… ended yesterday, and today I start the sixth year of blogging. The first year was blogging on the Perl-based TWiki software, 2003 through 2006 on Radio Userland. This year, I’m using WordPress, on a self-hosting Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP platform. Wonder what I’ll be running in another five years? It’s been a blast, and I hope it continues to be. Primarily, my blog is my voice online: notes of places I’ve found and want to share (or publicly bookmark so I can find them again), news to pass on, or events on which I comment. Thanks for reading.
Tag Archives | PHP
Linspire.com – Linspire Letter
In this week’s Linspire.com – Linspire Letter, Linspire announces a partnership with Canonical, the commercial supporters of Ubuntu. Linspire/Freespire plans to move their foundation distribution from Debian to Ubuntu, as MEPIS had announced some time ago. Ubuntu, in turn, plans to include CNR (“Click’N Run”) as an additional means of installing software – some free, some commercial, like codecs – into later versions of Ubuntu. This seems like a direct response to Eric S. Raymond’s call for better interoperability with proprietary formats for Linux.
No doubt, “Free as in Freedom” purists will see this as troubling. Pragmatic folks who just want to play their MP3s on Linux may welcome it. Whether this is the move that opens Linux to widespread adoption or destroys the underpinnings of Open Source… only time will tell.
MonadLUG notes: 8-Feb-2007: uniq and Joomla!
Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order promptly at 7 PM and cracked his whip to stick to his streamlined agenda. Brief announcements (“find GNHLUG events on www.gnhlug.org”) were followed by Ray Côté’s presentation of uniq. Ray explained the function and then introduced an increasingly complex set of examples, one building on another to show how uniq could remove duplicate lines from a sorted file, display various counts of duplicates and so forth.
Guy Pardoe was the main presenter. After the requisite wrestling with the projector, Guy talked about Joomla! Guy had hoped to be showing version 1.5, but it is still in early beta (beta 1 with beta 2 due rsn), so he didn’t feel it was ready to talk about for production sites. Guy explained when he volunteered for the presentation he thought 1.5 would be available, and promised to return when 1.5 was available and he had some experience in using it for production work. He briefly reviewed Barrie North’s presentation from DLSLUG last year (registration required) (and our notes from that meeting). Guy then showed us the Joomla! 1.0 correction: 1.5 install he had done that day, highlighting the basic features of the CMS and the ease of use of the administrative interface. It appeared to be a very open and accessible system. Templates and CSS files could be edited from within the interface and they appeared to be XHTML and CSS2 compliant.
A general Q&A followed. General concerns on the security of the core framework. Concern about the timeliness of the 1.5 release. General discussion of what CMS could do and what the target market was.
After the main presentation, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Maddog announced that he and Bill Sconce had met with faculty at the New Hampshire Technical Institute and that a plan to hold a series of MythTV Installfests was proposed (see the -org list for details).
Answering another question that has come up on the discusssion list, I came across this post while I was looking for Barrie’s presentation. While he is advocating for Joomla!, of course, he may be pointing out that WordPress would meet some peoples needs as well.
“Why you want to use Joomla! instead of WordPress”
Thirteen attendees were at the meeting. Thanks to Charlie for running the meeting, Ray and Guy for presenting, Ken and the Monadnock SAU for providing the facilities, and to maddog and all attendees for participating!
New Version: WordPress 2.0.7
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.”
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.
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?
Sparkline test
Here’s a test of sparklines: [spark][type line][size 20,90][series 14,27,31,30,31,30,30,31,30,31,92,79,118,103,59,67,49,98,57,58,61,53,55,49,52,28,45,54,46][dot 12,118,5,blue][/spark] . Sparklines were described in Edward Tufte’s books, implemented in PHP by James Byers and as a WordPress plug in by Graeme Pietersz. Cool stuff.
SANS – Internet Storm Center – Cooperative Cyber Threat Monitor And Alert System
In the SANS – Internet Storm Center Handler’s Diary on December 29th 2006 they describe the troubles that can occur when a user innocently chooses a likely search result from a popular search engine in “Pain reliever with serious side effects.” A chilling story. The moral of the story: anti-virus and anti-malware and firewalls aren’t sufficient. You must also stay up to date on all the latest patches. What if the patch isn’t out yet?
In related news, Microsoft will unprotect millions of Windows 2000 users tonight as their version of “Windows Defender” expires, with no update planned for the “unsupported” operating system. If you’ve been a depender on defender, it’s time to be a decider and a finder and find another product. Good luck, and happy new year!
FireFox and Thunderbird security updates…
Security is a process and not a feature. One of the easier tasks is keeping up with updates. FireFox (2.0 and 1.5) and Thunderbird each have security updates coming. They should automatically notice the new versions and offer to update it, but you may need to force it manually if you've somehow disabled updates, or you are working with an older (pre-auto-update) version.