Jen and Jon Johnson

On Nov. 30, 1939, the USSR’s Red Army crosses the Soviet-Finnish border with 465,000 men and 1,000 aircraft. Finland fought back but in the end submits to the USSR.

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Firefox, Wikipedia, OSX and many more… Stop by the news stand and see what other great applications made the PC World op 100 list. Looking at the top 50 it is preety clear that apple’s focus on usability and design has paid big dividends as well as projects developed in the open source “Bazaar”.

I just got off the phone with someone who works on the same campus I do. I had forwarded her an email which outlook sent as an attachment. She informed me in no uncertain terms that she did not open attachments. Now I know, obviously, that you shouldn’t open attachment from people that you do not trust. However, in this case, I feel like she is taking this too far. We work for the same institution, she was able to reach me on the phone, and I confirmed that I sent the email. By still refusing to open the attachment she has made a decision to give up on an important method of communication in order to feel safer. She clearly has no faith in her own virus defenses, nor in the enterprise level efforts to keep email safe.

When people give up on something like email attachments it is a sign that we have reached a very dangerous point where efforts to fight malware and spam must not only be improved, but user perceptions need to be changed. I know that efforts are being made university wide to protect users, but clearly the users do not. Once thse non-technical users loose faith it will be very difficult to get them back…. just think about how hard it was to get some folks on email the first time around.

On Nov. 29, 1950 Chinese communist forces overwhelm Allies in North Korea.
The U.S.-led U.N. troops begin a desperate retreat out of North Korea under heavy fire from the Chinese.

On Nov. 28, 1520 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan enters the Pacific Ocean after sailing through the “Straits of Magellan”, becoming the first European explorer to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic.

OK well the photo gallery is all done. I wasn’t able to use the WP built in Page functions because I needed to pass GET data and that was proving difficult with the permalinks and my limited knowledge of mod_rewrite. Instead I put everything to gether into a single application photo.php and I was able to import the WP functions and theme very easily. Very cool. I love open source! Everything looks good, so all in all a full WP install customized to fit my needs was easily accomplished in a weekend. Very nice piece of software.

Well I got rid of the papercrane so now this theme is called Golden Gate. I’m pretty sure that I have all the kinks worked out, so I hope that it works all around. Now all I have left to do is re-write my photo gallery to work within this theme… I’m not sure that I can do that within the WP framework as the static “Pages” which are available are not really up to the task in this case.

Well as you can see I have started development of my new theme which I’m lightly dubbing “papercrane” for the header image. So far I’m very impressed with the WP 1.5 theming engine and everything is coming along nicely. The only thing I would wish for is better commenting in the default files. Some function seem to be used in obscure ways. wp_footer() for instance is a cool bit of code which allows plugins to drop info into the footer, however it took me a bit of searching to figure that out.
Update: I now have the wp functions bookmarked so I’m moving a bit faster… anyway back to work.

Well I know have the entire site running over SSL which isn’t all that big a deal, but kind of bugs me especially since I use a server cert from CA Cert which will give most people a warning. I’m also having trouble with URIs dropping the www which for some reason gives a security warning in SSL logins even though I generated a wildcard cert for the whole domain, I guess that if now prefix is given a wildcard doesn’t work. I will have to look into how to set that up. For now I think this is it. Hopefully I will get time to do more work over thanksgiving.