Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • 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.

  • How do people on the internet know who you are?

    This came up when someone on a bulletin board I frequent sounded a little freaked when the moderators said that they monitor people by their IP address. The problem this board was having was pretty simple, actually. People would sign up with multiple accounts for various reasons, and then over the course of time, reply to themselves. The moderators were complaining that they couldn’t understand why someone would want to have multiple IDs, and one or two of the users were complaining that the moderators knew their IP address.

    Stepping back for a moment, I realize that I’m pretty young, but for my entire life there have been computers. The first home computers showed up around the same time I did, and I really have to take a moment to consider life without the personal computer. Back when I was in elementary school, my grandmother had a DEC terminal hooked up over a phone cradle/modem to her company server to do the books over the weekends, and when I wanted French toast, I’d use the computer to balance books and she’d cook. Personally I think it’s a small miracle nothing went wrong.

    When I was in high school, my friends and I had found the magic of on-line gaming. Text only stuff, or sometimes dialup to a bulletin board system and news groups. None of us actually had our own accounts, and email was a mythical monster we all wanted but didn’t have. Shortly there after came things like Hotmail (back before it was Microsoft Hotmail) and college, which gave us all our own email addresses and virtual identities. Those college IDs had access to a tool I rarely see used now, finger. Via a UNIX terminal (accessed mostly by telnet), we could ‘finger’ a username and find out who the person was, where they lived, and if they’d updated it, what they were interested in. This was nothing compared to what homepages and domain names give us now, but then it was the best thing. We were people. We had identities. We had communities.

    Not far into college, I started to wonder how safe it was to have personal information like that all over the net. My father was working in risk analysis and assessment, so I suspect it’s only natural my thoughts drifted that way. It was at that point I started researching how my identity was maintained and who had access to it.

    How do people know who I am? Bizarrely enough, the first image that comes to mind when I think about this is an old “George Burns and Gracie Allen” radio sketch. Their accountant has come over to drink and commiserate with George and says that Gracie had just been by to do her taxes. He tells George that when he (the accountant) asked Gracie for proof of identification, she opened her compact, looked in the mirror and says ‘Yes, it’s me all right.’ Were it only that easy. In the ‘real world’ I carry IDs with me to say that I am who I say I am. At work, I have a badge with electronic access and a picture ID, to let me into rooms.

    It doesn’t translate all that clearly to the virtual world, however. Microsoft, at one point, had a Passport application that let you use one ID all across their myriad of networks. This has fizzled. Yahoo! had a Yahoo! Wallet feature that is still in use, though even websites that use Yahoo! to sell their wares hardly use it, it seems. The concept of a single point of contact for peoples’ money is unpopular to many people, and this should be surprising. Everywhere you look, people warn you about identity, and I see the lack of faith anyone has in submitting their personal information to one location as a heart warming experience. At last! People are aware!

    And yet, as evidenced by my experience on the bulletin board in the beginning of this tale, that’s not the case.

    People didn’t like Microsoft Passport for the same reason I don’t have Quicken learn all my passwords for my bank accounts. They make me use an additional password to access my other passwords. It’s easier for me to just keep a spreadsheet of all my passwords and use that, then memorize a third (or fiftieth) password. Realistically, this makes sense. Either you have one password (or password schema) for all your accounts, which makes them easier to hack, or you have a thousand different ones and struggle to remember them all. There’s no easy win.

    So on that bulletin board as mentioned above, you have an ID and a password. On the best systems, the moderators have no idea of your password (YaBB’s Gold version, which is a CGI board, actually saved passwords in clear-text!). And yet anyone who’s visited an online community knows that there’s a certain amount of people on the internet who have fun making your life stink. They like to post rude things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, they insult you, they use language that makes the paint peal. Even if you don’t mind a bit of foulness, these are the people you look at in wonder. How on earth did they get out of elementary school?

    It’s the duty of the moderators to school those people in proper net etiquette. I’m not going to delve into what is and isn’t good posting, but my short comment on that is that it pays more to be as thoughtful of and respectful to your fellow posters as you would to someone you were talking to face to face. Listen to what they say and reply in an easy to understand manner. There’s a time and place for l33t speak, and you’ll know when it is (if you have no idea what that is, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A787917 and keep in mind some kid in England turned in a one page essay written like that, the f00).

    How you’re known on the internet is how the moderators can contact you and reprimand you for your wrong doings. Sounds fair, right? So how do they know? That’s surprisingly simple.

    1. Your ID
    People use IDs they can easily redeemer. I have the same account name at Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. If I was logged in as, let’s pretend, HintOfTheWeek_111, and I was making trouble, the moderator would likely run a quick Google on that ID and see if you were known elsewhere. When I had a hacker attack a board I moderate, doing that lead me to two notices right away. The first said that he’d done the attack before. The second included how to fix it. Very helpful.

    2. Your email address
    Most boards make you show an email address, at least to the moderators, when you sign up. This is, again, for accountability. They can use that email address and Google it as well, or they can just email you and chastise you. That’s my preferred method, by the way. A private ‘Hey, idiot’ always seemed more polite then being publicly brought to task on the boards where everyone can see it. Mind you, a lot of people sign up with freebie accounts, and never check them, which is why you end up looking at …

    3. Your IP address
    Every time you post to a bulletin board, every time you make an ID/Password on a website, check your web email (Gmail, yahoo, hotmail), every IRC session, online game, etc you log on to, your IP address is recorded. That’s the way the world works, and it’s the only way places have of holding people accountable for their actions. And if that scares you just a little, well good! You’re paying attention. Information is power, and you’re trusting the moderators to use that power wisely.

    On most bulletin boards, moderators would rather ban you from posting using your ID or your email address. The IP address is tricky. While, technically, it’d very easy to implement, it comes with some major drawbacks. Banning someone by ID or email means they can just make a new ID with a different email. Given how easy it is to make new email addresses, you can see how this is a problem for the moderators. The reason the IP banning is viewed as a last resort is that it causes a lot of damage to innocent bystanders. This has to do with how IP addresses are used, as well as what happens when people use dial-up and proxy servers.

    If you use dial-up, your IP address is going to change every time you connect to the internet. That makes it near impossible to ban you. If you use a proxy server (like the Northern people do at work), everyone shows up using the same IP address. You can verify this by getting a couple people around you to go to http://www.whatismyip.com/ and compare.

    This means if I, as a moderator, ban an IP used by a dial-up user, everyone else who uses that IP gets banned. And in all likelihood, the person I wanted to ban is on a new IP address and doesn’t care at all. If I ban an IP used by a proxy, everyone else who uses that proxy gets banned. In a way, it’s a no-win situation. The only solution for board moderators is constant vigilance. If two different user IDs with the same IP starts posting things that look way too similar, and are upsetting people the same way, then it’s probably the same person.

    What does all this mean for you? Now you know how you’re monitored, and in theory how to beat it. But that’s not enough. If the fact that the people who write viruses like Sasser can get caught isn’t enough of a hint, I’ll spell it out. Even if you’re using obfuscating tactics, you can get caught. To date, there’s no 100% fool-proof way of hiding who you are on-line. If you use a proxy server that used by a known troublemaker, you may find yourself unceremoniously banned. If you’re the bad person using the proxy, a court order can make them cough up your real IP address.

    Admittedly, there a many legitimate reasons to have two IDs on one bulletin board. There are many understandable reasons to use a proxy server. I’m not proposing a solution, but I feel that everyone should be aware of the reality of internet usage. In the age of heightened security concerns and identity theft, it’s important to know how some people are getting to know all about you.

    Before you get all scared, the amount of damage that can be done with your IP address, provided you’ve implemented the latest and greatest security patches from Macintosh, Microsoft or whatever other OS you might have, is minimal. They still need passwords and IDs to your computer, among other things. So if you’re essentially a decent person and you don’t knowingly break any laws, don’t panic about logging onto a bulletin board.

    On the flip side, assume that someone knows where you’re logging in from. It’s just safest.

    Helpful Links:
    What an IP address is
    Yahoo!’s explanation of IP addresses and privacy
    Determine what the rest of the world sees as your IP address
    What is ‘l33t’ speak?
    Home Computer Security

    PS: There’s a fairly humorous link I was given once, and it never fails to make me laugh. It’s a 1940’s style intro to posting on the internet: http://albinoblacksheep.com/flash/posting.php

  • Bugged

    While many Windows XP users are stressing over the major upgrade of SP2, Mac users got a tiny security patch, a small 10.3.6 upgrade, and a taste of our first, real virus. For years I got to brag about how my Mac would never get a virus and how I was safe because I didn’t have the flaws of Windows, or Outlook, or what have you. Then, right around Halloween, came the Opener malware script. It’s not a virus, but I’ll save that rant for another day. Opener has existed for Unix for years and since OS X is a Unix based operating system, it makes some small sense that Opener was adapted to a Mac platform. The benefit is that it’s a known entity and not all that hard to remove.

    Malware is software that does bad (mal) things. Opener is a shell script (similar to DOS) that attacks the root of your computer. Instead of emailing everyone you know, or deleting your user directory, Opener attacks your firewall, installs remote access software, plunks down a password decoder app (John the Ripper, of all things) and proceeds to take over your Macintosh. Pretty hefty for a first virus. Symantec calls it SH.Renepo.B, and their write up of it covers all its evilness in great detail.

    The blessing is that Opener has to be installed, either by hand or by another executable, and the safest way to prevent it from happening is to not install software you don’t get off a CD, lock your computer when you walk away, and use secure passwords. If you’re into filesharing, be it Limewire, Kazza or BitTorrent, be very careful. One of the ways this is distributed is in a PKG or DMG file, wrapped around the actually program you’re trying to install.

    None of this would have been possible if Macintosh hadn’t gone to OS X, the Unix based operating system.

    I hailed OS X as a fantastic leap forward for Macintosh. One of Mac’s many problems is the lack of software available. Sure, they have some of the best, native, handwriting recognition software ever (Newton 1.0 not withstanding) in Inkwell, and Microsoft 2004 is fantastic, but truly a fifth of the programs available for Windows can be found for Mac. By breaking Macintosh into the Unix world, suddenly Mac aficionados found themselves immersed in the open source world of Unix.

    Upgrading from System 9 to OS X was no mean feat and as with all upgrades, it’s not the sort of thing you should do on a whim. System 9 and OS X are as different as 95 and XP, just as System 7 to System 8 was giant Macintosh leap. The main problem everyone saw with OS X is that the majority of the software used had to be rewritten. To a degree, this backfired on Macintosh, as the prohibitive cost of upgrading hardware and software daunted a fair number of users. Apple built in a safety catch called Classic Mode, which let you run some (but not all) software via an emulator. I removed mine from my Mac after a year, having rarely used it.

    The other secret blessing was that Mac had been urging coders to move to a setup called ‘Cocoa.’ Cocoa apps had a fancier look and feel than the generic old school (classic) Mac, and a very different underlying structure. Microsoft, Adobe, and just about every major software company except Quark had jumped onto the Cocoa bandwagon, and many Mac users were pleasantly surprised at how much of their software simply worked natively on OS X.

    That was a very long digression to the heart of this tip, which is how to upgrade to Mac OS X.

    A lot of people are still on OS 8 or 9, and having been there, I tell you that you really need to upgrade. The actual upgrade process is not painless, and having heard the horror stories of XP SP2, I think they’re rather comparable. Unless you want to take your Mac to the Apple Store, you have to purchase the CD, and it’s not going to have the latest and greatest security patches. If you don’t have high speed internet, the upgrade will take a very long time (3 days on a 14.4 modem based on an upgrade I did last month).

    The first thing you have to know is that you must not, under any circumstances, simply throw in the CD and let it boot to the CD by holding down the magic C key. If your Mac didn’t come with OS X, the odds are that this will not work because your firmware is out of date. For most Mac users, this ‘firmware’ concept was new and unwelcome. I can count the times I’d ever done it on a Macintosh on one hand, and I’ve supported a lot of Macs.

    Apple.com has a great chart on which computers need an upgrade and where to get it. Surprisingly enough, the very new PowerMac G5s need an upgrade, while some iBooks from 2001 don’t at all. My rule of thumb is always to check if I need a firmware, as there’s no real way to know unless you memorize the list. If you happen to have OS X 10.0 or 10.1, you may have managed to upgrade without the firmware, and you’ll need to do it now to proceed. The catch here is that you have to apply these firmware bits with System 9. If you’ve already nuked your classic set up, you may be out of luck. Apple suggests that you start from System 9.2.2 at the lowest, though I’ve found you can upgrade from 9.1 in a pinch.

    Before you upgrade, remember to write down (or print) your internet settings. Yeah, I know it goes without saying, but having seen people call their ISP for tech support on getting a Mac set up at 3 AM, well, best to be safe. If you’re on dialup, go to Control Panels from the Apple menu, and then choose Remote Access from the submenu that appears. That’s where your ID, dial-up number, and password are kept. If you’re on DSL, check with your ISP, though I’ve found that my Macs auto-detect the setup very nicely.

    The next trick is actually upgrading. No matter what they tell you, don’t insert the CD and reboot, holding down the C key. While that might work for a new Mac, bought within the last two years, if your Mac is seriously older, you’re better off inserting the CD and clicking restart button from within the CD window that pops up. There are a few reasons for this, but the simplest one is that not all CD drives are created equal, and not all will reboot to the CD correctly. If you don’t start it from the CD, you may find yourself on a grey screen with a rainbow colored beach-ball, and a panic attack. Don’t worry, just reboot (unplug if you have to) and run it the other way.

    Once you get the upgrade started, go out for coffee. It takes a long time. Mac says 30-60 minutes. I say double it. After the whole thing was done, I still had about an hour or two of software updates, which was really frustrating. Even when I bought a new Mac from the store and asked them to run the latest updates, I found that I had a couple left when I got home. I chalk it up to bad timing, but it was really annoying. The software update feature’s been around since System 8, but I find it useful. I have mine set to check once a week (Thursdays, 7pm) and to download the update in the background. It slows my net imperceptibly, although I am on DSL, and when I tell it to install, it slashes the time for that considerably.

    Once everything is upgraded and done and configured, the actual ‘work’ takes less than an hour. Mac imports all your documents to their ‘new’ place, and if it didn’t, you still have access to the old sections. Most people I know did an ‘update’, leaving their old system files intact. I was the sort who backed up my documents and software, and did a full wipe the hard drive reinstall when I bumped to OS X 10.2. After all, I wanted the pure Macintosh feeling. The downside to that is you automatically loose Classic Mode, and any way of accessing the old Mac software. I didn’t find it a great loss.

    Mac has their own site all about why you should upgrade as well as one on why you should switch from Windows. I don’t think everyone should use a Macintosh, but I do think everyone who uses a Mac and can switch to OS X should. Mac’s aren’t for everyone, and while Mac pitches a hundred stories about people who love their Macs, I’m sure there are a hundred people who love their PCs. I’m not trying to start a flame war. I think people should keep an open mind. If all you want is email, word processing, and the web, a Macintosh may not be a bad idea.

    How to Upgrade: Switch to Mac

  • Hotlinking

    There are two questions I need to spell out for folks before I get into the code bits, and I’ll try to keep this as light-tech as possible. If you run a website, or have a free site, or just want to post your pictures on the web, you need to know this. If you have your own domain, you need to know this. If you post pictures to a bulletin board, you need to know this. Basically, if you use the internet at all, read this. I’ll let you know when you need to stop reading.

    Things everyone should know
    Things every webmaster should know
    Things every ISP should know

    Things everyone should know

    Bandwidth

    Bandwidth means, for computer users, the data transfer rate, or how much data can be transferred in a given time period. The easiest example here is how you access the net. If you use a modem for dial up (and I feel for you), then you use 14.4, 28.8, 33.6 or 54 kilobytes (kb) per second. To give you an idea how small a kb it, one letter (that is ‘a’ for example) is a kb, roughly. That’s not an exact science, but it’ll give you a rough idea. At 14.4, your email downloads at roughly 14 letters a second. Which is why dial-up sucks. In the world of computers, bigger bandwidth is better. The more bandwidth, the faster you can download the preview of the new Batman movie.

    In addition to speed, bandwidth also means how much data you can transfer in a given time period. This website has an allocation of 30 gigabytes of data per month, and we average about 5. My other website has the same allocation and averages 18. If I go over my data transfer for a given month, I can either pay out the nose for extra bandwidth, or I can let the site be shut down till the next month. The reason this is important to know, is if you run a website, every time a page loads, you use bandwidth. On a site like Yahoo! GeoCities, you get 3 GB/month. Yeah, you think that’s great, but it really sucks if you want to post things like a blog and people click here a lot. This aspect of bandwidth is the reason why most sites I design are low on the graphics. More graphics means more data transfered means more bandwidth used. In the case of data transfer allocation, bigger sites does not equal better, though bigger bandwidth is king.

    Then again, the bigger your site, the longer it takes to download, and the less time it takes for people on 56k to get pissed and tell you that you suck. Finding a webdesign that’s a balance between your dream design and speed is why people like me have jobs.

    In summation: Bandwidth controls how fast you can view the net from your home, as well as how much data a website can share with the world each month. Having more bandwidth is better all the time, but forcing users to use more bandwidth with image heavy sites and poorly coded web pages is not cool.

    Hotlinking

    Hotlinking is putting a link to someone else’s webpage’s graphic on your site. This is also called bandwidth theft. Directly linking to a website’s files (images, video, etc.) means that when someone accesses your website, they draw bandwidth from another. If you use an >IMG< tag to show a picture from someone else's page on your blog, forum post, or website, that's hotlinking. You're stealing their bandwidth. There is a case in which this sort of 'theft' is ethically permissible, though some webhosts don't like it. If you have multiple Yahoo! sites, and one is low on bandwidth, you can shuttle some of your content to the other site, and thus split up the bandwidth. This isn't always a good idea, as if it's against the Terms of Service on your host, they can kill you. Which is why you should always back up your websites on your on computer. If you own your own domains (like I do) and have multiple 'subdomains,' then it's okay to share an image. ipstenu.org is considered a different website that ipstenu.org/blog, so I have to tell my server it's okay to share between the two. But that's code geeky. What the common websurfer needs to know is this: direct linking to a picture, movie file, or any other content on someone else's site, unless it's a simple URL link to that site, is bad form, ethically asinine, and impolite. It’s akin to stealing electricity from your neighbor by plugging into their outlets.

    In summation: Hotlinking is stealing bandwidth from someone else’s website, and is considered to be unethical.

    Things every webmaster should know

    Now that you’ve gotten this far, we’re going into heavy geekitude. I have actually once had my site nearly shut down because someone was hotlinking to an image, and I had to figure out how to prevent it. This is the knowledge I share with you.

    Hotlink Prevention for Apache

    Apache is the de facto webserver for Unix. I don’t like IIS (Windows webserver) and so few people use Netscape’s webserver, I won’t even consider that anymore. Pretty much, I use Apache and if you don’t, I haven’t a clue how to help you.

    On Apache (and in theory this works on IIS, but as I said, I don’t use it), there is a file in the root of your html folder called .htaccess. This is an Apache directives file, or a config file, that controls how Apache handles the folders in the same folder as the .htaccess file. Your website has a folder, usually called public_html. Inside that folder you have things like a file named index.shtml and a folder named cgi-bin. Below is an example of what my webserver’s root public_html folder might look like.

        .htaccess    blog      index.shtml    images      cgi-bin   robots.txt
    folder1      folder2   foldern

    The .htaccess folder controls how the subfolders (blog, cgi-bin, folder1, folder2, and foldern) are handled. If I look at my .htaccess file, and you can open it up in your text editor of choice, I see this at the very bottom:

        RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://ipstenu.org/.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://ipstenu.org/.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://ipstenu.org.*$      [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://ipstenu.org.*$      [NC]
    RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

    This means that I’m telling Apache to turn on the mod ‘RewriteEngine’ and to only permit my webpage (the HTTP_REFERER) to access the images. The images I list are in the ‘RewriteRule.’ I could use variables like ‘jp?g’, but I know what the file extensions are for the files on my server, and I cheat that way. If I wanted to be really mean, and didn’t worry so much about my bandwidth, I’d change the last line to RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ images/nohotlink.gif [L] so that when you try and link to /images/jojo.jpg, you’d get some witty image about how hotlinking is wrong.

    I actually do that on my other server, but the gif I use is 2k so it’s not something I worry about. It also makes it easy for me to later go back and see who’s been hitting that particular GIF and find the mean people. Yes, I have been known to send nasty notes to them.

    Keep in mind, as with any .htaccess rewrites, you may block some legitimate traffic (such as users behind proxies or privacy firewalls) using these techniques.

    Now here’s the big problem. Not all ISPs let you use the Rewrite mod! Half the reason I switched to my current provider was hotlinking (the other was SQL). The rewrite mod (module, don’t you know?) “provides a rule-based rewriting engine to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.” It’s totally magic, and I secretly adore it. It’s complex as fuck, though, and I still don’t really get all that it does. I do know that it works.

    Things ever ISP should know

    You’re a fucking bastard if you don’t let your users use mod_rewrite.

    Was that harsh? Sorry, I mean to say ‘You don’t give a rats ass about bandwidth if you don’t let your users use this.’ I’m well aware there are security ‘concerns’ about what mean people can do with it, but let’s face it, if someone’s smart enough to figure out everything you can do with mod_rewrite, then you’re in trouble anyway. There is a performance hit as every request is checked against the rewrite rules, so if you’re running an image intensive site, this can suck. But the trade off between performance and bandwidth are, to me, minimal.

    Look, if a user have a website with images, and some dickhead out there is hotlinking to that user’s images, then you, the ISP, have to handle the bandwidth crisis, and the pissy user asking you why he can’t use this feature to stop the dickheads?

    And speaking of security, I can’t find any hack for it. So if the fear is ‘really smart, but really evil people utilizing my server for nefarious purposes,’ I think that should be pretty low on the list. I’d put ‘spammer’ and ‘virus distributor’ ahead of it.

    Hotlinking can act like a DDoS attack, and if there’s ever a way to prevent it, by G-d, do it! The mod takes five fucking minutes to install.

    SimpleNet, I’m looking at you.