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Zend is planning to release a pre-release of the highly anticipated Zend Framework sometime in February. From what I heard Andi say on the Pro::PHP Podcast at some point there will be CVS access to the Zend Framework project (read-only I am sure).

I am really looking forward to getting to see the progress that has been made. Once the Zend Framework is released I am planning to sit down and give it a thorough review here on the CentreSource Blog. I am unclear if there will be CVS access with the Pre-Release of if that will be later.

There has been a growing grumbling on the internet about big sites like Google storing information about individuals’ usage. Jr Colin posted a well reasoned ballast to those concerns today.

It is worth a read if you are concerned about your privacy online but don’t feel a need to wear a tin foil hat just yet.

As the CEO of a technology firm, it’s only natural that I would use the Internet to research solutions to even the most mundane problems life throws at me. One such problem was the size of my wallet. For years, I carried a tri-fold that served to carry to my identification, credit cards, and other miscellaneous items. Since founding CentreSource, my wallet has also become a precious repository for receipts for business related items. Needless to say, the girth of my wallet grew to ‘epic proportions’ – and the man-ritual of cleaning it out became a monthly event. But even at its most spic-and-span, my wallet was still large enough that it actually wore a hole in one of my pants… enough was enough. I had to find an alternative :) Enter the ‘All-Ett‘.

Earlier today, I posted about spam received in a blog comment that was clearly posted by an actual person. In that post, I mentioned tracking down (not hard in this case) and calling the company that appeared to be behind the spam, Advantage Consulting Services. Surprisingly, “V. Patel” called me back.

I told him I was interested in their company’s product and started off just asking him questions about SEO in general, followed by some leading questions about how linking might affect pagerank (hint hint). CentreSource deals quite a bit with SEO, though with legitimate “white-hat” vendors (naturally), so I had a fair idea of what I could ask to probe for nefarious practices, but he pretty much kept it legit. Eventually I cut to the chase and explained why I was really calling, I asked him if he spammed the blog. To my further surprise, he said yes, and that he was “sorry”. Yeah, well, I’m sorry too, pal.

The company name is Advantage Consulting Services (www.acsseo.com redirects to this URL). The website is actually a nice-looking website, and it comes across as being a legitimate SEO company (of which there are many). What’s even funnier is that they have an entire section devoted to ethics, where they note:

We recognize that your website represents both your integrity and ours – and we strive to give you the best results while maintaining the highest of industry principles. We use industry best practices and ethical standards to ensure that your search engine optimization and marketing processes are achieved through honest means.

It doesn’t get much more ironic than that, folks. “Your Integrity Is Your Integrity”, they say at the top. I wonder how “Abrams California Health Insurance” might feel about the “ethics” involved in Advantage Consulting Services spamming on their behalf. Unsurprisingly, nowhere in their Processes page do they mention comment spamming.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t so infuriating.

The transcript of our conversation is below. It’s not terribly exciting — I was admirable in keeping my composure while finding ways at the end to say “spam is bad” without swearing. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new friendly face of the comment-spam inundating your blog, “V. Patel”:

So, since I wrote and implemented wordverify, I have only had two comment spams slip by. They were both human-driven. I could see a clear path of them coming in to the site, go to a post, submit the comment, and get the “Please enter the security word” failure, go back, and then successfully post the comment.

It appears the reality of human-driven comment-spam is upon us. The most recent one I received is below:

Author: Colorado Health Insurance
E-mail: vpatel@acsseo.com
URL: http://www.abrams-california-health-insurance.com/
Comment: Great blog I hope we can work to build a better health care system as we are in a major crisis and health insurance is a major aspect to many.

We all know this ‘web thing’ is just a fad that will soon pass… but until it does, it looks like AJAX will continue to increase in popularity. Popular software makers now deem it important enough to include in their IDE platforms… CNET writes:

That popularity has spurred some major development software makers into action. Microsoft, a heavyweight example, was quick to jump on the AJAX bandwagon. Last year, it announced plans to create an AJAX toolkit, code-named Atlas, which works with its flagship tool Visual Studio. A early version of Atlas was released in December.

Software Property Tax is an issue that is near and dear to our heart. In continuing with our first assessment and subsequent update from the NTC, we thought we’d also provide this article from the Tennessean (especially since you can’t find it on their site by typing in ‘Software Tax’ in their Search field… go figure)

Seth Gottlieb wrote a good article about choosing an OpenSource CMS. Given the fact that there are so many choices at varying degrees of maturity, I think his advice in the conclusion is definitely sound:

Open-source content management software presents an attractive option for companies looking for a straightforward solution to a common problem. However, traditional methods of software selection are less helpful in evaluating open source than commercial software. Indeed, the vast selection of open-source content management software, coupled with the broadness of the category, can make the task of sifting through the possibilities tedious and disorienting.

While researching the situation with SSL Wildcards that i mentioned yesterday, the plot seems to have thickened a bit.

Here’s the situation as I see it so far. First, here’s all I can find about what the HTTP/TLS RFC says:

Names may contain the wildcard character * which is considered to match any single domain name component or component fragment. E.g., *.a.com matches foo.a.com but not bar.foo.a.com. f*.com matches foo.com but not bar.com.

This is rather vague, but it doesn’t seem to prevent what we want to do. That said, here is the actual behaviour I am seeing:

OperaWatch notes a weird phenomenon: different browsers are getting different deals advertised. 25 free songs to Opera users, 50 free songs to Internet Explorer (IE) users, and 90 songs for 99 cents to Firefox users.

Pretty weird. I am a big emusic fan and a big Opera fan — where do my allegiances lie?! Any guesses as to the explanation for this?

UPDATE: about.com’s take:

My best guess would be that they’re pulling for a greater market share from the browsers that use them the least, in which case I guess savvy Firefox users are being punished for using eMusic more than anyone else.