Leave it to the Catholic School System to take something fun, like my Facebook Fast, and turn it into something horrible, like homework (this links to a Microsoft Word document):

http://homework.bhncdsb.ca/upload/da5d6ddd834f54cd345fbd45e72a62fc.doc

Actually, I'm only kidding. As an ex-Catholic student, I can understand the difficulty of making religious education relevant to youngsters, and I applaud this teacher for finding "cross-curricular connections."

CBC called back to follow up from our original interview about my Facebook Fast. You can hear the post-Facebook Fast clip on their web site; I'm in clip number 2, starting around the 15:50 mark.

It was a true fiasco:

1. They had me on the line moments before I was supposed to go on; I heard two loud clicks, and then they hung up on me. I suspected they had hung up, but didn't want to hang up just in case I was wrong. Worse, I had left my cell phone (backup number) at home that morning (this NEVER happens).
2. About a minute later, I hung up, and the phone rang immediately, and I was on the air.
3. Within moments of the interview starting, one of the school secretaries came on our PA system LOUDER THAN BOMBS. (In the interview, you can hear it when I mention my sister saying "You don't know anything!").
   
4. After she finished her announcement, the music (that's right, we play music instead of bells, which would shatter a child's fragile self-esteem) to end the lunch period began. It lasted through the ENTIRE INTERVIEW.
5. I spent the remaining time with my ear and mouth pressed into the phone, waiting for the music to end, said some very stupid things, and totally forgot to plug my blogs and my TV pilot.
   

CBC, in true Canadian form, sound-edited out most of the background noise, and cut out the vast majority of my stupidity, bless their hearts. (It was pre-recorded on Wednesday because one of the guests was Jewish and couldn't do an interview on Good Friday.)

<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_0Hj1X7xRrnE/SeV4qb3wghI/AAAAAAAAAhI/onDS4dexS0k/Picture%201.png" />

Disclosure: I <3 Google. But I'm disappointed with their new heavy-handed password regimen. Trying to check my Gmail account this afternoon (but not this morning... odd), I was greeted with a warning page after I had logged in: my password was "weak" and needed changing.

This may be true, however I was alarmed that Gmail knew my password. Call me old-fashioned, but I was under the impression that it was fairly standard procedure to store user passwords after performing a one-way hash like MD5 (now insecure) or SHA1.

(For the non-geek: a one-way hash is a mathematical operation that scrambles data in a way that it cannot be unscrambled: your password would always be hashed to the same scrambled text, but no one could unscramble that text to get your password. This means that your password is stored in a web site's database in such a way that the web site does not know-- and no rogue database administrator can ever determine-- what your actual password is. When you login, they scramble the data you send using the one-way hash, and compare it to the scrambled value in their database, and if it matches, they know you typed it in correctly. The reason hashed passwords are so important is that most people use the same password on multiple sites, so any web site that knows your actual password could use it to impersonate you on other web sites. As an aside, one of the reason I love Computer Science is it's the only field where phrases like "salted hash" can have only mathematcial connotations.)

I appreciate that Google is trying to look out for my safety, but I couldn't even login without changing changing my password. They weren't warning me so much as commanding me. As a geek I understand that tough love is sometimes necessary; password security works like vaccination: if we're not all safe, we're all vulnerable, or something like that. However, I would have appreciated a window of a couple of days so that I didn't have to go and change the passwords on all my Gmail-linked services to keep them working just to check my email.

(Reality check: OK, so it was only 2 services, but still, it's the principle.)

The most insulting thing is that when I added a "1" to the end of my password, it instantly changed from "weak" to "strong."

Great work on that password strength-checking algorithm, Google. No brute force hackers will figure that "1" out.

So I've just finished a major overhaul of my site about writing, yoursinwriting.com. Part of that was migrating from my homemade CMS to a popular blogging platform (WordPress). Another part was more completely integrating Google Adsense into my page layouts. It's pretty amazing what WordPress has allowed me to do in a single day, but I wasn't expecting any revenue for a few months.

Then today I login to create some more ad units, and I get the report shown in the picture above. Today's earning? $0.01. The weirder thing? Nobody clicked any ads. That's right, 0 clicks = $0.01.

Here's my plan: I would like to apply the Multiplication Property of Equality to my earnings -- thereby keeping them the same -- and multiply both sides by 1 billion.

Drinks are on me.

(photo courtesy of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

Literally minutes after I had gotten off the phone with CTV, I received a call from CBC Radio One, asking me to be a guest on "The Point" with Aamer Haleem. I am a huge fan of CBC Radio, so I was really excited about the opportunity to do a show with them.

The day before the interview, the school shootings in Germany took place, and I got a call saying the CBC wanted to segue into our light-hearted discussion of social networks from a panel discussing the issue of glorification of mass murderers, and they wanted me to comment. <sarcasm>Awesome!</sarcasm>

You can hear the full interview on their website, I'm the third audio clip on the page.

After the Globe and Mail article, I got lots of email and calls from friends asking me about giving up Facebook, but most wanted to know how the hell I got in the newspaper. Fair question: what's so newsworthy about giving up a social media site? All I can think of is that there seems to be an interesting tie-in with Lent, the Catholic Church, and the collapse of the newspaper industry.

So I was even more surprised (and confused) when CTV wanted to talk to me for a story on their National News program. But they took a slightly different spin, looking at how social media was overtaking email in popularity, and how it was being used by business owners as a sales and marketing tool.

The interview was a lot of fun. They came to the school and we taped in my classroom. Not to shatter the Hollywood magic, but it was interesting that the interviewer was not there. I was answering questions coming at me from a mobile phone set to speaker, and I was looking at the light stand. They said it makes the interview look more natural.

(For the geeks: Note the Ubuntu login screen over my shoulder. That's right, my lab is open source. That's just how I roll.)

(Photo courtesy of Chris Bolin for the Globe and Mail)

Today there is an article in the Globe and Mail about people giving up Facebook for Lent. I am one of the main characters in the article, and even got a cool photo (above) out of the deal. (It took over an hour to get that shot, BTW.)

And it all happened because of Facebook. My original post gets picked up by Facebook and shows in my notes. A reporter bleeds the beast, using Facebook against itself to search for people who are giving up Facebook for Lent. Hours later we set up an interview, and then a photo shoot, and by the end of the next day I am all set to be portrayed on the national stage as a complete geek with technological dependency issues.

Who says there's no truth in media?

I've been off Facebook for a few days now, and Twitter is my methadone. With all the mashups going on out there, I immediately imagined something combining the two sites. It would have to be called TwitBook.com or Facester.com (since "Facetter" doesn't work).

TwitBook is a free screensaver web site. Meh. Facester however, is a domain squatter with one of the most bizarre collection of links I've ever seen (pictured above). There is a list of tabs across the top, labelled (and I'm not making this up):

1. Colon
2. Pancreas
3. Class Action Suit
4. Press Release
5. High School
6. Tour Dates

Even better, the main graphic is a collage of US Air Force imagery. Along the right margin are education-themed links. And just for good luck, there is a single link to President Bush in the left menu bar.

This is not random; some computer algorithm somewhere thinks this is the best money-making link combo for the name Facester.com. Feces-ter? F-ace-ster? WTF-ster?

NOTE: If you are not a web geek, stop reading now. This will only sadden and confuse you.

When you bend bits for money, your tools are important. An IDE or utility is like a carpenter's hammer or drill. After much research, I put together an system that not only lets me build web apps with super ninja skill, it is also instantly cloneable, transportable on a USB drive, and can even be moved across computers and even operating systems.

1. Install VirtualBox to allow you to run complete "virtual" computers on top of your own OS.
2. Install Ubuntu inside a new VirtualBox virtual machine (VM).
3. Go to the terminal and run sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install mercurial && sudo aptitude install phpmyadmin mysql-server. This will take a while.
4. Install the Eclipse IDE and then follow the instructions (including installing Java) to install the PDT (PHP integration) and Mercurial (SCM) components.
5. Install the CakePHP framework. 
6. You now have a fully configured web development environment. Shut down Ubuntu, and then make a backup of the folder holding the VirtualBox VM and .vdi file, so you can use it to clone new, fresh copies of this development environment whenever you want.
7. Begin geeking
8. ...
9. ...
10. Profit!

This process (steps 1 to 6) will take about three hours. Learning to use the tools will probably take you about 24-48 hours if you're completely new. In the long run, this will save you hundreds of hours in your development process (and likely in your recovery and backup process as well). You can install VirtualBox on any other computer, and move your VM there and start working in minutes.

Best of all: unlike carpentry tools, every geek tool on this list on this list is 100% free.

Happy coding!