Mostly about my amusement

Category: Software (page 9 of 22)

WordPress: Upgrade or DIE!!

That’s a catchy title. Keeping up with the versions of any software that you have installed is almost always a good thing. If you have any WordPress version pre-<insert-latest-version-here> then you should upgrade.

To me, open source software is best if only for one reason: vulnerabilities get discussed openly and often fixed very quickly. Open discussion is not a bad thing; people who exploit software on the Internet have their own forums too.

There is currently some hacks going on involved with older versions of WordPress. I am sure the details will come out but for now the remediation is upgrade to the latest version.

That’s not unreasonable. WordPress is not a paid software company (spare me the comments about Automattic, that’s a service company and the service they provide is the blog hosting) and there are no SLA or support contracts on a specific version of WordPress. Why should developers maintain multiple version trees of the software? That was tried with the 2.0.x release for Debian reasons but that didn’t work out.

Using software on the Internet is a game of keeping up with the Joneses and being responsible.  Your hacked server is not just hurting you, it’s making the whole neighborhood look bad and ruining it for everyone else.

So Upgrade or Die. Keep your software current.

Update: This is a fun read on the WordPress support forums. Most of the hacked/security threads turn into real name calling entertainment which in turn targets people who are trying to help them. Here’s how it works: someone gives solid practical advice, and someone else complains that their feelings were hurt. Name calling ensues.

Sad to say, but some people believe that free open source software means that the community must keep them safe from their own laziness ignorance stupidity inability to manage their own installations.

Sometimes a site gets hacked regardless of best effort. It happens and you deal with it. But these end users who don’t do what they need to? They continue to hang out in Darwin’s waiting room.

Transcoding for the iPhone

This is definitely one of those “you’d better write this down” posts.

Being a longtime LINUX monkey, I am used to manipulating files via the command line. The GUI is a fad and if you want to get something done switch to command line. Transcoding video files are good for that sort of CLI manipulation.

Let’s say I had a .mkv file and wanted to play it on my iPhone. The iPhone does not play that format so I need to convert or transcode the video/audio/subtitles to something the iPhone can play.

It’s a two step process that requires two executable files for Windows, mencoder and ffmpeg. Doing a basic search on Google located the two binaries that I wanted and I put them in C:util.

The first one used is mencoder.exe and that’s to take the mkv formated file and convert it to an avi file. This is accomplished using this command:

C:utilmencoder.exe -mc 0 -noskip -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr=128 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1200 "C:VideosEpisode-01.mkv" -o "C:tmpEpisode-01.avi"

This is an intermediate step since the iPhone can’t play avi files either.  Depending on the file this could take a while.  Once the output file Episode-01.avi has been generated then it’s time to use ffmpeg.

C:utilffmpeg.exe -threads 2 -i "C:tmpEpisode-01.avi" -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1200kb -mbd 2  -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 640x352 -async 1 -title "Episode 01" "C:iPhone VideoEpisode-01.mp4"

I am running on a Intel Core 2 Duo so I use the -threads 2 option. After that’s completed, I just drag the new file into iTune’s and sync my phone.  The sync process will not transfer a video file that it thinks the iPhone will not play so even it iTunes can play it, the phone might not be able to.

There are GUI wrappers for this, but I could not get WinFF or Handbrake to work reliably for me. They both wrap the CLI commands, so this works out better for me. The quality is not that good outside of the iPhone but that’s what the original .mkv versions are for.

Now in 9 months, when I want to do this again, I’ll have the steps ready and wont waste the morning trying to remember what I did last year.

Installed Windows 7 RC

My Dell XPS720 has been locking up and staying dead for hours. The only thing that would bring it back was unplugging the PC from the power and wait till it forgave whatever offense I committed.

This week I backed up all the data on my PC onto my 1TB My Book and today I wiped out the PC and installed Windows 7 RC.

Just wiping and installing the OS from the burnt ISO image did not work. The Wndows 7 install DVD wanted to find a valid Microsoft OS on the PC before installing.

I had done this dance before so I did the following.

  1. Removed one bank of RAM to make my PC 2GB
  2. Began to install Windows XP MCE (it came with my PC)
  3. Aborted the installation during the file copy portion
  4. Booted up the Windows 7 DVD and installed a fresh copy
  5. Put back the 2nd bank of RAM to go back to 4 GB

What a pain in the ass. My next PC will come with Vista SP1 and a free Windows 7 when it’s released. Hopefully I will not have to go through so many hoops then.

I’m currently importing my 18,000+ photos into a fresh installation of PSE 7. I’ve installed Far Cry2 and the 1.03 patch (no DVD check!). Running Far Cry 2 lately cause my PC to crash and get become frozen for a couple of hours.

I’ll see if  Windows 7 on my PC is as unstable as my old Vista install was.

Ubuntu UNR 9.04 performance boost

My Acer Aspire One netbook is good but the 8GB SSD drive that it shipped with is still the biggest drawback.  When I want to view HQ or regular YouTube clip (forget about HD), the SSD gets accessed and performance takes a dive. Videos stutter and playback is horrible.

After looking at the ApireOne community documentation page again I came across two tweaks that really helps a lot.  These are covered here at the Geek Sheet.

The first tweak is to mount the SSD switching the option from “relatime to “noatime”.

From the article:

Tweak #3: Change the file system mount options on SSDs to “noatime”. On certain Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, the default is “relatime”. This tells the kernel to write the Last Accessed Time attribute on files. Conversely, “noatime” tells the kernel not to write them, which considerably improves performance. Linus himself suggests using it in circumstances such as this, so therefore, I consider it to be gospel.

The second tweek is on the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst, right after splash, insert the option “elevator=noop”.  This will let you use the “noop” I/O scheduler.  The SSD is not a hard disk and there is no platter to optimize.

These combined reduces the amount of writes to the SSD and I am now able to view this whole episode of Gundam 00 in HQ. Before these changes I could not have done this.

Considering that my main desktop PC is dying and needs to be replaced, having an optimized netbook is not a bad thing at all.

Sing those upgrade blues!

With every release of WordPress there are always people who have problems. That not unusual since change can bring unexpected issues.

Most of the WordPress forum users are just looking for help and are in above their heads. Those users I can respect, asking for help should be encouraged. Providing help can be satisfying and I refer to it as “therapy”.

Then there are those other users.  You know the ones, the pissed off users. These are the ones who seem to feel like there is an SLA that is not being honored by the “WordPress” guys.

Here is a current sample from the WordPress.ORG support forum:

“It wiped my website completely and it wiped 3 more website hosted on my server. Now really, do you test these things? And why is it still available for auto upgrade if you see what problems people have here ?”

“Who released this Fiasco?… Is this untested beta junk?”

“Who’s responsible for this crap ? Did anybody do any honest and real testing on it?”

“Thanks a lot, WordPress! I always love having my blog borked just for doing an upgrade, per the instructions. I’m in the process of rolling back to 2.71 and never upgrading again.

What idiot released 2.8?”

If I were these users, I would demand my money back. That’s no way to treat a paying customer.

Everyone should understand that the support is all volunteer driven. If you don’t provide details, if you are not willing to provide those details, and/or you come across as a petulant child, then don’t expect anyone to step up and help.

I’m a fan of WordPress software. It’s well written, mostly well documented, and the volunteer support generally is successful. If you provide some details of your problem then you’ll usually get a solution.

With version 2.7 and above, the software provides a built in auto upgrade. But it’s not fool proof and can go awry. When that happens, the blog user must become the blog system administrator. Not unusual: to properly host and appreciate WordPress you must develop some system administration skills.  This is a requirement, it’s not optional.

So before users push that upgrade button they need to have a Plan B for if it goes wrong.  That plan can be as simple as wiping out the installation and restoring the backup up made right before you tried to upgrade.

Here are some WordPress Codex URLs to keep in mind and read up on:

Upgrading WordPress
WordPress Backups
Backing Up your Database
Restoring Your Database from a Backup
Disabling Plugins when you can’t login

Version 2.8 was tested and vetted. But when you have +330,000 downloads, some of those users will have problems. It’s to be expected; the people who ran the beta code knew what they were doing. Many users just have not gotten there yet so they need more help.

So if you are using 2.8 and still have problems, take a look at this 2.8 Problems and Solutions FAQ that MichaelH quickly wrote up. From the feedback it seems like this is working well for the problem cases.