(this in no way meant to condone or apologize for those who commit piracy.

It's just a handy guide.

With it comes a special shout-out to my good friend David in Paris, who would still consider pirates CRIMINALS to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and wants the law to be extended to include anything even remotely like, ahem, copying...)

Seriously, WTF? Apparently, our favorite administration has been paying Lockheed Martin $500 Million to upgrade a simple terrorist watch list database with about 400,000 records and yet they've fucked it up like John McCain taking an inventory of his real estate... But, c'mon, there has got to be thousands of companies and organizations out there with quite complex membership/subscriber lists of half a million records or more -- heck, American Express must have more than 400,000 card members -- and they seem to be able to find their subscribers and their non-subscribers quite nicely. I'm also quite sure they didn't pay that kind of ludicrous sums for their applications.

So what the hell kind of rip off artistry is this? Where to begin? With the incompetent bureaucrats who placed the order in the first place but didn't spec it so it could be built right? For their accepting a $500M bid? For not doing the Q&A to ensure they were getting what they thought they'd asked for? Or how about Lockheed Martin's ace coders, who either have been told not to bother doing it right while the money people sock away a windfall profit. 

Either way, it's not making me feel any safer when I travel. But of course, actually preventing terrorist attacks and making us all safer was never really the goal of the administration's homeland security efforts, was it? Nope, it's mostly a chance to play politics, and -- apparently -- suck the public coffers dryer still, while enriching friends and cronies. 

I'm a confessed geek -- I code websites for a living. So when someone like John McCain sets up shop online (after "a Google" told him to do so, no doubt) I prod and I poke a bit to see how he chose to do it. And look at this... violation of copyright right there in the code:

Here's a snip of the innards of the shopping cart on ol' John's shopping cart at http://store.johnmccain.com:

   <div id="footer_bottom" style="visibility:hidden">
<!--    
===========================================
VOLUSION LINK - BEGIN
===========================================
Customer has agreed per Volusion’s Terms of Service 
(http://www.volusion.com/agreement_monthtomonth.asp)
to maintain a text hyperlink to "http://www.volusion.com" 
in the footer of the website. The link must be standard html, contain 
no javascript, and be approved by Volusion. Removing this link 
breaches the Volusion agreement.
-->
<p>Shopping Cart Powered by <a href="http://www.volusion.com" 
title="Shopping Cart Software"   target="_blank">Volusion</a>.</p>
<!--
===========================================
VOLUSION LINK - END
===========================================
-->
</div>

Now, the web-savvy out there will notice that the div tag has a CSS style setting (visibility:hidden) that effectively hides it from view. It's a common enough trick used to disguise things you don't really want your visitor to see, but which have to be present on the page for whatever reason. But right there inside the same div is a link to the supplier of the shopping cart software, and it clearly states that the link has to be visible.

Couple of things: 1) if you're ballsy enough to violate a copyright agreement, then at least have the smarts to remove the comment from the code that so prominently flags your violation. 2) Big John has apparently contracted with an outfit called goptrunk.com for his adventures in e-commerce, so his web guys may not really know what the hell is going on -- but as we all know ignorance doesn't exonerate you: they're the ones running the site, and they are violating their agreement, direct or otherwise, with volusion. And clearly the hacks over at goptrunk.com know about giving credit where credit is due, because their own logo is prominently displayed at the bottom of the McCain store. Finally, 3) it's a bit ironic that volusion.com is also the supplier of e-commerce to the Obama campaign (see http://store.barackobama.com/). Obama's site does display the necessary credit for volusion.com.

Now, the plot thickens. According to this story at pajama media, goptrunk apparently is accused of being a spin-off of tigereye, a largely Democrat-centered e-commerce outfit. I think they've got their story wrong and are simply missing the point that all these front ends feed off volusion.com for order fulfillment. And, yes, if you go to democraticstuff.com to shop, you'll find a volusion.com e-commerce site as well. So, it would appear that the tigereye crowd have managed to pull a fast one on a desperate McCain campaign: after their initial campaign tchotchkes vendor was busted for getting stuff made in Vietnam, they evidently decided to go with someone who knew the game better -- and they just happened to be a democrat-run outfit. Good for them for picking a winner, and too bad for all the wingnuts who are having an additional coronary over this matter...

Several of my clients use Adobe Contribute (formerly known as Macromedia Contribute etc. etc.). How do I put this nicely... it sucks. Gloriously. Both from an end-user standpoint as well as from an admin's standpoint.

Just ran into a serious glitch where a previous geek overlord had set an administrator password but omitted to provide me with same as part of the handover. So, now what? Adobe doesn't provide anything useful in the way of a password retrieval mechanism within Contribute, their suggestion is, "Nuke everything, start over. Have a nice day." Whee. Not happening.

So, I turn instead to the trusted intertubes, and find this fix:

A couple tips for administrators of Contribute 3 content management systems:

If you lose your site administrator password, Macromedia/Adobe tells you some lies about having to wipe out all the Contribute settings on your server. This is not at all true. Do this to reset the password without wiping out your settings:

1. in the document root of your server, there will be a _mm directory. In that directory, find a file called something like cthub[a bunch of numbers].csi. This is the file that stores your Contribute site settings.
2. Make a copy of the cthub[...].csi file, so you can restore it if you mess something up.
   1. Edit the file with a text editor (it's just an XML file), and change the admin_password and admin_password_salt values to empty strings, like so:
      
      

      <admin_password value=" />
      <admin_password_salt value=" />
      
      

3. Now you can make a new connection to the site and make yourself part of the Administrator role without having to enter a password. You'll want to set up a new password under Administer Website » Administration, though, and Contribute will complain if you don't, so listen to it

It totally works. Just remember that the _mm folder is set to be hidden if you're trying to retrieve it from within Dreamweaver, and Dreamweaver is going to be mighty reluctant to let you edit the file. Use Notepad and a regular FTP client to zap the password. Huge props to Ed over at funkatron.com