Simon » Software

Keeping Hands Out of the Cookie Jar

Simon — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:17:27 +0000

The new version of WordPress adds additional protection for cookies. It is very much worth adding the config option mentioned, since it helps protect against problems where a database have already been compromised.

Hot on the heels of WordPress 2.5.0 is the security update – WP 2.5.1.

Rumours that I have as many draft posts as SKG are false – though more than ten will exist soon if I keep leaving them unpublished!

shell commands

Simon — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:31:46 +0000

I saw this meme going around the blog world and decided to join in.

history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head

Work

73 ls
63 svn
62 cd
56 make
48 vi
24 sudo
24 grep
17 acroread
15 ispell
9 ./repos-update.sh

Home

57 vi
54 cd
52 rm
50 ls
25 svn
25 sudo
23 make
23 git
15 mv
14 irb

Git and GitHub

Simon — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:23:58 +0000

Geir mentions that GitHub is live and that ‘Git is conquering the world‘.

At this point I feel rather smug. I keep a repository of my own files on one of my machines. When I set up this repository, several years ago, I picked Subversion. However, recently the repository server has been offline and, so, I needed easy offline access to the repository. Fairly much randomly I decided to use Git, through the git-svn tool.

WordPress 2.5

Simon — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:11:27 +0000

The new version (2.5) of WordPress came out recently. Upgrading this blog went smoothly.

The most noticeable change is the redesign to the admin section. It is certainly a big improvement on the old.

Firefox, Kubuntu, and GMail as the Default Mail Client

Simon — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 12:25:43 +0000

I have been using Minefield for a while. This will be released as Firefox 3 at some stage next year and there have been some good improvements. Recently I switched to using this runscript to solve the problems of using the non-default Firefox. Through the -no-remote switch I can also use Firefox 2 at the same time, which is useful for testing and allows me to have a profile setup with web developer extensions.

How-To Geek recently posted instructions on setting GMail as the default mail client in Ubuntu. In the comments are equivalent instructions for Kubuntu users and there is an altered script that also deals with cc/bcc/subject/body.

Gravatar Enabled

Simon — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:25:51 +0000

I noted in the tech press last week that Automattic had acquired Gravatar. Matt has posted the code to enable gravatars on his blog. I rather like the idea behind gravatars and have enabled them on this blog.

OCAD

Simon — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:14:28 +0000

I have been helping to finalise a map, for an upcoming orienteering event, and this morning I fired up OCAD (for the first time in quite a while, to add some logos to the map. It took me a couple of hours to add a handful of logos to the map. For reasons I do not fully understand the process just seemed to be more complex than it needed to be – particularly I found the whole way that colours and symbols are handled confusing. Of course this could just be an indicator that I need to spend some time learning how to use the program!

WordPress Administration

Simon — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:21:12 +0000

Tip #6 : Enhancing WordPress administration: Whenever I update a WordPress blog I think how overly complicated the ‘Write Post’ page is. There are lots of different pieces that you could use – most of which I have never had cause to touch. The post linked to suggests using Clutter Free to improve matters and, having installed this plugin, I am impressed. The ‘Write Post’ page is now so much more simple.
From the same set of tips I also added WP-AddQuicktag, which allows me to add some more quicktags for the chunks I html I often use. The code, as linked to, needs a small edit to make it work on all update/edit pages. Edit the line:
if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'post.php') || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'page-new.php') ) {
to be:
if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'post.php') || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'page.php') || strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'page-new.php') || strpos($_SER VER['REQUEST_URI'], 'post-new.php') ) {

Related to this is the question: ‘WordPress Visual Editor – Do you Use It?‘ I do not, switching to the basic editor wherever possible,

WordPress 2.3

Simon — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 06:41:31 +0000

The new version of WordPress, the software used for this blog, was released yesterday. I took the plunge and updated straight away. Everything seems to be up and fine, but if any of you notice a problem then let me know.

However, on upgrade I noticed a jump in database queries on page load – nearly double the previous level. I have made a few changes to the internals of my custom theme and this has improved the situation, but I think there are some more improvements possible. These changes should not be noticeable to anyone visiting this site.

Training Log

Simon — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:04:32 +0000

For several years now I have been keeping an orienteering/training log. This is something I programmed myself, as a project to learn php/mysql. I keep thinking about moving to a different system – Attackpoint or Nopesport for instance – but then remember how much info I have already and decide not to.

Over the last few days I was talking shoes (both orienteering and running) with a couple of people. This lead me to thinking about how many miles I had run in any of my current pairs. So I updated my training log code and added a way of recording the shoes run in for each race/training and an overall mileage count for each pair.