Author Archives: Donncha

WP Super Cache 1.4.9

There’s a new release of WP Super Cache out and it’s a security release to fix XSS problems in the settings pages. Those pages are only accessible by admin users so an anonymous visitor to your site can’t come along and enable it to steal your login cookies but along with those fixes come many bug fixes so it’s worth upgrading if you’re using an old version.

From the Changelog:

  • Fixed bug when not running sem_remove after sem_release. See https://github.com/Automattic/wp-super-cache/issues/85
  • Fixed a PHP error impacting PHP 7.1.
  • Fixed a bug where we cached PUT and DELETE requests. We’re treating them like POST requests now.
  • Delete supercache cache files, even when supercache is disabled, because mod_rewrite rules might still be active.
  • Updated the settings page, moving things around. #173
  • Make file locking less attractive on the settings page and fixed the WPSC_DISABLE_LOCKING constant so it really disables file locking even if the user has enabled it already.
  • Added a WPSC_REMOVE_SEMAPHORE constant that must be defined if sem_remove() is to be used as it may cause problems. #174
  • Added a “wpsc_delete_related_pages_on_edit” filter that on returning 0 will disable deletion of pages outside of page being edited. #175
  • Fixed plugin deleting all cached pages when a site had a static homepage. #175
  • Make sure $cache_path has a trailing slash #177
  • Remove flush() #127 but also check if headers are empty and flush and get headers again. #179
  • Add fix for customizer #161 and don’t cache PUT AND DELETE requests #178
  • Check for superglobals before using them. #131

You can click through to each of the Github pull requests above to see discussion around each bug fix.

If you’re hosting many sites that use WP Super Cache and you’re seeing issues with semaphores it may mean that your users are using file locking. It’s really not needed and in #174 there’s a fix that went into this release. You can disable file locking completely by setting the constant “WPSC_DISABLE_LOCKING” in a global configuration file. The file locking simply slowed down how fast cache files were created and is a hold-over from WP Cache when that plugin used to write directly to the cache files. This plugin writes to temporary files before moving to the final cache files so that locking isn’t really needed, but some sites still use it which is why it’s still around.

I’ve already been working on the next release with efforts to move the legacy cache files into the supercache directories. This will make it easier to maintain them and improve performance. We really need to find a better name for this caching method however. It caches everything – page contents and http headers so it’s quite useful!
If you’re going to test that PR, try #176 too. The plugin only deletes index.html type files right now but this chunk of code cleans up various for loops in the plugin and also deletes any file in the named directory. There are some restrictions on it so it won’t delete anything outside the cache directory.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

The Galaxy S7 finally gets Nougat

Nougat, or Android 7.0 has finally been released by Samsung for the Galaxy S7/ and S7 Edge and my phone is downloading it.

Now that it’s here I was wondering if I should install it as I’m quite fond of “Good Lock”, a replacement for the notification system in Samsung phones that doesn’t yet work in Nougat, but this comparison video (of the first beta) below convinced me to try it.

The notification panel looks ok, but has been updated since that video was made. The brightness slider can be moved to the top of the notification panel so it shows on the first pull-down now. That brightness warning dialog only showed the first time I set it to that bright. It’s definitely an improvement on the panel in stock Marshmallow on the S7. I like the multitasking, and the camera has got a nice UI update, even though I rarely use anything but the “pro” mode to shoot raw files. I hope Android Pay still works. I guess that’s one good thing about credit cards – you don’t have to worry about an OS update breaking it!

I wonder if I can enable the blue light filter only at night. That would be more useful than the screen turning yellow during the day. Nightmode Enabler doesn’t work.

Finally, here’s a video showing the final Nougat update..

Frank Kelly’s 12 Days of Christmas

Is it too late for Frank Kelly’s parody of 12 Days of Christmas?

Frank was probably best known as Father Jack on the show Fr. Ted, but I came across him first on an old vinyl record of his stories. He also produced many comedy sketches such as this one:

And he features in this clip of Yu Ming is Ainm Dom:

Watch the full short movie here:

A great talent who died earlier this year.

3 months free Backblaze again

A long time ago in 2013 Backblaze had a “sign up and get an extra three months free” offer and they’re back at it again.

For the next 32 days. click on this Backblaze signup link, you’ll get started on a free trial for a month to test it out, but if you decide to pay you’ll get an extra three months.

I love the Backblaze service. It’s a cloud backup service where you can backup your files. I won’t go on and on about it. I did that in my 2013 post, but if it’s any indication of how good they are, I’m still a customer all these years later with over 2TB of data backed up there now.

The signup link is an affiliate link of course (I get three months free as well if someone signs up) but if you don’t want to use it and don’t want that extra three months sign up through this link instead.

And to think, I used to rely on backing up my photos to CD..

Under Pressure Studio Take

A version of Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure you might not have heard before.

You can hear some talking in the background. From the title I thought this was made during the recording of the song but comments on this video and another video say it’s from radio interviews. Anyone know?

Here’s a great article on the making of the song.

Though the band sounds lighthearted enough in the studio sessions, the songwriting, May remembers, was fraught with tension. “It was very hard,” he said in 2008, “because you already had four precocious boys and David, who was precocious enough for all of us.” Bowie, says May, “took over the song lyrically” and insisted on presiding over the final mix session, which “didn’t go well,” according to Queen engineer Reinhold Mack. For his part, May has said he would “love to sit down quietly on my own and re-mix it.”

Howto disable syntax highlighting in Vimdiff

X > Y >> Z

Where X is the population of developers who read this blog, Y is those that use Vim and Z is those that use vimdiff regularly. I guess this post will only be useful to a tiny minority of my readers, but to them it might be the best thing they’ve read all year. (Well, it is 2016, right? It’s been a weird year.)

Vimdiff allows you to open two files in Vim and side by side compare them, pushing changes from one file to another. I’ve been using it as long as I’ve been working on b2/WordPress and even before then too. It’s supremely useful.

Vimdiff

Over the years I’ve used many different terminals, with various settings and colour configurations. My vim settings change over time too as I move from one machine to another. Sometimes the colours look ok in Vimdiff, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the colours are ok for one file type while conflicting in others.
The problem is that Vimdiff has it’s own colours it uses to show what parts of the files are different or missing. Those colours can sometimes hide actual text in the files. I find myself highlighting those lines with SHIFT-V to see the text.

I could pick a different colour scheme but then there’s no guarantee that a different part of text will be hidden by Vimdiff’s colour scheme. The easiest way to fix this is by disabling syntax highlighting completely when in Vimdiff and you do it like this. Open up your ~/.vimrc and add these lines:

if &diff
syntax off
endif

With that in there Vimdiff goes from looking like this to the simplified appearance below.

Vimdiff

Vimdiff

Ironically, the theme I’m currently using in Vim in the screenshots above isn’t that problematic, but here are two screenshots that show the problem from another machine. In the second screenshot I have highlighted (with SHIFT-V) the line with the function name in the left side. As you can see, the text “function” is still invisible in the right side of the screenshot.

Vimdiff Vimdiff

If you don’t want to edit your .vimrc for whatever reason you can also manually do :set syntax=off from within the editor but you’ll have to do that for each of your files.

All the code above is GPLed WordPress code. Thanks to user hildred on Stackexchange for that one. Hopefully someone else will find this useful.

Somebody to Love

As a joke a few days ago I shared an awful cover of a Queen song on Facebook, so in apology I give you Marc Martel singing the beautiful Queen song, “Somebody to Love”.

And as a bonus here’s an amazing rendition of Nessun Dorma. Wow, just wow.

All this found at the same time I find out that Freddie Mercury’s mother, Jer Bulsara has died at the age of 94. RIP.

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