My Ebay account was broken into somehow by someone in Indonesia. I really can’t figure this out. But, the damage was done as this person bought a cell phone for $320.00 and used my PayPal account to purchase it. I didn’t notice it until I say that Paypal had dipped into my checking account for that amount. Then, come to find out, I’m locked out of my ebay account.

I set up the Ebay and Paypal relationship long ago, back before all those phishing schemes and fraud was too prevalent. Because of this, my password for Paypal and Ebay were the same. That was a big problem that I didn’t realize, or should have realized could be a potential security breech. Anyway, turns out it was.

After several hours of spending time on the phone with Paypal and using Ebay’s security fraud chat thingy, I finally got back control of my accounts and reset all my passwords. I had to file a dispute with my bank as well.

The bad news is that it is a few days before Christmas and I was counting on that money to buy some presents and what not. Paypal admits that it was a fraudulent charge, but says it will be up to 10 days before they can return the money into my Paypal account. From there, it will be another 4 days to get it in my regular bank account. In the meanwhile, some ACH clearing house is making money off my money by holding it. I don’t know who is the bigger crook – the guy in Indonesia or Paypal.

What I can’t figure out is how my account was compromised. I would never fall for a phishing scheme or email and my computers are clean as a whistle. Being a developer on the web, I know when something is not right and always check my security certificates on trusted sites, since I install those regularly for businesses. The only thing that I can figure is that Ebay’s database was compromised. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about some major breech in the next few days or weeks. At this point, I do not trust Ebay or Paypal, but more so Ebay.

Stay tuned…

I’m starting to get a little better at identifying fluent interfaces. This is a programming technique where you can chain method calls together, and it reduces redundant code. Some claim that it is easier to read, but I think that the old way may be a little easier for me at this point, until I get used to this method of calling class methods.

Here’s an example:

$passwordFilter->addFilter(new Zend_Filter_HtmlEntities())
->addFilter(new Zend_Filter_StripTags());

Something about this photograph of Meher Baba struck me, so I wanted to share it. To me, Baba is absolutely glowing and radient, despite the fact that the photograph is black and white. Le me know what you think.

You never think about these things when you’re plugging in your hair dryer.

Right now I’m getting into learning some MVC development techniques. I got turned onto MVC by an exciting new project in the ecommerce realm called Magento (no not as in mag-neto,  but ma-gento). I thought it was mag-neto at first and tried typing that into the address bar to get to their site, but was redirected – looks like I’m not the only one that is slightly dislexic…

 Anyway, they’ve got a neat new shopping cart developed (right now in beta) in php5 and built off the Zend Framework. So, I started looking at how the implementation was structured and found that it didn’t fit the traditional mold. First, there was only one index file and a .htaccess file with some code I had never used or seen before. So, I dug a little further and found that the structure is based upon the Zend Framework and MVC archetecture / approach.

If I were a betting person and really, I do suck at gambling or playing cards - i’d say that this type of approach, especially as we get into Web 2.0 a little further will be the certain path that we must take as developers. I’ve been all over the Zend site and they are doing some amazing things with Ajax and web services.. Check out some of the feed articles on this blog from the zend site. Especially this one.

 Charles

Our old thermostat quit doing its job effectively, so I picked up a new one from Lowe’s today for around $50.00. The selling point for me was that it was accurate within +/- 1 degree on holding its temperature. I also got a model that was programmed for a 5-1-1, which means programmable separately for weekdays and weekends. Why don’t they just say that?

Anyway, the unit came with a mini-cd, so being naturally curious what kind of information Honeywell would provide on their “interactive” CD, I loaded it up.

The presentation is pretty good, typical of corporate product Flash demos, but what really impressed me were the interactive simulators for each of the Honeywell thermostats models. This must have taken a huge amount of programming on the developer’s part and it is buried somewhat in the rest of the presentation. You can actually go and program / operate each thermostat model. I uploaded it to my site just to show you. I hope I don’t get into trouble by Honeywell for doing so, either. Check it out here.

Charles

I’m finding out that blackberry only allows Emails in MIME type encoding. I’ve been working with a client who has had some recent issues in getting copies of orders forwarded to his blackberry. There’s very little out there on this issue that I can find, so I thought I would document it here for anyone with the same problem. Hopefully, I will be able to update this with a solution.