Music, pro audio & new media...

Anthem Hacked, Ridiculous Correspondence Ensues

Anthem health insurance, the subsidiary of Wellpoint (yes, the very health insurance company in the center of the health care premium scandal - short ticker "WLP") has just informed me that the portion of their website where they track applications has been compromised. My name, Social Security number, and credit card information was compromised in the break-in.

I received a hilarious letter from them explaining the situation.

Out of an abundance of caution, we are notifying you of this incident so that you can take steps to protect yourself from any possibility of identity theft. In addition, consistent with our commitment to protecting the privacy and security of your information, we would like to offer you identity protection services for one year under Debix Identity Protection Network at no cost to you.

OMG! An abundance of caution! You can't make this shit up! Their consistent commitment to protecting my privacy is a knee-jerk stop-gap response to the fact that my Social Security number and credit card number are now in the hands of multiple unknown persons. Anthem hopes to compel me to give my personal information to yet another corporation that Anthem certifies is totally, like, trustworthy and secure and stuff.

This appears to be a very popular response to such incidents by large organizations with poor security practices.

Debix's Terms of Service goes on and on about how their liability is limited to the amount I pay to them over the course of the 12 months prior to the claim. In other words - nothing.

I shall be keeping my eye out for class action lawsuits.

And with my wife having fantastic experiences with Kaiser Permanente, I don't think I have much reason to stay with Anthem. So fuck you very much, Anthem and Wellpoint.

Obama Administration Reserves Nuclear First Strike Option

"Under a new national strategy for nuclear weapons, the Obama administration is maintaining the right to use nuclear weapons first and to use them to attack any nation accused of violating the main treaty to halt nuclear proliferation, including Iran and North Korea."

Obama to Issue New Nuclear Posture Review

Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, ladies and gentlemen.

FUCKED UP

CloudCrowd Nears Its Stride

The tech startup I work for, CloudCrowd, got written up on a huge technology blog over at TechCrunch. Subsequently we've been getting a shitton of calls and, in fact, the CTO and BAMF Jordan Ritter will be appearing on Press Here this Sunday here in California just after Meet the Press. Rumor is that we might have an article on us appearing in a national newspaper in the near future, as well.

This is pretty freaking exciting and it's only gonna get more interesting when we pull out the big guns.

Magento is a Fucking Nightmare

I created my first Magento shop as a freelancer for a small business client back when version 1 had come out. Oy. I even just rel="nofollow"'d that link to avoid boosting their Pagerank any further. The software showed SO much promise and was SO much better than anything else out there that I was eager to try the new technology.

I designed the shop and got the client up and running, moving their inventory over from their old e-commerce solution.

A few months later, some updates started to trickle in. So I patched the site with the upgrade packages. Fail. The file permissions got messed up, the template system had changed entirely, and the database didn't migrate properly. I rolled the software back. Waiting a few months I tried upgrading again, got it marginally further, and was able to get the site up and running with some important security updates.

The "easy" upgrade solution they provide, Magento Connect, is a disaster. The thing will absolutely break your site.

Their forums are riddled with developers, designers, and proprietors for whom every upgrade destroys their hard work. Varien, the corporate sponsor of the project, is typically silent. And now that they've released their $12,000 Magento Enterprise Edition you can expect the 'community edition' to continue to be supported by people digging through the forums and exchanging cut-and-paste hacks to get the shit to work right. Looking under the hood reveals a labyrinth of directories and PHP files that will make your head spin. The database schema is insane. Any features that a client would actually want, such as WYSIWYG product editing require hacking the core files - hacks that will be lost when the software upgrades itself in place.

I have never had this much strife with a well-adopted open-source project before.

So do yourself a favor and stay far, far away from Magento. I feel pretty bad for subjecting a client to Magento, although admittedly it's a powerful piece of software that can really expand a business. It's too bad the support structure for it is a non-starter. At this point the best we can hope for is to keep the security bugs at bay and let businesses do what they do best.

Drop a comment and suggest the open-source e-commerce software that you like and why.

Dynamic Name Input Attributes with IE and jQuery Clones

Wow, look at me getting all nerdy all of a sudden.

We all know that IE sucks pretty hard.  For work I'm charged with supporting IE7 in our Javascript framework, based on jQuery.  We have a javascript powered template engine that duplicates content for n-numbers of data collections.  So, for example, you might end up getting four sets of data, one for each url, which includes something like a chunk of review text and the url itself.  

The template would then go about cloning the initial html structure four times, thus producing four distinct chunks of html.  The template system renames each chunk's element's IDs and the names of any form inputs in order to ensure that everything remains kosher for submission or DOM manipulation.

Problem is, Internet Explorer 7 doesn't support programmatically modifying the names of the elements.  No matter how many times you try to modify the attribute with jQuery, or how many times you try to read the HTML, you end up with the original name.  This blows.

So best solution I've found, if you're programmatically modifying the name as we were, is to parse out the outerHTML, regex replace the name to your desired name, then use jQuery to replace the input in question with the parsed HTML.  Certainly not the most elegant thing in the world, but it is a transparent solution that you can plug into your element cloning process.

Here's what I did, basically:

$(some_cloned_element).each(function(i, elem){
    var newName = "yay_i_love_my_new_name";
    if ($.browser.msie === true){ // evil browser sniffing *cries*
        $(elem).replaceWith(document.createElement(
            this.outerHTML.replace(/name=\w+/ig, 'name='+newName+'_'+i)
        ));
    } else {
        $(elem).attr('name',newName+'_'+i);
    }
    $("body").append(some_cloned_element);
});

Or whatever. You get the idea. Basically creating fresh elements for IE to get itself attached to rather than modifying a clone in-place.  Works well enough.