Blackhat, whitehat, rootkit, cyber security, and bugs are just some of the terms that flew around my head the past weekend because I went to Kiwicon V. Having gone already last year, I kind of knew what to expect and was very much looking forward to 2 days of technical bombardment interspersed with demos of how the talented hack into the system of their choice.

Mind you: hacking is not just the bad, bad guys. There is also a lot of good coming out of hacking: software / web site producers are made aware of security holes in their systems that could be exploited by not so kind people.

It was amazing that some companies don’t care at all: vt for example took down 5 software packages frequently used in Hollywood and only 1 company really talked to him. Others were not as willing and still haven’t fixed their bugs.

I learned:

• how insecure the iPhone is and how easily you could read the RFID information stored on an EFPOS card by using a mobile device.
• that poop has an ASCII sign UTF8 character Unicode code point but in contrast to the snowman sign, it cannot be used in a URL. Go figure.

Poop can't be used as URL

• not to say CyberWar if I didn’t want to start on a drinking binge.
• that I didn’t understand Erlang and couldn’t defile MacOSX on my own.
• how to go rogue.
• how to hide images in images.
• about the National Cyber Security Center.
• how not to go about your first hacking job and that if you do you better know some people in high hacker circles.
• and was reminded of the security fails of the last year.
• and much more

This year’s Kiwicon was the largest so far. There were over 600 participants, and we were in Wellington’s Opera House as the previous venue would not hold as many people. Just imagine 600 people mostly clad in black in the middle of Wellington on a sunny weekend.

Kiwicon is not just a conference, but it is an experience. The pre-conference emails are the funniest ever, the registration process produced random quotes as comments that made you laugh, name tags were not your typical plastic around paper, but laser engraved leather and VIP had hand-made ones. Participants can also learn how to pick locks and handcuffs, and how to work in a team to hack a big organization who does evil.

I am already looking forward to Kiwicon VI to learn even more and be awed by the things that some people find when they look more closely.

While listening to talks on exploiting RFID technology and hiding information in pictures via steganography, I was wondering how secure EyeFi cards were. Could somebody put malicious code on them which would alter images put on the card so that when they are transferred they would not just include the image taken by the photographer but also some hidden information, possibly code that could endanger the computer / server where these images can be uploaded immediately wirelessly?

As this is a longish comment on “The ePortfolio Debate” by Mike Bogle, I post it on my own blog.

Hello Mike,

Thank you for bringing the Twitter conversation onto your blog. That’s how I realized that there was more going on than just the 2 tweets I had seen earlier.

You are correct when you say that e-portfolio solutions (no matter what they may look like) be available beyond educational institutions to ensure that (former) students continue to use them. In contrast to LMSs, e-portfolios center around the student.

I have not yet met anybody from the efolio provider in Minnesota, but from what I can gather from the web site, Minnesota provides space for all its residents to create an e-portfolio at eFolio Minnesota for free (to a certain data allowance).

For Mahara, there are services around that offer free hosting (again, up to a certain data allowance). I do not know how many there are, as there is not yet a list of them, but I have seen FolioSpaces (hosted in Australia primarily). Ian writes a bit about FolioSpaces outside of their web site here. If anybody knows of others, I’d like to hear from them.

In New Zealand, the MyPortfolio services for schools and tertiary education are hosted Mahara solutions that do not sit on an institution server. Thus it is easy for students to take along their portfolio when they switch schools. On myportfolio.school.nz they only have to be put into a different institution. There is not even the need to export and import a portfolio. If they go on to study at university, they export their Mahara portfolio and have it imported into myportfolio.ac.nz. Later on they can export it again and use on another hosted solution or even a different portfolio system (that follows the LEAP2A portfolio standard).

It will be interesting to see how far we can take “lifelong” in the electronic world. Will it actually be feasible to work with one (dedicated) portfolio software for more than 5 or 10 years or will we have to find other solutions and try to archive a certain phase instead of having to upgrade everything to the current software?

Kristina

The HTC Desire is my latest toy. Instead of an iPhone 4 I wanted to explore an Android phone, especially after having seen a Nexus One of a colleague.

I started transferring all my contacts, installed a few apps and set up my friend streams. Currently, I am in the clean-up phase and have to stop trying to locate the power button on the right-hand side and hitting the home button to turn on the phone.

My HTC Desire and me; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

What I like best

The flashing notification light which alerts me to anything that I asked to be notified about. As I am not attached to my phone like a Siamese twin, it could happen that I went an entire day without turning my iPhone once. A flashing light would have allowed me to respond to messages more quickly.

What I like least

I have to go through my address book and add the birthdays and anniversaries as Google contacts does not interpret the fields from my Mac address book correctly. Let’s see how the sync works out in the future. But at least now I don’t have to run a script to create a birthday and anniversary calendar, but I can subscribe to my contact’s birthdays and anniversaries in Google calendar through my Google contacts.

After a wonderful lunch and small talk at the lunch buffet, we had two more sessions at the EYC unConference today. You can read part 1 and part 2 before continuing if you haven’t already done so.

Low budget user testing

Courtney Johnston offered to facilitate a session on user testing and how to do that on a shoe-string budget.

A lot of user testing can be done by using paper and web site mockups. You also do not need hundreds of users, but can often already get an idea when you ask about 6 people to participate in a card-sorting activity or give them a task to complete on a web site. Some professional usability testers may bury their head in the sand when they read these lines, but here were are talking about testing web site for communities that operate on a very low till non-existent budget who cannot afford to have sessions in a usability lab and use awesome, but expensive software and setups to conduct their testing.

Often, even only with a few number of people, you can get an idea of whether a certain navigation works, whether menu items are named logically etc. However, when you only have access to a small number of people, you should be acutely aware of their ICT background to interpret their answers correctly and not make false assumptions and objectifying these.

Courtney Johnston provides tips of how to do low-budget user testing; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Feeding back to software developers

Tim McNamara offered the last session that I went to for this day of learning more about community involvement online. It was on how to give useful feedback to software developers. That was a dear topic to me as I get frustrated sometimes when people write forum entries or send me emails from which I cannot really make out the problem and try to solve it. It always takes a lot of effort to figure out what the issue might be and how to solve it.

The Google Project Hosting issue tracker is a good example of how to guide users in providing constructive and useful bug reports. When you open a new issue, you don’t just get an empty text box, but depending on your bug report, you can choose a template which then gives a few suggestions of what to include in your bug report. The template for a “user defect report” has the following items:

What steps will reproduce the problem?
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

What browser (or hg/svn client) are you using? On what operating system?

As these questions are written directly in the text box, people can’t overlook them.

I will have to check if we could also add such pre-populated text in Launchpad for people filing Mahara bugs. That would be very useful.

Now what?

Currently, I am still in the processing phase because there was a lot of information today, a number of web sites to check out, things to try out for myself and wrapping my head around. It was great to meet people who create web sites for non-profits and a lot of times use open source. Joomla was talked about quite a bit as a person ran two sessions on it whereas other CMS were hardly mentioned (we should remedy that next time). However, as was pointed out when the Wordle was shown: Drupal sits on top of Joomla and has “brain” right next to it.

EYC unConference in a Wordle; created by Wellington ICT

A big Thank You to the organizers and volunteers as well as the participants of the unConference who made that day a great learning experience.

As written in the previous post on the EYC unConference, everybody could propose a topic for a session and gather people to discuss it. After my initiated session on how to actually get people to use a community web site in which the attendees greatly participated and did not need a lot of facilitating, I went to a similar session. There the focus was on the use of social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook.

Online communities and social media

People saw the purpose of Twitter and Facebook differently and it always came down to finding where the people you want to reach hang out and picking them up from there.

Another important point that was raised was that not everybody is using social media and should not be forced to do so in order to join a community, but they should have alternative means for engagement. though that does not mean that the lowest common denominator should be chosen. It is worthwhile to educate community members about the possibilities of social media and offer them training so that they can become literate in its use.

Despite that, especially established community members should not be forced to go out of their way to continue engaging. Somebody came up with an analogy to a restaurant that was picked up by Joanna McCleod. When regular patrons come to a restaurant, they should not be made to go out again to find a flyer that is being distributed on Lambton Quay in order to be able to dine at that restaurant. They should still be able to just go inside without any detours.

The session attendees agreed that it is about the way of communicating and not necessarily the tool. Twitter and Facebook can change rather quickly in this day and age. So you may have to switch to another service. However, the idea of the social networking will persist. And you should not be afraid to pull the plug and discontinue using a tool when you realize that your community does not take to it. Your efforts can be used elsewhere more productively.

Never mind the nice weather outside. Community's social media use is as good. CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Web accessibility

Robyn Hunt talked about what everybody could do to improve their web sites to embrace accessibility. That does not only mean that people with disabilities can get more out of a web site, but it also means that the web site is improved for everybody as accessible web sites often also include looking at usability issues that might frustrate “regular” users as well.

I know that I have to improve the accessibility of my blog here, e.g. give meaningful alternative text and not just my picture caption and probably improve a whole bunch of other things that are normally hidden to the eye, but help people greatly who use screen readers.

Learning more about accessibility is a project on my ToDo list for which I will have to set aside a time and either participate in a workshop or read relevant texts.

One thing that particularly stuck in my head was that Facebook is not a good page in terms of accessibility because it is quite busy among things. However, when viewed on a smartphone, people with disabilities can participate as the content presented in the smartphone apps is basically clutterfree making it easier to use. Thus, though the service was not changed, a change of device suddenly enables a number of users to finally participate. And the internet offers independence and freedom to a great many people with disabilities as they can now get information that they had previously no access to and they can also engage in online conversations.

I cover the rest of the day in part 3 on the EYC Conference.

Today the Engage Your Community unConference, initiated by Wellington ICT, took place at the Rutherford House at Victoria University in Wellington. It was “a day long learning event for community webmasters and others using IT for Wellington’s communities”. On top of that, it was free thanks to its sponsors.

Around 90 people fought the urge to stay outside in the wonderful sunshine and rather warm temperatures to engage with like-minded people in discussions around using the web with communities. Some people had already thought about a topic to present beforehand while others decided on the spot.

I belonged to the latter category. After listening to a number of people shouting out their topics in the opening session, I thought I did not want to bring yet another tool-centered session to the table. Therefore, I decided to offer a session on online community engagement after all the tools had been set up and talk about what happens then, how to get people to participate, and how to keep them interested in the conversation.

Engaging communities online

As I do not have eternal wisdom in that area, but wanted to share my experience as well as tips I had learned at WordCampNZ just a couple of weeks ago, in particular from Suzanne Kendrick on Day 1 and Matt Miller on Day 2 (using his example of story telling to not talk about your business but just something interesting), I started the session also hoping that others would want to share their thoughts.

The group of about 18 participants took to the topic and brought in their own perspectives and community management tips that worked for them. Tim McNamara volunteered to jot down notes. It became clear that people in one community do not all communicate in one space, but that community organizers who want to reach their community, should be present in a number of spaces online and offline to cater to the community. Discussions on Facebook may differ greatly from those in a discussion forum on the community site itself. Sometimes just having a “like” button next to a post already helps to engage those (the majority) who would otherwise not comment.

A great book to read on the topic of online community stewardship is Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith.

Whiteboard notes thanx to Tim; CC shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Are you interested in learning more how the day progressed? Continue with part 2 and then part 3.

My summaries of the presentations I listened to at WordCampNZ 2010 continues. If you missed the previous installations, you can read Part 1 and Part 2. A list of presentation slides can be found on the WordCamp NZ site.

This blog post covers the morning sessions on Sunday, August 8, 2010.

Matt Miller – Business Communities

Matt talked about building an online community for businesses in Hawke’s Bay. Instead of choosing a dry name like “Hawke’s Bay Online Business Community”, they came up with Fruitbowl.

They will soon celebrate their 1st anniversary and have learned a lot of things during the last year. For example, that social media is about people and not hearing about business all the time. That resonates with the other presentations on communities by Suzanne and Courtney.

Very successful posts on their blog (58 contributors already) deal with non-business things, e.g. a list of suggested restaurants and the making of a duck shooting boat. Tell stories and do not promote your business endlessly on your blog because people want to read stories is Matt’s advice.

A cool plugin that Matt showed and uses on Fruitbowl is Author exposed. If an author provided details about himself, these are shown in a small pop-up immediately on the page and you don’t have to navigate away from it first.

Take-home message: Setting up a community for (local) businesses is worthwhile because they can interact differently. The community should not just be a self-promotion and ad space, but a place where stories can be told and where people also connect socially.

Matt Miller; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Jeffry Ghazally – Extending WP e-Commerce through plugins

Jeffry had a talk prepared that led the audience into the depth and intricacies of the plugin that he and his company develop, WP e-Commerce. The main message that was important to me was that a plugin should never be hacked, but added onto ideally via another plugin that hooks into the existing one. That way upgrade issues can be avoided.

Jeffry did a live demo of his plugin showing off the technical side, but also giving us a glimpse at the frontend. For example, he uploaded audio files that were added automatically and retrieved from the database for purchasing. Basic information on the songs were provided and the songs could also be previewed before purchase.

Jeffry reflected his impressions in WordCampUK + WordCampNZ. You can also find his slides there in the recording from WordCampUK.

Take-home message: Leave the original code alone and extend it by writing a plugin. And: live demos can work.

Jeffry Ghazally; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Special mention – Vicky Teinaki

Vicky Teinaki deserves to be mentioned specially. She was called the Twitter Stream Queen because she covered WordCampNZ continuously and exhaustively on Twitter. Her speed of finding references and cranking out the tweets were amazing. She has written a blog post How I Live Tweet Conferences that should be on the reading list of anybody wanting to embark on such a task.

She received a reusable coffee cup and specialty coffee for her contribution to WordCampNZ.

Vicky Teinaki, Bill Bennett, Jason Kemp, and unknown woman; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Final thoughts

The 1.5 days of WordCampNZ were brimful with a variety of presentations that ranged from providing an overview of BuddyPress features to talking about examples of designing WordPress sites to building and managing communities in WordPress (and in general) to nitty gritty technical issues.

One topic that I missed, I realized on my way back home, was the educational sector. Why was there no talk about the use of WordPress at school or university? Are there not so many educational users in New Zealand? Did they think a presentation by them would not fit because all other presenters came from the business field?

My shining example of WordPress use that I refer to when I want to get inspiration is University of Mary Washington where Jim Groom started out with WordPress MU and expanded to BuddyPress. His experiences have been tremendously positive and he gets invited to present at conferences and other institutions to talk about his implementation and in some cases also assist setting up something similar.

In hindsight, I could have asked, once I knew that I would attend WordCampNZ, if there was still a slot available to talk about using WordPress in a university study program. But for some reason I felt far removed from Luxembourg (and it was not only the distance) and especially the university to talk about the use of WordPress in the Bachelor in Educational Sciences during the academic year 2009/10.

During this short conference I learned a lot and not just related to WordPress. A number of presentations that I followed touched upon topics that are of general interest and have impact also on other things and not only WordPress, e.g. community management, creating a custom theme, and writing. But also the sessions that dealt with technical issues were helpful because I could always understand parts of them and make sense of these parts and learned more about the technical side of WordPress.

A big Thank You to all organizers, in particular Jason Kemp, who was the spokesperson and kept us updated before, during, and after WordCampNZ 2010.

My summary of WordCampNZ 2010 in Auckland, August 7-8, 2010, continues. If you have not read the beginning, you can read Part 1.

Bill Bennett – Writing for blogs

Bill Bennett has decades of experience as journalist and shared his wisdom with us in regard to what journalism can teach bloggers. He already summarized his presentation nicely. A few words that I want to highlight:

• a lot of things that applied to newspapers of old are true again today in blogging, e.g. to write concisely (I have not yet mastered that art)
• keep it simple: your audience often is often second-language speakers
• keep sentences short and simple -> 15-20 words
• don’t fill the entire screen with your words, but have short lines as reading on screen is already in general 20% slower
• he called headings “page furniture”
• remember to cover “who, what, why, when, where” close to the top to give the reader direction
• make your points in descending order so that a reader could stop at any point and still get the entire story (and only get additional info when reading on)

Take-home message: Writing for blogs has a lot of same features as “good ol’” newspaper journalism that many journalists don’t know how to write anymore. Revive the old art.

Bill Bennett; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Jo Couchman – A plugin for every occasion

Jo wanted to share with us her favorite and most useful plugins. Unfortunately, the Wifi didn’t cooperate and she spent most of her speaking time trying to get connected to the internet. However, you can view her presentation online and check out the plugins she suggested for yourself.

Take-home message: There’s a plugin for virtually everything. Check it out via Google and read comments about it before installing it (cf. Quintin Russ’ presentation).

Jo Couchman; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Pippa Coom and Suzanne Kendrick – Community Management

Pippa introduced us to the Grey Lynn 2030 Transition Community. This is a community exploring sustainability and acting upon it. They also have a virtual home that she presented. The site connects local people around the idea of improving their community. They have established a community garden, started a Farmer’s Market and so on. The community members are also very active online.

Pippa Coom; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Suzanne talked about community management in general and gave useful tips, among them the following:

• An online community manager must personify the soul of the company -> be “on brand” -> intrinsically personify the product, e.g. because you use it yourself, fit the target group etc.
• Be personal, be authentic and use your real name and voice.
• Be a bridge between the company and customers.
• Companies should have only one Twitter account and not several because that gets confusing for people who want to follow the company and are put before the task of subscribing to a multitude of Twitter channels.
• Remember: 1 creator, 10 commentators, 1000 lurkers -> Even if you think nobody listens / reads, there are lots who do. You just don’t know about them.

Suzanne Kendrick; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Take-home message: Community management becomes more important and should not be neglected. It should be viewed as essential and engaged in appropriately.

Sacha Dylan – Who are your audience

Sacha shared facts about disabled people in New Zealand and how they are disadvantaged when accessing the internet. A lot of sites are not made with people with disabilities in mind. He pleads his case that everybody should at least be able to access the content of a page in one version or the other.  Often that already involves developers running their page through a color check. His presentation slides.

Take-home message: Accessibility to web content for people with disabilities is still not guaranteed widely and needs to be improved.

Justin Scott and Sam Dalton – Vital Gifts app

Justin Scott; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

WordCamp is not only about WordPress, but great ideas in general and issues that can be presented using WordPress. Justin and Sam talked about their app VitalLink that they will launch in September.

the idea behind is VitalLink is the following: It is a storefront for Fairtrade where you can choose a real gift for a friend, have it delivered by the closest supplier and post a status update on your favorite social network (in the first version only Facebook) letting everybody know that you supported Fairtrade. In a latter version it will be possible to delay the delivery of a status message until after the friend has received the surprise gift.

The app wants to promote Fairtrade and better wages for producers in Third World Countries and at the same time give people an easy way to purchase Fairtrade products.

I think this is a cool idea with great potential for people to use it because you cannot get Fairtrade everywhere in a store.

Take-home message: If you have a cause in mind, do something and don’t just think about it.

Sam Dalton; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

That concludes the first day WordCampNZ 2010. Day 2 will be covered in the Part 3. If you missed the earlier presentations I followed, you can read Part 1.

(with apologies to Bill Bennett for writing 5 times his suggested word limit)

The second WordCampNZ took place over the weekend (7-8 August 2010) in Auckland. I had never been to a WordCamp, basically an (un-) conference for WordPress users and developers, before. Shortly after learning that I would be moving to New Zealand, I checked whether there would one. Luckily there was going to be one already organized in August. Once I knew whether I would have the time to go from Wellington to Auckland, I booked my ticket.

Jason Kemp, one of the organizers besides Anthony Cole and Dan Milward, kept everybody perfectly informed about new speakers, the venue, and also how many days were left till the beginning so that nobody could miss to book a flight and accommodation if needed.

Jason Kemp; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

I had already gone to Auckland on Friday to explore the city. The day was brilliant and I had a great view of Auckland from Sky Tower and went to the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

Saturday was the first day of WordCampNZ 2010 held at Unitec on Mt. Albert. We had two conference strands: One with a great mix of topics and the other one more developer-oriented. I spent most of my time in the main conference room.

There was a livestream for some time, but as the Wifi could not manage it, it had to be cut off more than it was up and running. However, Vicky Teinaki kept us and the rest of the world completely informed about what was going on in the sessions that she attended. She is amazing at live microblogging and earned her specialty coffee and reusable coffee mug well.

Here’s a quick run through the sessions that I attended. It was not until a couple of sessions in that I started to take photos. Due to critical editing not all made it to Flickr and I apologize to all speakers whom I did not capture in pixels and only mention here in the text.

Robert Popovic – BuddyPress live & other advanced topics

Rob gave a thorough introduction to BuddyPress and its features. Although I had of course already heard about BuddyPress, mainly from Jim Groom who uses it at the University of Mary Washington along his WordPress MU, but I had never had the chance to put my hands on it myself.

Take-home message: BuddyPress is a powerful tool that I need to check out.

Rachel Cunliffe – Blog designer and community site designer – Custom themes

Rachel deals with custom themes on a daily and often nightly basis as many of her clients are overseas. In her opinion, the biggest challenge is not the theme design itself, but dealing with people’s content and making it easy for them to add further content. “Nice” and “easy” are the two terms that pop up most often when she talks to clients who come to her for a better web site.

Although WordPress can be used as CMS, she advises to use Drupal or any other CMS as they bring in the desired functionality natively and not via plugins (potential security vulnerabilities, compatibility issues).

Take-home message: Small things can actually define the entire design process of a theme and often require that a theme is written from scratch to make it easy to handle in the end.

Courtney Lambert – Social Media and Blogging for Corporates

I had first started out in the technical strand and thus missed Courtney’s beginning (thanx to her uploading her slides, I can view them anyway). However, I was happy that I switched sessions and could listen to Courtney’s presentation. One of the many things that stuck: New Zealanders are increasingly using social media to interact with brands and to support their purchase decision making. The key term here is “interact”. Social media should never be used as a one-way street by a company, but always regarded as a conversation. Participate and don’t broadcast. That new thinking is often still difficult for companies as they are not used to it and have not planned for resources to fulfill that role.

Courtney did not only give her presentation, but also interacted actively with us, the audience, when she played “Oprah’s awesomest fruit” game with us. We were divided into 3 groups and had 4 minutes time to come up with a pitch for our fruit (apple, orange, lemon) to Oprah aka Courtney to make it to her show and become famous instantly. The game showed us the following:

• think outside of the box and don’t cling to what’s in front of you and what you are used to
• think big because you need to get attention and have to compete with others
• you need to engage the person you are pitching to into a conversation to gain their attention
• the person you are pitching to usually doesn’t have any time, only half-listens and you are pitching at the same time as many others -> you need to stand out
• make yourself available on as many channels as possible and be contactable

Courtney Lambert (right) and the leaders of the teams in the "Oprah's awesomest fruit" game; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Take-home message: If you engage in social media in a company, you need to provide for a community manager and make resources available as this job takes time and dedication.

Michael Brandon – SEO 101 – Search phrase selection especially for WordPress

Michael knows all about search engine optimization and shared his knowledge with us. SEO is often also increasing usability of a site by putting content at the top of the page and not hiding it at the bottom.

He said it’s not so much about individual words than it is about search phrases because most people don’t search individual words, but entire phrases. Furthermore, if you get your SEO right for Google, you are pretty much covered.

A common mistake people make is to not put the search phrase on their web page. Apparently, that’s a SEO no-go and should be corrected as quickly as possible if you want to increase your listing spot.

Nowadays when your site is listed as #2 on Google, you are basically #1 because hardly ever can anybody beat Wikipedia that dominates the throne.

Take-home message: SEO is also improvement of usability of a web site and not just pushing a site up on the result list in a search engine.

Michael Brandon; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Richard Hollingum – TEDxAuckland – Making a difference

Richard Hollingum from the Deapartment of Doing (what a cool company name) shared with us his experience of organizing TEDxAuckland, being at TED himself several years ago and having taken up again the organization of TEDxAuckland that’s coming up on September 26, 2010.

TED and TEDx events are all about “ideas worth spreading”. Richard, however, wants to take it a step further after having seen that people wanted to continue the conversation last year beyond the event. He wants to include “ideas worth doing” and therefore charges an entrance fee for this year’s TEDxAuckland to get the seed money for supporting a cause.

Take-home message: Inspiration is good (and can be bought for $15 from the Department of Doing) and necessary, but it should not end there. Keep the dialogue and engagement going.

Richard Hollingum; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Quintin Russ – WordPress and you – Security tips for 2010

Quintin’s presentation was the best scariest presentation I have ever heard. He talked about how to make a WordPress installation (or for that matter any installation) more secure. It was scary because it showed that you live in constant danger of falling pray to security vulnerabilities and other exploits.

Quintin’s talk was very technical, but I could follow except for the occasional abbreviation or something like “hash with a salt” (What? Make hashbrowns with salt? Well that’s a given ). His target audience was site hosts and server admins who need to make sure that the installations run smoothly.

But what can a normal WordPress user already do without spending her / his entire day monitoring web sites that publish updates about security vulnerabilities and without needing a diploma in techspeak?

• update, update, update
• don’t use “admin” as any user and use strong passwords -> use KeePassX, for example, to manage your passwords
• write your blog posts with the least privileges because you don’t need admin rights to write
• read OWASP
• Google every plugin you intend to install to find out what others are saying about it and whether there are security issues related to it; you can check the Exploit Database for that as well
• intrusion detection software / plugins are not free of vulnerabilities as they are just plugins themselves -> don’t trust them blindly

Quintin had many more useful tips, but if a normal user follows the ones above, s/he is already well ahead of the majority.

Take-home message: Everybody who has a WordPress installation, should know basics of web site security and do her / his share to ensure a site’s security.

Quintin Russ; shared by Kristina D.C. Hoeppner

Part 2 and Part 3 to come.

Summer of Tech (in general known as Summer of Code, but NZ expanded it to include more disciplines) is still almost half a year away for us. To shorten the time until then and to keep students and companies involved, the Summer of Tech team organized a Hackfest today.

They brought soon-to-be graduates and mentors from IT companies together to work on small programming projects in either PHP, Perl or Ruby on Rails for 5 hours and present the results at the end.

The e-learning team from Catalyst had dispatched François Marier and Jonathan Harker to mentor students in PHP programming. François supervised 2 students who worked on developing a block for Mahara that would display updates from Twitter and Identi.ca.

Jonathan had one student as another one had dropped out with short notice. His student created a search block for Moodle to read data from a library catalog that uses Koha.

The other teams developed a Twitter ticker, a system that would build your semester schedule according to previously defined rules, a spam protector, and a 3-player pong game to be played over a network.

The students worked closely with their mentors for the entire time. Occasionally, they had a brief break for drinks, food, Ubuntu stickers, PostgreSQL blue elephant pins, baseball caps, and shirt and bag prices.

Ruth McDavitt had the organizational hat on and made sure that everything was taken care of and that everybody was happy in general.