Category: Software (page 7 of 22)

April 3, 2010

Playing with WordPress 3.0, Beta 1

As I usually do, I switched this blog from WordPress 2.9.2 to the current 3.0 beta. I always run the beta versions and I have not yet gotten myself into a hole. It also helps that I have very good backups for the last 30 days.

I re-ran my overnight backup job one more time to make sure I’m up to date and used SVN to perform the switch.

$ cd /my/wordpress/web/directory
$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/

When I went to the login page I had to upgrade my database. And that’s all there was to it. I’ll do a regular “svn up” and keep my install current with the beta.

I have been kicking around the idea of taking the sites I manage and making them one multi-site WordPress 3.0 install but that will be down the road for a while. For now I’ll continue to maintain them separately with the released version (2.9.2 as of right now).

As for the beta, there are not many visual differences (the color scheme is lighter and less “harsh”) and each of my plugins check out. I am hoping that when 3.0 is released, the usual forum drama will not happen. But I also know somewhere someone will upgrade without doing the work of a full backup.

March 8, 2010

Now using Hybrid and a child theme

I’ve been interested in switching to a theme framework and after looking at both Hybrid and Thematic, I’ve begun plugging into Hybrid with the child theme WP Full Site.

It’s a fun little exercise and Hybrid has lots of places to make changes just using a child theme. The WP Full Site function.php file has already gotten some additions by me and I’ve switched from using the_content() to using it for just the first two posts. The rest uses the_excerpt(); I couldn’t work out how to use the Query Posts widget so I broke down and copied hybrid/home.php to wp-full-site/home.php. The file in the child theme directory gets precedence over the parent template version.

This is hands down the wrong way to go about this and defeats much of the point of using a child theme. But until I work out the widget logic, this will have to do. And besides I get to brush up on my PHP skills some more.

Update: Nuts, while playing with my install I lost this post. This is actually copied from my RSS feed on Google Reader. Backup, backup, backup…

March 7, 2010

And the winner is Xmarks

Earlier I had dropped Xmarks and installed Mozilla Weave. After a few weeks I’m back to Xmarks. Syncing the browser history is a very useful feature, but some really weird things have been going on with my Weave sync data lately.

My problems began when I installed Weave on my Ubuntu 9.10 work station. I could not get the bookmarks to install on that browser for anything. No errors in the log, just no sync either. I have just plugged in another old PC in the basement and installed Weave. The same thing happened and I was not getting any data synced.

Also being able to roll back to an earlier set of data on Xmarks is a huge benefit. I screw up sometimes and Xmarks has a great safety net.

I know that I can install Weave and Xmarks at the same time. That way I can use Xmarks for password and bookmarks and Weave for browser history. But I’m not going to do that because I want to limit the amount of add-ons that I’m using.

Now if only Xmarks would just sync web browsing history then I would not keep looking at Weave…

February 1, 2010

Mozilla Weave

Image from Mozilla's Weave website I’m giving Mozilla Weave a try. I’ve been a big fan of the extension formally known as Foxmarks (Xmarks) so when Mozilla released Weave, I was not sure if there was anything for me to look at.

I use a work PC, my HP, and a laptop. Xmarks has been good at keeping my bookmarks and passwords secure and supports a revision history of your changes. Somehow I messed up my bookmarks and this got moved to the Xmarks server. Not a problem, I just rolled back to an earlier revision and got all of my bookmarks back.

It’s like applying SVN onto my browser. Mozilla Weave is not quite like that. It does do bookmark and password synchronization but it doesn’t provide a means to rollback to an earlier version of your bookmarks (or maybe I just couldn’t find it). What appeals to me is that it also syncs up your browsing history. I have often been at work trying to remember a web site I had seen the night before at home. I’m hoping that this will sync my browsing history.

Xmarks has been very responsive to their users so I expect this feature to make it into their extension soon.

January 31, 2010

Recycling an old printer

Stefan had replaced his old Epson Stylus Photo R300 printer a long time ago and dropped it off at my house. It’s a USB Epson inkjet printer that has been replaced a couple of times over. I don’t even know what the current model is, but this one was free so who cares?

Naturally, I hooked this up to my Linux server in the basement. I could not get CUPS to agree with me so I’m printing via Samba.

I went to Costco and picked up replacement inks and glossy photo paper. The Epson inks were $60! The paper was the Kirkland knock off so I’m assuming the price was good. I connected my laptop to the print queue and shot off a test page using plain paper. That came out okay, so I loaded up the glossy paper and printed a couple of photos.

The photos looked like crap. There was banding all over the place and it looked like the ink had not decided to adhere to the glossy surface. If I looked closely, I am sure that the ink was about to slide off the page. So a few more test prints later and I set the default as premium glossy paper, Photos only, and enhanced photo processing.

The next photos looked stunning. The colors jumped right off of the page and the detail in the photos was just plain amazing. For my color test, I printed this photo of some fish statues. I had forgotten that some of the fish were actually not blue. I’m printing more and I have lots of paper and ink. The only downside is that the printer often has problems grabbing the glossy paper. It requires a lot of “take out the paper, insert the paper the exact same way”. But the output is really good and as I said, I got the printer for free.

What? No, I did not read any of the printer instructions or documentation. Why would you ask?

On Monday I’ll update the photos in my cubicle with these new printouts. I can look at them and admire the photos I took.

January 30, 2010

Wow, Skype looks different

I was catching up with a friend and she asked me if I still used Skype. When she and I worked at the same company, instant messaging and Skype were very popular.

I have not used Skype or IM for many months. With Skype I was getting weird spammy contact requests so I left it off. For IM I just stopped using it. This morning as a “why not?” I installed Skype on my PC. The interface looks more busy but aside from that it’s still Skype.

I was going to post a picture of the Skype GUI but somehow I don’t think my contacts would really appreciate that.

Facebook and keeping a blog journal have ruined the whole instantly contact your friends experience for me. I have a working phone and e-mail address; it’s much more personal that way. Even when someone I know joins Facebook, I’m usually on the phone with them the next day.

Instant anything just does not have much appeal for me anymore. Or maybe I’m getting old. I work with lots of mundane technology for a living, so the gee whiz factor rubbed off me a long time ago.

January 4, 2010

Moving WordPress again

I have been running my blog on the URL wp.dembowski.net for years. If you are familiar with WordPress then that’s an OK URL to use but most people are more comfortable with a generic name.

I did not want to use www.dembowski.net (already used for a place holder) and did not want to put move to a folder off of the web server. So I picked blog.dembowski.net and moved my WordPress install this morning.

It went very well.

I created a new virtual server for blog.dembowski.net on my server and enabled it in Apache 2 (a2ensite blog.dembowski.net) and copied all of my files from the old wp directory to the new blog directory.

I used my nightly backup script and produced a text file of my mysql database. I then ran this command on that text file:

$ cat wp-database.sql | sed -e 's/wp.dembowski.net/blog.dembowski.net/g' > new-database.sql
$ cat new-database.sql | mysql -D blogdbname -u blog-user -p

I did it that way on purpose so that I could always restore the old wp.dembowski.net setting if I messed this up. By hunting through and changing every instance of wp.dembowski.net to blog.dembowski.net in the database backup file, I guaranteed that even obscure plugin settings would get updated as well.

In my old directory I moved everything out and left a two line .htaccess file like so

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://blog.dembowski.net/$1 [R=301,L]

That way any hits to http://wp.dembowski.net/some/thing/here/ will get 301 Permanently Moved to the same URL but on http://blog.dembowski.net/.

After a little testing everything is confirmed to be working. I am in the process of updating my stats settings in Clicky and Google Analytics but so far so good.

December 18, 2009

WordPress 2.9 is released!

I just got home from Christmas shopping and my SVN pull down of the trunk was 3.0-alpha. Which told me 2.9 is released and I should switch to the 2.9 branch.

As always it’s just

cd wordpress-directory
svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9/

And that’s it. I’m now on the 2.9 branch.

I’ve been using the 2.9 beta for a few weeks now and what I think will make this release a success is that it looks almost 100% identical to 2.8. Change on the back end is well recieved; change the UI and it’s an open revolt…

The WordPress user base can be a fickle group and each release brings a set of complaints. I have not had any incompatible plugins (and I never do) but new releases always brings “issues”.

You can read up on the official notice here.

List of changed files

When ever a new release comes out, people want to know which files changed. With every major release it’s always a lot and going from 2.8.6 to 2.9 really means do the whole thing. It’s 286 modified files that are different from 2.8.6 to 2.9.

Running this command got me the output.

$ svn diff --old=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.6 --new=http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.9 | grep ^Index | sed -e's/^Index: //' > wordpress-286-29.txt
$ cat wordpress-286-29.txt | wc -l
286
$

You can view that list of changed files I created here. Also visit the codex link on 2.9, it’s a good description of what got in and what didn’t.

December 5, 2009

Beware the canary mismatch on efree monster

For traffic logs, I use Clicky Web Analytics and take a look from time to time. See that flat dark blue line? Around noon on December 3rd my blog stopped serving web pages and it was not until about 5 hours later that I noticed it. I don’t get a lot of traffic but I do like my blog to be working.

It wasn’t that my VPS went nuts, the CPU usage was fine. What was happening was that my PHP interpreter was tossing hundreds of these errors.

[Thu Dec 03 12:17:27 2009] [error] [client 66.249.71.233] ALERT - canary mismatch on efree() - heap overflow detected

Not cool and until I restarted Apache2, my blog was not serving anything. PHP just kept blowing up. This has been an ongoing problem for me that has been attributed to the Suhosin PHP security patch and I had not found the magic bullet to fix.

I’m not going to disable the hardened PHP. That’s like turning off the safety switch on an excercise treadmill. It’s juts not safe.

As a work around I have done the following: I activated the WP Super Cache plugin, removed the Xcache op cache I setup, and disabled the ssh2 PHP extension I installed.

The WP Super Cache created static HTML pages for your dynamic content. It does cache expiration, garbage collection, etc. and limits the amount of time PHP needs to be run.

The XCache was a hold over from when I was running my blog on a Pentium II. The VPS I use is very responsive and losing it does not hurt me. Using the Pingdom tools I can see that I still get a good response from my web server.

Losing the ssh2 was easy; I only added it to my PHP to be able to answer a WordPress support forum questions. I never use it. I’ll look for any other PHP extensions that I added as a “what the hell” but so far so good. No more canary mismatch errors as yet.

Category: Software (page 7 of 22)

Playing with WordPress 3.0, Beta 1

Like this:

Now using Hybrid and a child theme

Like this:

And the winner is Xmarks

Like this:

Mozilla Weave

Like this:

Recycling an old printer

Like this:

Wow, Skype looks different

Like this:

Moving WordPress again

Like this:

WordPress 2.9 is released!

List of changed files

Like this:

Beware the canary mismatch on efree monster

Like this:

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Jan Dembowski