Steve Smith over at Ordered List has hacked together a customized stylesheet for the WordPress administrative interface. Based on the screenshot thumbnails, it looks pretty nice. I plan to download it tomorrow and check it out more closely!
Alternate style for WordPress backend
June 9th, 2005Zend Core for IBM
June 8th, 2005Cool, IBM and Zend have announced Zend Core for IBM. Basically, it’s an officially supported version of PHP with tight integration into IBM’s DB2 and Cloudscape database servers, and some web services stuff. This is probably going to grab some new eyeballs for PHP from some IBM-based businesses who have probably never heard of it before.
If I was still working at my previous employer back in Alabama, I would be all over this. They are a big IBM user who are currently migrating their web platform from Microsoft’s IIS to IBM’s WebSphere. If I were still there, I’d have a much easier time converting all the Perl ASP code that I wrote to PHP than if I tried to rewrite everything in JSP.
This is definitely cool news for tech geeks in Big Blue evironments that like the security blanket of support contracts.
via: Sam Ruby
Redneck
June 6th, 2005I’m a redneck.
Not because I was born in Alabama and spent most of my life there. And not because I now live in Georgia. And definitely not in the sense of chawin’ tobaccy and watching NASCAR.
I’m a redneck because I spent most of hottest portion of Sunday out in the hot sun. I finally got around to starting a project of refinishing some old dressers for our kids — a project that Susan has been asking me to get done for quite some time now. We first had to clear a bunch of boxes out of our garage in order to get to said dressers. But the garage is packed to the gills with stuff, so the actual work had to take place in our driveway.
As a result, I now have a quite prominent farmer’s tan (hey, wow, no Wikipedia entry yet!). My forearms have a slight sunburn, and my face less so. But the back of my neck is very lobsterized. I quite literally have a red neck. Ouch.
WordPress Sponsors BrowseHappy
June 1st, 2005WordPress is now the official host and sponsor of the BrowseHappy campaign, as noted in a WebStandards Project press release.
In an effort to refocus energy on advocating for standards from a perspective of universal access and vendor neutrality, WaSP is handing over the reigns of the BrowseHappy campaign to the good folks at WordPress.
What does this mean to the average user? Not a whole heck of a lot. But it probably means a bit of good press for WordPress, BrowseHappy, and WaSP. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming Internet Explorer 7 affects the web standards balance. The IE7 team seems to be making an honest effort to improve that browser’s compliance.
WordPress Security Update
May 27th, 2005We were recently notified of a SQL injection bug in the WordPress code. Matt patched the code and updated the archive on the downloads page last night. All users are encouraged to upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1.2.
The patch is very simple (it just requires one new line of code in the get_category_by_ID() function), so if you don’t want to upgrade your whole installation, you can follow the instructions in the announcement. As a side note, the same fix applies to version 1.2, but at around line number 125 in the file.
OpenDocumentation
May 27th, 2005From Tim Bray, we learn that Open Document 1.0 has been approved as an OASIS Standard. The new format will be the standard for the OpenOffice.org office suite. This paves the way for an unprecedented level of compatibility between applications and tools dealing with a wide variety of document types.
In the interest of fairness, I’ll point out that Microsoft did document the new XML formats for Microsoft Office 11, which opens up the same sorts of capabilities. Mostly.
SpamValve Download
May 26th, 2005I only had a couple of responses to my call for SpamValve testers. One of the testers has already begun using SpamValve on his FreeBSD server. The other is tied up at the moment, but is going to attempt to adapt it to work on a Linux server sometime next week.
In the meantime, I’ve started using it to filter spam hits to my mail service. This was accomplished with a one-liner:
tail -0f /var/log/maillog | \
perl -e 'while(<>){ m/Mail from (.*) rejected/; \
system("/usr/local/sbin/svupdate", $1) if $1;}'
The command above watches the end of my sendmail log for entries indicating messages rejected by RBL checks. When it matches one, it sends the IP number to svupdate, which updates the spam counter for that host. That’s how easy it can be to use SpamValve to monitor a network service.
That said, I’m going to go ahead and make the code generally available. Obviously, feedback is welcome.
Download SpamValve: .ZIP (15K) or .tar.gz (11K)
I’m dubbing this SpamValve Version 1.0-alpha-2 “Hyrax”.
