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Geeks Are Sexy

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary the original meaning of the word geek is:

a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake

Nowadays a geek usually refers to a person who is an enthusiast or expert in a technological field. I wouldn't say that these 2 definitions are mutually exclusive but that is another story. What I am going to present here are some information on and photos of computer geeks to show that geeks are very sexy people.

Celebrities

With celebrities I mean highly influential persons, e.g. those who invented operating systems or programming languages.

Alan Cox

Alan Cox is a computer programmer and major contributor in the development of the Linux kernel since its early days in 1991.

John Gilmore

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project.

John Hall

Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International, a non-profit organization of computer vendors who wish to support and promote the Linux operating system. According to Hall, his nickname maddog came from a time when I had less control over my temper.

Grace Murray Hopper

Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. Because of her achievements she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".

David Korn

David Korn, creator of the Korn Shell is really a cool geek because he often wears Korn shirts.

Eric S. Raymond

Eric Steven Raymond is a computer programmer, author and advocate for the open source movement. I could have taken virtually any photo of Eric Raymond I found, so it was a tough decision to end up with only 4 photos of ESR here.

Richard Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman, a.k.a. RMS, is a software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer. In 1983, he started the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system. Stallman also developed the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and the GNU Debugger.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist. He designed and developed the C++ programming language in 1983.

Linus Torvalds

Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer who initiated the development of the Linux kernel.

Larry Wall

Larry Wall is a programmer, linguist, and author. He is most widely known for his creation of the Perl programming language in 1987. Without Perl I wouldn't be a software developer. So thanks Larry for making it possible for me to pay my rent.

Steven Gary Wozniak

Stephan Gary "Woz" Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs.

Famous Couples

The famous couples listed below worked together to achieve something of inconceivable value.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie and Kenneth Lane Thompson were the principal creators of the UNIX operating system. Ken Thompson is responsible for the B programming language and Dennis Ritchie for C.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen

In 1975 William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates) and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. Bill Gates became the richest geek and Microsoft one of the biggest corporations on our planet.

Hackers

People who have done truly evil things, especially Mr. Gates.

Loyd Blankenship

Loyd Blankenship, a.k.a. The Mentor, has been a well known hacker and writer since the 1980s, when he was a member of the hacker groups Extasyy Elite and Legion of Doom.

Riley Eller

Riley Eller a.k.k Caezar is a member of the Ghetto Hackers.

John T. Draper

In 1971 John T. Draper, a.k.a Captain Crunch, discovered that a toy whistle given away inside Cap'n Crunch cereal generates a 2600 hertz signal, the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call. Draper built a blue box that, when used in conjunction with the whistle and sounded into a phone receiver, allows phreakers to make free calls.

Dan Farmer

Dan Farmer is a computer security expert. After graduating from Purdue University he started developing the COPS program for identifying security issues on Unix systems. In 1995, he and Wietse Venema created SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks), a network based vulnerability scanners.

Bill Gates

The richest ex-criminal of the world.

Susan Lynn Headley

Susan Lynn Headley a.k.a Thunder is one of the few female hackers and member of the Roscoe Gang.

Vladimir Levin

Vladimir Levin does not only look like a Russian criminal he is one at least in the eyes of the evil Citibank corporation. Levin spent 3 years in jail because of attempting to fraudulently transfer US$10.7 million via Citibank's computers.

Gordon Lyon

Gordon Lyon, better known as Fyodor, is a network security expert, open source programmer (Nmap Security Scanner), writer, and self-proclaimed hacker. He obviously likes skiing and eating low fat foods.

Richard Pryce

As a 16-year-old music student Richard Pryce, a.k.a Datastream Cowboy, was arrested and charged with breaking into hundreds of computers at Griffiths Air Force Base, NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. On the black and white photo Pryce somehow reminds me of Michael Jackson.

Bruce Schneier

Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security specialist, and writer. He authored several books on computer security and cryptography, and designed the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms.

Simple Nomad

Simple Nomad calls himself a hacker and a fucking dinosaur.

Peter Shipley

Peter Shipley is a real beauty. He likes to drink Grolsch, a German Dutch beer, wrote the first network scanner NetSweep in 1988 and is the inventor of Wardriving.

Wietse Zweitze Venema

Dr. Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer who wrote the Postfix mail system. He has also written security tools, such as SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit together with Dan Farmer.

The Root of all Evil

The beginnings of Microsoft. No further statement needed.

Update 1 - Even more Evil

Commentator bloid proposed that I should post some photos of myself to feel less grubby about this collection. I start off with a recent photo being surprised in a somehow embarrassing situation. To get photos from the 70's and 80's, I need to visit my parents, so be patient, I'll post them at a later time.

Geek Links

My Favorite Firefox Extensions

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Firefox is a great Web browser. It offers good Web standards support and is open source. As a Web developer who regularly creates templates/themes based on Photoshop designs, Web standards compliance is a very important aspect and one of the reasons I hate Internet Explorer. As a person who believes in the spirit of open source, it is also important that Firefox is open source software.

The speed of Web page rendering is not the biggest strength of Firefox, there are other browsers that render pages more quickly, but the most important aspect, that makes Firefox incomparably useful are the free extensions available.

Cool Firefox Extensions

Below I list the ones I am using for making my life as a Web developer easier and my browsing experience better.

Firebug

Firebug is an amazing extensions I can't imagine living without Firebug when developing Web applications. Firebug enables you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any Web page. I can't list all of the cool features Firebug comes with, but the ones that are most important to me:

Displaying which CSS rules actually apply to the currently selected HTML element and changing the values to immediately see the effects.
Debugging JavaScript, setting breakpoints, and testing code before adding it to a live site.
Monitoring load times of the executed HTTP requests and their order of execution.

If you are a serious Web developer, Firebug is a must have extension.

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension was one of the first I used to facilitate my work. It adds lots of convenience features in form of a toolbar. The following Web Developer Toolbar features are most useful to me:

Quick links to validation services for the currently displayed page.
Resizing the browser window to customizable screen sizes.
Disabling JavaScript, images, and CSS to see what a page looks like in a text browser or for robots.
Disabling referrer information in HTTP requests.
Disabling and clearing session cookies.
Displaying various information for the currently displayed page, such as DIV order, ID and class details, and many more.

The Web Developer Toolbar is an extension I definitely would not want to miss.

ColorZilla

I use the ColorZilla extensions for retrieving the hex code of the color value I point my mouse cursor over on the page currently displayed. This add-on offers more features, but I only use the one mentioned, which I find very useful.

Link Counter

The Link Counter extensions allows you to copy all links as a plain text or unordered HTML list of the URLs displayed on a page. You can choose all links, internal or external links only. Very useful for writing posts on .edu-Domains.

del.icio.us Bookmarks

I use del.icio.us to manage and access my bookmarks from any computer that is connected to the Internet. The del.icio.us Bookmarks extension makes it easy to add and search my bookmarks without actually visiting the del.icio.us Website.

Download Statusbar

With the Download Statusbar I won't see the default download pop-up window that comes with Firefox. It offers more features that I don't use, mainly because I have not checked them out so far.

HTML Validator

The HTML Validator extensions tells whether the page currently displayed validates as HTML or XHTML when taking a look at the page source.

MeasureIt

MeasureIt adds a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any element or region on a Web page.

Save As Image

The Save As Image extension enables you to save a page, frame, or part of either as an image. You can use this extension to create snapshots of the full page from top to bottom.

SearchStatus

Last but not least I use the SearchStatus extension to retrieve SEO related information. SearchStatus displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank (also affects it) and Compete ranking. SearchStatus comes with a keyword density analyzer, offers nofollow link highlighting, display of backward and related links, Alexa info, and much more.

Summary

I am sure there are many, many more Firefox extensions I'd find useful for doing all kinds of things, but the ones briefly described above suffice to state that Firefox is the best Web browser available. Fuck IE!

More on Clearing Drupal's Page Cache

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Recently I wrote an article where I explained how to clear page cache entries in Drupal when content is commented on. This time I want to clear entries in the cache_page database table when the following conditions apply:

A new node is created, set to published and promoted to the front page.
A published node which is promoted to the front page is deleted.
A published node which is promoted to the front page is unpublished.
A node which is promoted to the front page is unpublished.
A published node is updated.

When one of the conditions 1 - 4 applies the page_cache entry for the front page is to be deleted. When the 5^th condition applies the page_cache for the node itself is to be deleted.

To achieve this functionality in Drupal 5, I implement the hook_nodeapi() function in my custom.module and add the function custom_clear_front_page_cache() for deleting the front page cache entries.

The custom_nodeapi() function checks whether the conditions described above apply and deletes the cache entries by calling the cache_clear_all() and the custom_clear_front_page_cache() functions:

<?php
function custom_nodeapi(&$node, $op, $a3 = NULL, $a4 = NULL) {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'insert':
    case 'delete':
      // clear the front page cache_page entry if node is promoted
      // and published or deleted
      if ($node->status && $node->promote) {
        custom_clear_front_page_cache();
      }
      break;
    case 'update':
      // clear the cache_page entry of the updated if it is published
      if ($node->status) {
        $url = url('node/'. $node->nid, NULL, NULL, TRUE);
        cache_clear_all($url, 'cache_page');
      }
      // clear the front page cache_page entry if node is unpublished
      if (!$node->status && $node->promote) {
        custom_clear_front_page_cache();
      }
      break;
  }
}
?>

The custom_clear_front_page_cache() function first retrieves the value of Drupal's system variable site_frontpage generates the absolute URL for the corresponding page and deletes the appropriate entry in the cache_page database table.

By default the value of site_frontpage is set to node, which is also the case on SEO Expert Blog. The deleted cache entrie's cid value is http://www.seo-expert-blog.com/node. The problem is that there is also a cache entry with the cid http://www.seo-expert-blog.com/ with a trailing slash.

To also delete this entry in case the front page is set to node, I delete the cache entry of the URL that corresponds to the value of the global variable $base_url (http://www.seo-expert-blog.com) with a backslash appended:

<?php
function custom_clear_front_page_cache() {
  $front = variable_get('site_frontpage','node');
  $url = url($front, NULL, NULL, TRUE);
  cache_clear_all($url, 'cache_page');
  if ($front == 'node') {
    global $base_url;
    cache_clear_all($base_url .'/', 'cache_page');
  }
}
?>

Again, thanks to the geniuses behind Drupal, very few lines of PHP code achieve the desired functionality. One of the benefits of doing this, when caching is enabled, is that visitors who are not logged in, will see new content that is promoted to the front page immediately after it is inserted in the database.

Google is Hostile to Privacy

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Privacy International (PI) is a London based human rights group concerned with surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations. PI investigated privacy practices of key Internet based companies for six month for their A Race to the Bottom report.

According to the Interim Results Google is the worst threat to privacy of the search, email, e-commerce and social networking sites they inspected.

Google was the only company assessed as Hostile to Privacy. The justification reads as follows:

Track history of ignoring privacy concerns. Every corporate announcement involves some new practice involving surveillance. Privacy officer tries to reach out but no indication that this has any effect on product and service design or delivery.

Company Ratings

The assessments of all companies according to the interim rankings are listed below from best to worst regarding privacy.

Privacy Friendly

No company received this rating.

Generally Privacy Aware

BBC
eBay
Last.fm
LiveJournal
Wikipedia

Notable Lapses

Amazon
Bebo
Friendster
LinkedIn
Myspace
Skype

Serious Lapses

Microsoft
Orkut
Xanga
YouTube

Substantial Threat

AOL
Apple
Facebook
Hi5
Reunion.com
Windows Live Space
Yahoo!

Hostile to Privacy

The one and only Google

My 50 Cent

I wonder for how long the website of Privacy International will still be found in Google's index. Publishing such results must definitely be more evil than selling or buying links in Google's eyes.

Matt Cutts reacted with this blog post I haven't read so far. But from the title it's clear that he does not agree with the outcome of PI's investigation. What a surprise ;-)

Recently I wrote an article on privacy concerns using MyBlogLog, which has not been investigated by PI. I guess they would have received a Hostile to Privacy rating too, at least I think they deserve it.

What's your opinion on privacy and Internet services and do you think the benefits they provide justify using them no matter whether the companies behind are concerned with the users' privacy?

CSS Galleries: Free Web Designs for Download

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

A visually appealing website design will not result in lots of recurring visitors if you don't have good content. In contrast bad, old-fashioned, or boring designs may well be accepted by a loyal readership if you have good content. To have both good content and a good design is invaluable.

People who want to publish on the web do not need any knowledge of HTML, CSS and the like to get a site up and running. Many providers offer one-click installs of systems such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. Learning how to configure these systems will take some time but it is manageable.

As the headline tells this post is not about writing good content but about where to find good web designs that give your site a catchy look and feel.

Free Web design Galleries

All of the resources listed below offer free downloads, browsing and most of them search functions. Moreover there are previews for the designs, so you can test them in different browsers to see how they look and behave. When sites offer advanced functions such as filtering search results, I describe them briefly.

Open Web Design

Open Web Design offers an advanced search to restrict type of validation (various versions of HTML/XHTML strict, transitional), contrast (dark on light, light on dark), primary and secondary colors, and categories.

Open Design Community

Open Design Community is a group of Open Source Website designers. They offer an advanced search to restrict type of validation (versions XHTML strict, transitional), license (Public Domain, GPL, Creative Commons), contrast (dark on light, light on dark), width (fixed, fluid), Number of columns, colors, designers and free search terms.

CSS Design Templates

CSS Design Templates has sections for generic templates, Wordpress themes, Joomla, and Blogger templates.

Free CSS Templates

Free CSS Templates currently offers a small number of free generic and Joomla templates. Moreover they have sections linking design tutorials and about CSS techniques.

Free CSS Templates

Another Site called free Free CSS Templates. Currently they do not offer a search so you might want to use Google's site search feature. Currently they have 192 free CSS templates for download.

Open Source Web Design

Open Source Web Design currently offers more than 2000! free web design templates for download and live preview. Using the advanced search function you can set filters for type of validation (versions XHTML strict, transitional), whether images and CSS are used, contrast (dark on light, light on dark), Number of columns, and colors.

Solucija

Solucija is a site dedicated to information architecture, web standards and web design. They offer some truly professional looking free templates for download.

Open Source Templates

Open Source Templates offers download and preview of Open Source templates. Registered users can vote on templates. Templates with the highest vote appear on the front page.

Free CMS Themes and Templates

The web design resources listed above all offer generic templates for download. In this section I'll list some sites that offer templates and themes for Open Source content management, forum and blogging systems such as e107, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Fusion, phpBB, PHPNuke, vBulletin, Wordpress, and Xoops.

themesBase

themesBase offers templates and themes for some of the most popular content management, blogging, and forum systems, each of which has it's own dedicated section.

OSSkins

OSSkins of Joomla templates, Drupal and Wordpress themes for download and preview. Each of these 3 systems has it's own dedicated section on the site.

Drupal Theme Garden

Drupal Theme Garden is a live showcase of themes available for Drupal 4.7.x and Drupal 5.x. Themes can be previewed on Theme Garden and downloaded from the linked Drupal theme project page.

Wordpress Theme Viewer

Wordpress Theme Viewer offers live previews and downloads of Wordpress themes. You can set filters for Number of columns, colors, rounded corners, whether plugins are required and widgets can be used.

Summary

This list is not all-embracing, but the resources listed are impressive and definitely worth checking out. If you are a designer yourself, you probably find new sources of inspiration. Enjoy these sites and the great free web designs they offer for download!

Recommended Web design Books

For those who want to create their own unique web design with HTML and CSS, and don't know where to start, I recommend these books, I enjoyed reading very much. The links below are affiliate links pointing to the respective Amazon book pages.

MyBlogLog or How to Leave Your Footprints

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

I wonder why people don't care about privacy anymore or is it just the 15 seconds of fame you get when someone visits your MyBlogLog community or even your website? Many sites use a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows their recent visitors who have the necessary MyBlogLog cookie saved on their computers.

From an SEO point of view this is just another method to gain some attraction. That's why many people use avatars of barely dressed women with big tits or used animated gifs when they were still allowed.

As you can see in my main navigation I also have a MyBlogLog community. Actually I have four of them, but I am thinking about deleting my account, because I don't see any real benefits using such a “service”.

People logged into MyBlogLog who accepted the cookie mentioned above will leave their avatar on many sites, so anyone can see what sites they are visiting. Why would you do so, just to get more visitors for your own page?

When I was a child people protested against census for example, nowadays you leave contact information and the like anywhere on the web. What are the reasons for us to do so? I know I do it myself but I am thinking about it. What are your reasons and do you sometimes ask yourself why?

Clearing Drupal's Page Cache after Adding Comments

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Using Drupal's cache can greatly reduce server load, especially if you have lots of non-logged in visitors and many database queries have to executed before a page is displayed. When caching is turned on the HTML output of a page is stored in the cache_page table, so one query is enough to retrieve the HTML output for display instead of hundreds of queries on pages with many blocks, links, etc.

For logged in users pages are not retrieved from the cache but are newly generated each time they request a page. If logged in users post a comment for example they see it immediately after they hit the submit button, wheres non-logged users have to wait until the minimum cache lifetime of the page has expired.

If your comment and access settings allow non-logged in users to post comments and you have some kind of spam protection activated instead of moderating these comments, this behavior is irritating for visitors, because no message is displayed, that says something like “your comment will be visible in XX minutes.”

The good news is you can change that behavior quite easily by making use of Drupal's smart hook system. Instead of displaying a message like the one above I will clear the cache entry of the page that was commented on, so the comment is immediately visible for non-logged in users as well. Note only entries for that particular node in the cache_page table will be deleted per comment.

To do so I add some code to my custom.module implementing the hook_comment(). I write such a custom modules for almost every Drupal site I implement to achieve functionality that is specific to that site.

To also make sure that comments unpulished or deleted by the admin are not visible any longer for non-logged in visitors, the cache entry for that page will also be deleted in these cases.

Check out the following code snippet for Drupal 5.x to see how this kind of functionality can be realized:

<?php
function custom_comment($a1, $op) {
  switch ($op) {
    case 'insert':
    case 'update':
      $nid = $a1['nid'];
      break;
    case 'unpublish':
    case 'delete':
      $nid = $a1->nid;
      break;
  }
  if ($nid) {
    // retrieve the absolute url for the node
    $url = url('node/'. $nid, NULL, NULL, TRUE);
    // delete cache entries for that url
    cache_clear_all($url, 'cache_page');
  }
}
?>

That's it. If you want to learn more about Drupal's cache system I strongly recommend Jeff Eaton's article A beginner's guide to caching data.

CSS Design: Website Turned Blue

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Today I changed the design of SEO Expert Blog by replacing some colors in the CSS rules, changing the newsfeed icon, adjusting margins, paddings, and borders as well as modifying the body background image to get rid of orange and turn it to blue, which I like more.

The Web 2.0 Color Palette helped me choosing the currently used blue tones, which are Flock Blue [#4096EE], Mozilla Blue [#3F4C6B], and Digg Blue [#356AA0]. The new mouseover color for links is Last.fm Crimson [#D01F3C].

Actually, I am tweaking the design quite often. Recently I installed the nice jTooltips Drupal module by Psicomante which shows tooltips that can be styled via CSS. jTooltips integrates J�rn's Tooltip plugin for jQuery and Dustiniaz Sweettitles. I opted for the jQuery plugin, because I like jQuery and it is used as the JavaScript library in Drupal 5.x.

Tooltips are shown when links have a title attribute and the selector in the JavaScript code added to the pages is applicable to a link. I chose to only add tooltips to links in the main content and sidebar regions.

I think the new design looks good and I'll stick with it for a while. What do you think about the new look?

BRB Technorati's Witty Offline Page

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

For some reason the Technorati Website has been down for a while now. One hour ago the server could not be reached but they seem to be almost back and display a witty offline message you can see on the small screenshot below. Probably the best offline message I have seen so far. What about you?

Technorati Will Be Right Back

Update 06.06.07 - 00:46 (MET)

Now they are using this one. Think I have seen that before.

Technorati is borked right now

Things You Really Shouldn't Say

Sat Jul 4 15:26:32 CDT 2009

Actually, I don't much to say about Trevor Moore's Satire. He tells what your are not allowed to say if you reside in the USA, e.g. I want to kill the president of the United States. Even if you want to kill the president of the United States, it may be dangerous to say it in public. What I don't know is, if it is also illegal to take action. What do you think?

glumbert.com - How to Kill the President