Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • Why not homogenize?

    For another site I maintain, I use a total of six different coded products. Not one of the lot is actually integrated with the other, and no, I don’t use the same password between them. I’ve been having thoughts about merging the various tools into one vended support option, but as I look into the options, not one meets all the goals I have.

    Most of the time, when people look at a One Ring solution to keep all their products in line, they think of two aspects: usability and style.

    Usability means that, on the back end, you only have to learn one style of tools. We all know that no two product vendors produce the same style of code. Microsoft’s suite of word processing tools are, by far, the best out there, but Photoshop’s the place people go for photo editing. The interfaces between the two software tools is nothing alike. They’re so far un-alike it’s laughable. Hell, even Word on Windows is dissimilar to Word on a Mac.

    So for usability, people like things to look the same, or at least similar, so they don’t have to think hard when wanting to make a change. That makes sense.

    Style is more complicated. They want things to look the same. This makes more sense when you’re talking about a webpage, were you might have multiple background tools, but you want the whole site to look the same. This is called seemless integration. I call it style, since it’s a look and feel situation for the end use. Style points are useful. Style points keep people coming back to your site.

    In web software, which is as far as we’re going today, seamless integration is the thing. is content, a point most sites I’ve seen tend to miss. You have to have something worth reading, or people won’t read. Second? They have to enjoy the visit.

    A pox on all the sites with dark backgrounds and light fonts! That is not enjoyable! Most of us grow up with black text on white/light paper! We’re used to it, we like it, and our eyes have adjusted. Pander to us!

    There, was that too hard?

    Once you get a design, folding your multitude of tools into a seamless integrated design is fucking hell. Period. The majority of my sites are hand-coded, which means any integration was done manually. Over the years I got wise and used PHP includes, and then a PHP/SQL pastiche. But I attacked each part of the website problem as a separate entity.

    I needed polls, so I found good software. I needed an RSS feed, so I found one I liked. I needed a better gallery, so I picked on and so on and so forth. Doing things that way made extra work for me, this is true, but it also allowed me to tackle each new component as an individual. Would it have taken less time if I’d found an all in one solution? Yes, but it falls back on the problem that what I need doesn’t fall under usability and style.

    When I look for a new addition, I look for it as it’s own thing. A gallery needs to stand alone, without the rest of the site, and meet my organizational goals, my pretty URL goals, and my bandwidth goals. I’m confident enough in my l33t skilz to hack a system and make it look like how I want.

    So for me, a hacked up mishmosh system suite is what I need. Each tool is tailored specifically to my goals, and while it makes more work for me, the end user never has to deal with most of it.

    And if they’re happy, I’m happy.

  • Caveman Tech Support

    The tech support problem dates back to long before the industrial revolution, when primitive tribesmen beat out a rhythm on drums to communicate: (more…)

  • Stop repeating yourself!

    Almost a year ago, I blogged (and sent to a mailing list) a little ditty on how people know who you are on the net.

    One of the readers replied:

    : Admittedly, there a many legitimate reasons to have two IDs on one bulletin board.

    This might make an interesting follow-up article.

    Does it? Let’s find out!

    Some background information for the neophyte: Bulletin boards/forums have an ‘Admin’ who is the lord of all they survey. They run the code, generally the design, and have access to all things. Below the Admin are the Moderators, who have a varying degree of power. Some can only close nasty topics and some can do everything but blow the board’s code up. In other words, there are a lot of possibilities when we get into how much ‘power’ a moderator can have, so your millage will vary from board to board. Take this post with a grain of salt.

    Reason One: You’re The Admin

    In this instance, what you see logged on as the admin is not what you see as a user. For those of you at my office (and hi, I know you’ve found this page, I won’t tell anyone you read it from work, but I can see your IP address!), this is the same reason we have some people as admins and some as users. I’ll step it back.

    A user can log in, read posts, post a message, maybe send someone a private message. Just the simple stuff. That’s all they need to do, after all. Read and communicate. That’s all a user needs to do.

    An admin, however, can see the code, gets different error messages, and has control over not just the code, but the database with all the personal information.

    Now, as an admin, you also get a very different layout for the board, and when you’re designing things, it can be a problem. You know that what you see as an admin doesn’t match Joe User, so you make a second ID that’s just a user, and use that to test things from a user’s perspective.

    Reason Two: You’re The Admin

    No, I’m not repeating myself.

    If you’re the admin, sometimes you want to just be you. Having a second ID with which you can catfight with the best of them sometimes takes a load off people’s minds. It makes you normal and people have normal conversations.

    Reason Three: It’s a gaming board and you have multiple characters

    Some bulletin boards have roleplaying adventures and you can interact as different characters. Hence, different IDs.

    …

    Crap. I ran out of reasons.

    Okay, so there aren’t a whole lot, but there are some.

  • Why Wiki?

    I like the site I have for my RPG a lot, but it’s very big and often unwieldy.

    So I started to think about the ways I could simplify it, make it easier to use and easier to navigate. The first idea I had was a Wiki. I want to point out that when I started with a CMS (which I still love for what it is), I spent a lot of days going ‘Oh, my head! I’ll never get this.’ So I expected the same here.

    What ended up happening, over the course of a month, was the realization that while the CMS is a little pain in the ass to navigate, it works better for what it needs to be. Everyone who uses it has a blog, and I’ve put so much effort into customizing it that really, the only part that would be helpful is if the ‘encyclopedia’ for the site was a Wiki. At that point, however, it wouldn’t be ‘linked’ with the CMS I have so I’m fucked. Not in a bad way, just in the ‘this works, it works 90% of the way I want, and there’s no reason to screw with it.’ If Slayer ‘reboots’ and we start a new game, I may try something different. CMS was an experiment, and it was successful.

    But … I do have another site that might benefit from an encyclopedia. About 150 individual pages of information, contextual and informational. Okay that was a little redundant, I’ve had a long week. But still 150 pages. And maybe, just maybe, updating it all, by hand, alone, is a bad idea. After all, there’s stuff I’ve never finished because I don’t have gobs of free time. And as proved by the forums on that page, people want to talk and help. So how can I combine that with an ‘easy’ to use back end, and a not-terrifying to use front end?

    Wiki.

    Okay, so it’s got a crappy admin side and if you’re not a coder you’re going to cry setting up MediaWiki, which I did and I am one. And some users are skeptical about how to create pages and … it’s been 2.5 months and of my 32 users (yes! 32!) four people (besides me) have added information. Hell, having one person add information is helpful to me, so I call it a success.

    There are 1314 total pages in the database. This includes pages about the Wiki, minimal “stub” pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 291 pages that are probably legitimate content pages. Of the 291 pages, 150 or so came over as a direct copy/paste import (and some clean up), and 140 or so were added special to the wiki because I had more ‘flexible’ room.

    That flexibility is what drove me to Wiki. You know, when you make a new website, it’s a pain in the ass to link everything up the way you want it, and you have to come up with some sort of structure that will make sense to everyone and you hope they can follow it?

    Wikis piss that out the window and laugh at your ancestors.

    That’s a joke, son.

    Wikis aren’t linear. Wikis are fluid and organic. They grow in the direction they grow because there is information to grow in that path. Not to say there’s isn’t a rhyme and reason to the site, but a Wiki accepts the fact that things criss-cross and double back and take weirdo curves and twists when you’re not looking. Of my 291 pages, only 61 don’t link back to something else, and even so, I’m taking the time to go through those pages and cross-reference. Yes! That pain in the ass, time consuming project of ‘Doesn’t X refer to something over on Z?’ A Wiki links all those up with a simple, easy code [[Page Name]]. Thats it.

    Okay, if you’re an HTML coder (guilty), your brain has a moment of pain looking at this. Another fsking pseudo code language to learn? First HTML, then BB code and now Wiki Code? 90% of the HTML I’d want to use work on a Wiki. The only ‘argh!’ moment I have is with headers, and even then it was easy to fall into that code mind-frame.

    So what did I learn?

    To run a Wiki you have to let go of control. And that’s really hard. If you have a ‘normal’, let’s say traditional, website, you have a small number of people who can update the site. You have a set design the site maintains. You have templates and standards and such. For a Wiki, you have to step back and say ‘This is the site, this is how it looks. Please add more information, but we’d like to keep the feel we have.’ Yeah, you can follow along behind people and clean up what they do (some people use wacky grammar, others use l33t speak), but essentially you’re giving room for their voice.

    You can’t take that away once given.

    Well, you can, but you’d be an asshole.

    Running the Wiki has made me a ‘kinder’ person, sort of. I’m more laid back with people who post in perplexing grammar on the forums. I’m not going to be a firm rule-mistress. Okay, maybe on the Wiki I’ll be a little more the enforcer, but there’s no reason not to give people chances.

    Of course, I still can’t figure out what the hell “I love to but deberia to allow him grissom sara to love it also” means!

    By the way, why did I choose MediaWiki, over something more use friendly like TikiWiki or something ‘prettier’ or something easier to hack? Well, I actually tried out a handful of Wiki’s before I settled on this one. I’d load them, make a couple pages, toggle around and see what I thought. The one I picked was the one that felt right to me. You might think differently.

  • Are we getting smarter?

    A recent study said that 81% of computer users had changed their web surfing habits in order to avoid spyware and malware. My buddy, Beebear replied ‘And the other 19% are AOL users.’

    Taken at face value, that number seems to be a little too high. I agree, that just about everyone I know has changed their browsing habits to avoid spyware. All the Mac users I know told me ‘I haven’t touched IE since OS 10.2.’ I suspect Ipstenit was a bit of hold out, but when I upgraded her to OS 10.3, I took IE off her computer. She was a Netscape Fan, and never liked IE in the first place.

    The browser wars, though, really are a peculiar place. Here’s IE, the most prolific browser known to man (that works better if you say it in a booming ‘g-d’ voice), and it sucks donkey balls. The GUI is acceptable. It loads pages, it makes HTML look decent. What more could a person want? Well, let’s look at Safari, which is my Macintosh browser of choice.

    1. Spell Check.

    I have an already included spell check tool, so when I post my blog, I can right-click and correct typos. Also, the tool is tied into my system wide dictionary, so everything that uses it knows ‘Ipstenu’ and ‘blog’ are real words, thanks. There’s a tool called IE Spell that can do this for IE, but it’s not exactly the same. The Mac one can be set to remain on and it’ll underline in red squiggly lines the unknown/misspelled words. Just like Word. Hmm. And IE is missing this?

    2. Easy Searching

    I have a search field on my menu bar. I can type in ‘The life cycle of documentation,’ hit enter, and away I go. Google has a toolbar you can add in to IE and get this done, but again. It’s built in on the Mac.

    3. Tabbed browsing

    One window, six websites. Thank you and good night. Supposedly IE 7 will include this, but reading the IE blog off MSDN leads me to think it’ll be pretty basic. They suggest a couple third party apps that can put in tabbed browsing on IE 6, but one is $15 and the other is free but appears to be it’s own application (that is, a new browser).

    4. Popup Blocker

    I hate popups. I despise them with the fiery passion of a thousand burning nuns. Okay? Popups, popunders, and similar IN YOUR FACE advert scams piss me off. They need to die. Safari? Menu bar, Safari, Popup Blocker. Click, done. IE? Download something like Google’s toolbar and then you can have it.

    Of course, Microsoft sees all this and says ‘Look at how expandable our browser is!’ To a point they’re right. I like IE because you can add on to it. The problem is the items I want to add on should already be there. Microsoft’s fatal flaw right now is complicity. They assume that people who are using IE aren’t going to be buggered to change their habits and get a new browser.

    Microsoft needs to look at that 81%.

    And before you say Apples/Oranges about the Safari thing, with the exception of the spell check, Firefox does all that too. Firefox also has an easy to implement spell check, and yes, I use Firefox on my Windows PC, and IE only when I have to.

    Is Microsoft going to ‘lose’? Eventually, maybe, possibly. It’s hard to say. Do I care? Not as much as you might think. I love Macintosh because it works for me. It lets me work without muss or fuss and it lets me geek when I want to. That’s really all I want with a computer. I do like certain things about Windows. I like the squareness of it, sometimes. It’s obvious that my Windows Machine is to get the job done. But it’s John Wayne. My Macintosh is ‘How can I help you?’ Polite, well groomed, funny. It’s the Fab 5 from Queer Eye.

    Neither one is better than the other, any more than one cell phone is better than another. They all have different functions, and their form is best suited to the user. I think custom PCs should be the way to go, for the users. Make a PC the way someone wants to use it, and they know where to come for fish! I mean, they’ll be likely to come back.

    As for Apple? Well. I love them, I use them, and my Mac is me beloved. I prefer the way it’s handles pop-up alerts. I like being able to hide the geeky UNIX underpants and I like being able to access said panties. I don’t think it’s perfect. Apple’s making a push against Office, with Pages, but frankly after using Pages for a month, I’ve switched back to Word.

    The perfect world for me is an OS that can run anything I need (preferably made by Mac) and my resultant documents/output is compatible with everyone I need to work with.

    Hey, wait … I have that with my Macintosh.

  • Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

    Who watches the people who watch what I do on my computer?

    Like many corporations these days, my office has instituted a ‘no internet for personal use, thank you’ policy, which has trickled down to no use of personal email. I won’t begin to snark about how I feel there, since frankly, I can see both sides of it and I know it’s a matter of me not liking it.

    I still spend a significant time on the net, but frankly, I’m looking up information about the desktop, security, etc. And if I get yelled at for it, well, I’ll have to ask what they mean by ‘for work only’ since I think I’m not causing much harm and I’m still ass kicking my projects.

    Who keeps an eye on the people who are monitoring my internet usage?

    Who keeps an eye on the people who monitor the databases where my personal information is kept?

    The other day, while venting about something stupid at my office, we talked about the latest security breach at a major company (Lexis-Nexis). Personal information was shared all over the place. Credit card information, you name it, it was hacked. And no one knew how much stuff was snagged or who was affected.

    Pause and do that golf clap as you say ‘… Well done!’

    I’m considered a mild paranoid (I don’t think everyone’s out to get me, but I keep abreast of the issues in personal privacy/security). I was asked if I was worried. No, no I’m not. Because I know for $8 or so, I can dig up the personal information, credit card history and rating, criminal records, drivers information, and a slew of other things. And yes, I did mean $8. That’s the second lowest rate I could find for paying a PI type website to snoop. I’m pretty sure if I asked at my local spy shop- excuse me, locksmith- I’d get a better and more secure rate.

    Don’t think for a second I’m going to give my credit card information to a website that specializes in, oh, selling information. That’s right up there with Tossed Salad Man and shooting my own ass. But. I also tossed the idea of becoming a licensed PI for Illinois just to have access to the cool tools I know Veronica Mars uses. Yes, it’s a TV show, shut it. I’m just saying it would be cool to be able to pull up that information when I wanted to. For a monthly fee.

    But that has it’s own problem. What if you, like this poor woman in Florida had your Sheriff get your personal information from the DMV? Okay, so he could have gotten the information he wanted off of Google. Instead, he used a very legit tool for a squidgy reason. It’s not illegal per-say, but maybe it should be.

    What’s to stop a bank teller from looking up a neighbor’s bank account? What stops Mrs. Landingham my IRS person from taking my personal information and ripping me off?

    Social conscience.

    And we all know how reliable that is.

    I’ve known for years that anyone who knows my name can find out a shit load about me. A stalker could find my address and phone number, regardless that the latter is unlisted. Hell, I own a domain, and I know exactly how easy a whois would be for anyone looking for me.

    Not that I was a hell of a lot safer pre-internet. A couple phone calls, a trip to the DMV, and bam. After all, it has to be legal for a Repo Man to, well, repo. So the information must be accessible. It’s only logic. Next go look at colleges. Every last stinking one I’ve been to uses your SSN as your student ID. Easy to remember for the student. Easy to tie into databases for the school. And when I got a bill? Damned if my SSN wasn’t printed right there on my bill. Everyone knows (or should) that tampering with mail is a federal offense, but let me walk you through how my mail was delivered on my high school campus.

    1. Mail is sent to a PO Box
    2. Mail is picked up by a teacher
    3. Mail is sorted into two piles ‘Teacher’ and ‘Student’
    4. Student mail is put in a box
    5. Student assigned to mail takes the box to our unlocked, public mail boxes and sorts
    6. Students pick up mail

    We’re trusting three key elements here: the guy at the PO Box, the Teacher who gets and/or sorts the mail, the student who ‘delivers’ the mail.

    Yeah, your personal information has never been secure. It’s just faster to find now.

    It’s weird, but I’m going to bring this around to the Pope, so hold on for a sec.

    Bruce Schneier wrote a great article about Hacking the Papal Election, when he explains the ins and outs of how they vote. The short story is this: Hacking the Papal election is nigh impossible! The entire thing is manual, so no hanging chads or manipulated computers. Only the Cardinals are allowed in, and it’s not like you can play dress up and sneak in. You have to walk up, in front of everyone, to vote, and since the votes are counted twice and chucked if there are too many or too few, you can’t stuff the ballot. The only places where it might be easy to change votes is when the votes are counted the second time (the person could slight of hand a vote, though given the dresses- I mean robes– they wear, it’s hard), or when a transcriber writes the vote for a Cardinal who’s unable to write. And if you get caught doing that you get excommunicated. So not worth it.

    I bring this up because it goes back to social conscience. What ever you think about the Pope and Catholics, you can probably agree with me when I say that these Cardinals really want to do the best job they can. They’ve got so much shit thrown at them, from JPII being so damned popular to sex abuse and STDs that they need to get some positive spin on them. In their case, it’s freakishly reliable that they’re going to do the best they can. Now, I do think there’s a lot of bullying, bribery, promised, etc going on pre-vote, but I expect that. “If you vote for Cardinal Glick, I’ll tell everyone about the hooker you had in your room when we were just priests.” See, I’d totally do that shit, and you know they would too. I know the votes are secret, but you can’t expect me to believe people won’t try and persuade each other.

    How does this reflect on security and your personal information?

    It’s indirect, I admit, but follow this: Personal information which is compromised leads to identity theft, which can be used to commit voter fraud, which can re-elect George Bush, but which can’t be used to make an American the Pope.

    Yeah, you were worried about your money.

    Okay, look, here’s the real point of all this: You’re not safe. You never were and you’re really never gonna be. There are things you can do, starting with paying better goddamned attention. Get an email that looks iffy? Delete it. Buying stuff online? Make sure it’s from someone you can trust. Have a different password per site that you use in conjunction with your money. And be careful.

    You know that you can’t rely on the social conscience of others to not fuck you over, so all you can do is keep a close watch on what you do.

    After all, how is it any more secure to pay for your dinner with a credit card than it is to do so online? They take your card to a back room, run it through the card scan to make sure you can pay, and bring it back. Shit, they could photocopy it in that time, and they have an example of your signature!

    Which is why all my cards say ‘Ask for ID.’

    And people so rarely do.

    I don’t have the answers, but if this blog has scared you then I’ve done my job. Be aware.