Just finished updating WordPress to 2.5 from 2.3.3. Ran into a few problems. Normally I diff the old version of WP to the new version and just apply the generated patch to my “custom” install. Somewhere along the line I must have deleted extraneous files like license.txt because the patch failed to apply because some files listed in the diff didn’t exist in the directory I was applying it to… this is the first time this method of non-destructively updating Wordpress had failed me. I could have edited the patch by hand but it was 100K lines so I wasn’t particularly interested in this method.

So I finally ended up actually following the upgrade instructions, deleted wp-admin and wp-includes, and copied all the files from 2.5 into my existing install. The database update took about 1 second to complete. The upgrade was technically complete at this point but of course it wreaked havoc with my theme.

One thing about the Wordpress theme architecture is that if a failure occurs in a custom theme it kinda falls back to the default theme, this is due to CSS I guess. Problems with a theme, like my Binary Blue bastardization, also show up in the strangest ways.

For example, my last.fm plugin’s cache directory got blown away. The plugin could no longer find the image cache and was throwing a (fatal?) error to Apache’s logs. The site was being styled by what looked like a combination of the default classic and my own customized Binary Blue theme. What I do to fix this is an utter hack, I move the default theme out of the way and symlink the directory of my theme to wp-content/themes/default. Then when things go wrong it is still pulling from my theme. Then I go back and fix the actual problem.

The upgrade is complete. It took me about 30 minutes to migrate total. But I am more concerned about “corner cases” this time since my traditional method of just merging in the diff between releases failed. I also haven’t stress tested all of the widgets and plugins. Overall I would suggest upgrading. The experience was worse than usual, but not terrible.

I just noticed when writing this post that the “Preview this Post” feature in WP 2.5 must pull from the auto-saved draft. When I click preview I don’t see the content that hasn’t been saved yet. Small potatoes, remind me to open a bug.

Update (4 hours later): I figured out why my theme was getting butchered into some combination of the default and my own - I had some absolute URLs in my header.php where I forgot to use the template path variables.

I know the idea of robots in space sounds cool but lets think this through.

First of all the robot is fucking huge, “11-foot arms, a shoulder span of nearly 8 feet and a height of 12 feet”. It doesn’t have legs but with arms like that you don’t actually need appendages on the bottom half. Plus when you’re in space legs aren’t especially useful. I hope they programmed “I will crush you pesky human fly” into it’s voice synthesizer.

Second, robots will take over the world. It is just a matter of time. I had come to grips with that. But now we’re handing them space on a silver platter. Brilliant.

Third, they named the thing Dextre and call it Dexter. Dexter, as in the socialized sociopathic serial killer from the book and more recently Showtime. Thats right, they named the ginormous metal machine of death after a serial killer. If you’re going to create a peaceful, human loving robot you name it Buny or Elff or some other cute variation on something “nice”. If you’re going to create robots bent on obliterating humans, a la Dextre, then this might be an acceptable naming convention. Also note that Dexter the serial killer is nice and gets along with people - right up until he kills them. So don’t trust this Dextre lest you fall into a similar trap.

Fourth, last week we, the US, are telling China and the international community as a whole we’re not trying to militarize space. This week we’re launching Terminator’s great grand pappy. Sounds like militarization to me.

Finally, this (selective) quote from astronaut Garrett Reisman troubles me: “we’re worried it’s going to go run amok and take over the space station or turn evil”. If astronauts are worried than I’m worried.

Updated 2008-03-16 to add pictures of our destructor.

It’s been three years since we upgraded the hardware that hosts our various sites. I contacted my provider (Crucial Paradigm) and got some competitive offers. Stefan, my friend in Berlin that I split the server with, and I agreed on the following specs:

• Athlon 64 x2 4000 (2 cores @ 2.1GHz, 512K L2 each)
• 4GB RAM, 160GB SATA, 100Mbps
• CentOS 5
• Apache, BIND, MySQL, Postifx, Spam Assassin, ClamAV, Cyrus IMAP
• SELinux enforcing

Once again this is going to be a dedicated, remote, hosted server. A few days later and they contacted me with the login information. I’m going to describe the move from a high-level. I’m not going to go through the individual config file modifications or how to dump a Cyrus database.

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I’m visiting Australia for business. This is only my second trip down here but last time I was relegated to Surfer’s Paradise and Brisbane. Great, beautiful beaches but it was still a beach. This time I’m down in Canberra (then Melbourne, then Sydney) and was lucky enough to visit over Australia Day (American’s think the Fourth of July).

Believe it or not this was all burnt to a crisp back in 2003.

Josh’s envy has spun out of control. First he puts OS X 10.4 on his Dell:

I really don’t know why people think it is soooo hard to get OS X onto a Dell.

Josh has been running 10.4 like this for about 6 months.

Now he upgrades to Leopard:

At this point I just had to play with the hackintosh. In all honesty I think his Leopard install might be more stable. His install only crashes when he drops his laptop and it is too much for the adhesive to handle. My Leopard only crashes when I have 10 important things going on… note to self - scotch tape can prevent kernel panics.

Disclaimer: No Dell’s were harmed in the creation of this blog entry… so far. We still haven’t removed that last sticker, ahem, “we have yet to downgrade to from 10.4 to Windows”.

Lately conversations keep turning up new slogans for SELinux. I figure this is as good a place as any to keep a running list so here we go:

• SELinux - Because users do weird shit.
• SELinux - Fuck root.
• SELinux - Hampering administrators since before it was cool.
• SELinux - Take revenge against the BOFH
• SELinux - High-security gone haywire.
• SELinux - Turning it off is like removing the batteries from a smoke detector. Sure it sounds better but you might get burned.
• SELinux - Because life is too simple.
• SELinux - AppArmor sucks.
• SELinux - It’s too early in the morning to be cleaning up after 11-year old kiddies.
• SELinux - Too powerful for our own good.
• SELinux - Here’s our root password, what’s yours?
• SELinux - Didn’t they teach you about using protection in high-school?
• SELinux - Blind faith not required

Thinking about slogans actually got me thinking about “short reasons to use SELinux”.

• SELinux will save you tons of money, your TCO will go down and your ROI will go up.
• SELinux supports 3-letter acronyms out of the box, no complex policy changes required.
• Zero day vulnerabilities are a fact. Do something about it.
• Trusted Solaris has been end-of-lifed and you’re not in the government space to begin with.
• Path-named based access control is weak.
• Implicitly trusting admins doesn’t have to be SOP.
• You’re not a security expert, let us do the hard work.
• The US military (and others) trust SELinux with their information, shouldn’t you? [1]

These are just a few.

[1] The answer to this question might actually be a resounding “no!” Don’t worry, I’m not offended.

Jarno over at F-Secure commented on the recent “trojan” for the iPhone :

Hopefully this serves as a warning for those who have opened their iPhones using a security hole in the system and then installing unverified software without a second thought to what they are doing.

Warning noted. The lesson here is not that we, the hacked iPhone community, should not take advantage of the holes; the lesson is use some common fucking sense. Especially if you’re using a hacked phone with wireless stuff coming out of the wazoo.

Those of you reading this via RSS can fuck off… just about… now.

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I recently decided that the tried and trusted [1] personal information management tool I had been using, a G5 pen and a Levenger Circa, wasn’t doing much to manage the information on my computer. In actuality I had the paper notebook, Entourage, iPhoto, folder structures, del.icio.us, etc to manage all my information. For awhile I thought this system rocked. Then I thought it was missing something. Then I thought it sucked. Then I knew it sucked. Then I thought about how all this information was like disconnected graphs. Then I wanted to kill my discrete math professor. It was time to do something about this mess. Someone had to be connecting the disparate information centers in life. The exploration of personal information management started anew.

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I’ve been reading about webclips but was having a problem finding a real use for them. Webclips, you know, just right click in Safari and “Open in Dashboard”? I thought RSS met my needs. I just added some dynamic content to my sidebar, which may or may not still be there when you are reading this.

It’s actually not the fact that the content is dynamic that converted me to a Webclips fan. The content to the right is actually “powered by” XML and/or RSS so I could just as easily have reached the same information in other ways. There are tons of Dashboard widgets that do a great job with those tasks.

The thing that really intrigued me was that I could use the Webclip to monitor the new content. Since I’m building the content from another site I just want to keep an eye on it for awhile to ensure it behaves as expected, like preventing Enya from appearing in the Album list.

I fully expect to find other uses now that I’ve been exposed (no, not like that). Take a look at the pics below.

(it’s 1am and I don’t feel like doing proper foot noting so screw you for judging me)

I decided to try come out of my cocoon and try all the social networking sites. Of course there are quite a few and the attempts to unify all of these sites haven’t been successful. So for your enjoyment, as I know you all are very interested in my life, I have started using these sites and have pulled the most recent content into my sidebar. Just refresh the page to see the latest on my life.

Twitter will tell you what I am/was doing plus perhaps some random thoughts. I can update twitter via SMS on my cell, the twitter web page, or a dashboard widget I’ve installed.

Flickr will contain recent pics from my iPhone and iFlickr on a regular basis. Occasionally it will contain pics from a real camera as well but for convenience, the cell phone is always at my side.

Last.fm will display recent music I’ve been listening to - once I finish the integration. I have to build up some stats before activating the sidebar widget but expect it to appear in the next day or so…

I use del.icio.us for all of my bookmarking. Following my bookmarking you can see the subjects I’m currently interested in or researching. I still need to add a sidebar widget for recent bookmarks.

I’m going to try to stay active with my social networking for awhile to see if I/you like it. Eventually I may get bored and stop updating but for now it is maintaining my interest.