Aaarrrggghh!
I ended up writing the bottom half of the previous article three times, thanks to not having been careful enough when upgrading WordPress. I had lost my fixes that send out the necessary headers to prevent the admin pages from being cached. I guess others don’t get bit by this because they don’t have ExpiresActive enabled on their web server.
Anyway, I’ve saved the changes in a patch file now, for future reference…
I wanted to see if I could have my WordPress links in the Firefox Bookmarks menu. I thought this should be possible, since it knows about RSS. From using reBlog I had learned about FeedCreator, which is a great package for quickly creating feeds. So I enhanced wp-links to support feeds.
However, I was to be disappointed — the links are in Firefox now, but they are all piled up together in a single huge menu. In the WordPress database the links are categorized, as can be seen on my links page. I was hoping Firefox would use the categories to create more subfolders.
I thought about another approach: XBEL. The format is simple enough to follow, so I added XBEL support to FeedCreator 1.7.2. This works perfectly with the Bookmarks Synchronizer plugin for Firefox. I’ve configured it to download a single subdirectory inside Bookmarks, and all my WordPress link categories show up as subdirectories inside it.
I’ve made some sample code available to show how I’m calling wp-links. The code won’t run as-is, as it calls some other libraries I’m using. It should be simple enough, though, to remove (or ignore) the “extra” stuff.
After 2 days of compiling, we have no more vulnerable packages installed once again. However, I was unable to recompile XFCE, due to xscreensaver not compiling due to the gle library not compiling: it thinks it cannot find the GLU library… (yet the pkgsrc framework says it is there…)
I was supposed to build a mail server this weekend, but that did not happen as I was spending time with the upgrades. However, I will try hard to get it done next weekend, as it would help with the stupidity (a DoS attack?) going on against our combined firewall and SMTP server. I think it keeps running out of memory at times, and dropping connections. By this I don’t mean just SMTP connections, but apparently IP flow states get lost if there is not enough memory, and suddenly I just see a “read error” from my ssh client on a remote network and lose the connection.
I really like WordPress!
I had made some tweaks (e.g. setting the charset in Content-Type headers) and hadn’t really heard back on my emails to the developers. This made me a little worried about upgrading the code on my site. As I run code from CVS as opposed to a release, there might be major issues after running cvs update.
As it turns out, there were some conflicts, but they were mostly mechanical differences around the Content-Type header. One or two were related to patches I’ve written about before, but nothing major.
Since I hadn’t really thought about what the procedure would be, here’s a quick outline for any other “daredevils” diving into it:
.htaccess rules again — there are new rules to be added.In that last step you can also add calls to posts_nav_link() to enable paged browsing. This is a really great feature: no more huge pages when browsing a category. Also, from the index page it is now possible to browse entries as far back as you want, one nice size page at a time.
Since my blog is rather small, I had not worried about this until recently, and here is the solution already. Perfect!
I was surprised to see a new version of the old IceS client — after all, it wasn’t supposedly developed anymore. The reason I’ve packaged it is that it supports streaming of MP3 data. My Audiotron doesn’t handle Ogg Vorbis, which is the only format supported by the new IceS client.
So, to stay current on the version, I’ve upgraded the ices-mp3 package to version 0.4. It adds FLAC support, actually, so that might be a reason to upgrade. Note that it transcodes the data, though, so you’ll need the CPU power to decode FLAC and encode it to MP3 (using LAME).
I recently had some time to go through all the packages I maintain to see what version upgrades would be needed. One long overdue one was www/wml.
It wasn’t an easy upgrade, though. Since the software apparently hasn’t been maintained for a couple of years, it took some work to make it work with the pkgsrc framework. It seems that we expect more recent behaviour from configure scripts than what was available 3-4 years ago.
I got the software to compile, finally. I just hope I didn’t break any functionality. I don’t have a wml-based website to test with anymore.
I have new versions of Firefox running on my computers, and I was busy adding block images rules on each one. I thought this was less than ideal, so I decided to give Privoxy a new try. I saw that a new version is out, so I updated the www/privoxy package as well. Apart from getting more up-to-date filters, there’s a memory leak fix and I could also enable threads for parallel request handling.
While people are commemorating the tragedy of 9/11/2001 today and certainly for years to come, this year it is also more “business as usual” regardless of the date. I’ve just finished setting up network connectivity to the NASD for a new application, and for this afternoon I’m on standby for (of all things) a Disaster Recovery Test conducted by ADP Brokerage Services Group. Since I was to be working today anyway, I also scheduled some hardware maintenance of my own.
I think this is a good development: things do move on — it doesn’t mean we would forget about the past.