December 26, 2007 – 12:39 pm
Before I forget, I went in to Riley’s room the other night and switched off his fan and TV, as I usually do when he leaves them on while falling asleep. This time, he was awake, and so I reminded him to turn them off before he goes to sleep.
“No, you don’t have to, because it [the TV] turns off automatically. So does the fan.”, he said. “Every morning when I wake up, they’re turned off even if I left them on the night before.”
December 23, 2007 – 12:25 pm
If you run your own installation of WordPress (and you’re paying attention to security) you’ve probably heard quite a bit of talk recently about a couple issues that could lead to a compromise of your blog.
I won’t go into too much detail here on the exploits, but they’re definitely out there, “in the wild”, as they say, because I’ve seen quite a few hacked blog posts show up in my RSS feeds in the last couple days.
This prompted me to get to work on patching these issues in WordPress MU. I put together a patch that addresses the two main issues: stored password hashes not being salted, and the cookie authentication vulnerability. (See those last two links for detailed discussion on the problems). If you’re running WPMU, I suggest applying this patch to keep your installation safe.
The patches have already been applied to the standard version of WordPress, but not in a released version yet. This may be complicated for those of you running regular WP, because there are a ton of other significant changes that have also been commited to the SVN repository , and you may not want some of those in your day-to-day install yet (specifically, the unfinished redesign of the admin UI).
The changed files are all the same as in my patches, though, (only the line numbers will be different) so you could probably use them to figure out what you need to change in your own installation to apply the security fixes without the other current changes.
December 20, 2007 – 1:01 pm
A while back I commented on a clip from the excellent documentary God Grew Tired of Us, reflecting on how this particular scene got me thinking seriously about how we celebrate Christmas in our culture.
It looks like somone posted this excerpt up on YouTube, so I wanted to share it here. I plan to post a more lengthy summary of my thoughts on the holiday season when I have time, but for now, this is food for thought.
Again, I highly recommend this film for anyone who hasn’t seen it. It documents the journey of several “Lost Boys” who fled Sudan as children and have grown up in refugee camps in other parts of Africa, and are eventually given the opportunity to come live in the US. Their first experiences with so many things we take for granted (electricity, showers, etc.) as well as our culture in general range from humorous to thought provoking. It really is a must see, if you trust my opinion at all.
December 15, 2007 – 12:27 am
I posted not too long ago about how cool Amazon’s shared storage and e-commerce services were for application developers, and now they’ve done it again with SimpleDB.
It’s amazing to me how Amazon continues to outshine established tech companies with these hugely valuable and innovative infrastructure type systems / services, when their core competency is selling books (and more of course).
I guess now that I think about it, maybe their core competency doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with selling books (or whatever else), but rather building good software that lots of people like to use, whether that be their own web site / app or services that others can use in building stuff.
It also makes me that much more happy to remember that the founder (Jeff Bezos) is interested in futuristic things like making space travel accessible too.
December 13, 2007 – 7:35 pm
I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while now, but I’m now hosting several different sites under this same WordPress MU installation. In addition to the freepressblog.org ones (mine and Martha’s), I recently added a couple other sites (other domains, hosted using the same WP installation): one for Martha’s school and the other for our latest foray into the land of podcasting.
All that to say that if anyone is looking for a place to host their blog, you’re welcome to do it here for free (friends only, non-commercial, normal traffic blogs of course).
The benefits would be that you would always be running in an up to date WPMu installation (similar to what you’d have if you signed up for a wordpress.com account), but with a bit more flexibility in terms of available themes, plugins, etc., as well as being able to pick your own name.
You can have whatever.freepressblog.org, or just use your own domain name that you’ve already bought but don’t want to pay for web hosting for, and you can have the whole scope of *.yourdomain.com to set up multiple blogs under.
The only drawbacks would be that I can be a bit picky about installing themes or plugins (I would have to review and approve them first), and I wouldn’t allow certain types of advertising or other monetization methods that I deem inappropriate (TLA, pay per post, etc.)
Not trying to make any money or anything, just throwing it out there in case it might be useful to anyone.
December 12, 2007 – 10:07 pm
Tonight I put the finishing touches on the last of several side projects that I’ve been working at on and off (mostly off, and late) for quite some time. Some were paying, some were not, but it’s good either way to cross them all off the old to-do list.
From here on out, it’s unlikely that I’ll be taking on any new side projects, as I plan to focus any of that extra time on one big side project. I’ve been planning and thinking about it for quite a while now, but I recently realized that I have to seriously dedicate the time if I’m going to make it happen.
I’ll definitely be posting more on this soon (maybe even tracking it in a separate blog), but for now I’m just relieved to have a clean slate in front of me.
December 11, 2007 – 12:19 am
Well, I finally got around to working on a new theme for a bit, so here it is. It may still need a bit of polishing up, but I think it’s ready enough at this point.
I always qualify any of these announcements by saying that I certainly don’t consider myself a graphic designer of any merit, but I’ve been wanting to start from scratch on here for quite a while now, and I figured I might as well take the opportunity to get some practice.
I’ll eventually get around to packaging it up and releasing it for anyone who’d like to use it too. To get a feel for how it works with a wider variety of content, you can see it in action at a blog I added with some sample data designed for testing out the theme.
Hope you enjoy it!
PS - I’ll probably also package up the plugin I whipped up to replace the blog description with my Facebook status too, if anyone’s interested in that.