After an interesting weekend, I wrote an article for GigaOm about Wordpress Themes and vulnerability. Got lots of press — even made the front page of Digg! — and several people propelled the story to new levels.

• An Italian site, Blaug, posted a video of decoding the offending strings within the theme.
• Derek Punsalan, whose awesome Grid theme led me to the fake, wrote it up in detail.
• Paul Carroll of Codescout had come across the issue some time earlier
• Mark Ghosh points out that there are lots of sites that hack legitimate themes

Nice to see the amount of activity on the topic and how much coverage it got. Derek, Paul, and Mark had all rung the warning bell earlier on.

I’m running Vista. It came on a new (and surprisingly good) Acer notebook I bought recently. And I have to say, it’s disappointing. I mean, there’s the usual Vista backlash; the amount of video processing used by things I don’t really need, like translucent windows. And most painfully, the networking sucks (more on that later.)

But one of the most disappointing things so far didn’t come from Vista. Instead, it came from Symantec. Specifically, from the 90-day trial of antivirus that shipped with the machine. It keeps crashing, encountering the tremendously informative “unexpected error.”

Turns out, there’s a fix: Don’t scan compressed files.

I mean, no hacker’s going to try and hide their nefarious deeds in a compressed file, right?

More invective and accusation after the jump. It gets worse!

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Just completed a presentation for Ryma (who make Featureplan, a product marketing application) as part of their product management webinar series. This one was on making products viral.

Viral marketing is a tremendously appealing way to gain product adoption. The basic idea is that you let your customers do your marketing for you, because they help spread your message. Hotmail is often cited as the perfect example, and Facebook is following suit.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as Hotmail made it look. They were able to get 12M customers for just $500K in marketing spending. Unlike web-based e-mail, many products need tweaking before they can have successful viral marketing campaigns. This presentation looks at what makes things infectious in nature, and what we can do to create products that also spread easily, with concrete examples from a range of product categories.

It’s available as a Powerpoint Show here (or on the presentations page) but Ryma has the recorded Webinar available as a Flash-based web show or audio-only podcast download.

On Saturday, I hung out at Barcamp in Montreal. Basically show-and-tell for geeks, with everything from new applications to the doom of DRM to pretty much anything technically or culturally active.

One person asked me how I defined “nerd.” I suggested that it’s a person who gets significantly more enthusiastic about a specific subject than their cultural surroundings deems appropriate and resists a dampening of that enthusiasm, usually by denigrating the status quo.

Pretty much like a cult. Mea culpa.

It was a great event. Montrealtechwatch has some pictures and a synopsis. I had a very interesting discussion with the folks at Cakemail (helped greatly by input from Ian over at Syntenic.) Cakemail is a product of Montreal’s thecodekitchen startup, which I wound up writing about over on WebWorkerDaily.

At one point I got up and showed some Coradiant to the crowd to fill in a gap; a bit hectic, but the audience is so web-savvy they understood a lot of it right away.

For future Barcamps in Montreal, check out the Wiki. Evan, the organizer, tells me the next one will be a Canada-wide one held in Montreal in the early spring.

(I think my favourite time-waster was the Powerpoint Karaoke, in which victims participants get up and deliver a presentation they’ve never seen before. Very funny stuff, particularly when you’re reprising an RIAA slide deck to a room full of people who think a CD is what games come on.)