Development Blog › WordPress 2.0.7. I missed this first time it came around: a security-fix for WordPress, upgrading to version 2.0.7: “Recently a bug in certain versions of PHP came to our attention that could cause a security vulnerability in your blog. We’re able to work around it fairly easily, so we’ve decided to release 2.0.7 to fix the PHP security problem and the Feedburner issue that was in 2.0.6. It is recommended that everyone running WordPress 2.0.6 or lower upgrade to this new version.”
Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid
Thinking about deploying NAS? Before you do, you ought to read through Things we wish we’d known about NAS devices and Linux Raid by Daniel Feenberg of the National Bureau of Economic Reasearch, a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization boasting 16 of the 31 US’ Nobel prizewinners in Economics as past or present staff members. Having reliable data to work with is important to them. There are some interesting lessons learned in the humorous reviews of systems they have used:
“That turns 20 minutes of scheduled downtime to several days. I can only assume the motivation was to discourage the upgrade.”
“Later, NFS exports of snapshots were added at our request. This is the only time any NAS vendor was willing to learn anything from us.”
and
“I’d be very reluctant to put data on a proprietary system with no aftermarket support. Every vendor is in constant danger of being acquired, divested or turned around. When that happens you and your box are no longer “strategic”, and contract or not, requests for help are likely to be brushed aside. Even with an enforcable contract, the vendor can easily discourage calls for service by proposing solutions that don’t save your data.”
and
“In a crowded server room you won’t be able to tell which system is beeping, so some visual indicator is essential – but not generally provided. ”
Excellent pointers, worthy of review. There’s also some good discussion of the statistics and odds of disk failures and double failures. Well worth a careful review if you need to be thinking about storing a large amount of data reliably.
Eric Sink: Baptists and Boundaries
Eric Sink, a fine essayist and software developer, does a little vanity Googling in “Baptists and Boundaries” and makes several excellent points about people and their world views, the punchiest of which is “Objects in browser are smaller than they appear.” Do read the essay and enjoy.
I’ve been involved in several insular communities (Commodore, GEOS, Amiga, FoxPro) that believed that they had The One True Truth and all others were mistaken, ignoring the growing evidence outside the walls that other alternatives might have something going for them, too. My biggest shock in my journeys outside the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field has been discovering that there are rich and powerful tools, long traditions of software excellence and some subtle (and blatent) differences in culture. The rich bazaar of choices: BSD vs. UNIX vs. Linux vs. Solaris, Perl vs. Python vs. PHP vs. Ruby, PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. SQLite vs. BerkeleyDB, tabs vs. spaces, vi vs. emacs, n-tier vs. mvc, African vs. English swallow, only add to the richness and freedom of the environment.
The biggest complaint of people stuck with a one-size-fits-all solution is that there is no choice. The biggest complaint when faced with the dazzling alternatives of FOSS is that there are too many choices. With great choices comes great responsibility. Conversely, “choosing” to stay with a one-size-fits-all monolithic solution is no choice at all, but rather an abdication of responsibility and a surrendering of freedom. Choose wisely.
CentraLUG, 5-Feb-2007: Matt Brodeur and GnuPG, OpenPGP, keysigning
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on February 5th at 7 PM.
Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org and on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we’ll be meeting at our usual location in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
At this month’s meeting, Matt Brodeur will present an introduction to e-mail and file security using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The talk will cover basic concepts of encryption and digital signatures. Examples and demos will use GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a free (GPL) implementation of the OpenPGP standard available for most modern operating systems. Following the presentation, a PGP keysigning event will be held. Anyone interested in exchanging key signatures with other local PGP users can find details on our website,… as soon as we’ve set it up. Stay tuned.
Matt Brodeur is a Quality Assurance Engineer at Red Hat in Westford, MA and volunteer in local LUGs. He has previously presented OpenPGP talks at the Boston Linux & Unix User Group.
More details on the group and directions to the meeting can be found at http://www.centralug.org and at http://www.gnhlug.org.
The Dilbert Blog: Voice Update
Scott Adams blogs The Dilbert Blog: Voice Update “Wish me luck.” We do.
Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Reader Voices: Invalid Terms
Ed Foster’s Gripelog || Reader Voices: Invalid Terms asks, “At what point is it clear that a nasty license provision goes so far across the line that it must be deemed invalid? That seems to be an increasingly hot topic, due in large part to recent discussions here and elsewhere about various terms in Microsoft’s Windows Vista EULA.” Anyone considering installing Vista needs to be informed about the liabilities they may be assuming for themselves and their organizations. Or not, depending on whether you’d like to go to court and debate the validity of these licenses…
Ernie The Attorney: Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers
Ernie The Attorney blogs about how to Avoid penalty for switching cellphone carriers when you’re signing up for the new Apple iPhone. He points to Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch where Mike suggests, “My recommendation is to simply throw out the PC and switch to Mac. You’ll do it eventually anyway. Might as well do it now.” Wow! Will the iPhone be the new driver for Switchers?
Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs – New York Times
In today’s New York Times, Randall Stross writes, Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs
Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one — and only one — line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one — and only one — online music store, the iTunes Music Store.
Well, I suppose that might be “fair play” if you make your living selling iPods or you’re a record company whose business plan is to sell listeners the same music over and over, each time they want to listen on a different media. Great business if you can get away with it.
Make no mistake: I’m not advocating we steal content. That’s not right. The Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression puts it succinctly:
- Piracy of an artist’s work is illegal. Fair use is not.
- We have the right to hear, speak, learn, sing, think, watch, and be heard.
- No one should assume by default that we’re criminals, and the technology we use shouldn’t do so either.
- We have a right to use technology to shift time & space.
DRM-encumbered devices are Defective By Design — intended to prevent you from using all of the capabilities of the device.
Groklaw – EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS
Groklaw points to EU Commission Study Finds You’ll Save Money Switching to FOSS. The “free” adjective has always been a burden for FOSS, but when the other choice sounds like “Open Sores” it doesn’t take a marketing genius to decide… that geeks shouldn’t try to sell software. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) stalking-horse has been one of the best ways to confuse the issues, like the “shopping cart” estimates of cost of living. It depends if you prefer organic tofu or roast beast. Calculating the total cost of developing, maintaining, installing, training, supporting, migrating to/from and disposing of software is a guesstimate so mired in swags and assumptions it can mean whatever the company paying for the study wants it to mean, now can’t it?
Five Things You Might Not Have Known About Me
Andrew Ross MacNeill tagged me with the “Five Things” chain letter, also tagging Craig Bailey, Eric Den Doop, Kok Kiet (John Jones), Richard Base (FoxPro: Catalyst). In turn ARM was tagged by Rick Schummer, who was tagged by Alex Feldstein and Rick also nabbed Kevin Ragsdale, Kevin Cully, Mike Feltman, Randy Jean. Alex had tagged Rick along with Garrett Fitzgerald, Rick Borup, Doug Hennig, Craig Berntson. Alex, in turn was selected by Claudio Lassala. Claudio was tagged by Markus who was tagged by Rick who… well, you get the idea. Someone was bored over the holidays, probably someone who wasn’t incensed over Microsoft giving away Acer laptops for Christmas, and decided to double the volume of the internet with self-indulgent blogging bit. Folks, who cares?
I’ve followed the links back 27 times and still haven’t come across the first couple of A-List bloggers I’d seen playing this game only a few weeks ago, so my back-of-the-envelope math tells me that there’s no one left who has a blog, so I’m tempted to declare the game over. Well done.
But just in case there’s bad juju with breaking the chain, has anyone heard from Calvin Hsia, Christof Wollenhaupt, Paul McNett, Andy Kramek and John “Gonzo” Koziol? No? Tag, boys, you’re it!
For those into this six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, there’s a list of blogs at Fox Wiki Blog Watch and, yes, a self-referential aggregator of the resulting feeds at Planet Fox.
- I was saved from near-certain death aboard a submarine by a quick-thinking shipmate… and his clipboard. Really.
- I sat next to Senator George McGovern at a political rally.
- I earned three varsity letters in swimming. Butterfly was my specialty, though I wasn’t very good.
- I’m Union and I Vote: UAW Local 1981, the National Writer’s Union, AFL-CIO.
- I lived in a travel trailer over summer of 1980 in Orlando, Florida and the winter of 1981 in West Milton, New York, yards from the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. Might explain a lot, eh?