Security fix: wordpress-2.6.5-2 packages for Fedora 10

wordpress-2.6.5-2 just got rolled into dist-f10-updates by bodhi; should be available via mirrors soon. This should address CVE-2009-1030 for those folks not behind a modern httpd webserver.

Mead?

Saw this from Stumbleupon: http://scottdavisanderson.com/blog/sustainable-vision/mead-making-101/

Given that my buddy, taw, is a local bee-keeper, I wonder if I should give this a go?

Debugging Firefox + GSSAPI

So, I’ve been working on internal collaboration apps, and a big thing is seamless authentication. Unfortunately, I’m no kerberos/gssapi guru, and have been fighting w/ my development KDC instance quite a bit.

I kept wondering why I couldn’t get some sort of console log from Firefox, since the commandline kinit lines were working fine but mod_auth_kerb was very unhappy… turns out, you can

1) Close all instances of Firefox.
2) Open a command shell, and enter the following commands:

[bretm@koom Desktop]$ export NSPR_LOG_MODULES=negotiateauth:5
[bretm@koom Desktop]$ export NSPR_LOG_FILE=/tmp/moz.log

3) restart firefox and tail /tmp/moz.log

(from RHEL 5’s Deployment Guide)

Problems with git bare repos and hooks?

Had an interesting issue crop up yesterday… supposedly, the reason a post-receive hook wasn’t firing was because the repo was set to “bare=true”.  I’ve googled for “bare repo” plus “hook”, and can’t find anything that would suggest hooks function any differently on bare repos vs normal ones.

Can anyone out there point me in the right direction?

Time Machine & NFS or Samba backup

Janel has been very pleased with her Mac so far; mostly she’s been working mostly with iPhoto and iMovie. I have to say: I’m damn impressed with the machine.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on the integrated backup program, Time Machine, that’s included in Mac OS X 10.5. At first, I was disappointed to hear it required the HFS filesystem, but I did a bit more digging, and found these two links:

http://freakymousemats.com/blog/posts/2007/11/01/time-machine-over-smb/

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=141960

These suggest that folks have had success using both SMB as well as NFS to serve as the persistent storage. I haven’t tested it out, but plan to use it with the 300gb HP Media Vault that serves as our on-site backup. Wish me luck.

Oh, and the critical command appears to be:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

UPDATE (14-July-2008): so, this didn’t work out too well.  The machine complained that it wasn’t able to create the image.  I’ve heard that other folks have the same issue, and will be trying to find and document the solution.  Then I’ll start testing restoring files =)

UPDATE (22-July-2008):  Some initial success… Wes’s information got me past the sparsebundle failure, thought I had to dig through the link comments to find the right parameters for Janel’s Intel-based Mac.  Here’s what I used:

hdiutil create -size $SIZEg -fs HFS+J -type SPARSEBUNDLE -volname “Backup of $MACHINENAME” $MACHINENAME_$MACADDRESS.sparsebundle

You then recursively copy that sparse bundle to the network share, and it should become something you can select during Time Machine setup.  Time Machine is going to try backing up her Mac in an hour, I’ll post if it succeeds.

One thing I am concerned about is keeping the network connection available to the Mac… I haven’t found the equivalent of “reconnect,” etc.

Blackberry vs iPhone

Ok, sure, the iPhone now has all three of the drool-over functions I knew I wanted in a phone:

1. GPS
2. WiFi
3. Quality calendaring w/ syncing

However, I’ve just found the uber-feature I never knew the Blackberry Curve’s had; honest-to-god voice dialing.

I used to try to use this w/ my Motorola Razr; it would record a sound tag of me saying something, then try to match it when I was placing a call. The results were similar to the Newton’s handwriting recognition attempts as immortalized in Doonesbury. I was a bit skeptical when I saw it in the Blackberry’s menus, but I eventually got around to giving it a shot. I hit the voice dial button, and the phone ordered me to “say a command.” Disconcerted, I said the first thing that came to mind: “Call.” The phone responded: “Say a number or a name.” I rattled of the ten digits of the home phone, and was soon talking to my wife.

It was a little scary.

I think I’ve dialed about 20 unique numbers this way, and the phone has only made mistakes on ~3. And when it screws up, it guesses two alternative numbers before giving up completely, and only 1 of the 3 recognition failures proved ultimately unsuccessful.

If the iPhone doesn’t have this functionality, I flat-out do not want one.

MacBook Pro

We finally did it; we made the switch. Janel’s HP was on its last legs, and while I did try to get her onto Fedora, it proved a bit to rough-around-the-edges for her. So, we picked her up a 15″ MacBook Pro. So far, I’m envious… it is pretty. Plenty of horsepower in it for her music, photos, and now gaming

Blackberry Curve 8310

Well, I finally won a new Blackberry Curve 8310 off of EBay. So far, I love it. The Google applications are beautiful on the BB compared to what I’m used to on my old Treo. Palm’s days are numbered.

Coolest feature: integrated GPS + Google Maps. I’ll never be lost again.

All these innovations in the wireless field are getting me pretty interested in what kind of applications might be most needed. Pair open handset platforms, with the new ease of developing distributed web services (App Platform, EC2, S3, etc), and there’s a new world heading our way…

Open-source blogging software :/

I’ve been playing around w/ WordPress-MU’s code-base a bit, helping evaluate it for potential in fedora-land and other places… so far the experience has been a bit frustrating. While I think it has more potential than our current solution (lyceum), I would have expected a much easier path.

For someone that is rather intimately familiar with the construction of web applications, the installation process is *horrible*. It requires the schema to be there prior to installation; why not simply allow your installer to create your datastore? Once I finally got myself through the installer process, the 1.3.3 codebase is blowing up on some unknown column error (“blog_public”).

They do have an interesting approach in terms of trying to keep some level of compatibility with the core WordPress code-base… I have to wonder, though, why they just didn’t move towards -MU as the new common platform? Cut a branch for the single-user code-base, maintain it for awhile, but do active development in the multi-user space? If anyone can shed some light on the reasoning here, I’d appreciate it

I also briefly looked at livejournal & Movable Type; both of these may merit more of a look.

Has anyone found a good python or java FOSS blogging system? If so, *please* let me know.

Fun in Philly

Since Janel and Graeme were in LA this week, I headed up to Philadelphia to visit my sister Chris. We’ve had a blast; she’s taken me to wonderful restaurants, and shown me the sights around town. I’d wager we walked about 4 to 5 miles yesterday alone.

Most enjoyable part was bowling and pool at a place called Lucky Strikes; the gutters liked me and my pool que did not.

Here’s the album of pictures.