My WordCamp NYC Talks

Authentication Hacks
My first talk was on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems, all about integrating WP with LDAP/AD/CAS and other directory authentication schemes, as well as the hacks I did to make that integration bi-directional and deliver new user features. My slides are online (.MOV / .PDF), and you can read earlier blog post [...]

Spell Checking

Matt demanded accent-aware spell checking for the WordPress spell checking plugin his company acquired earlier this year. And just a little more than a month later, After the Deadline delivered. Now Beyoncé, café, coöperate, and even my resumé look prettier.
Separately, Wordnik offers a new take on online dictionaries, and they just launched an API.

Backblaze Storage Pod

Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own.
The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes at [...]

Drobo: Sweet Storage, One Big Flaw

I’ve been a fan of Drobo since I got mine over a year ago. The little(-ish, and sweet looking, for stack of disks) device packs as many as four drives and automatically manages them to ensure the reliability of your data and easy expandability of the storage. However, Thomas Tomchak just pointed out one major [...]

The Bugs That Haunt Me

A few years ago I found an article pointing out how spammers had figured out how to abuse some code I wrote back in 2001 or so. I’d put it on the list to fix and even started a blog post so that I could take my lumps publicly.
Now I’ve rediscovered that draft post…and that [...]

SSH Tunneling Examples

Most of my work is available publicly, but some development is hosted on a private SVN that’s hidden behind a firewall. Unfortunately, my primary development server is on the wrong side of that particular firewall, so I use the following command to bridge the gap:
ssh -R 1980:svn_host:80 username@dev_server.com
That creates a reverse tunnel through my laptop [...]

Yelp: A Poster Child For Semantic Markup

Search Engine Land.com:
Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.
There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings [...]

iPhone’s Anti-Customer Config File

In March of this year Apple applied for a patent on technology that enables or disables features of a phone via a config file. The tech is already in use: it’s the carrier profiles we’ve been downloading recently. On the one hand this is just an extension of the parental controls that Apple has included [...]

Evil Evil klaomta.com

A quick Google search of klaomta.com reveals more than a few people wondering why it’s iframed on their websites. The answer is that the site has been compromised.
Unfortunately for the fellow who asked me the question at WordCamp, solving the problem can be a bit of a chore. Keeping your WordPress installation up to date [...]

Hacking WordPress Login and Password Reset Processes For My University Environment

ny university worth the title is likely to have a very mixed identity environment. At Plymouth State University we’ve been pursuing a strategy of unifying identity and offering single sign-on to web services, but an inventory last year still revealed a great number of systems not integrated with either our single sign-on (AuthN) or authorization [...]