Author: TechGremlin

Owner and main content writer.

WordPress 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 are out

A little late on the news here but I have upgraded to 2.6.2. Grab it here. View their blogs here for 2.6.1 and here for 2.6.2.

Both upgrades are not too necessary, but don’t break anything if you do intend to get them, it’s always good to check to see if you really need any upgrades anyway, just in case something does break.

2.6.1:
The admin styling has been improved for people with right-to-left writing languages.
A gettext pug with certain PHP configurations was fixed.
Fixed a few issues with permalinks for IIS hosted blogs.
Image insertion problems for IE users using ‘Press This’ were fixed.
Small performance improvements with blogs that have many plugins in the admin section.
There’s over 60 more, check them out here.

2.6.2:
The main fix in this one is due to a vulnerability in MySQL that can allow someone to reset passwords on websites (WordPress based websites included) and reset passwords provided they have an open registration system.
There’s a few more fixes, check them out here.

Firefox crashes, WordPress flash uploader and new host

Firefox has locked up again

Firefox has crashed again, I can always tell because It’s closed, in fact I probably closed it an hour ago, but it’s been slowly sitting there in the background hoping I won’t notice it, it does this occasionally when I close it, sometimes after I have used it for some time, sometimes when I only have it open for a short time, it doesn’t seem to matter, it just does it, further more I haven’t found anybody with a similar problem, except some sources that insist it might be the plugins causing it.

The WordPress flash based picture uploader has been giving me grief ever since I changed hosting providers recently, HTTP error was all I was given when trying to upload a file, using the browser based uploader worked fine so I used that instead, but it got annoying for me so I did a bit of googling and found out that the reason it wasn’t working is because on some providers you must have this directive in your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

Now flashed based uploading works fine.

UPDATE: James at The Theme Blog has experienced a similar error and has posted another workaround here, if this doesn’t work out try that one.

I have been a member of Aussiehost for over 6 months now, however this site has stayed specifically on Servage up until a few days ago when I realised this website is a little slow on Servage for my liking, the latency is shocking. The changeover was seamless and I’m very happy with the performance so far.

Update for Servage Referral Widget etc

Last night after over an hour of coding I was able to finish version 1.2, the new version is able to count how many times a user clicks the link, then report it in the Widget control panel. I might make an option later to report it under the widget, or in the Dashboard.

Google Analytics is quite a handy tool to see who reads my site and for what purpose, the Webmaster Tools is also great, however I am noticing the search ranking isn’t very accurate for some reason.

In other news I went out half way through writing this entry, the slimline sets of Mythbusters seasons appear to be slowly coming out, I got my copy of Season 1 today.

I also just bought the spamannoys.me domain, mainly for e-mail of course.

WordPress/Servage spam IP filtering

I have Akismet set up to keep spam out as well as keeping all comments for moderation, I initially decided to do some IP blocks seeming as there would be a few that would constantly send spam.

The only problem was that as WordPress only use

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

to determine a user’s IP address which as most people who know PHP know it is a bad idea because it doesn’t take into account proxies etc. In my case it was actually giving Servage’s own IP for every result which wasn’t of much use unless I wanted to block comments/trackbacks altogether.

As there’s no documentation that I could find about where WordPress actually contains the code to find the IP and Google wasn’t much help I had to look manually.

I eventually found it in comments.php in the wp-includes directory.

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '', $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] );

First to add in the neccessary code a variable must be created, change the above code to this:

$commentdata['comment_author_IP'] = preg_replace( '/[^0-9a-fA-F:., ]/', '',$bp_IP );

Then add the required code above that stating:

$bp_IP = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] : $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

This allows the correct IP to be shown in most cases, most of the thanks must go to Jason for this.

Update: This piece of code also works in WordPress 2.6x.

Google Suggest/Trends, theme editing, FileZilla issue

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
This is now my homepage, it is extremely handy, plus it’s slightly less bloated than the default Firefox search page, trends http://www.google.com/trends is quite interesting to have a look at as well.

Thanks to http://www.blogohblog.com/, http://www.dyers.org/blog/archives/2008/05/21/how-to-add-avatars-to-your-wordpress-25-theme/ and Jason I was able to fix some issues I was having with the Gravatar section of the theme which is by default not supported, the code at first didn’t work I figure because it was incorrectly detecting the WordPress version as something less than 2.5 however there was a </div> that had no starting tag which caused the theme style to get messed up also, after fixing those the Gravatars work fine now.

I have been experiencing a ‘DDE execute request failed’ error in FileZilla 3 when choosing to view/edit files regardless of the fact that it does appear to view/edit the file perfectly fine, there doesn’t appear to be any information that I can find about it when searching around.
I managed to stop it appearing by setting a default text editor, choosing ‘Always use default editor’ and unchecking ‘Inherit system’s file-type associations’, must be a Vista/FileZilla/TextPad/UAC thing.

I received my Windows Vista upgrade advisor shirt not long ago, it’s very well made but I don’t think I’ll be wearing it anywhere anytime soon.

I just found out what a post slug is…

OS Collection – Part 2 – Windows Me

Here’s one I got the same day I wrote my Windows 3.1 article.

Windows Me

Released in 2000 right between Windows 98 SE (1999) and Windows XP (2001) it didn’t have too much going for it with such a reduced life compared to most Windows OSes, it had it’s fair share of controversy and is undisputed as the worst Microsoft OS to ever be released.

Continue reading OS Collection – Part 2 – Windows Me

OS Collection – Part 1 – Windows 3.1

Recently I have taken to starting a little collection of PC Operating Systems, starting with Microsoft and IBM full retail boxed copies sourced from the wonderful world of eBay. I have started receiving these copies so I have decided to install them and do a review of the experiences of using them in modern times.

Windows 3.1

Released in 1992 Windows 3.1 was a minor update to Windows 3.0, mainly including Truetype font support and 32-bit Disk Access. It however has became the most popular pre-Windows 95 era Windows OS. I have only managed to get my hands on an OEM copy, so here are a few pics of what comes out of that package.

Continue reading OS Collection – Part 1 – Windows 3.1

Windows Vista Ultimate Extras

It seems many people are having problems with the Ultimate Extras that have been released by Microsoft in the past due to the low amount of Extras that were released and the time it takes for Microsoft to release them. Now it appears that everybody is at Microsoft’s throat again after the release of new extras that to many do not represent the kind of extras they were expecting when purchasing Windows Vista Ultimate.

New Sound Schemes

The sound schemes are quite similar to the original Vista sound schemes, after going through the sounds that were released I initially noticed that Pearl has way more sounds included than both the default sound scheme and Glass, why were these extra sounds left out of Glass? Personally I like Pearl and I am currently using it, however something tells me this is not the kind of thing most buyers of Vista Ultimate would actually use.

Dreamscene Content Pack 3

The Dreamscene Content Pack #3 however is a much needed boost of quality for the default Dreamscene content, even though there are only 3 in this pack their quality outperforms the previously released Dreamscenes both in content and actual picture quality, when paused there are no more pixilated images like you get when running vid8898 (the raining path) or vid8899 (the stream). I look forward to more content packs and wouldn’t mind it if some of the earlier ones were updated as well.

On the subject of Dreamscenes, as much as they are a "fancy feature" and don’t offer much in the way of directly improving productivity, I do feel that in a workplace they would probably do quite well in improving the overall working environment.

The most important point of all of this is that if you bought Windows Vista Ultimate for the extras then you bought it for the wrong reason and most likely did not need it in the first place. These are free extras that nobody paid for, it’s up to Microsoft when and if more get released.