For the sake of others out there who might run into the same problem, here’s how I did it. It’s pretty simple but no one has published anything as straight forward as this, yet (or at least I didn’t find one in my Google searches).

1. Log into your MySQL database via PHP Admin
2. Find the ‘xx_usermeta’ area.
3. Find the username of the account you want want to make the ‘keymaster’.
4. Look for the area that looks like this a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;} and replace it with a:1:{s:9:"keymaster";b:1;}.
5. Log-In to the account to make sure everything worked.
6. Pat yourself on the back buckaroo, you’re done!

If you know hacking, you know that having an account with the username ‘Admin’ can be a security risk. I got locked out of my account after changing my name from ‘Admin’ to something else to make it harder for potential hackers to get into my forums. Then I deleted the account called ‘Admin’ because I thought it was enough that I promoted my new username to administration status. The BBPress manual doesn’t mention the fact if you delete the Admin account, you’re deleting the sole keymaster effectively locking you out of the real administration of the back end of your site!

This technique should fix everything…at least for BBPress 0.9.0.2, the version that I used this on.

Now that Twitter has purchased Summize and corrected some seriously boneheaded moves, their next major moves need to be in the mobile space.  VentureBeat makes some interesting points on this very subject. If I were the powers that be at Twitter I would be looking to snatch up all of the best thirdparty applications using the API.  This would Include Hahlo and Tweetdeck, or possibly Twitterific (which has the feature-set of both).  Rather than spend more money and time trying to compete with these existing products, why not bring them into the fold? In addition, they need to take a hard look at the functionality provided by TwitterFeeder.  I use TwitterFeeder to announce that I’ve updated my blogs.  Without it, I have to do this manually. 

I’m not suggesting TwitterFeeder in and of itself is worthy of acquisition (the staff at Twitter could write this code in a heartbeat) but the functionality would be useful to Twitter users. It would also allow them to compete more directly with FriendFeed and Tumblr.

Normally the opening Terminal results in a default window that looks like this:

username_macbook:~ username$


Now let’s get a list of all our open communications ports by typing ls /dev/tty.* This command normally returns something that looks like:
dev/tty.BTRS232 /dev/tty.Tigoe6630-AppleAgent-1
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem /dev/tty.Tigoe6630-Dial-UpNetwor-2
/dev/tty.KeySerial1 /dev/tty.modem


When I was at borders today I opened this and noticed something odd…

250:~ username$


I’m not sure exactly what that 250 means but I assume it’s got something to do with taking over my open ports and filtering them through whatever T-Mobile device is used in-store. To confirm this I typed /dev/tty.* again which returned:

/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync

This essentially means I have no open ports except these two Bluetooth ports.

Now, we know T-Mobile does this because they don’t want to be held liable for hackers attacking users of their networks. Unfortunately that means from now on when I need to do real work I’ll just stay home instead of spending money with them.

Blog Networks is a social networking application that esentially turns Facebook into a massive database of blogs not unsimilar to Yahoo’s MyBlogLog.  The idea is to encourage reading by the casual reader.  I just signed up GosDot and Appfrica which you can check out by clicking the links.

All my social media discussion can be found at the Appfrica blog as it relates to work there..

So if you’re confused, where can you find Jon Gos on the WWW these days?

Appfrica.org
Smashing Magazine
Imaginepublishing.co.uk
Developertutorials.com
weworkforfree.net

I never expected to be a professional blogger but with the increasing amount of gigs I’m getting, that might just be possible.

The biggest is the announcement that Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have decided to leave the company they sold to Yahoo! in 2005!  This is big, not only because they’ve been pretty adamant about staying involved with their pet project but because Yahoo! is in the middle of formulating new strategies to appease angry shareholers after that much publicized Microsoft acquisition failed.  They’re also under increased pressure to breathe life back into their stock which has also suffered in the wake of that same deal.

Technorati announced some new funding, no doubt related to the longtail business model they just unveiled.  Technorati essentially plans to allow bloggers and publishers of all levels of popularity to sell ads.

The Huffington Post is also making a major step towards becoming an even bigger news media outlet.  They intend to compete in localized news markets initially offering a Chicago, Illinois portal and eventually expanding to include other regions of the country. This is apparently part of a larger strategy to move beyond solely political blogging, which has obviously been critical in this election year.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began,” Huffington said.

I’m almost certain this will either lead to acquisition offers by the major media news outlets who are (or should be) afraid of Huffington’s growing dominance on the web.

Lastly, Facebook surpassed Myspace to become the most popular social network worldwide. Considering it was valued by analysts at over a billion dollars only a few months ago, this adds more validity to speculation that Facebook will file for an IPO and go public soon.

Jaiku is joining Google. While it’s too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, we have decided to close new user sign-ups for now.

But fear not, all our Jaiku services will stay running the way you are used to and you will be able to invite your friends to Jaiku. We have put together a quick Q&A about the acquisition.

Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen, Jaiku Founders

In the past few weeks Twitter has faced confusion and what some might call a mass exodus of users because of the fact that it was unprepared for such heavy traffic from users. The combination of high traffic, too many calls to the API and the strain of Instant mesaging has brought the Twitter servers to their knees more than once. Now it appears Google is kicking the service while it’s down by purchasing Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. Now it appears Google may be prepping a big relaunch of the service it purchased last year, Jaiku. Meanwhile new competitor Plurk and FreindFeed continue to experience rapid booms in growth from former Twitter users who seem to be debating on weather or not they want to stick with the ailing service.

Note: This post has been corrected due to an error on my part. I left the original erroneous text but struck it out to avoid confusion.

It’s the new beta test model, where the actual testing and bug reporting is essential crowd sourced, allowing those diehard, bleeding edge, early-adopter users to feel more nerdy while helping Google work out the kinks. They’ve also opened up channels for sending feed back directly to engineers. Here’s somewhat of a GLabs manifesto from Product Manager Kieth Coleman.

People often ask how we decide what to build next. It’s usually a mix of factors, like how many users are asking for it (think delete button, vacation responder, and IMAP, among others), how useful we think it will be (think chat, conversation view, etc.) or how much fun it will be to work on (this is actually really important). We have all sorts of debates about each option, we weigh the pros and cons, and then some of the time we probably make the wrong decision.

Gmail Labs is a way for us to take lots of the ideas we wouldn’t normally pick and let you all (who use Gmail) decide whether they’re good or not. When you sign in, you’ll see a new page in Settings called Labs. It has a list of experimental new features, and you can enable or disable each one. Some of the popular ones will become core parts of the product, and we’ll eventually retire the ones that don’t get much use. We’ve put feedback links in there, too, so you can discuss a feature with other users and the engineer(s) who wrote it.

If you think this is just direct competition for Google Docs and 37Signals you’re wrong. Acrobat trumps them both in spades!

The Highlights at a Glance:

• Flash-based
• Uses Adobe ConnectNow
• Uses your pre-existing Adobe ID to log-in
• Allows for online storage
• Sharing of Files
• Works with the downloadable version of Acrobat 9
• Edit and Creates PDFs online
• Each user is given a space called a Meeting Room
• Allows for Screen Sharing via Web
• Can access your web cam from the browser!
• Can share your microphone from browser
• Appears to allow VOIP conference calls
• Advanced Bandwidth Allocation Preferences
• Shows all connected users
• Shared Whiteboard for taking notes and quick sketches
• Native chatting

PICS
Click pics to see more.

I tested it briefly for this article and a few things I can tell you is that it’s fast and dead simple to use. While the fact that it’s Flash-based worries me, it makes perfect sense. They invented Flash and I’m sure are dedicated to proving it’s scalability and usefulness for building web applications. It would be admitting a weakness if they used Ruby for something like this, not to mention with the recent problems Twitter’s been having that doesn’t sound like the best idea these days anyways.

The verdict? Acrobat.com aims to be the new place people do business online. It’s Skype, 37Singals’ Campfire and Google Docs all rolled into one! After Beta testing this once, I’ll never use at least two of those applications ever again! ReadWriteWeb has an even more in-depth review.

WeWorkForFree is a design community that allows it’s members to upload and share their portfolios in order to raise money for international programs that benefit developing nations.

They do this by hosting contests sponsored by donors that need a job completed, but who are also willing to donate money to a good cause. The programs are target small communities in places like Kenya, Uganda and India. Examples of some of these programs include goals like raising money to donate OLPC laptops to classrooms, raising money to send food to Tsunami victims or donating funds to a clinic that shelters refugees from Kenya.

One of the most interesting elements is that artist can apply for scholarships to actually go volunteer for a few weeks in some of the countries where WW4F are established! The idea is to help designers, photographers, illustrators, and other artists get involved in using their talents to benefit the world at large.

The UI of the site will be quite familiar to those of you using services like DeviantArt, CarbonMade and ConceptArt.org with the added benefit of raising money for the people in areas of the world that desperately need it.

We Work For Free is currently in private beta. Click the image below to visit.