Geeking Out

Friday at work I downloaded Firefox 1.5 from getFirefox.com. After the download window opened, I noticed the mirror chosen. Kinda funny.

On this site I am using version Gallery 1.5.1. When I first discovered this software I thought it was awesome. It seemed fast, had an easy to use interface, I could get up and running in no time, configuration was a breeze, upgrading was simple, and it was stable.

There were rumours about Gallery 2 that was in the works. Something about a complete rewrite. It used a more modular development style, used a database backend, was supposed to be more configurable, and more exensible. When I could I downloaded a beta and gave it a test run.

The beta seemed stable enough, but lacked a lot of features that the regular stream already had. The admin interface was a bear; it felt overly complex and hard to grasp. Overall, it was also, very, very slow. So slow that I decided to dump it.

Over on another site I run (my baby blog [yes that means Sox is pregnant]) I decided to give Gallery 2 another go since it had been taken out of beta and released. I installed the files, got the database installed and the tables created, and set it up (the documentation was not straight forward),. I downloaded the necessary modules, enabled and configured them. So far so good.

Who here has heard the term phishing before? In a nutshell, an unscrupulous person tries to trick you into divulging personal information to gain access to accounts you hold. Quite often this is to try and break into your eBay, PayPal, of even Bank Accounts.

One of the key things to look for in a suspected phishing attack, is that the sender of the message matches the correct url. If you receive an email from gfox@somebadplace.com, and it tells you to login to your muddylaces account, but the url provided goes to somebadplace.com, you should not do it. Pretty simple you would think, but some people have found bugs in popular web browsers, and this can mask the true url. These fakes sites are often very official looking replicas of the original site. They could mimic the bank's website, tricking you into thinking you are logging in there when really the fake site has just collected your account number and pin. Scary thought.

A little housekeeping around the house this morning, and a little housekeeping around the website. Drupal has been upgraded to 4.6.4

These types of announcements are generally just for my benefit, noone elses.

I just logged on to my computer, and had this error message displayed on the screen. I am pretty savvy when it comes to web technologies, and I have a vague notion of what certificates are and how they are used. My problem is that I don't know what application popped this up, nor why. I don't know or understand what can or will happen with either the yes choice or the no choice. Does this mean a trusted website has been compromised? Whatever application opened this did a poor job with the UI. What will happen when I just close the dialog (top right X).

What are less techy people supposed to do with this dialog. I think that software developers around the world do a pretty poor job of writing to the lowest common denominator. This is just one example of pretty horrible user interfaces (UI) I have seen.

From a developers perspective I know it can be difficult to create a good UI that flows nicely, works, and makes sense. Sometimes it is easier to just make it work, and explain it in the documentation. For this example, what documents should I read?