Handling the Somali Pirates

Okay, here’s an idea.  What if we put a few predator drone aircraft in the area armed with some high-end missiles that could do some serious damage and then give these seaboat captains a private access line where they could link up with our military to call in these missiles if they should come under attack by these pirates?

I would think that it couldn’t be too hard to blow one of these pirate ships out of the water with a drone given their spot on accuracy, not to mention that it would send a sharp message back to the other somalian pirates thinking about getting into the pirate business as well.

If the missile is on the money, there would be very little cleanup needed, in fact I am sure that the sharks or whatever oceanic life there is nearby could feed on the remains for a few days.  Since these incidents seem to be happening in international water, who’s going to cry about it?  Plus, this whole thing would give our American service people some additional practice shooting missiles from these drones so when we do find Bin Laden we won’t miss…

I know, I should probably keep my mouth shut and just blog about the web and leave the news to the news guys, but I couldn’t resist putting my two cents in about this…

Demjanjuk Stalls Deportation

Okay, I know that this is not my normal type of blog post, but sorry, please bear with me why I rant on this one a minute.  Why is it that this guy, Ivan the Terrible, has been allowed to leave in peace here in the United States up until this point?  I know that there have been several attempts to bring this dude to justice in the past but they have all failed, in fact if you get on youtube you can just enter his name in and see some of his arrogant courtroom appearances in the past.

I am all about forgiveness, don’t get me wrong, but if the guy is guilty in playing a part in the murder of 29,000 people, shouldn’t we have made it a big deal before now to get this guy convicted?  And why isn’t there more outrage about this case?  If he was guilty of molesting 29,000 children wouldn’t a lynch mob have already moved into place to string this guy up by his toenails by now?  Especially if he was living in your neighborhood?  (not that I am condoning violence or anything, I am just saying…)

Sorry to rant about something that is somewhat off topic but watching a short news story on CNN about this guy got me to wondering about the whole thing a bit.  I actually am somewhat of a history buff and have known about this guy for a while now and this story has always amazed me.

And, there is very little doubt that this guy was actually Ivan the Terrible either, there are several documents pointing to him, so this isn’t some innocent dude that has a terrible case of mistaken identity going on.

CLEVELAND — John Demjanjuk, accused of being a Nazi death camp guard, marked his 89th birthday Friday by winning a reprieve of his ordered deportation to Germany to face possible trial.

An immigration judge in Arlington, Va., issued the stay of a deportation expected during the weekend, said his son, John Demjanjuk Jr.

Immigration Judge Wayne Iskra on Friday ordered that Demjanjuk’s deportation be put on hold until the court can rule on his request to reopen the U.S. case that ordered his removal.

Authorities in Germany said Demjanjuk had been expected there by Monday.

Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker who lives in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, kept out of sight Friday, as he has for years. He has argued that his deportation would amount to torture, given his frail health.

A German arrest warrant issued in March accuses the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk of 29,000 counts of acting as an accessory to murder at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland during World War II.

In Germany, Demjanjuk would have a chance to respond to the allegations before a judge. He denies involvement in any deaths.

In a three-page signed statement, Demjanjuk asked earlier in the week for asylum in the U.S. and said deporting him "will expose me to severe physical and mental pain that clearly amount to torture under any reasonable definition of the term."

"I am physically very weak and experience severe spinal, hip and leg pain, which limits mobility and causes me to require assistance to stand up and move about," the statement said. "Spending 8 to 12 hours in an airplane seat flying to Germany would be unbearably painful for me."

In the statement, Demjanjuk said he suffers from a bone marrow disorder, kidney disease, anemia, kidney stones, arthritis, gout and spinal deterioration.

His attorney, John Broadley, said a government physician examined Demjanjuk on Thursday to determine his ability to travel and there was "dramatic evidence" of his back pain. Broadley submitted a portion of the exam videotape to the government on Friday as part of his argument against deportation.

In his statement seeking asylum, Demjanjuk questioned Germany’s motive in seeking his deportation and suggested the German government was trying to make up for lax earlier pursuit of war criminals.

"It is possible that the German authorities see a prosecution of me as means to draw attention away from their past approach," the statement said.

A German Justice Ministry spokeswoman, Eva Schmierer, declined to comment on Demjanjuk’s statement.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in interview that the family was relieved.

"There’s a sense of relief that we don’t have to deal with the trauma for him and for our family and for the many, many people that have been sympathetic to his cause for many years, believing in his innocence and believing that he was a victim of the war as much as anyone else was but he’s still in pain. He’s still ill," he said.

Demjanjuk Jr. said sending his ailing father to Germany would have led to a medical emergency.

"He would wind up in a German hospital. I don’t believe they would ever put him on trial," he said.

Demjanjuk Jr. said there was no merit to the German allegations. "They are taking the old case and applying it to new allegations. There isn’t evidence of one single murder, let alone my father being involved in 29,000," he said.

A court-appointed defense lawyer in Germany, Guenther Maull, said he would seek an examination of whether Demjanjuk is fit to be held in custody and stand trial. He said he does not expect a trial to begin before this summer.

Maull said there were 120 guards at Sobibor and it was unclear which of them did what. As a result, he argued, it is unclear whether formal charges would be brought to court.

Demjanjuk came to the United States after the war as a displaced person and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His citizenship was revoked twice, first in 1981.

Demjanjuk was extradited in 1986 to Israel, where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death in 1988. In 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court determined he was not the notorious Nazi death camp guard Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka in Poland, and he was allowed to return home.

Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998 and revoked again in 2002. The U.S. Department of Justice renewed its case, saying he had indeed been a Nazi guard and could be deported for falsifying information on his U.S. immigration paperwork.

Ohio man branded Nazi guard stalls his deportation

WordPress HelpCenter

I love how WordPress has become so mainstream these days that ancillary business opportunities are being created.  Alex King, a well-known software developer has launched the WordPress HelpCenter, a call-in technical support service that supports WordPress issues.

Here’s a link to the website: http://wphelpcenter.com/ I would love to hear from some people who have actually used the service as to what their user experience was like.  I can only imagine that it has to be quality technical support.

WordPress HelpCenter is a real-time support center for all things WordPress. We can answer simple questions about how to create categories and tags, how to use your links list, or we can help you install and/or troubleshoot themes, plugins, etc. and answer questions about your WordPress.com blog. We can also make little modifications and tweaks to plugins and/or themes (change your colors, fonts, header images, etc.) as desired. Best of all, we have real developers answering the phone when you call – you can get answers, right now!

If WordPress HelpCenter can take care of your needs in under 3 minutes, the call is FREE! We’ve set the service pricing low and we’ve created a price list for most commonly requested items. Every item on the standard price list is under $20.

My company, Crowd Favorite, is a partner in WordPress HelpCenter. My development team and I are on-call to the WordPress HelpCenter staff to answer tough technical questions as needed and to generally provide support and expertise as the service grows. We’re committed to providing top-notch service and friendly support.

I’ve seen a growing need for this service both personally and professionally over my years of involvement with WordPress.

  • I have a number of WordPress plugins that I’ve released, however I do not have time to provide end-user support for them. Though I wish I could, I don’t have time to answer the many simple questions people email me each day. Now I have a place I trust to send these people to get answers. They can get the answers they need without me being a bottleneck.
  • At Crowd Favorite we build complex sites using WordPress as a CMS. We include help pages in the WordPress admin area for the site manager that covers how to use custom features we’ve built and provide training on how to use them. However, it’s not uncommon for our clients to have multiple authors and editors on the site, and they often have a variety of WordPress related questions. As a development shop, Crowd Favorite isn’t set up to handle these types of intermittent tech support questions. Now they can pick up the phone, call WordPress HelpCenter, and get immediate answers.
  • Forums and mailing lists are wonderful. They are a wealth of information and public archives that are great community support. However, they can also feel unfriendly and intimidating to people who are less experienced with them. When I need a quick answer I’d rather pick up a phone and call someone than write up an email or forum post, then wait for someone else to answer it. WordPress HelpCenter doesn’t replace mailing lists and forums, but it provides an option for those would would prefer friendly phone or email support.
  • The WordPress community has a number of great developers and designers that create fantastic plugins and themes. Having spoken with many of them, I feel comfortable saying that they prefer coding and designing to providing support to people who are using those plugins and themes. If you are such a developer or a designer, perhaps sending your users to WordPress HelpCenter will be a good option for you.

Most of my work in the WordPress community over the years has been more technically oriented (building plugins, themes, etc.). I’m excited to be launching a service that is less developer oriented and instead is aimed at helping the many people who use WordPress every day. I think this is going to be an invaluable service for the end-user WordPress community.

Next time you need a WordPress answer, try calling WordPress HelpCenter: (512) 788-9236. Let me know what your experience is like.

WordPress HelpCenter | alexking.org

Kelso -vs- CNN

Ashton Kutcher, AKA Kelso to all of us 70′s show fanatics, has issued a challenge to CNN to see who can have the most followers on Twitter.com.  This should be pretty funny to watch, I think that they are in the process of getting Ashton on the Larry King Show (probably the only CNN personality who has no clue what Twitter is…).  What’s funny is how they have even involved Ted Turner…


Viral Fan Growth on Facebook

Rarely do I try to post things on my blog that I can’t put my head around completely but here is one such case.  When my partners and I launched NascarView earlier this year we of course setup a Facebook fan page for the project.  Immediately we had about 100 or so fans and for the most part it stayed in that range.

Well on Friday last week I just happened to take a look at NascarView’s Facebook page and noticed that there were approximately 1500 or so followers, I was shocked because we were pretty much stalled out at around 200 or so for such a long time.  In the past building a large Facebook Fan Base has been a huge time investment.

Well, I alerted my partners to what was going on and as each of us tuned into the fan page we would periodically refresh our screens and announce a new number of fans.  The number of fans was climbing at an astonishing rate, sometimes each time we would refresh we would see approximately 10-20 new additions.

This growth continued throughout the weekend, and even as I battled the cold shivers and aching side effects of the flu I would find myself wandering from the bedroom into the office to get the latest count.  I even texted my partners, one of whom was flying an airplane to Destin, Florida this weekend and the other who was running a 5k.  We checked in w/ each other off and on throughout the weekend and remained astonished at how fast this number was growing.  By the end of the day yesterday we had picked up our 12,000th follower.  That’s right, and this morning we are on track to exceed 15,000.

Here’s the jist of the story for you, we have done absolutely nothing to promote the fact that we have a fan page on Facebook, absolutely nothing!!!  Once we saw the trend that was happening I went ahead and posted some blog entries about NascarView on Facebook but I honestly can’t say that this had any impact at all.

Totally bumfuzzled to say the least I started trying to research what could be fueling this explosive viral campaign promoting our project.  I spent the better part of the evening last night just looking at the new Facebook.  A lot of people think that I spend a lot of time inside of Facebook but I really don’t, I mostly update my status using Twitter during the day, but that’s another story altogether…

In my research I found that fan pages inside of Facebook now appear in the people you may know section of the site.  For instance, if you have 12 friends who are also friends with someone, they usually show up in this category so that you can add them to your friends list as well.  Well, apparently with the new Facebook updates, fan pages are a lot more like profile pages.   With this being the case, apparently when someone adds NascarView to their friends list, it then shows us under their friends “people you might know” section.

This is the only thing that I can use to explain how this rapid viral growth has been fueled.  Here’s a screencap of our insights metrics from Facebook, notice the timeframe that all of this started happening, amazing…

facebookinsights

Facebook | Nascar View

The Twitter Song

I just thought this was worth sharing w/ my readers this morning, pretty funny stuff…

YouTube – The Twitter Song

Google Container Data Center Tour

google-logo I thought that it was pretty interesting that Google posted these tours of their new container data center storage facilities on YouTube.  If you are a nerd like me and you look at a Data Center Tour like others would a trip to Disneyland, you will love this…

I got a kick out of how advanced this data center is laid out, and all of the research and planning that went into it, pretty much under the radar screen of a lot of us in the industry.  Way to go Google:

 

Extremist Websites Using US Hosts

This is a practice that has been going on for a while now but is just starting to get some attention.  Apparently some of these Muslim extremist websites that are touting anti-American sentiments are actually using web hosting infrastructures located here in the United States. 

I personally know of at least two other incidents similar to this where websites were being hosted that were in support of Al Qaida.  This is something that is very hard to police, but I think that as an industry we should do our best to make sure our clients are all on the up and up.  Before any clients gain hosting access onto any of our web servers, my partners and I always take a close look at the project and if there is anything we aren’t sure about we always try to error on the side of caution.

Honestly I hate it that this happened to the Planet, but at the end of the day there really isn’t a whole lot that they can do to prevent it from happening again, especially given the high volume of hosting accounts that they house in their data centers.

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After taking credit for a deadly March 25 attack on coalition forces, a Taliban website claiming to be the voice of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" was found to be hosted by Texas web host The Planet (www.theplanet.com).

Unbeknownst to the US web host, according to a Washington Post report Wednesday, the militant group used The Planet’s hosting services for more than a year "to rally its followers and keep a running tally of suicide bombings, rocket attacks and raids against US and allied troops." As one of the world’s largest hosting providers, The Planet was unaware of its Taliban connections until a blogger noticed the connection last week and The Planet pulled the plug on it.

The Post article connected The Planet’s incident with a greater trend of extremist groups using US hosting because of its reliability, ease-of-use, and terms of use that allow for anonymity. At around $70 a month, payable by credit card, Site Intelligence Group co-founder and extremist Muslim communication researcher Rita Katz told the Post that low-cost, high-quality US hosting has resulted in many extremist groups willing to pay US companies to host their anti-US messages.

Using Free Web Town (www.freewebtown.com), run by Atlanta-based Tulix Systems (www.tulix.com), Tora Bora Front (www.toorabora.com), another Taliban Web site, continues to post regularly about attacks on US-led coalition forces and other inflammatory material.

Such incidents fuel the debate on whether US webhosts should shut down these websites or let them continue to operate, giving US intelligence access to clues about the leadership and structure of terrorist groups. This also reminds web hosts of the importance of being aware of the companies with whom they are dealing.

Extremist Websites Using US Web Hosts – Web Hosting Industry News | Daily Web Hosting News and Web Host Interviews

Good Explanation of Twitter

Explaining to clients why Twitter is important is something that we have definitely gotten better at as an industry I think, and the media attention has certainly helped out with their coverage of the social networking phenom.  But explaining exactly what Twitter is as opposed to what it can do is still not the easiest thing to do.

I have long said that I would rather explain Global Warming to someone than to go into what Twitter is all about.  Well, thank goodness I don’t have to now, I ran across this video this morning and it does a great job explaining it, so here you go for all of you wondering what exactly Twitter is…

Current Projects: The Cotton Club

I have been playing around with the idea of updating my blog theme, or giving it a facelift for a few weeks now due to the fact that I had hacked my old theme pretty heavily testing various plugins, etc.  I didn’t really want to go for anything drastic in terms of design because I have been pretty content w/ the overall design and layout so I basically pulled from two different themes that I really liked and more or less made my own.

I started with a free theme that Brian Gardner had on his blog a little while back called Shades of Blue, and the theme that I had used a while back called Angelic Design.  I also got creative in Photoshop, something I haven’t done in a long time, and came up with my custom header background to blend with the overall theme.  The total time it took me to roll out this custom theme was about 30 minutes.  Granted, I already had an idea as to what I was wanting the end product to look like before I got started but I was pretty pleased that it turned out as well as it did in such a short period of time.

One of the advantages to this new theme that I am using is that in addition to the sidebar being widgeted, I also have 4 widget areas that I can drop content into on the footer.  I haven’t decided yet what widgets I will run there yet, but it’s going to come in handy because I am always running out of sidebar area…

blog-facelift