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DLSLUG Monthly Meeting – June 1st
Bill McGonigle announces the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux Users Group Monthly Meeting – June 1st; The Return of the Nifties!
Read more at [DLSLUG-Announce November 2005 Archive]
Skype hole discovered and patched
Computerworld Breaking News reports Aussie firm finds hole in Skype client install. “Australian security firm Security-Assessment.com Ltd. has discovered a flaw in the install of the Windows-based Skype Ltd. client.”
Skype has issued an update they claim patches the problem. Get patching!
Ed Leafe screencasts the dabo AppWizard
Ed Leafe posts: “Some of you have seen the Dabo AppWizard before, but for those who haven’t, here’s a screencast that shows what you can do…”
Symantec patches AntiVirus Corporate Edition
SANS Internet Storm Center posts Symantec Patch Posted, (Sat, May 27th). “Symantec has just posted patches for the Security Advisory SYM06-010.” Note that these patches seem to be for the Corporate Edition of Symantec’s anti-virus tool. Get patching!
Time that tries mens souls
Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system.
— Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.
cited, in turn, in the GNU tar manual
Hacking WordPress with Visual FoxPro
My first attempt at importing blog postings from Radio Userland to WordPress resulted in over seventy categories. Every post with a different combination of categories like “MySQL; LAMP; Technology; Security” created a new category with that exact name, rather than a one-to-many post-to-categories representation. WordPress supports this, as does Radio. The communication breakdown occured between the two, in an export routine I used that created MT-compatible text files.
I could have kept experimenting with different imports, but I’d rather just plow ahead with what I’ve got, so I took a look at the WordPress schema and figured out what I’d need to hack. I used Visual FoxPro to read in the category table, figure out which (multiple) category posts I should have instead of the single, multi-category category, and rewrote the many-to-many file that joins the posts to the categories.
That narrowed it down to 15 categories. I added a new one, “Personal” for notes about politics and personal goings-on. I hope to squash the four, now three “My” categories, which are the old example categories left over from the original Radio install. Stay tuned!
I noted the counts of the number of posts per category was showing zero for several categories. There’s a (denormalized) category_count field in the category table. I popped open phpMyAdmin on the server to poke around and finally issued a “update wp_categories set category_count = (select count(*) from wp_post2cat where category_id = cat_ID)” to get the counts to update. Thirteen rows updated in 0.0635 sec. Darn near as fast as Rushmore.
BSA: Billions and Billions Served
Over at Ars Technica, Nate Anderson asks “Global software piracy losses: US$3- or $34-billion?” The BSA doesn’t make their case any better by making outrageous claims. Software piracy is an issue, but it is not a world-shaking crisis. 87% of the people with a pirated version of PhotoShop have no idea what to do with it. 63% of the people with an illegal copy of Adobe Acrobat would likely switch to a free product like PDFCreator if they knew of the product and had some motivation not to pirate. Use of the software by others does not correspond 1:1 to lost sales. And 73% of statistics are made up on the spot.
U.S. PTO smashes JPEG patent
LinuxWatch notes U.S. PTO smashes JPEG patent. The US PTO is far too eager to grant patents for bogus, vague, overly-broad “inventions.” We need to seriously reconsider whether most computer algorithms, file formats, business processes or genes qualify for patent status – a complete monopoly on the use of a design. The idea of a patent is to improve society with new inventions while ensuring the inventor can recoup the investment of building and manufacturing an invention, at the cost of slowing innovation.
Problematic PostgreSQL patch
Computerworld Breaking News notes PostgreSQL fix could break applications. “PostgreSQL users have been put in a potentially sticky situation by a security flaw made public this week. The hole allows for SQL injection attacks, and affects all unpatched versions of PostgreSQL. The fix breaks many users' applications.” Ouch. A cure worse than the disease?