Well folks, from the mouth of babes — my babe anyway, “It’s sterile & lacks character!” I guess you can’t please everyone all of the time.

What she doesn’t know is that I plan to skin it one of these days. That interprets to, of course, “I’ll start in two months, do half the job, and finish 3 months later when I’ve run out of Star Trek episodes to watch (from our newest season DVD collection) and I drank too much Coca-cola that day (or night.)

Personally, I thought this was a pretty slick out-of-the-box theme. What do you guys think?

One of my favorite geeky subjects is Internet Security. At my job, I have been dubbed “The Security Nazi” — Not very nice (and not that I’ve done any really anal security things to deserve it either

The fact of the matter is that there are few Internet users out there that know or care about Internet security. The result is alot of garbage to wade through for the rest of us — mostly spam from all the bot net zombies out there helping bot net masters make an unscrupulous living of sorts! Unfortunately, there are many smart and eager Internet criminals out there waiting like tarantulas to lure us into their Webs and suck us dry (or at least our PC resources and bandwidth.)

Thank heaven for Security Now!

Security Now! couples two of my favorite computer-world icons. Do you remember Call for Help on Tech TV? That’s right, it’s Leo Laporte himself, the purveyor of geekdom to the masses. I learned alot from that show before I started working professionally. My parents groaned each time I commandered the remote control to make sure I didn’t miss an essential episode (they all were.)

The next guy is none other than Steve Gibson, the security guru from Gibson Research Corporation. He’s the guy that brought the Internet world to attention about Spyware (in fact, he coined the phrase.) I’ve been going to this site for years. It’s were I learned the foundation of my Internet security knowledge. I had never even heard of a bot net before grc.com.

So they’ve both teamed up to talk about a different security topic each week. Of course I faithfully tune in! Now my wife groans when I bring the laptop to bed with my headphones to make sure I don’t miss any of those essential tips and insights. Some of the highlights have been: Gaining a better understanding of Internet cryptology methods, discovering Hamachi and iPig, and learning about new exploits to watch out for.

I highly recommend this show to Network admins and newbies alike.

Being the PHP aficionado I am, I tend sometimes to stay in my little PHP bubble (ASP made me distrust & dispise the Web scripting world.) Every now and then I come out and see something that is a breath of fresh air.

Ruby on Rails (or ROR) is yet another framework for Web applications. It’s not kludgy like Java and .NET though. What I mean (or meant) is that the learning curve is moderate as opposed to being quite daunting to plunge into like other frameworks for Web.

Ruby is a relatively new language on the block, but is gaining popularity in the development world for its simple and clean syntax and portability.

Ruby on Rails is easy to setup on windows so you can play with it yourself before committing to turn it up on your live site. O’Reilly OnLamp.com has an excellent tutorial to get you up and running with a web editable database in minutes!

I certainly plan on giving it a whirl within the next few months.