In an attempt at a slightly less lame post this week, I’ll recount how I got a wireless USB adapter to work under Ubuntu. You might find yourself in situation in which a wireless USB adapter makes more sense that installing a normal wireless card, in which case, these instructions might be useful.

Recognizing the importance of consistently implementing persistent identifiers (PIDs), a group of librarians at Cornell University evaluated several PID strategies and chose to implement the Handle System. As a member of that group, the author immediately perceived cultural and technical challenges to adopting handles that included accommodating diverse computing platforms. The development of cross platform Web Services and corresponding client libraries are explored as a way to address these challenges and create new opportunities for future development and maintenance of digital collections.

Well, for the past few months, I have been busier than a one legged man in an ass kicking contest, and I have had to prioritize my paid work as well as writing that actually furthers my career over luxuries like sleep, exercise and posting substantive content to the blog. As a result, my posts lately have been fluffier than usual.

I do intend to get back to writing posts that are a little geekier, hopefully sooner rather than later, but it doesn’t look like its going to happen this week. Instead, I decided to add a new feature to the blog…

Recently, a friend that I commonly sub-contract with purchased a few copies of Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer, and he sent one to me. Although I initially thought that I wouldn’t get much out of this book–as its intended audience is non-technical–I read it. It was a free gift after all. And, I was pleasantly surprised by how informative I found it.

Several weeks ago, I received a frantic call from an administrator of a site running a popular fork of osCommerce, saying he had 72 hours to fix dozens of vulnerabilities reported by ScanAlert–the company behind the “Hacker Safe” PCI compliance logo–or his right to display the Hacker Safe logo would be revoked. I ended up doing the job I was asked to do: I not only eliminated all of reported vulnerabilities, but in the eyes of ScanAlert, the site was now able to display the presumably more stringent Visa branded PCI compliance seal, which it hadn’t been able to do before. Although the customer was relieved and even downright ecstatic about the outcome, I was left with some very mixed feelings about ScanAlert, and the work I had done.