OpenOffice.org in my life

I just wrote in an email

Alternatively I believe that Excel has a csv import wizard, but I forget how to get it working (I haven't used Excel in over a year).

I feel very happy today and I think you should feel happy too. Pathauto is a great module that has served millions of visitors to thousands of sites very well over the years. But Pathauto, along with all of Drupal, is getting a little bit better!

Enter Token Module

At the very end of 2006 Jeff Eaton started work on a token module which took the pattern logic out of Pathauto into its own module (and extended it a bit further). All those little strings of text like [title] and [cat] and [user] which Pathauto uses were all placed into a separate API. This provides two great benefits - first, it makes them available to other modules such as the custom breadcrumb, autonodetitle and other modules. Second, I instantly recognized the personal benefits from this decision because the token parsing part of Pathauto was the source of most of the bugs. I thought that if I outsourced the patterns I'd also outsource the bugfixing! In the end I'm now a co-maintainer of the token.module providing some bug fixes, features, design reviews for the module. At least I have a partner in crime on the issue and at least the work can benefit all of Drupal instead of just Pathauto users.

Call to module developers

This call is two fold:

First, to modules that implement pathauto hooks: now's the time to start implementing the token hooks. This will open up your module to interaction with a much broader set of modules and is a much better long term solution than the Pathauto hooks. To learn more about token or discuss it's use, join the tokens group on groups.drupal.org.

So, privacy. That's kinda an important thing right now. As we go around the internets we leave all sorts of information about ourselves online. That information is valuable. No, I mean really valuable. Even if you don't submit your personal information (like name, or address) to a website you are still leaving providing private information just by visiting a site. Don't believe me? Look at this press release from hitwise about real estate. Notice anything? Like how visits to real estate sites are a leading indicator of home purchasing behavior. Yeah, your visits to sites, or "clickstream" is a predictor of what you think about and what you are planning to do. Looking for a house - you visit a real estate site. Looking for a new job - you visit a job site. Looking for...you get it. Your clickstream is a mirror of you - even without personal information associated with it.

Big Evil Google

What is the company that concerns you most when it comes to privacy? It's GOOGLE right? Man, their search is so good. Their search is good and their information awareness is so strong and not only do they have my clickstream (cause I only find sites through their site and they know what I click) now they also have my email, spreadsheets & text documents, blog, photos, credit cards & address - shoot, they have everything too. Organized. Segmented. Cross referenced. Searchable. Um, yikes.

Privacy of your clickstream

Fon's continuing struggles in the US Market

I've remained pretty unimpressed with FON recently. Their expansion in the USA has gone in fits and starts of free giveaways that seem to result in basically no growth of their network. We can no longer see the real numbers after the inaccurate data problems they had...

However, I have kept a close eye on the statistics for certain areas and have noticed two consistent situations:

1. Growth of active hotspots in the areas I watch on the FON Maps is stagnant or declining
2. The majority of access points are still in suburban areas - the freeloading "Linus" model is more popular than the Bill

This isn't a real surprise. Their model rewards people who live in low density zones and sign up simply to get access to free routers. The result is a low quality network. On a recent trip to upstate New York I was amazed that there were basically no routers in the towns I visited and those that existed were in the middle of nowhere. The US is a spread out land, and the availability of the Linus model just might not work here.

Fon's deal with TimeWarner

So, I'm writing from Drupalcon Is Drupal an Enterprise Solution? which is an interesting and awesome presentation.

Web application security

Secondly, Rasmus this morning had some great quotes this morning. jeff captured one that I really liked:

When I'm surfing around to find hackable sites, I love to find hand-rolled CMS systems. I know I can hack them in a heartbeat. If I see a site is running on Drupal, or Joomla!, or another CMS? I know there may be a hole, but as soon as they fix that hole, everyone using them is safe.

But there was another fun one from Rasmus. He was talking about his XSS XSRF scanner and how about half of the major banks that he scanned with it had major security problems. He wanted to release his tool as an open source tool, but was concerned about the frequency of the bugs it found and how many companies would be exposed overnight with problems that would ruin their banks/customers. That would be sad. So, as he discussed this he was like "yeah it would be nice to release to the world because it works pretty well but..."

"I didn't want to be the guy that released the tool that broke the whole web."

Yeah. I think we all agree that we don't want to be "that guy."

Open Source in the "enteprise"

Someone from the audience (who works for the US government) dropped this quote:

"build" vs. "buy" vs "assemble and extend"

That's really valid and I hadn't heard it before. "build vs. buy" we're all familiar with. But where does open source fit into that equation?

Getting More Folks to Adopt Drupal

Final quote I just heard was in response to the question of how do we get everyone to drink the Drupal "Kool-Aid"?

Chant! Chant! Drink! Die!

So, not many people understand programming. Here's a funny/interesting way to describe programming in terms of cooking. I like it.

Similarly, I once heard an analogy about asking a software engineer to build a bridge from San Francisco to Hawaii. A software engineer would say "no problem" and then do:


while (notInHawaii) {
buildbridge();
}


Well, I didn't have any idea two months ago when I first wrote about www.angieslist.com that it would have quite such a strong reaction. There have been about 50 comments on the post and it has been growing daily. Yikes.