Long, long ago, when I was first setting up my website at DreamHost, I wanted a way to store a personal wish list. I looked at the Amazon wish list, but it had one fatal flaw: there was no way to list items that weren't sold at Amazon or one of their partners. This flaw was enough to drive me out to develop my own wish list software. It's not flashy, but it gets the job done. But it, too, has some annoying faults.

Recently, while perusing Lifehacker, I ran across a link to this article that points to the Amazon Universal Wish List. Essentially, Amazon provides a bookmarklet to users, enabling them to save any product to an Amazon wish list! This new feature has me seriously considering whether I should switch over.

One thing I really like about the Amazon wish list setup is that people can purchase things for you without knowing your address. So folks who would like to support Born Geek could simply buy me something off my wish list, without worrying how to get the item to me. Another big benefit is that I no longer need to copy-paste the product link and information. With this bookmarklet, it's simply a two-click process to save an item to my wish list. Pretty sweet!

As I surf through various news sites around the web, I often enjoy reading user comments. On many of the sites I frequent, the comments truly add to the discussion and are a good for a belly laugh or two (or three). The feedback left on nearly every story at Gizmodo is hilarious, and visitors to Slashdot are often quite funny as well, making those my favorite tech news sites. Other sites can be hit or miss. Take Digg.com for example. Occasionally, some classic comments can appear on a popular story, providing some insight into the story, or more often, supplying a funny, sarcastic remark about the story as a whole. Other times, the comments are mostly juvenile and unhelpful.

Unfortunately, the comments on some sites are painful to read. Take my favorite gaming news site, Blue's News. Nearly every comment on the site falls into one of these categories:

• {Insert Game or Publisher Here} is Lame
• {Insert Game 1 Here} is Better Than {Insert Game 2 Here}
• Software Pirates Rule
• Steam Sucks
• OMG PONIES!
• Yo momma!

The target demographic of the site is most likely males aged 13 to 21, but you'd think that someone would eventually have something good to say. Are there no civilized gaming websites in the world? This problem doesn't just affect gaming websites. Places like CNN.com or our local news station WRAL are nearly as bad. It's a shame that discussions vary so much. Do you read the comments at various news web sites? If so, what do you think?

The Acid3 test for web browsers has been released. Drunken Fist has a number of screenshots that show the failure rate among the various top browsers. There are some really interesting results from the tests:

• Safari 3: 39% success (latest nightlies are up to 87%)
• Firefox 3: 59% success
• Firefox 2: 50% success
• Opera 9: 46% success
• IE 7: 12% success
• IE 6: 11% success

Safari is the surprising top dog in the list, but what I find most interesting is that Firefox 3 (which passes the Acid2 test) only hits 59% in the new test. I would have guessed that being Acid2 compliant would mean being nearly Acid3 compliant. Apparently, that isn't the case. It looks like web browsers still have a long way to go in the standards race.

As if we needed any more proof that CAPTCHAs don't always work, it seems that spammers have now successfully cracked the GMail CAPTCHA. A one-in-five success rate is being reported, and it appears that there are multiple bot-nets taking a tag-team approach in hacking the sign up process. This is particularly dangerous, since Google's domains are highly unlikely to be blocked by any website or ISP.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is (if I did I'd be rich), but hopefully Google will figure out a way to prevent this kind of nefarious activity from continuing to happen.

Slashdot is running a story on RoadRunner intercepting domain typos. My dad noticed this 'feature' a few weeks ago, and opted out via their preferences page. In addition to the Slashdot story, Ryan Govostes has an interesting article (written back in December) on the security holes lurking in this opt-out program. According to his post, one could wreak all kinds of havoc with TWC's poorly written page, enabling or disabling the service for essentially all RoadRunner customers. SQL injections also appear to be a possible line of exploits.

I got an email this morning mentioning the following:

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #XXXXX has a balance of $71.34 (including any charges not due until 2009-01-23), with $71.34 due (since 2008-12-23).

What?!? I renewed my subscription about a year ago (if I remember correctly), and I got a 2 year renewal, meaning that I should still have about a year left. Furthermore, I completely used rewards money to pay my bill (since I had it available), so my credit card was never charged to begin with. Thankfully, the credit card they have on file for me had expired, but I've lost all of my referral rewards! Needless to say, I was pretty upset by this. Then I found this post over at their emergency status blog: "billing issues". It seems like something went wrong, they know about it, and are fixing it.

I have yet to get my money back, and I have no doubt they'll fix the problem, but it bothers me nonetheless. This problem, coupled with the DreamHost hack seen back in June, are starting to concern me. Not to mention the fact that the server this blog is hosted on has degraded in performance drastically over the past several months. It might be time for me to find another web host. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Update: To their credit, DreamHost has corrected the issue.

Is Digg.com on the way down? I personally find myself visiting the site less and less, turning instead to Slashdot and Gizmodo for my news and entertainment. When I do visit Digg, there's little that I find appealing enough to digg. In fact, looking at my profile, I find that the last story I dugg was on December 12, quite some time ago. The majority of stories seem to be very uninteresting, or (more likely) stories that are already covered on other websites.

Even the Diggnation podcast seems to be degrading in quality. The show used to be solidly funny, but I find myself laughing only a few times per episode these days. I'd much rather have the higher grade content as found in The Totally Rad Show. Neither Alex nor Kevin seem to put as much effort into Diggnation as they once did, which isn't too surprising. Like the saying goes, 'All good things must come to an end.'

Can anyone recommend to me a secure (i.e., spam-resistant) contact form? I use the NMS FormMail script over at Born Geek, but spam is starting to pour through it. A replacement would be great, so any recommendations would be appreciated.

I've been out of town, so I know that this story is a few days old, but I really dig the new look at CNN.com. It's clean, sleek, and takes up much more screen real estate. The HTML doesn't validate, nor does the CSS, but I still think this is a step in the right direction.

Nearly a week ago, a malicious person or group of persons hacked into DreamHost, the company I use as a web host. The passwords for over 3,500 FTP accounts were compromised, and some customers found unauthorized changes to files or directories. My account was among those that got hacked, and the experience has made me a better computer user.

Having a password stolen is frightening enough, but my situation was nearly a worst case scenario. When I originally set up my user account with DreamHost, I naturally provided the password to be used with that account. This user account granted me access to the DreamHost web panel, FTP uploads, and access to the web server's shell (via either telnet or ssh). When I later set up an email account, I chose to use this same account out of sheer convenience. I made a likewise decision for access to my web server logs. So, in short, one username and password provided me access to five areas:

1. The DreamHost Web Panel
2. My web storage (via FTP)
3. My web server home directory (via telnet or ssh)
4. My primary email address
5. My server logs

Do you see the problem here?

As soon as I got the email that my FTP password had been compromised, I realized how slack I had been about security and panicked. Thankfully, none of my files or databases were corrupted (though I'm still taking a look through everything). I have since changed all of my passwords, and they now all differ from one another, something I should have done from day one.

I try to be as security conscious as possible, but I really dropped the ball in this area, mostly for convenience's sake. This is the first time I have been 'hacked' like this, and I'm actually glad it happened. The experience has motivated me to be more secure in my password handling.

Lots of people are jumping ship as a result of this, but doing so seems premature to me. The folks at DreamHost are being open and honest about the problem, and I really appreciate that. Any company that steps up and says "we made a mistake and we're trying to prevent it from happening again" is worth sticking with. At the very least, I've learned a much needed lesson.

Update: I forgot to mention that other web hosts were also hit by this attack (according to this post), so it wasn't solely a DreamHost issue.

I am growing increasingly frustrated with Google Maps. In the past month, on two separate occasions, Google Maps failed to find my intended destination. What really gets under my skin is the fact that Google's competition found each place without any problems.

Example 1 My family checked out the Clarksville Station restaurant in Roxboro, NC for my sister's graduation. It's a steak-house built inside of an old train station and a couple of dining cars from an actual train. It's located at 4080 Durham Road, Roxboro, NC. Let's see what the mapping services show for this query:

• Google Maps: Only locates Durham Road, not the 4080 address.
• MapQuest: Shows the location as expected.
• Yahoo! Maps: Can't find the exact location, but interestingly enough, centers the map at the exact location. Weird.
• Microsoft Live Search: Gets it exactly right.

Example 2 My car needed service recently, so I took it to Jay's Automotive, a repair place not too far away from where I live. They are located at 3510 Highway 70 West, Efland, NC. Let's see how the various mapping services do with this one:

• Google Maps: Wow. This is so far off, it's not funny.
• MapQuest: Again, MapQuest gets the location exactly.
• Yahoo! Maps: Again, they cannot locate the address, but the map is centered at the correct location.
• Microsoft Live Search: Again, Microsoft got it exactly right.

What gets me even more steamed is the lack of aerial (or satellite) images for example number 2. Google Maps only has images beginning at zoom level 6 (levels 1 through 5 are all "unavailable"). MapQuest has color images down to zoom level 3 (1 and 2 aren't available), which is very close. Yahoo! Maps has color imagery at all zoom levels, while Microsoft Live Search has images to zoom level 3 (just like MapQuest, though the image quality is very poor).

Google needs to stop spending money and effort on cheap gimmicks like their recent Street View (is that thing worthless, or what?), and instead beef up their location database and aerial photographs. I can't even see my house on Google Maps! All the other mapping services have it, so it's certainly possible to do.

Get with the program, Google. Until then, I think I'll stick to your competition (at least when satellite photographs are involved).

Last Thursday, Google unveiled their new universal search, complete with a change to the look and feel of their website. Now when a user searches Google, not only are web results returned, but other search results (e.g., news and product results) are also returned. What's most convenient is the fact that these additional items are inserted quietly amongst the web results, not directly above or below them. This new search paradigm is interesting, and it will be interesting to see if it holds on. I particularly like the subtle changes Google made to their look and feel, with that slick little menu bar running across the top of all pages. Having direct access to all the various search types is very handy.

Matt Cutts has posted a short collection of improvements he'd like to see over at Amazon.com. I agree with him on all counts. There are a number of areas that Amazon could do way better on; hopefully some of these ideas will see the light of day.

Judging by the comments on the post, it also looks like I'm not the only Amazon Prime junkie. :-D

An article over at Slashdot mentions the news that Apple, Mozilla, and Opera have requested the adoption of HTML 5, a successor to HTML 4 and XHTML, both of which are aging. The draft spec for HTML 5 is courtesy of the WHATWG, a group that formed for the very specific purpose of creating a successor to what we use today. It seems that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been wasting time working on an incompatible replacement to HTML and XHTML, a decision that I feel is destined to fail (backwards compatibility is a definite requirement in moving the web forward).

Adopting HTML 5 is a great idea (HTML does need cleaning up), but unless Microsoft climbs aboard, we might as well start building the HTML 5 coffin. As much as people dislike hearing it, the fact is that Microsoft owns this kind of thing. If it doesn't get into Internet Explorer, you might as well forget it. And I doubt that IE will migrate to something like this anytime soon. I mean, they just fixed their CSS box-model bugs! How many years did we wait for that? And after all that time, the rendering engine is still broken.

Perhaps Firefox will continue to take share from IE, giving the 'little' guys like Mozilla a voice in what direction to take the web. I've certainly got my fingers crossed.

An increasing number of links to photographs are making the front page of Digg, making an already weak collection of 'news' even weaker. There's a petition for adding a new photography section to the site, and that would certainly help keep these links off the front page. Most of the photographs that get linked to on Digg are nice, but none of them are front-page worthy.

On a photography related note, I will be making some upgrades soon to the photo album software I employ here at this website. Don't be surprised if the photo galleries are down for a while over the next few days. Some new features are coming, and I'm excited about them, so stay tuned for updates.

It looks as if Yahoo! will be undergoing a reorganization effort in the future. Both Matt Cutts and Greg Linden provide some interesting commentary, and there's plenty of other news on the subject.

I am not an expert on the search industry, but it seems to me that this was the only way for Yahoo to stay alive. If their recent TV listings overhaul is any sign of their current state of affairs, then I am ready to declare the company in shambles. The old TV listings page was light weight and usable; the new one is bloated, confusing, and very ugly. Although their primary competition (Google) doesn't have a TV listing service, I can assure you that if they did, it would be light weight and responsive. Google knows what users want; Yahoo appears to only know what they want for their users. That kind of direction can only lead to collapse. Hopefully Yahoo can turn things around. As much as I love Google, we need some semblance of competition.

I'm going to go ahead and call this one: Ctrl+Alt+Del has jumped the shark. What used to be a mildly amusing online comic has devolved into something so far out in left field, so detached from reality, that I'm not going to bother reading it anymore. The current story line is just a joke. Each character is a mindless, empty shell of what they used to be. It's sad to see the comic take this turn, but I can't say I'm surprised. In some way, I sort of saw this coming.

Google has apparently bought out YouTube, which is a rather surprising move. Greg Linden predicts that this will be the point in history where people say that Google jumped the shark. While I don't think things are quite that extreme, I certainly don't fully understand this acquisition.

Perhaps the Google higher-ups have insights that we do not. Or perhaps Google felt like dropping 1.6 billion (with a b) dollars for no good reason. It should be interesting to see what happens to YouTube as things move forward. Will Google Video be rolled into the YouTube look and feel? Or vice versa?

I know it has been live for a few days now, but the new design over at Slashdot is a most welcome change. The site had become quite crufty, looking more like a website from the mid-1990's than a hip, modern site of today. This new CSS redesign has made the site much cleaner, and I have to believe that they are now enjoying significant bandwidth savings since they've gone the CSS route (though their markup still isn't the prettiest in the world). Hopefully this face lift will boost the site's apparently sagging popularity. I for one, am most pleased with what they've done.

Even though the month of June has just begun, it has already been phenomenal in regards to web traffic over at Born Geek. On June 1, the folks over at Lifehacker.com featured my CoLT extension as their download of the day. The resulting traffic was simply tremendous; many thanks to everyone who came from there.

On June 5, a story was submitted to Digg about a tutorial discussing how to write Firefox extensions. Though the story link itself pointed to the tutorial over at Roachfiend, the second comment made on the Digg post pointed to my toolbar tutorial. The comment author remarked that it was "the best reference I have found so far..."

Residual traffic is also coming in through other sources: del.icio.us, diggdot, and others. I've already had a total of 8050 unique visitors this month, with over 1/2 of a GB of bandwidth served up. That's in comparison to the 18,952 visitors last month and 1.94 GB of bandwidth: nearly half the visitors and a fourth of the bandwidth! What's more shocking is that we're only 6 days into the month. Hopefully I can keep up with the demand. I hope to have a new version of CoLT out in the next few weeks, and perhaps a tutorial or two will pop up soon. As always, good times.