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When it comes to “shall” and “will,” Strunk and White gives the following example: “A swimmer in distress cries, ‘I shall drown; no one will save me!’ ” But a suicide says, “I will drown; no one shall save me!” And I say, “You two (pedantic) know-it-alls deserve to drown.” I mean, what about “Help!”

via Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good?.

Yahoo! has divested itself of Blo.gs and is shuttering GeoCities. Would this have happened in a good economy? No. Did it need to happen anyway? Yes. Yes. Yes. And for the love of god, yes.

It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:

• In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article. We’re unable to index articles from news sections which consist of one long page rather than a series of links that lead to articles on individual pages.
• If your articles are located in a drop down box, we won’t be able to crawl them. Google News is unable to crawl articles only accessible through a drop down menu.
• Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
• Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF format, although this content is included on Google Web Search. Our automated crawler is currently best able to crawl plain text HTML sites.

A few weeks ago I said I no longer needed the Wufoo embedding code that I’d put into bSuite. I was wrong. So I’ve taken another look, fixed the code from my old post, and coded it up into a stand-alone plugin. I’ve added installation and usage instructions to the bottom of the original post.

I spent some time looking for panorama-related apps for the iPhone and came up with the following:

• Panorama by Airshed
• Panoramas by Helix Interactive
• TripStitch by Byteslice Software
• Pano by Debacle Software
• Panoramascope by Phil Endicott
• PanoLab and PanoLab Pro by Originate Lab

I’ve actually played with PanoLab a bit (landscape, portrait) after seeing p0ps Harlow using it.

I’m a fan of Batcache, the Memcached-based WordPress full-page cache solution, but I’ve discovered that it ignores the content-type header set when the page is initially generated and re-sends all content with content-type: text/html. I posted a note about this at the WordPress support forums, but then I realized what the problem was: apache_response_headers() doesn’t return the content type, but headers_list() does.

The solution is to replace apache_response_headers() with headers_list() in the code, though headers_list() is PHP 5+ only, so it might be a while before we see a change like this committed. Still, I’ll shamelessly tag Andy Skelton (Batcache’s author) on it.

[Facebook’s guide to sharing][1] details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

> 
> As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the 
> 
> <meta />
> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the 
> 
> <link />
> tag for any source urls.
> 
> The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

 [1]: http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php "Facebook | Share Partners"

VoIP Now offers a few tips, Hackszine discusses VoIPong, and Mac VoIP mentions Cain & Abel and describes ARP poisoning to make a man-in-the-middle intercept.

The BuddyPress forums have a number of threads about handling invitations (two worth looking at: one, two), but no real solution has emerged. At the same time, there’s also a need for some means of confirming other actions such as password resets, email changes (both of those are already handled by WPMU, I know), cell phone numbers to receive SMS messages, and other actions that need to be confirmed later.

So I’m proposing a generic API to handle things like this. The built-in WordPress cron and ajax functions seem to offer a clear pattern for creating such an API: Simply, plugins and core code could register an action and a function to be called when that action is executed. The API could also store data to be sent to that function when it is executed.

Among the things I’d do with this?

• Confirm email addresses
• Confirm cell phone numbers via text message
• Confirm IM accounts
• Confirm Twitter accounts
• Confirm password reset requests
• Confirm invitations in BuddyPress

Anybody else interested?

There’s a WordPress has-patch marathon going on now and I’m hoping one of my recent patches gets some attention. I’m hoping to fix the user meta functions to allow them to accept multiple values per key, per user.

It’s listed there among the other has-patch tickets in Trac, and there’s been some discussion in WP-Hackers. Why not take a look?

A study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:

WiFi and college choice

• 90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
• 57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
• 79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
• 60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi on campus is an indication that a school cares about its students

WiFi and where they use it

• 55% have connected from coffee shops and restaurants
• 47% from parks
• 24% from in their cars

WiFi in the classroom

• 55% have checked Facebook™ or MySpace™ and sent or received e-mail while using their laptop in class
• 47% have sent instant messages to a friend during class
• 44% used Wi-Fi to get a head start on an assignment before a class was finished

WiFi and linkbaiting statistics

• If forced to choose, 48% would give up beer before giving up Wi-Fi

Survey methodology: “In conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wakefield Research surveyed 501 U.S. college students in September 2008. The sampling variation in this survey is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.”

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with unrar, the common Linux utility, but you can easily get it bundled in UnRarX, a convenient Mac OS X utility. Dig around and you’ll find it in UnRarX.app/Contents/Resources.

Adam had to remind me of this:

sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 port 80

Of course tcpdump can only tell us what other machines the computer is talking to, not what the conversation is. That requires a sniffer like Wireshark.

Here’s a simple way to tell whether the star you’re following is the real thing. Are the alleged celebrity’s tweets funny and entertaining, with a palpable sense of self-awareness and wit? Full on fake then, and by default, well worth following. Oh, and Twitter, if you’re still confused, the fake celebs are the ones who cannot afford a publicist to announce that the @fakeAccount everyone’s following isn’t really them.

via On Twitter, you’re nobody unless you’re fake – Technotica- msnbc.com.