Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

WordPress, web development, and world domination.

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About Dougal Campbell

Dougal is a web developer, and a "Developer Emeritus" for the WordPress platform. When he's not coding PHP, Perl, CSS, JavaScript, or whatnot, he spends time with his wife, three children, a dog, and a cat in their Atlanta area home.

WordPress 1.5.2 Security FUD

Aug172005

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 →

Server trouble

Aug172005

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.

WordPress 1.5.2

Aug152005

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 →

blo.gs update

Aug112005

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 →

That’s a bad thing?

Aug112005

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 →

The Real Round Up

Aug102005

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 →

Round up

Aug102005

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 →

Review: Wolfgang Puck’s Gourmet French Vanilla Latte

Aug032005

0.2  A so-so product in a nifty can Aug 3, 2005 by Dougal Campbell product Wolfgang Puck’s Gourmet French Vanilla Latte ????? This morning, I tried out one of those self-heating coffee drinks, in particular the French Vanilla Latte from Wolfgang Puck. Many geeks have been interested in discussing the can technology, which is simple, yet interesting. But what about the beverage itself? Okay, before I discuss how the “latte” tastes, let me say this: … Continue reading →

Yarrr!

Aug022005

Don’t forget: Talk Like a Pirate Day is only about six weeks away. I’m going to get a customized golf shirt made for the occassion. It’s pretty convenient to have in-laws who own an embroidery business. <plug> Visit Hometown Threads, Your Embroidery Headquarters! Located inside the Wal-Mart on Highway 92 in Woodstock, Georgia 770-591-9264 </plug> I’ve picked out the main pirate design that I want on the shirt. I just need to decide what text … Continue reading →