Zero to One-Eighty » releases

MAMP 1.8.3

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:42:58 +0000

New version of MAMP was released yesterday, which, amongst other things, fixes this ridonculous problem:

Result of a bug in PHP, version 5.2.10.

NetNewsWire and me

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:41:01 +0000

The things we nerds do for the sake of our nerdom. I know you want to hear all the details, so don’t try to deny it. Here goes… NewsGator,^† makers of my favourite feed reader NetNewsWire, is transitioning all of its non-enterprise products to Google Reader synchronisation services and closing their own synching service. So far it’s been a schemozzle for yours truly.

I care about this because after e-mail clients (Mail.app and Thunderbird), text editors (TextWrangler and Coda) and browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc.) my next most heavily used application is NetNewsWire. I like this product and I want to stick with it. It’s bloody excellent. I use it on two computers (home and work) and on an iPod touch—so the synchronisation feature is fundamental.

It was on Brent Simmons weblog that I first heard that a new version was in the works. Not long after, I received a rather pumped up message from NewsGator saying that exciting changes are coming ra ra ra and oh, by the way, synching is changing:

NetNewsWire for Mac – you may continue to use your current version (synchronization won’t be supported after August 31, 2009). However, we recommend that you download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account for synchronization. Please refer to our transition instructions for assistance.

NetNewsWire for iPhone Customers – a mobile RSS Reader requires synchronization and a new version of NetNewsWire for iPhone that supports synchronization with Google Reader will be available soon. We will notify you when it is available so that you can download the latest version of NetNewsWire and sign-up for a Google Reader account prior to August 31, 2009.

I don’t want to use Google Reader for synchronisation, but that’s another story. Let’s just say that I like this software enough that I’ll go with it for now. I’m tuned in and following along at home. The transition instructions told me to download the new version of NetNewsWire for my Mac:

Download the latest version of NetNewsWire.

That link takes you to a beta version. Okay, so it’s not ready yet but they want us to move everything over to Google Reader really soon so they can shut off synching. The iPhone version is not available yet either. Here’s the part where I digress and tell you that I’m a weird nerd who still uses Mac OS X 10.4 even though at that time all the cool kids were starting to count the sleeps until 10.6 was released.

This is relevant because I decided to follow NewsGator’s instructions anyway and installed the latest version of NetNewsWire. It doesn’t work on 10.4. Fortunately, when I downgraded again to my previous version (which I’m still using) all my data was there so I didn’t have to resort to restoring from backups or anything.

So now I’m thinking, hmmm—I will have to finally upgrade to 10.5. No big deal, I guess. I’ve been using it on my work machine and I love it. Then I had a brainwave and decided to check the prices of replacement hard drives for my Mac. [ed.—Excursus #2, for those who are counting.] These things are cheap as chips! You can jam a 300GB drive in there! (I have an 80GB drive currently.) Next, I ask my friends whether upgrading is something that anyone can do with sheer hutzpah alone, or whether you really need to be a technician. @berkleebassist was quick to tell me that the answer lies somewhere in between:

@adriancooke 36 screws to remove the top case. Takes me about 2 hours to do, & I’m a certified mac tech. Get a manual, & be careful!

Ahh… yeah. Well, maybe that’s not really me. I would freak out too much if I killed my computer. I did check out the procedure on iFixit and there was a reader comment in there somewhere about little hooks that you can’t even see in the high res photos and you can break things if you’re not careful and I was all not tonight Josephine after that.

Anyway, back to NetNewsWire… I eventually ordered a copy of Leopard, carefully installed it last night (i.e. using the John Gruber’s Murphy’s Law approach) and now I’m sitting down to figure out how many days I have left until my synching is switched off. So far I have seven related tabs open to try to get this straight:

The e-mail: “Action Required – NewsGator Consumer RSS Reader Product Changes”
NewsGator Product Transition Instructions
NewsGator FAQs
nnwbeta.com
Google Reader’s signed out page [ack!—sorry, hairball]
NewsGator Exporting Clipped and Tagged Articles
NewsGator Online (where I’m logged in, but clueless)

Of all of these number four is the most helpful:

Note: This is still a beta — it’s unfinished, and it has bugs and incomplete features. If you haven’t started using a beta yet, you don’t need to: you can wait until it’s finished. […]

(Note: we won’t turn off NewsGator syncing until NetNewsWire 3.2 and NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone are finished.)

Oh, and in the midst of all of this I got another message from NewsGator saying, “chill, the dates have been pushed back because we’re not quite ready just yet.” I don’t know what to do next, so I thought I’d tell the Internet. All of this for a feed reader! And people are saying that RSS is dead. Pish!

† Does anyone else think that NewsGator should have a small “g” just like Photoshop has a small “s”? Wow,you all do? Would you look at that.

New WordPress worm

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:15:11 +0000

This is a bummer, man. WordPress is being targeted by a nasty worm, and it’s gaining momentum, apparently. Versions 2.8.3 and earlier are currently vulnerable. Matt Mullenweg, today, addressing the exploit:

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.

It should be noted that version 2.8.4—the latest stable and secure version—is only 24 days old, so if you haven’t upgraded recently your blog is vulnerable. Apparently it’s more difficult to recover from this one than previous WordPress attacks because the worm makes changes to the database. Immediately upgrading to version 2.8.4 and making sure you have a strong password is the recommended preventive medicine. And I would add: institute a good backup routine, if you haven’t already.^† If you can get into the habit of upgrading within a week of a new release you should be able to stay ahead of these kinds of exploits.

† For example, I run a copy of my weblog on localhost using MAMP. When backing up I export the database from the remote host and import it to the local instance, check that it is displaying as it should, and confirm that I can login. I also synchronise the WordPress files using Transmit over SFTP. At least once a week—that’s my estimate of how much I could afford to lose and not start smashing things.

Opera “9.8”

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:58:46 +0000

Craig Buckler on Opera 10’s weird user agent string (my emphasis):

Opera is one of the oldest browsers and is the first to approach a double-digit version number. Unfortunately, the Opera developers started to experience strange problems with a selection of sites that use browser sniffing to serve version-specific content and/or scripts. Many of the sniffing scripts simply detected the first digit in the user agent string and boldly assumed they were running on Opera 1 rather than Opera 10. Worse still, many of these sites decided that the browser was unsupported and refused to provide any content.

Which sites? In the comments, David Storey says:

One of the biggest reasons why we did this is because it effects [sic] ASP.net/IIS sites, meaning potentially many thousands of sites are broken by the Opera 10 UA string. These range from AJAX not working, large parts of the code being missing, or being out right [sic] blocked. Major sites like Bank of America were also effected. [sic]

Shudder.

WordPress Automatic Update

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 04:57:07 +0000

After years of following the extended upgrade instructions for WordPress I was a little skeptical about using the “automatic update” feature in 2.7. But it’s a nice implementation that requires fewer steps and worked smoothly for me.

Before you start, you should back up your database, and verify that the backup works. I also redirect traffic to a “down for maintenance” message while I’m upgrading. (It’s probably best to disable plugins too.) Then, run Automatic Update:

This beats waiting around for SFTP

The main difference is the speed of the actual update. It ran in a minute or so. The rest of the time was spent synchronising remote files to the local machine, rather than the other way around. The whole process probably takes about the same amount of time as updating via SVN, but this option will be a lot easier for users who are more comfortable with a GUI than the command line.

This is probably the best new feature in WordPress.