovic wrote in a TechCrunch blog posting that the leaked code could reveal vulnerabilities in Facebook's applications that could be exploited.

"From just this single page of source code, a lot can be said and extrapolated about the rest of the Facebook application and platform," he said. "At a quick glance, I know that I can see some obvious things in the code that both reveal certain hidden aspects of the platform and give a potential attacker a good head start."

{snip}
More at:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201800144&cid=nl_IWK_daily

(FYI, I found a copy of the leaked code and, yawn, it is about as intriguing as the aforementioned article).

From the 'Who Knew' Department...

On Cherubs...

A cherub is a mighty angel. One of the functions of the cherubim was to serve as guardians. These angels guarded the entrances to both the tree of life (Gen 3:24) and the Most Holy Place (Exod. 26:31-33). Two cherubim of hammered gold were part of the ark of the covenant (Exod. 25:18-22). The living creatures carrying God's throne in Ezekiel 1 may have been cherubim.(from Wikipedia).

And I thought they were just cute cubby little angels. I guess you don't want to get on the wrong side of one of those.

About the 35W Bridge...

The big news this week was the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. This has been world news, a fact that is supported by me living in the same metro area as said bridge but able to read about it on the Sydney (Austrailia) Morning Hearld newspaper's website. Why read about it there? Just to confirm to myself that it wasn't myopia-- I'm right here, of course it is news and I can relate and sense the importance. But was it really a big deal to other people? The answer has been given over the last few days, a resounding YES.

This is a Big Deal, but what does that mean? It is big in a physical sense, big in the time to fix sense, and big in the human lives were lost sense. Yet I don't know what to write about it.

The physical scale is hard to describe with words in a worthy way. You can look it up in newspaper archives today and find phrases like 67 feet above the water, a couple thousand feet long, sixty cars, an unknown number of missing people. All just words that fail to convey the sheer Big-ness of this Deal.

The time to fix enormity is hard to write about because no one knows. 2-3 years is a long time in a culture raised on 30 minute sitcoms and 30 second sound bites.

It is hard to write about the human lives that were lost because I didn't know them but I think they deserve a better description than some stranger (me) could string together with a few words.

So maybe I've said enough. Maybe if I'm right, that this is a Big deal that anyone could relate to, then you already have and nothing else needs to be said.

(note: the photo is from the Minneapolis Star Tribune).

Blogging from Live Mail - Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

I just got done noodling with the Microsoft Mail Live Beta's integration with Spaces.live.com. The new 'outlook express replacement' has an option to write a blog post (or simply blog an email) directly from the mail client. Google docs offers similar functionality so I thought I'd give that a test drive too (this post was made using Google docs).

The Live Mail (beta 12.0.1184) to Live Spaces integration had a couple quirks:

(1) The title of the blog entry is changed on publication from whatever was typed (like 'thoughts on dogs') to be prefixed with the phrase "talking about...". So the post ends up as "talking about thoughts on dogs".

(2) The body of the entry, typed within a Live Mail editor much like the e-mail editor is changed on publication to be a quoted text block.

(3) The publish to blog link simply opens the browser to the web-based Spaces blog editor with the text filled in (with the changes noted above).

Maybe nice for transferring an email to a blog entry, but that can easily be done with copy and paste. Overall first impression: evolutionary, not revolutionary. That seems to be the tag line for tech this year.

Over on the Google Docs / Blogger front, there were some quirks too.

(1) Sending a document to blogger involves clicking the "Publish" tab. The user must preconfigure their blog target. If that is not done, clicking the 'publish to blog' button activates the blog target configuration dialog/webform. But you aren't done! Finishing the dialog simply configures the settings. You have to push the same button again to send off the blog post. This is all written on the screen (sort of) so if you are into reading directions, this double-pump shouldn't be a problem.

(2) Google docs offers to use the title of the document as the blog post title, or at least implies that is what it is going to do. Google docs has a 'feature' of using the first line of text in your document as the title. If you rename your document then publish, the new document name is disregarded and your post is untitled. Wierd, hard to follow, and just plain quirky.

(3) No labels support. Labels can be applied by opening the post in the blogger editor and tagging.

Bottom Line: both of these are preliminary editing tools. Some post-posting clean-up will still be required.

I Can Has CheezBurger - Code Edition

I don't know why I find ICanHasCheezBurger.com so funny, I just do. If you can read the following code, you know what I mean. If you can't, you might want to check out the site.

From another blog...

HAII
   HAS A CHEEZBURGER ITZ 1
   IM IN YR LOOP
      VISIBLE "I has dis many: " N CHEEZBURGER
      IZ CHEEZBURGER BIGGER THAN 11 O RLY?
      YA RLY
         GTFO
      NO WAI
         UP CHEEZBURGER!!1
      KTHX
   KTHX
KTHXBYE

And the book http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/lolcode.jpg

Yenching Palace closes

From an article in the Washington Post in January:
Tucked between Engine Company 28 of the D.C. fire department and a 7-Eleven known for having a mural painted across its brick wall, Yenching Palace has been a Cleveland Park landmark for more than 50 years, a place where -- in its heyday, in the 1960s and 1970s -- diplomats and movie stars dined, secrets were told, international crises were mediated.
Sometime this year, if all goes as expected, the art-deco restaurant with the lopsided "Y" in its famous neon sign on Connecticut Avenue NW is going to get a makeover. It's going to become . . . a Walgreens.

Then NowPublic.com Posted this:
One of the most notable and historic restaurants in Washington, DC, Yenching Palace, will be closing for good on June 10th. Yenching Palace opened in 1955.

Yenching Palace, located on Connecticut Avenue, NW just south of Porter Street in the Cleveland Park neighborhood, is the secret location where President John F. Kennedy's negotiators met with representatives of the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also at Yenching Palace, Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, discussed better relations with the Chinese. After that, Yenching Palace became a popular restaurant among the diplomatic community. Kissinger dined there regularly.
Although Yenching's culinary skills and offerings haven't kept up with newer Chinese restaurants in Washington, DC, it's still very popular among Washington residents, and has a very busy delivery service. It is a much loved family restaurant among neighbors.

Yenching still boasts about their now historic reviews: "In Washington, the China watchers, basking in new found esteem, are acknowledged experts in Chinese restaurants. Their honorable selection; the Yenching Palace," wrote Time Magazine in 1967.

The inside of Yenching Palace is something out of time. There are beautiful Chinese decorations all over, and even a phone booth in the restaurant's lobby. (How many full phone booths are there left?) The booths are classically spacious and comfortable. According to rumor, these booths were bugged by the FBI.

Walgreens, the drugstore chain, has purchased the space from Yenching Palace. The storefront will change; it will be made to look like it did in 1945, or at least as much as possible. Walgreens' design is based on a single photograph from 1945. The diamond windows will remain, as will the art deco glass panels. As for the neon sign that's nearly become a Washington trademark -- that may end up in a museum.

Twitterpaited - Follow vs. Friend

Twitter is new to me and some of my clan, so here's a how-to tip on "Follow" versus "Friend".

To follow someone without making them a friend you can send “follow {username}” from your phone. On twitter it is a bit more complicated.

Here’s an example: You want to follow Fred. Fred is a friend on Janet’s page. If you go to Janet’s page and click the blue “Friends” link, you will see a list of actions (twitter calls this the ‘action menu’). One of those actions is “Follow”.

So what’s the diff between friend and follow?
Friends show up on your twitter me+friends list of tweets. When you make a friend, twitter sends an email to the person you befriended to let them know you’ve declared them a friend.

Follow messages only show up on your phone or IM client, and do not show up on your own “With Others” tweet list. The person does not appear on your friends icon list, and no email is sent to the person you are following.

Sounds creepy, why follow instead of friend?
Mainly because you may not know the person very well and just want to keep up with them for a little while to get to know them. After you’ve had a chance to get to know the person you can always make them into a friend.

Who is following me?
Send the command “followers” from your phone. Twitter will respond with a follower list.

I followed and don’t like what I see, how can I stop?
Send “leave {username}” from your phone. This works for friends too- it doesn’t “unfriend” them, it just stops their tweets from going to your phone or IM. They are still listed on your friend list.

Business Cards as Art?

Business Cards as Art?

Found on the web: A website dedicated to the art of business cards. The site describes business cards as "...little tokens of identity, with their everyday and ephemeral nature but also as a keepsake - a token of remembrance".

Decide for yourself at http://dailypoetics.typepad.com/photos/business_cards_and_other_/index.html

How to fix the blog post editor's title field.

Odd...The blog editor won't let me type in the 'Title' Field. What is up with that?

The fix seems to be to click on preview. That magically heals the unresponsive title field.

A sucky blog post, but good to know.

Follow up: It seems that the title field gets randomly disabled when blogger automatically saves a draft of the post. I've only seen it happen in FireFox, but haven't done thorough testing in other browsers.

Chinese market, hot or not?

This weekend’s research paper is based on the use of statistics in analyzing research data for new product launches. The scenario involves a bank assessing new credit card offerings (what a fresh idea!).

Anyway, in doing some research on banking I stumbled across this snippet regarding banking in China.

When might the Chinese consumer help really drive the global economy? Analysts at Credit Suisse Group have conjured a rosy scenario in which China becomes the world's second-largest consumer nation (after the U.S.) by 2020, up from No. 5 today. UBS is less upbeat, estimating that the middle class includes only about 25 million people--just 2% of China's population--hardly big enough to have much impact globally. And even Credit Suisse acknowledges that personal incomes, while climbing, aren't keeping pace with rising GDP. "If you think the purpose of rapid economic growth is to increase consumption and the general welfare, then China isn't doing a very good job," says Nicholas R. Lardy, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

From CAUTIOUS CONSUMERS; The Chinese are on a spending spree, right? Not really. In fact, they're so tightfisted, Beijing is worried By Dexter Roberts. Business Week. New York: Apr 30, 2007.

Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better

Here are 77 tips related to knowledge and learning to help you on your quest.

A few are specifically for students in traditional learning institutions; the rest for self-starters, or those learning on their own.

77 Tips

How Big is 'The Big Dig'?

There is a huge construction project in Boston that is referred to as "The Big Dig" that you might have heard about in the news. But how big is "The Big Dig"? Read on…

The Central Artery/Tunnel (CAfT) in Boston: The Big Dig.

The Central Artery/Tunnel Program is the largest, most complex and technologically challenging highway program ever attempted in American history. It is the largest federally-funded public work project in history, noted as "bigger than the Panama Canal or the Hoover Dam," consisting of 161 lane-miles (the majority of which is underground at depths up to 120 feet), and requiring excavation of 18 million cubic meters of earth and placement of 4 million cubic yards of concrete (enough to build a foot path three feet wide from Boston to San Francisco and back three times). The casting basis, built on site for construction of the submersed runnel sections at the Fort Point Channel, was large enough to hold three Titanics. The program will dramatically reduce traffic congestion and improve mobility in one of America's oldest and most congested major cities, improve the environment, and lay the groundwork for continued economic growth for millions of New Englanders in the coming new century. While planning commenced in the mid 1980s, actual construction did not start until 1992.

From: A Continuously Changing As-Planned Baseline? John C Livengood, Mark I Anderson. AACE International Transactions. Morgantown: 2005.

Knowledge must be free-- according to MIT

Everybody needs a hobby, and TV sucks anyway…

Play along at http://ocw.mit.edu/

=====

MIT To Put Its Entire Curriculum Online Free Of Charge

The university said it hopes to stimulate global learning by letting students access its entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end.

By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek

In 2002, when MIT decided to experiment with placing course contents on the Web for open access, the university's officials knew they were breaking new ground and had no idea how the effort would be received.

On Tuesday, school officials revealed plans to make available the university's entire 1,800-course curriculum by year's end. Currently, some 1.5 million online independent learners log on the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site every month and more than 120 universities around the world have inaugurated their own sites for independent learners. MIT has more than 1,500 course curriculums available online to date.

Who are MIT's independent learners? One MIT calculation found that 17% were educators elsewhere, 32% students everywhere, and 49% were self learners.

Periodic Table of Visualization

From a newsletter that showed up in my e-mail...

So many ways to visualize information, so little time.

Fortunately, this site has gone to great trouble to organize and display the many ways we can represent data with illustrations, charts, graphs, flowcharts, and more. A quick mouse-over shows you all your visualization options.

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Google Apps Review

Did you notice that Google Apps was released? Did you notice that the Google Documents Spell Checker has been broken for about a week? Bad timing eh?

I've been using the free Gooffice for about 4 months now for notes. My vote? It is impressive what they've done, but what they've really proven is that the functionality/price ratio for Word and Excel is most excellent.

Taking desktop functionality away is silly, Gooffice is all about sharing and collaboration, it is more a "sharepoint killer" than desktop replacement. Example 1: The Google document spell checker has been broken in IE for about a week now. Go for a week without a spell checker in Word then tell let me know what you think about online based desktop replacement apps. (side note: flip over to FireFox and spell check is working fine, there is a javascript error in the IE version of Google's spell check code). On the flip side? Create a document and e-mail it to four people, ask each of them to change one sentence and send their change back to you. Then see how long it takes you to merge the changes. Now go to goofice, upload a word document and share it with four people, revel in the online change integration.

Also in Googles defense I will say that GMail and Calendar have been rock solid. Google calendar can even create and reply to Outlook/Exchange calendar notices and support apparently unlimited shared calendars with appointment reminders via SMS. People who already have Outlook are not going to get anything from it, but new businesses looking for shared calendaring could be better off than small business exchange based solutions.

Making fun of some things and sense of others

From indexed.blogspot.com

Things that make you say hmmm...

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study (The Guardian Guardian Unlimited): "Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

A noteworthy story:

- Has a catchy headline

- Seems sensational on first glance

- Raises questions about the topic without actually saying the activity is wrong.

- Contains a nice polar bear picture

Early Adopter Woes

One of the issues with being an early adopter of a new Operating Systems is compatibility with exiting applications. Why? The app vendors need a bit of time to get their software updated to be fully compatible with the new OS.

If the company has a serious desire to promote their product they can get involved during the beta phase to work out bugs and ensure a smooth transition for early adopters. But what if the app vendor doesn't really care if the new OS succeeds? What if the app vendor may actually benefit from a difficult transition, say for example if the app vendor makes a competing operating system? Say, someone like Apple...

Item from InformationWeek:
Windows Vista May Corrupt iPod Music Players, Apple Says

Upgrading to Vista may result in the inability to play songs purchased from the online iTunes store; other problems 'may corrupt your iPod,' Apple warns. Apple Computer is warning customers who use the Windows version of its iTunes software to hold off upgrading to Windows Vista until it can release a patch to fix a number of serious compatibility issues, one of which could result in a corrupt iPod player.

Apple, in a statement posted Thursday on its Web support forum, says upgrading from Windows 2000 or Windows XP to Vista may result in the inability to play songs purchased and downloaded to the desktop iTunes player from its online iTunes store. Worse, however, is the problem that iPod users could encounter if they try to eject their digital music player from a desktop port using the "Safely Remove Hardware" feature found on the Vista system tray. That, Apple warns ominously, "may corrupt your iPod." Apple says the safe way to undock an iPod from a Vista-equipped PC, until a patch is released, is to be sure and use the "Eject iPod" control in the iTunes software. Apple says the problems will be fixed when it releases the next version of iTunes "within a few weeks." Until then, PC-using iPod customers could experience a number of other problems if they're running Vista, including contacts and calendars that won't synch with their iPods and problems making changes to iPod settings.

In the meantime, some users report that they can get downloaded iTunes songs to play on Vista if they right-click on the iTunes.exe program, select Properties, click on the Compatibility tab, and check "Run This Program As An Administrator."

Blogger vs. WordPress Smackdown, Round 1.

I was starting to think WordPress was such a good blogging tool that Blogger would become obsolete. Then I noticed something cool. Blogger has been doing Mobile Blogging for a while, but I ignored it. I really didn't 'get' it. Now I do.

The picture above (pretty bad eh? read on) was taken using my phone. I took a picture of my laptop screen showing an image on the blogger instructions for mobile blogging. Self referential, but it serves its purpose. Once the picture was taken, I sent it to Blogger (go@blogger.com). Blogger then sent me a reply with a 'token' to claim my picture. Blogger had also set up a blog for my phone (elfbug266, cute). When I was back at my computer, not too tough since I was sitting at it the whole time, I launched Blogger and claimed my picture. Blogger then asked if I wanted to merge the elfbug266 blog into my existing blog. The post migrated over and I was able to add this text to explain the very bad picture.

According to the instructions, Blogger accepts text messages as well. No photo required, same process. One nit on the whole thing: When I tried to edit this post by adding text, Blogger's text editor kept trying to delete the picture. After a few tries, I switched to 'Edit Html' view of the posting page and added some text then flipped back to 'Compose' view and here we are!

Round 1 goes to Blogger for mobile blogging. Wordpress, bring it on.

10x10 Photo Experiment

An online time capsule—every hourPart news portal and part interactive artwork, 10X10 collects the 100 most prevalent images and words appearing in online news outlets every hour—then arranges them into a vibrant collage, inviting both a user's involvement and contemplation.

http://www.tenbyten.org/