Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Bush style….
May 29, 2007
This is pretty impressive… This person must have had sooo much time on their hands…
VLog – Memorial day 2007
May 28, 2007
VLog Entry #2
Towelday 2007 vlog entry
May 25, 2007
Well, I hope towel day finds you all well!
Can you believe it has been a year already? wow… life certainly has some exciting twists. Humanist or not, DNA an I shared a lot in our outlooks on life. You find something that catches your eye and follow it and you will end up EXACTLY where you are supposed to be. I’d only add a heart felt God is good.
Well since I can’t carry my Towel around for this Towel Day, I thought I would create a video entry to commemorate the day.
So, how about some pics of you and YOUR towel?
Upgrade to WordPress 2.2 or have your Admin PW stolen
May 24, 2007
OK It’s been a couple days now and this news is only spreading. If you haven’t heard already, there is an attack out there that allows the Admin PW to be compromised for any WordPress 2.1 and 2.0 blog. Only 2.2 and the yet unreleased version of 2.0 are safe and it will stay that way. The 2.1 is not a maintained version. So far, I’ve heard nothing about the plans to release a new 2.1. So at this point, for most people running 2.1, your only choice is to upgrade to 2.2.
I’ve stolen the admin PW of several 2.1 sites under my control and tested the sites of some of my friends to make sure they were safe even though they hadn’t upgraded.
There are two things that may make your 2.1 DB safe:
1. Your user named Admin is NOT user number 1.
2. Your database prefix is NOT wp_
If you want to upgrade safely and quickly, try my script. The latest post about it is always at: http://www.thecodecave.com/EasyWPUpdate
If you want to see how we handled this at b5media, read here:
Guide to Disaster: How The Tech Team Handled WordPress Security Flaw
Feedburner Acquisition – An Open Letter to Google and Feedburner
May 24, 2007
Since the rumors are pretty much confirmed that Google has bought Feedburner for $100 million in an all cash deal, it begs the question of how well Feedburner will integrate into the Google culture and treat Feedburner’s loyal customer base. With their track record, it is not just will they be a evil, but will they be a good partner?
My interview with b5media
May 21, 2007
Well, I’ve finally collected my phone and transfer cable in one place and have gotten the pictures off. So, here’s the story of how I became a b5media Code Ninja.
It all started back at the end of March. I got a call out of the blue from Aaron Brazell, now Director of Technology for b5media. I wasn’t looking for a new job as for almost 9 years I’d been a software engineer for DRB Systems, Inc..
I was in a fairly central position at DRB. All configuration of software and hardware filtered through software and solutions that I made. I was also involved with the HealthWatch Committee which was responsible for getting everyone involved in physical activities and helped radicaly reduce our insurance fees.
But that silken tongued sweet talker Aaron, got my attention.
He told me of the wonders of working at home. Reminded me of the thrill of working for a startup. And seduced me with the lure of spending my days working from where ever I wanted to set myself up.
So, it was two weeks later that I found myself up at six am for a drive to the Cleveland airport. Do you remember the Cleveland Indians’ Season Openner? I do. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It was the night before my drive. Here’s the video as they tried to battle the snow long enough to finish a came that was a shut out at the bottom of the 5th with two outs and three on base:
(Sorry I had a nice video saved in a SWF file but the sneaky buggers now have it playing an ad software engineering jobs. lol Here’s a much longer youtube movie instead:
).
You would have thought that would be a clue to the road crews that they’d have some work to do on the roads. But no, it seems they decided to sleep this one off.
Now I grew up in the Pennsylvania Laurel Highlands (Satellite view). That’s right where all of the snow broke at the edge of the Laurel Mountains. So I know snow. I rode a motorcycle year round even when it was 11 degrees out. I KNOW winter driving. But driving up 77 into Cleveland was the WORST conditions I’d ever been in.
Now, I got there in plenty of time for my flight, well ok not plenty but I was sitting at the terminal before boarding was scheduled to begin and actually had a 20 minute wait until they openned the doors. All in all that was really good considering a good portion of the trip was spent going 15 mph. Even at 15 mph with the roads TOTALLY untouched with four lanes of rush hour type traffic, I passed more than a dozen cars that were 40-60 ft off the road into no-man’s-land. I stopped counting at a dozen because I knew I had enough for a great story and had probably missed some at the beginning anyway.
You’d be driving along and suddenly you’d find that your car would be switching lanes and you’d watch for all the other cars to your left and right to do the same. One car about 5 in front of me, in the far left lane slowly started drifting to the right and turning sideways. I was in the next lane over and the cars in front of me just let off on the gas enough to let them go across. They were completly sideways traveling at the same speed as the rest of us when the left the next lane. Up ahead 10 ft off the berm was another car facing the on coming traffic. The non-voluntarily exiting vehicle continued drifting off the to the side and picked up speed. This was a good thing as they managed to pass behind that stopped car and as I passed them, they were facing the right direction and, still in one smooth motion, were merging back into traffic. I suspect it was deliberate…
So, finally I got to the airport (note to self, always unpack laptop from carry on bag), boarded my plane (standing in the plane’s doorway, I could look directly over the top), and in my seat.
Here was the view out my window the wind had cleared enough for me to see out:
I was to take this flight up to Buffalo, snow capital of the US and drive from there up to Toronto. After the drive I had that morning, I was glad of it… I began to wonder though after several hard bumps occured and the plane still hadn’t moved. Well it turned out that the tug they had, couldn’t push us free from the slot. So they had to get another. 20 minutes and several bumps later, and THAT tug wasn’t powerful enough to free us from our frozen grave. 
So a third tug, it must have been for a 747, came after another 20 minutes and THAT got us free and pushed us back into the unplowed run way.
But we’d lost our slot in the deicer line some 40 minute earlier. So we had another 20 minute wait to get deiced. That was somewhat humourus actually.
See the guy on the left of that plane, he’s in a nice enclosed cabin. The guy on the right is in an open bucket that is now backed off as the antifreeze drains out from the cabin dude blasting him with a firehose stream of antifreeze for 3 or 4 seconds. He just absolutely nailed this guy full in the face as he raised him self up above the plane and the other guy totally over shot it from the other side… they both just sort of stopped and had an exchange of some sort or or another :-O
If you ever have your plane deiced, bring polarized sunglasses. It makes the whole experience psychodelic as you’ll see rainbows everywhere.
The pale frozen green goop look just doesn’t do it justice.
However, once I gut to Buffalo, it was clear sailing. There was almost no snow to be seen anywhere, I had a sweet ride and things were looking up.
I met Jeremy and Aaron at the hotel lounge of the Intercontenental Toronto.
I was there about an hour before our original planned meetup time, but also an almost hour after they’d called “Hey, we decided to meetup early in the lobby. Where are you?” My 40 minute flight had turned into 2 hrs but I was thinkin’ I was still peachy-keen till that phone rang. Buffalo has a great blues station and some BB King had me nice and mellow for most of the drive. I’d found a pretty good alternative rock station by the time I’d neared Toronto. So, I couldn’t have asked for a much better ride.
I got into the hotel shook hands with Jeremy and Aaron, went to my room, splashed water on my face, ran my fingers through my hair and I was on!
Jeremy and Aaron are great guys. Here’s a shot of Jeremy and doing his “Sexy Entrepreneur” look:
Sorry ladies, Shannon snatched this guy up!
So, we sat and hung out chatting, till Mark Evans , former senior tech reporter from the National Post no now b5 VP of Content, happened to wander by.
We pulled up a fourth chair to the two person table, and we ordered another beer to go with the bowl of mixed wasabi nuts on the table. Now Mark is a journalist at heart and so, the interview began in earnest. A few minute later, the pro blogger himself Darren Rowse, b5′s VP of Training, came in from the hotel down the street and pulled up a fifth chair.
And if you ever had an interview
with Darren staring at you this way,
the entire time, let me tell you, it is unnerving!
Ok, it wasn’t that chair but the picture fits doesn’t it? :)
As we were quickly over staying our welcome in the narrow aisle of the bar section, about 15 minute later we adjourned to The Cave. A short stop for Red Bull later, and we were there.
The best shots of the cave can be found in the standout jobs video they’d made two days earlier. We hung out there and chatted about the strategy for b5 and the future and what I could do for them. Later that evening we went out to dinner at a French restaurant. You can see pictures of all of us here. I had this wonderful view across the table of Aaron, Gary King, and Darcie Vane:
Gary is a developer intern and Darcie is b5′s Office Manager
Some escargo, shrimp(?) pate, oysters, lamb chops, ice wine and creme brulee later, and Chad Randall b5′s Director of Sales and I were chums:
Then it was back to my hotel room. I was beat. It had been a LONG week.
I didn’t get a good picture out my window, but I could lookup and see the CNTower right out my window. I caught this nice refelection off of the offices in front of my hotel the next morning:
A quick workout, a swim in the pool with the Disney theme for The Little Mermaid playing in the background and a soak in the hot tub and 10 minutes in the sauna later and I left to have some coffee (with about a dozen false fire alarms sirens as background music) with Aaron at a local coffee house.
Then it was off to home:
Back to Cleveland and the same old same old weather…
Of course, after that horrible drive the day before, I forgot to turn off my headlights… Not that you could tell because the battery had long since died and they were covered in snow anyway…
An emergency jump kit later, and I was on the road. Soon to be calling 911 because an elderly couple had driven their Cadilac out into the middle of a snow covered area between where the two major highways Yd off in different directions. They were staring at each other trying to figure out what to do. They were helpless, so I called 911 and sent the police to help them.
I’d just held out the phone and closed it (why do we do that?) and looked up to see a car totally engulfed in flames sitting beside the road. As I drove by, I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside or not. Me and the guy behind me stopped and we ran back. to see that someone had openned the passenger door and dove down the steep embankment to the road down below where there was a police car stopped beside a minivan with its sliding door open… We had to assume they were OK as we daren’t go much closer.
We retreated to his car, stared at the flames and each other, watched as two firetrucks came up, boxed the car in and covered it in foam, and then continued our drive home.
So… There you have it, my b5media interview weekend. After that it was a nice relaxing week or so till I got a call back from Jeremy. Yeah… Relaxing… That’s the ticket…
EasyWPUpdate for WordPress 2.2 (and earlier)
May 15, 2007
The release of WordPress 2.2 is finaly at our doorstep. You can find the download on the on the main download page here: http://wordpress.org/download/ or from the announcement here: http://wordpress.org/development/2007/05/wordpress-22/. This has been an interesting release. For the last month I’ve been concentrating on the new job, but in the middle of all that I did participate in the debate that ended with the original tag implementation being pulled from this release. Matt M. showed some real maturity by being willing to step back from his implementation upon the recomendation of others. Oh! and for info about the name of this release “Getz” head on over to Matt’s site for some sweet tones to put you into the mood to upgrade…
Aaron Brazell, aka Mr. Boss Sir, has come through and delivered another one of his 10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.2 articles and does a pretty good job of describing the heart and soul of this release.
I’ve released an updated version of my EasyWPUpdate script which includes some of the suggestions I’ve had from my readers. Now, I must admit that Aaron’s similar script is downright awesome and the absolute best script in the world (yes I must admit that because it was a condition of my employment with b5media (REALLY!)), but if you don’t have automated server backups and you don’t regularly backup your SQL files, you might want to try my lowly little script.
Its features include:
- Many blogs in one shot
- Any version of WP
- Automaticly runs upgrade script
- Cleans up all files
- Can use hosted or local files as source
- Can be croned to ensure backups and/or refresh of dirtied files
- Backup of files to new directory
- Backup of files tarball/li>
- Backup of database to SQL text file
- Backup of database to tar ball
- Optional inclusion/exclusions of directories.
- Error detection and safe aborts
You can peruse the text version, EasyWPUpdate.txt, here:
Here are the basic steps to install this script:
1. Use Telnet or Putty to connect to your website and log into the shell
2. Type the following line:
wget http://www.thecodecave.com/downloads/EasyWPUpdate
3. Type the following line:
chmod +x EasyWPUpdate
4. Use an editor to change the values in Step 1 and save it again.
5. Run the script by typing:
EasyWPUpdate
That’s it. You will have just made backups of the files and database and updated all of your blogs. When 2.2.1 or even 2.3 comes out, the process will be:
1. Log in
2. Type
EasyWPUpdate
And you are done.
Now, step 1 looks like this:
# ##################################################################
# Step 1. Tell the script where to find the blogs
# ##################################################################
# List all of your WordPress directories and urls here.
#
# Each Blog should have a BlogDir and a BlugURL.
# Each Blog should have its own number [1],[2],[3] etc
# Delete the ones you don’t need.
#
BlogDir[1]=’site1dir’
BlogURL[1]=’www.example.com’
BlogDir[2]=’site2/news’
BlogURL[2]=’www.site2.com/news’
BlogDir[3]=’wordpress’
BlogURL[3]=’blog.site3.com’
That isn’t that hard to change is it? Even in VI.
Some quick tips on editing the script
1. type
vi EasyWPUpdate
2. Hit i
3. Make your changes
4. Hit ESCAPE COLON W to save your changes (or skip this step to lose changes)
5. Hit ESCAPE COLON !Q to immediately quit
Also, if your root directory is accessible from the web, you might want to change the name of the script:
mv EasyWPUpdate SomeSneakyName
to prevent unauthorized access.
(If you are a guru, please read through all 6 setup steps (and the rest too) there may be things you want to change.)
Enjoy 2.2!
Feeling good on a Monday
May 14, 2007
Starting week number three at b5media and things are really starting to click.
I feel like I’ve settled in just a bit and I’m ready to get some real traction. b5 is really growing and it’s great. Over the last two weeks I’vehelped add a bunch of new sites to the network and we’ve got a number more coming in.
There’s a new theme that is being rolled out to a bunch of the blogs and I’ve helped with that, but due to the way it was implemented, we had some load problems as large common sections of html were being generated over and over again. It was causing WAY more CPU usage than it needed to.
So, our excellent linux guy Sean pointed me to a PECL module I’d not used before: memcached.
To quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached:
memcached
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Memcached lacks authentication and security features, meaning it should only be used on servers with a firewall set up appropriately. By default, memcached uses the port 11211.
Memcached’s APIs provide a giant hash table distributed across multiple machines. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in LRU order. Applications using memcached typically layer memcached requests and additions into code before falling back on a slower backing store, such as a database.
The system is used by several very large sites. Some well-known websites that use memcached are:[1]
It’s worked really well so far. A few apache recompiles later and bam! CPU load goes bye-bye. With the initial partial rollout on a single channel we’ve tremendously reduced the load on the servers making 80 cache pulls per second instead of doing all of the db lookups and xml code generation.
I’m convinced!
I’m going to do some further implementation this morning we should be sitting sweet by EOD.
I’m also feeling good because I got the whole family up and did a morning workout in the new execise room I’ve setup in the garage. I’ve also got Akaza hits nice and loud…
I’ve also got to send an email out to my Google Summer of Code student and we’ll get rolling on that this morning. I’m looking forward to a good week.
Oh! and my pictures will be transfered by the end of the day so I can tell you all all about my toronto trip as I said I would two weeks ago…
Cheers all!
Delphi for PHP Update 1 Hits the streets
May 9, 2007
OK folks, the long awaited update has been released from beta testing.
You can get it yourself right here: http://dn.codegear.com/article/36406
There are some good fixes in this. The big one for most folks will be the input filter fix. For many the UTF-8 cleanup will be a god send. Deployment tweaks are included too.
In fact here’s the complete list:
- Fix to the IDE to ensure correct storage of UTF-8 strings in the .xml.php
- Fix to VCL for PHP to parse .xml.php in UTF-8 mode
- Save Project As… fixed (QC 43580)
- Updated sourcecode documentation for the VCL
- Fixed problem with PHP 5.2.1. The Input Filter extension is out of beta and function for filter data was changed to a new name, so Input object now takes that into account (QC 43607)
- Fixed problem with vcl-bin folder. The alias is set to be a root alias, making it easier to configure on deployment
- Added global var to specify if properties are html_decoded when read from the .xml.php
- Corrected support phone list .txt file
Enjoy!
Another good day
May 1, 2007
Well, things went well today. I added blogs to the b5network, came to the rescue of some sites that were having trouble and got further into the infrastructure of b5.
I also got added to the b5 team blog listing. That instantly takes me up to over 135 blogs linking into me. So that’s a nice side bonus I hadn’t thought about.
Aaron has written a very nice welcome note on his blog today in The Tech Team Adds a Fourth Member :
Yesterday, I posted the announcement about Brian Layman joining the b5media tech team. We’re really excited about hiring him because we have some big plans. Brian is classified as “big guns” in my book. He’s got a lot of development experience and is one of the more active people in the WordPress developer community.
It was important that we found someone who understood the way WordPress worked and operated and how to make it dance. Unlike some competitors, we shout from the roof that we’ve drunk the WordPress kool-aid and aren’t going back. While we’ve toyed with Drupal and other software packages, we know who our daddy is and that’s WordPress.
Brian’s joining of b5media marks a redeclaration of our WordPress allegiance. It’s really great to have him on board!
I also got some details of the exciting stuff I’m going to be working on in the upcoming weeks. Let me tell you, we’re gonna…
well actually I can’t tell ya… So you’ll just have to wait to see what kind of goodness will be coming out of the b5 in the near future.
(removed blog list as I have a better way to access this now)