I noticed earlier this morning that the blo.gs updates appear to be functioning (more or less) normally again. I haven’t heard anything from my contact at Yahoo!, so I don’t know if they found a better way to filter the information from feed updates, or if they simply dropped feed updates from their ping sources. It still seems to be seeing some spurious false-positives, but it’s much better than before.
We have some software that requires a hardware dongle, which connects to a standard printer port (25-pin DIN, female). Dongles are annoying enough, normally. But now we would like to occassionaly run this software on our new laptop. No, problem, just move the dongle over, right? Nope. The new laptop doesn’t have a printer port. Just USB and Firewire. We found a USB/Printer adaptor, but it converts to a Centronics connector, not a 25-pin DIN, … Continue reading
Here’s an awesome list of titles for Klingon Fairy Tales. Some of my favorites: “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe With a Big Spike on It” “The Hare Foolishly Lowers His Guard and Is Devastated by the Tortoise, Whose Prowess in Battle Attracts Many Desirable Mates” “Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Was Delicious” Additions I’d make: “Brer Fox Finally Gets Brer Rabbit by Blasting the Entire Briar Patch Off the … Continue reading
There is some misleading FUD going around about a vulnerability in WordPress 1.5.2. Let’s get this out of the way plainly: There is not a code execution vulnerability in WordPress 1.5.2. Now, a little more explanation of how this came into question: There was some communication between the person who discovered the problem (Stefan Esser, to the best of my knowledge) and Matt. Matt formulated a fix, which was checked into the repository and which … Continue reading
My server has experienced some downtime over the last couple of days. Probably my own fault, due to some changes I made in some service monitor scripts. After trying to manually wrangle things for a while and still experiencing mysterious performance issues, I finally rebooted the box this morning. Hopefully this will return the site to a more acceptible level of performance. So far, so good.
Announcing WordPress 1.5.2, now available for download. Owen Winkler has a good plain-English description of the changes. There is a security-related bugfix in this release, which affects servers that have register_globals turned on (which you shouldn’t). If this is the case for your server, or if you aren’t sure, then you definitely should upgrade. Other changes include: New API hooks relating to comment notification emails New category-related API hooks Improvements to the RSS feed for … Continue reading
An update on the ongoing problem with blo.gs updates… Blo.gs is still reporting erroneous updates. Not as many as before, but still enough to be a problem. And I know why. As previously theorized, after Yahoo! took over the service, they began feeding it updates from their RSS sources. The problem is that there are many feeds for comments which (obviously) update more frequently than the main site content. Unfortunately, there’s probably not a foolproof … Continue reading
There’s no telling how this post is going to affect my Google ads or my status in certain website blocking systems, but here we go… We’ve all seen television commercials for Viagra, Cialis and other “male performance enhancement” medications. And depending on your particular sensitivities, you might be embarassed, amused, or intrigued by these things. I probably fall in the middle group. What I love about these advertisements are the legal disclaimers. “Certain sexual side-effects … Continue reading
Whoops, I forgot to rename that previous post, since I didn’t actually post the round up. So, this post will be the real round up… Sort of. I had some other links I wanted to post, but I lost them. Confirmed: Water on Mars! (that image is my new desktop background) Space Shuttle Discovery returns safely Google News offers feeds IE 7 really will fix lots of CSS bugs (I’m curious to see what’s going … Continue reading
I was going to post several small items yesterday, to make up for the lull in activity, but my server was down for the better part of the day. When the other admin finally got it rebooted, some of the database tables had some minor corruption, so if you visited late yesterday you might have seen some warning messages. I was able to run some repairs, and everything seems to be happy again, now. I … Continue reading