March 2008 – Something Odd!

Stargate: Ark Of Truth

Sunday 30th March at 9pm on Sky 2. If you’re a fan that’s all you need to know

Stargate: Ark Of Truth, the feature length episode which followed the last and final series of Stargate SG1 was released on DVD in the US at the start of March according to Barry’s post. I thought I’d have to wait until the region 2 DVD became available but Sky ponied up the dosh and I presume it was shown during the week on Sky 1? I’m still catching up on my regular programming through Sky+ and haven’t hit last week yet so I missed any trailers if there were any.

Sky+ is all set to record Ark Of Truth tomorrow night! I hope it’s better than the drivel they served for the final episode! Here’s a trailer to wet your appetite. I think it just might be a winner.

There's never been a better time to upgrade WordPress

When is the best time to upgrade your blog software?

After the latest release has been out for a few weeks?
When a release is so new it’s burning a hole in the ftp servers?
When there have been a couple of releases because idonthavethetimetoupdateeverysingletime?
Now?

The best time is right now. Spammers are taking advantage of exploits in old versions of WordPress and inserting hidden spam links in posts and using WordPress powered blogs to distribute viruses and malicious software. They’re also using these exploits to run their own code on your server.

This morning I spotted an Irish blog in my feedreader that had hidden links added to it. I contacted the blog owner and she’s going to upgrade her blog soon.

The best way of stopping them is by downloading the latest version of WordPress which at the moment is ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5 and if you use use WordPress MU you should download version 1.3.3 of that. Once you’ve upgraded change the passwords of all your users. On WordPress MU sites, it’s probably enough to ask any user with site_admin access to change their password. To make your life easier, try the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I haven’t used it yet but it works for a lot of people.

If you suspect that your blog has been compromised and you have already upgraded then please change your passwords and overwrite your current install with the files from a newly downloaded copy of WordPress. It’s worth checking that no extra php files have been added too.

Running your own blog is about more than just writing and contributing to the blogosphere conversation. You also have an important responsibility to be a good ‘net citizen by keeping your software up to date.

If you absolutely cannot upgrade straight away then adding a .htaccess file in your wp-admin/ directory and adding another username and password level of authentication might help. This page describes how to do that, but it is no substitute for upgrading to WordPress ~~2.3.3~~ 2.5. You should delete you xmlrpc.php too, thus depriving yourself of pingbacks and desktop blog posting abilities.

Go on, upgrade. After you do it once it doesn’t seem so scary.

Update! To find any posts with hidden links search your posts for any of the following:

display:none;
height:0

You can use the Search box on the posts edit page, or phpMyAdmin.
Open up phpMyAdmin, go to wp_posts, click Search and in the box next to post_content type %string% where string is one of the two options above.
That may return posts that don’t have any hidden links but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

StumbleUpon's brief dalliance with CAPTCHAs

I was shocked to see a CAPTCHA this morning when I stumbled a post not yet in the SU database. StumbleUpon to me was and is the one social network where I hadn’t come across reams of spam or annoying behaviour. The overall experience there has been so smooth and enjoyable that I wondered just how they managed to keep the spammers at bay. Obviously they’re attracting the wrong attention now because this morning I was presented with a CAPTCHA twice when I discovered new content.

Illegible StumbleUpon CAPTCHA

A slightly more readable StumbleUpon CAPTCHA

Those CAPTCHAs look like the one on Matt Haughey’s post. I guess StumbleUpon were using ReCAPTCHA too? Thankfully they stopped and the last post I stumbled (Matt’s post above) had a big empty space where the CAPTCHA had been. Please SU, don’t bring the CAPTCHA back!

Thanks Mark for the link to Matt’s post.

Do you read any Irish blogs?

If you’re not Irish or living in Ireland, can you name an Irish blogger that you read on a regular basis? (Besides me of course!) And more importantly, why? Is it because of their niche, or is it their witty and insightful commentary?

I ask this because Kathy Foley blasted Irish blogger Twenty Major’s new book and proceeded to question whether the Irish blogosphere had anything to offer the world. Has the land of saints and scholars become a land of consumers without giving anything worthwhile back?

I haven’t read Twenty’s book so I can’t comment on that but I do not agree with her assertions regarding the Irish blogosphere. If you’d like to find out for yourself, here’s an easy way to immerse yourself:

The Technorati top 100 Irish blogs as maintained by Justin Mason.
Irishblogs.ie aggregates almost all the Irish bloggers out there.
Gastronom.ie is a food blog aggregator for all you foody types.
The Irish Blog Awards blog links to all the nominated blogs and winners each year.
And finally for the photographers there’s Pix.ie’s explore page and of course the Ireland and irishblogs tags on Flickr.

Happy reading!

Jump Around as Gaeilge

“Léim Thart” le Des Bishop ag canadh ag Oireachtas na Samhna 2007 i gCathair na Mart. It’ll be on RTE 1 tonight on “In the Name of the Fada” at 10:15pm if you want to catch a probably better version. I can barely make out any of the song in any of the Youtube videos of his performances I watched this morning!

Fair dues to him for taking on the Irish language. Takes a foreigner to show the Irish how to make it popular! 🙂

FAIL

A conspiracy of silence

Britney Spears and the Paps

I caught the last 20 minutes of Britney: Speared by the Paps on Sky 1 last week. It was a candid look into the world of the paparazzi who follow Britney Spears everywhere. Britney Spears has her own agenda and apparently laps up the attention and encourages the “photographers” but how low do you have to sink to crave this attention? Sickening and weird.

If you’re wondering just how bad it is, watch this short clip which was featured in the show. Britney visits Rite Aid and she’s mobbed by paparazzi.

So, is anyone taking bets on how long Britney will survive under this constant onslaught? She was taken to hospital in January while Paparazzi waited for her ambulance after she refused to hand over her kids to Police. You don’t even need any training to do what these guy do. They just buy a decent DSLR, a powerful flash and point it in the right direction.

Is it worth it? What’s the payout for these guys?

Celebrity gossip magazines and websites say that they will pay $10,000 or more for an exclusive photograph of Britney – three times as much as for an image of Angelina Jolie, the next most bankable star.

I’ll happily live in obscurity and photograph unknown strangers for no money at all! 🙂

HOWTO: Ubuntu desktop visual effects on Dell D630

The Dell Latitude D630 comes with a number of different video cards but if you use the Intel chipset you may be frustrated when trying to activate the visual effects eye candy of Compiz:

Checking either of the lower two options brings up this alert saying, “Desktop effects could not be enabled”.

I didn’t bother trying to fix it for ages and put it down to using Ubuntu on exotic hardware. Fortunately it’s simple to get working. I just needed to install the xGL server:

# aptitude install xserver-xgl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
  libglitz-glx1 libglitz1
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libglitz-glx1 libglitz1 xserver-xgl
0 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/1843kB of archives. After unpacking 4854kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

Once I logged out (and rebooted, for some reason my external monitor doesn’t always “catch” when I restart X) and back in again xGL was loaded and I was able to enable desktop visual effects. Despite my misgivings about using an embedded graphics chip it actually works really well. Windows bounced around, bent out of shape and did lots of nice animation stuff.

Then I removed the whole lot by uninstalling the xserver-xgl package again. Why? Unfortunately it conflicts with other openGL apps. In a toss up between fancy desktop effects and decent SDLMame performance, SDLMame wins hands down. It’s nice to know the visual effects work though!

Thanks Arthur for all the great stories

I couldn’t possibly let today pass without noting that Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at the age of 90. I read it first last night when Scott Beale twittered it and my first emotion was shock, and then of course sadness. I don’t know how many Saturday mornings I spent in Cork City Library looking through the science fiction section for his books. Then it was back on the bike and off home to devour my latest find if I was lucky and found one I hadn’t already read.

His Mysterious World tv series was compulsive viewing for a young fella like me (and I’m not the only one!). All I remember of it now is a rotating crystal skull but every week I was glued to the tv screen. Ah, Youtube to the rescue. Here’s that programme about the crystal skull:

Here he is years later on his 90th birthday last December, sharing his reflections and thoughts.

Wired interviewed him way back in 1993 and Jeff Greenwald asked him the following,

WIRED: As a futurist, do you spend much time thinking about your own death?

ACC: I think about it more than I ever did in the past, of course, since I’ve had these brushes. It doesn’t worry me; I hope I won’t have any discomfort, is the main thing. And I’m more concerned with the people I love, and the animals I love, than myself, in a way.

WIRED: What is it that you’d most like to be remembered for?

ACC: I’m happy that people are calling the stationary orbit the Clarke Orbit. I think that’s enough. And of all my books, The Songs of Distant Earth. It’s got everything in it that I ever wanted to say.

WIRED: Have you given any thought to what you’d want your epitaph to be?

ACC: Oh, yes. I’ve often quoted it: “He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”

I have to go dig out Songs of Distant Earth again. That was an amazing story, and so sad too.

WP Super Cache 0.6

It’s been a while since the last release of WP Super Cache, so it’s about time to release the updated code on the world!

This plugin allows a WordPress blog to be served directly from static HTML files just like another popular blogging engine.

When this plugin was originally released some users noticed strange folders being created in the root folder of their blogs. I was never able to replicate it and despite my efforts to track down the bug it remained unfixed. Well, I fixed that bug thanks to whooami and to Jennifer who allowed me to login to her server and debug my script. Barry was astute enough to figure out why it happened.

Other changes include:

Compressed cache files are deleted properly now, props John Pozadzides.
Documentation got a serious update. I added a FAQ, and the Troubleshooting section has been expanded.
The .htaccess is not updated until the user clicks a button in the backend now.
The listing of cached files is gone for this release as it was inaccurate. It didn’t include super cached files.
The backend admin page has been rearranged slightly. Advanced features go at the very end, and if you’re only using the WP Cache functionality, the Super Cache items disappear. The mod_rewrite check and .htaccess items are only enabled if Super Cache is enabled now.
Not all blogs have permalinks ending in a slash so I added a slash back into the mod_rewrite rules. If you use .html at the end of your permalinks you’ll appreciate this. props Michael R Aulia for that.

One more thing to note. If your blog is visible at a URL with or without the www you should decide which one is more important to you and download the Enforce www preference plugin. Super cached files are stored in a directory named after the hostname so if you go to the www URL and someone else goes to the url without the www they won’t see the static html file. Deciding on one URL avoids any issues with duplicate content too which is probably much more important too.

Grab WP Super Cache 0.6 from the download page!