Dale's Weblog

Smoothwall reinstall

I did a reinstall on SmoothWall yesterday to clean out everything. I’ve also found a fix for the problem I was having. Every 30 or so restarts the box would not come back online without human intervention. There is a problem with fsck or something.

More stats

Some stats from my mail server (this is from the last 16 days).

Holidays

I’m off for a holiday tomorrow. Don’t ask where as I’m sure to forget. I should be back Wednesday or Thursday.

Later ;)

XSS Security Holes in WordPress

Security vulnerabilities have been found in WordPress that allows users to enter code into the site through certain urls (whose content is not checked).

Homecoming

Well I’ve just returned from my holiday to Jervis Bay. With another 100km on my speedometer; quite a nice break away from everything. We stayed with another family and were situated here:
http://www.hyamsbeachonline.com.au/rental/silverstand6.htm

Mysql Optimizing

As databases have grown on this server the following configuration changes have been made to mysql.

key_buffer_size=128M
table_cache=4096

from

key_buffer_size=8M
table_cache=64

More details:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Server_parameters.html

Wordpress 1.2.1

This release of Wordpress is principally a bug fix and security release. This version fixes the problems talked about here (http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/149) and also a few other problems. The full run down can be found here:
http://wordpress.org/development/2004/10/wp-121/

It is highly recommended that you upgrade to this version asap.

Upgrading from 1.2 is very easy. Your existing templates and plugins should work just fine; all you need to do is overwrite the wp-* files and folders. To upgrade:

1. Download 1.2.1
2. Unzip
3. Upload the new files to your site, taking care not to overwrite anything you may have modified like index.php

To download the latest version see this link: http://wordpress.org/download/

About

Just added an about page: http://blog.dalegroup.net/about/

Embedded Devices

Embedded Devices are cool. Things such a mobile phones, routers, VCRs etc all include embedded devices. Quite often these devices are just smaller slower counterparts to things you’d find in your PC.

Something that annoys me.

Okay you have to get into your head that I am a very lazy person. Picture a lazy dale….got it? Good. I shall continue.

I don’t like websites that don’t point their root domain to their website (or at least give me a redirect). What do I mean? Well for example.

http://sacs.nsw.edu.au doesn’t work where as http://www.sacs.nsw.edu.au works.

Online Election Results.

http://vtr.aec.gov.au/

Log rotation

My apache log file has become too big again. This time I am going to rotate them properly, unlike last time

Very General Questions?

What do you think about very open ended general questions? Let’s try this.

What interests you?

SANS Top 20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities

http://www.sans.org/top20/

I'm too short for your friendship.

I was reading the SMH this morning and came across this:

Short children standing tall in the popularity stakes

Friends and popularity are not measured in centimetres, says a groundbreaking study on height and social adjustment.

It challenges perceptions that taller children are more popular, and it raises questions about the use of artificial growth hormones to help short children spurt up towards their peers.

I’m not quite sure what is groundbreaking about this. I thought it was quite funny.

Full story here: http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/10/1097406428206.html

Coding is bad.

Last night I decided to quickly write up a script that allowed me to change a few of my details for this blog script (like email address, password etc). Now normally this should have taken 15 minutes, it really is a simple task.

A coders worst nightmare

Rewriting your program or script from scratch. Matt talk briefly about it here (http://photomatt.net/2004/10/11/13-cleanup/) and also about things to come with Wordpress 1.3.

It seems as though the backend code for 1.3 is much cleaner than the current version (1.2.1), this can be seen through the alpha versions (which can be downloaded here http://wordpress.org/download/), even Matt is running Wordpress 1.3 alpha on his website.

Although I don’t use Wordpress I am looking forward to it and seeing what changes there are.

Rewriting code from scratch is always hard. You don’t want to rewrite stuff you have already done, but the problem is this code is normally out of date can could do with fixing anyway. Breaking support for old stuff is hard too, even if it is only URLs (in my case).

With my rewrite I think I’m going to have to hide the old code (or even delete it) just to make sure that I rewrite everything! (Trust me, it needs it).

Stop the Press, Let’s Move! WordPress vs Movable Type

About the Programs

Movable Type (MT) is probably one of the most popular blogging tools currently around. While WordPress (WP) although fairly new is making a huge impact on the blogging scene and is looking to challenge MT for “top place”.

MT was first released in 2001. During 2002 a company, Six Apart, was formed around this blogging tool.

MT is primarily based on the perl scripting language and seems to function quite differently to the PHP based WP.

The WP project started in 2003 as a branch off b2, another blogging tool. WP has now become the official branch of b2. Although it seems more like a fork than a branch. As I’ve said before, WP is coded to work on PHP/Mysql.

The heat is on

Today seriously didn’t have enough cool factor.

38c. Damn!

Stuart and Greg are currently in a blackout. There are some North Sydney Substations which have keeled over and died.

My computers aren’t liking it either. No aircon in this room. I’ve got the cases off the servers and my main pc. Fun fun.

Meant to be the hottest day in October in 150 years! wow.

Minix

Minix is an operating system that includes a small built in web server and runs on a system as slow as an 8086. So when I have time I am going to pull out my old 286 and get it running. Hopefully I’ll have a web server running on a 286 10MHz with 2.5mb Ram ;)

More information can be found here: http://phoenix.anomic.net/ (This is a 286 web server so be nice to it)

Thanks ucosty for the heads up :)

EDIT: Big thanks to ucosty for providing me with some more hardware to complete this :D

Standalone Internet Explorer

When testing websites it is always a good idea to check your site in more than one browser. Windows will normally only let you have one IE version installed at a time so it can be hard to test your site on say IE 5 and IE 6 (unless you have another computer). Although it is very possible to have more than one version.

Internet Archive Wayback Machine

mmmm. This site is lame. Uberly slow and pretty pointless. But I feel so much better now. My robots.txt file has been archived!!! Hell Cool. So in 10 years time when I’ve changed my site I can go back and see what my robots.txt file will look like……….

http://web.archive.org/web/*/dalegroup.net/*

Whatever :|

Anyway today it Katy’s 19th birthday (I’m pretty sure she is 19, but I’ve been known to get this wrong).

If you don’t know who she is, well you should because she is cool.

Over-plump Grouse Scutter like Mechanical Toys

Study consisted of looking at a wall today. Unfortunately I’ve got sick and feel like crap. DOh. I never get sick. Dodgy because the HSC starts tomorrow. Ah whatever.

I have risen from bed to bring you this VERY important announcement. I changed some CSS stuff and now we have a few small graphical changes. What fun.

*goes back to bed*

7 Exams to go :)

Advertisements == spam?

It looks like RSS feeds are set to have ads now too according to this article (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65347,00.html).

What I really want to know is how much money do advertisements really make, and how many people click on an ad? You really need a high traffic website to make ads profitable but even then, if you’re running a high traffic/volume site you should have the income to easily support it.

I don’t know. It just seems a bit odd. Like spam in a way, really isn’t all that effective. I know I don’t click on ads. Maybe that is because I don’t buy stuff online.

FreeBSD + SPF records (update)

Just a quick post.

During the time I haven’t been studying I’d decided to give FreeBSD a go. Linux never worked for me, I don’t like it. It just feels messy. I’ve got a link to a post about it on my other computer so I’ll edited it in later. But yeah, FreeBSD rules.

ucosty on wordpress

Just thought I’d send him his first trackback ;)

Welcome to Wordpress ucosty.

Check it out:
http://www.ucosty.net/

State of play with FreeBSD

Well as some of you may know I’ve decided to jump out of my typical “OMG WINDOWS RULES EVERYTHING” stance. FreeBSD has been a great learning experience. Mainly because it is so damn easy to use and so damn hard to break!

Although this it the first time I’ve had a computer dedicated to another OS. When ever I used linux it was a dual boot which is bad. I think when I tried to do a kernel recompile on linux it crapped out because of space or something (booting from a floppy disc? Something like that). Anyway.

Recompiling the kernel on FreeBSD is easy and if you DO screw up (which I didn’t! *shock*) it backs up the old one and lets to go back to that from the boot loader. Sexy. And I’ve turned this box off without shutting down and I didn’t loss my partition!! Maybe I was just unlucky with linux or using the wrong distribution but whatever…..

Now the funny glare to pay a gleaming tare in a staring under heat

I was lying on the grass on Sunday morning of last week
Indulging in my self-defeat
My mind was thugged all laced and bugged all twisted wrong and beat
A comfortable three feet deep
Now the fuzzy stare from not being there on a confusing morning weak
Impaired my tribal lunar-speak
And of course you can’t become if you only say what you would have done
So I missed a million miles of fun

I know it’s up for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Making sure I’m not in too deep
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

Keeping versed and on my feet
I was lying on the bench slide in the park across the street l-a-t-e-r that
week
My sticky paws were in to making straws out of big fat slurpy treats

An incredible eight foot heap
Now the funny glare to pay a gleaming tare in a staring under heat Involved
an under usual feet
And I’m not only among but I invite who I want to come
So I missed a million miles of fun

I know it’s up for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Making sure I’m not in too deep
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Keeping versed and on my feet

I know it’s done for me
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Not as some and hard to see
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE
Keeping dumb and built to beat
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

My Sunshine
IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

LEN - IF YOU STEAL MY SUNSHINE

The glove compartment is inaccurately named

The glove compartment is inaccurately named
and everybody knows it
so I’m proposing a swift, orderly change
’cause behind its door there’s nothing to keep my fingers warm
and all I find are souvenirs from better times
before the gleam of your tail lights fading east
to find yourself a better life

I was searching for some legal document
as the rain beat down on the hood

when I stumbled upon pictures I tried to forget
and that’s how this idea was drilled into my head
’cause it’s too important to stay the way it’s been
but there’s no blame for how our love did slowly fade
and now that it’s gone, it’s like it wasn’t there at all
and here I rest where disappointment and regret collide
lying awake at night

but there’s no blame for how our love did slowly fade
and now that it’s gone just like it wasn’t there at all
and here I rest: where disappointment and regret collide
lying awake at night; all night, when I’m lying awake at night

Death Cab For Cutie - Title And Registration

RSS Formatting

My RSS was a touch dodgy (well it still is dodgy but it is better), it never used to format things, like new lines and urls etc.

Simple fix needed to wrap the content around <![CDATA[ content here ]]>. So yeah, formatted RSS. Funky. ;)

Please don't visit this site in IE

Although this site doesn’t look great at the best of times, viewing it in IE will be even worse.

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/ie-vs-firefox.jpg

That is only the front page too. The comment area looks more messed up. The comment box is too far to the left, the labels don’t highlight when you click them and sometimes text goes missing! Bah go get a real browser.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Spam + htaccess + queries

I’ve got 6 minutes to talk about three things. Lets go!

Stuart (http://smkz.is-a-geek.net/) just got comment spammed on his website. Spammers target wordpress, movable type a lot because they are very popular and widely used. The comments submit form is standard across multiple sites meaning bots can target these. Course of action? Do what josh did, http://www.joahua.com/blog/2004/09/22/my-new-blacklist

htaccess. If you want to protect a folder from directory listing in apache add Options -Indexes to your .htaccess file. Better than a blank index file any day :p

Queries counter can now be found at the bottom of this page. Need to talk about that later…

For future reference

SELECT news.*, COUNT(comments.newsid) AS count FROM news
LEFT JOIN comments ON news.id=comments.newsid
GROUP BY news.id ORDER BY Id DESC

…don’t mind me.

EDIT: Excellent down to 0.16 from 0.26 seconds. And down to 1 query from a shocking 162 on my little test. Very very good.

Source code. Public release of mysql class.

I’ve decided to release the source code for the mysql class I use on this site.

http://blog.dalegroup.net/source/mysql.phps

Feel free to leech and use. I plan on adding more to my source collection in the future.

This is only a very basic class compared to others I’ve seen but it works well.

Video killed the radio star.

I heard you on the wireless back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young it didn’t stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh

Message In A Bottle

Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh

The internet should be made to print :(

When you print something off the internet or publish something on to the internet it just feels weird. Using print CSS helps (http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/127) but when you have typed a few thousand word thing and put it online it feels as though it is only a page or something.

It’s just so depressing.

Printed stuff rules. I don’t like really any large amount of text on a screen, I’ll always print it. Books are even better than printed pieces of paper. That it why I want to purchase the FreeBSD handbook (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html). Not print it or read it off the screen. Books > printed sheets of paper > screen.

Speaking of print. Print design, such as business cards or brochures are cool. I wish I had some graphical creative skill.

On another topic. In about 1 hour we’re getting a billet from France who speaks no English and is 12 years old. Should be interesting…

…and now I’ve run out of paper for my printer.

ROFL

I just got this in an email.

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/BOS.JPG

For those who don’t know. This is our HSC Stimulus booklet that we needed to study in year 12 2004.

Thanks Kylie/Lexi :D