Well it appears that Google has finally let their Jabber server talk to other XMPP messaging systems, meaning that if you use Jabber somewhere then you should be able to now communicate with Google Talk people (including VOIP if your client supports it thanks to Google releasing their Jingle specs openly as well as a sample library) as well as with anyone else on a Jabber server.
Nice one Google!
Category Archives: Computers
RSS issues
Sorry to those tracking this site via RSS that may have seen odd behaviour recently – an artifact of importing all the old stories from Postnuke into WP2 is that the guid’s for the stories weren’t created properly and that was causing a non-compliant RSS2 feed, so I switched to RSS1.
Then I discovered that I could limit the RSS feed to just the last 5 articles (being the ones authored directly in WP2) and that fixed the validation of the RSS2 feed so now I’m switching back!
Off to Linux.Conf.Au 2006!
Thursday morning Donna and I fly off to New Zealand where I’ll be attending LCA 2006 in Dunedin and Donna will be doing a number of talks in Aukland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin (and I’ll be travelling with her to those).
Updates will be occasional, if at all, to the site until we get back to Australia..
News on GPLv3, Samba4 and poor old Daniel..
Couple of interesting things today, first off is that the first draft of the GPLv3 has been posted for comment on the FSF’s website finally, so we get to see what they’re thinking. Then we have some news on a technology preview for Samba4 and finally why you shouldn’t put off packing to the last moment, like I’m doing..
Continue reading
The continued adventures in WordPress
The more I find the more I like this – it makes life so much easier compared to Postnuke!
For instance, I’ve now installed this Get Latest Comments plugin which displays both recent comments and trackbacks to the blog. Very easy to setup and a trivial amount of editing of the sidebar PHP script and it’s done..
Shot in the foot by anti-referrer spam measures..
In a word, d’oh!
Spent a while trying to work out why I could install the Google Analyticator plugin but then when I tried to customise it from its option page, or go to any other link on my site from it I got a 403 Forbidden error. Looking at the Apache logs didn’t give much help, it was just whinging about client denied by server configuration and I was completely stumped, so I thought it must be some weird bug and installed Rich’s Analytics plugin, but that had the same problem!
But the fact that two plugins with similar names had the problem, whereas others were finally caused the penny to drop – I had installed a whole bunch of .htaccess to prevent comment spammers from getting too many links in and if they match they return with a 403 error. Turns out that one of them was broken and matching on the “anal” in Analytics!
Sigh.. at least it works now!
Conversion to WordPress complete
Well after many years of running PostNuke I’ve now switched to using WordPress and imported all my Postnuke stories into this (with a bit of hacking). It’s by no means finished, there’s a few more modules to install but mainly for backend stuff rather than frontend.
Still, I’m quite impressed by what I’ve seen of it so far!
New Alec Muffett Video – Archaeology Meets Computer Security
Kudos to Alec on putting up a rather good homemade video about defence in depth; rather well illustrated by him storming up the side of Maiden Castle (an iron age hillfort) in Dorset and explaining (whilst fighting for breath) why its design makes it so darn difficult. He then explains about what the flaw in its defences were and how this applies to computer security. Well worth a watch!
Coldplay CD’s now NoPlay CD’s – Unless You Use Windoze
Groklaw has a good piece about the DRM on Coldplay’s new album, including this part of the warning on the CD liner:
USAGE GUIDELINES:
This CD cannot be burnt onto a CD-R or hard disk, nor can it be converted into MP3 for file sharing.
This CD has been manufactured for usage in regular CD players but might not play in the following players:
- Some CD players that have the capability of burning into an MP3(such as portable players or car stereos)
- Some CD players that possess CD-R/RW functions (such as portable players or car stereos)
- Some car steros with satellite “Guidance” systems
- Some CD players or car stereos with hard disk recording capability
- Some CD-R/RW Recorders used for music
- Some portable CD players
- Some DVD players
- Some CD/LD Convertible Players
- Some Game Players
In other words, it’s not guaranteed to work on anything – and to cap it all off they say that you can’t get your money back if it won’t play in your system, unless there’s been a manufacturing fault! PJ sums it up very well, with an extra bit they must have missed off the liner..
Coldplay: This CD is only for customers who use Microsoft products and only on players that are blessed by Microsoft, and for customers who are willing to accept DRM controlling how they can use the CD. If you use a Mac or GNU/Linux, you are excommunicated. And if you look for an alternative, we reserve the right to tip off the RIAA and then it’ll be off with your head. Don’t like it? We don’t care. Watch us sitting in our offices not caring.
As Phillips said – it may look like a CD, but it isn’t..
Friends Don’t Let Friends Do Internet Explorer..
To expand briefly on this story of Leon’s about the problems with security in Internet Explorer I will add a quote from the source article:
Actually there was only one period in 2004 when there were no publicly known remote code execution bugs – between the 12th and the 19th of October – 7 days in total.
So for 359 of the 366 days of 2004 (it was a leap year) users of Internet Explorer were vulnerable to being hacked..
I await their figures for 2005 with interest!