My Geekdom

• Personal Blog: focused on geeky toys, cool programs, and such.
• OneStopAppSecurity.com: homepage for my security consulting company. Satisfaction guaranteed security assessments are available.
• OWASP.org's Top Ten Vulnerabilities, 2007 Version: I helped on the content and was Wiki editor for this document. It went live on May 15^th, 2007. as of June 27^th, 2008 it has 138,000 Google hits. That makes the US Declaration of Independence less than 4 times as popular as the declaration has 3.8 million hits. The 2004 was claimed to be the single-most read security document in the world and I suspect this one will be as well as there were 100 new hits added in the past week alone.
• Professional Blog when I was working for BEA Systems: focused on security in general and security in BEA Systems' products specifically.
• Resume: This focuses on my employee work. I have a resume more oriented to consultation on OneStopAppSecurity.com.
• Currently looking for full-time employment or a consulting job (see OneStopAppSecurity.com for consulting information).

• Web Programming: A search engine for help on many common Web technologies such as HTML, DOM, XML, CSS, DHTML, AJAX, etc...
• BEA Documentation Searches: Includes WebLogic Server documentation searches where you can focus on an individual version and a search of BEA blogs.
• Application Security Search Engine (links offsite to http://www.MyAppSecurity.com): A search engine for application security.

• Current non-fiction book: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel Dennett
• Articles in my reading queue: 
• Know your Enemy: Web Application Threats
• The Five Major Priorities for Information Security
• Current favorite video: Sorry no hints about this one, you'll have to check it out yourself. If you want to buy it (the book, not the thing in the video), you can help fund this site by using this link.

Cool picture demonstrating wingtip vortices with the help of some red smoke.

You will have probably noticed that many of my pages have one or more graphics looking like:

These buttons are a simplified interface into social bookmarking (if you don't know what that is, try reading my blog entry on social bookmarking - this page also has a good description). Each social bookmarking site has its icon and its own unique way of integrating your site with it. This leads to pages that can literally have dozens of similar looking "add this" buttons on the page, one for each such site. AddThis.com provides a single button that takes you to a page that allows you to select the social bookmarking site you prefer and then will add the bookmark to it.

AddThis has two major advantages. First, I don't have to keep updating my site with new bookmark buttons and deleting old ones as new sites wax and wain in popularity. Second, you don't have to look at all of those ugly buttons when you probably care about no more than one of them. Here is one set of buttons I found on a page I was looking at:

The only real disadvantage I see to AddThis is that it is two clicks to get to your bookmark site rather than one. Not much of a price to pay in my mind. But if you consistently use the same bookmark site, you can check a button on AddThis to tell it to so and then it will not show you the bookmark site chooser window again.

One really nice feature of AddThis is that it also allows you to add the bookmark to your browser. So, if you you prefer to bookmark pages by clicking on buttons on the page rather than using your browser's controls, you can use the AddThis button.

You will have probably noticed that many of my pages have one or more graphics looking like:

This is a connection to my site's RSS feed. Yahoo! has an excellent introduction to RSS, but, in short, RSS is a mechanism for getting updates from a website that you are interested. The website publishes a feed. You subscribe to the feed via a program called an aggregator (AKA: reader or viewer). The job of the aggregator is to take the entries from your feeds and show you what is new. The best summary is that RSS plus an aggregator basically lets you build your own customized website. 

If you haven't started using RSS, I strongly recommend it. Starting with an online aggregator is probably best. If you are a Yahoo! fan then My Yahoo! is probably not a bad choice (help page), and if not, I recommend the Google Reader. 

This is my new look-and-feel to my blog and homepage. I made the switch for a couple of reasons. First, I've been trying to play around with different web technologies (I've already blogged about Google Apps, and AddThis.com) and there's no way to learn something like using it. Second, Google hosed me and refused to help.

So how did they hose me, you might ask. Well the story begins about a year or so ago when Google bought Blogger. Since then they have made ongoing incremental integrations between Blogger and Google. As they were doing this small stuff, they were working on basically a rewrite of Blogger to make it integrate with the Google's new page web editing features (used in Google Apps, and Google Page Creator). They've run an extended beta and, sometime in March or so, started practically begging me to switch to it. 

I (and this was probably my mistake) decided to switch my existing http://smithline.net/mygeekdom blog to check out the new features. Instead, I should have created a new blog to play around with the new blogger and then, if happy, switched my site. That being said, Google did promise things such as full compatibility and easy conversion and such.

So, I switched to the new Blogger and was very disappointed. It is not that Google Page Creator is a bad tool, it just doesn't have the flexibility I wanted. It does integrate well with Google Gadgets which are growing at an incredible rate. But I really wanted more flexibility.

The big difference is that the original blogger works by having you basically create a page in HTML. The trick though is that rather than putting in specific data such as the title of your blog entry or your blog's data, you enter "template tags" such as <$BlogTitle$> and <$BlogEntry$>. This allowed for nearly infinite customization of your blog. On the down side, you were not just stuck with nasty HTML, but nasty HTML plus nasty custom tags (by custom I mean non-standardized - each blog engine has its own version of these nasty tags). That being said, I'm a geeky programmer and I preferred the control over the drag-and-drop-but-nearly-featureless functionality of Google Page Creator.

So I decided to switch back to Blogger basic (as I believe they are now calling the original version). This did not work. Blogger would not let me switch, nor would it even allow me to reconnect with my original blog (I had been hosting it on my own server and not on Blogger.com. When I tried to hook my blog back up to my own machine (http://www.smithline.net) I got this error:

I'm sure there is no other blog registered there as I own the site. My blog had originally been registered there but when I upgraded to the new Blogger, it was moved to a Blogspot URL. And I do own the domain and have for years. But, as I said before, I'm a big Google fan, so I decided to post on the blogger help forum - no answer. So, I decided to email the blogger team directly:

They never replied.

From my viewpoint, the Blogger team had strongly encouraged me to change to their new system, their system was broken, I used their preferred help system (the blog), then an alternative help system and never heard back from them. All this time my site was at least partially down. That was it. I washed my hands of them. I had been looking at MovableType.org's blogging system. So I switched. They, like blogger, offer hosting such via LiveJournal.com but I decided to self-host as I'm working on another project and will want the self-hosting feature on that.

Well, enough for now. I'll talk more about MoveableType, my new project (still top secret), and I've promised to say a few more words about my experiences with Google Apps.

MTEntry plugin: http://www.rayners.org/archives/blogging/movable_type/mt_plugins/entry/

http://plugins.movalog.com/enhancedentryediting/manual#Download

http://plugins.movalog.com/liveplugin/manual#Download 

Thanks for donating to me. I run this site out of my pockets and the kindness of friends (I beg server space from them). Not only does this help financially, I'm flattered. Please tell me what you liked about the site. While you are at it, I'd love to hear what you didn't like, what you'd like to see done differently, or what you'd like to see added.




Thanks - Neil

I fund this site with my own money, the generosity of my friends (I beg server space from them), and my own time. If you've used it and enjoyed it. Please donate. Even a dollar or two adds up over time.

Don't sweat it if you don't donate. I put the site up for you to enjoy.  

- Neil 

smithline.net now has a new look and feel. Read about the change here.

Outlook has a nasty habit of getting duplicate, or even sometimes triplicate entries for a contact. While during normal use this can happen, it is not terribly common (especially if you check the "Check for Duplicate Contacts" checkbox in the options window. But, I find it does happen at unusual times such as when synching my treo with Outlook and under unusual circumstances (eg: a new computer, a new treo, treo get's disconnected during synchronization) or when recovering from a disk failure or something.

This problem seems to pop up about every 6-12 months for me. I have over 1000 contacts as I never believe in throwing out an address until I'm certain I will never need it again. Now I'm a PDA user for 18 years and I've migrated my data from PDA to PDA so I've collected quite the collection. Furthermore, long before I ever heard of "tagging" entries, I was adding what I thought of as "keywords" to help me find entries (I have an abysmal memory for names). A typical case could be that one Dr. A, my primary care physician, recommends Dr. B, an orthopedic surgeon to look at my broken toe. So, in Dr. B's contact information (typically in the company name or role), I'll include the string "Dr. A orthopedic orthopedist bones surgeon broken toe". I might also put in a few words Then, if all I can remember is that I want the name of that dude who fixed my broken toe, I'll search for "broken" or "toe" and find the doctor.

The reason I mention this is that, when the contacts get duplicated, they pretty much never copy all those fields. So if I lose my keywords, not only might I not be able to find Dr. B's entry very easily, I might not even recognize who Dr. B is when I stumble upon the entry.

So I need a tool that is going to do some clever deleting and merging. I've looked around and can there are many such tools but they all cost about $30 and I can never justify spending $30 just to help me with a 1-time problem (OK, it is a recurring one-time problem but I always assume that this time is the last time). 

Well today must be my lucky day because I just found, not one, but two free tools. I found them both on Slipstick Systems site (the site is a must for Outlook users - IMO, among the best technical sites anywhere). One of the free tools is ODR5 (Outlook Duplicate Remover 5). A pointer to it can be found here. I must be honest, I don't know exactly where I found the other pointer on Slipstick but the site is here (curious that even Google's "link:http://www.anti-dupe.com" seach didn't help - learn about link: searches).

In any case, I've downloaded both and triend Anti-Dupe (I chose it because "A" comes before "O" and hence I found it first in my download directory). It seems to have worked brilliantly so far. And, with me not being willing to go through my 1000+ contacts by hand, it might be some time before I find out if it messed anything up (eg: next time I search for "toe").