WordPress filesystem abstraction – and automatic updates June 11, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : patching, wordpress , 1 comment so farWay back in the not-so-distant past the only way to update WordPress was to download (wget/ftp) updates, plugins and themes, unpack them and perform the update/install.
It is possible to pull the latest builds from subversion – but that’s really focused on the core hacker.
New in WP 2.7 was the ability to update automatically.
There were a few challenges with this – permissions, PHP modules, various host implementations – but I found it generally quite successful.
I found a great FAQ here – http://dd32.id.au/2009/02/20/wordpress-filesystem-abstraction-faq/
From the same author is a very cool plugin – core-control – it lets you enable and disable various transports – and shows the status of them.
Online presence June 8, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentI just noticed that I moved this blog to WordPress 1.5 some four years ago!
Prior to that I had several online things – including a static html status and news diary.
Here’s a post on this from April 2005 – my first online web page was in 1993!
WordPress 2.8 RC1 and audit-trail update
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentWordPress 2.8 RC1 is out – looking very good.
Also John Godfrey updated the audit-trail plugin.
Consolidation and acquisitions in the Systems Management space June 3, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentNever a dull moment watching Systems Management.
I remember talking with Ronni Colville from Gartner in early 2000 about how what was then known as “Enterprise Software Distribution” would always keep evolving – but would never really change.
Today the challenges are many – mobility, bandwidth, expectations of users, privacy, security, compliance – all tied into a real budget squeeze.
At the same time there is a continuing trend towards consolidation.
In the past week or so we have seen Configuresoft, Solidcore and most recently Cassatt be acquired.
My gut feeling – most of the virtualisation management, run-book automation and niche players will be gone by year end.
A wave of smaller ISVs are rising to replace them. I’ve met with some great new talent in this space – and just as I discussed with Ronni in 2000 – it’s still the same problem to solve.
WordPress themes May 29, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentHunting around for the ‘right’ theme – my hacks to Regulus by Ben Gillbanks are still doing an admirable job.
I’ve dragged the theme through a miriad of WordPress alphas, betas and releases; and added a stack of plugins and widgets to the side.
My ideal is a clean, two-column, widget-ready theme. Fast to load – and able to support the Gallery2 integations.
Fixing _weak_escape errors in WordPress 2.8
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , 4 commentsI’m hoping this saves someone some searching.
I upgraded a couple of blogs to WordPress 2.8 beta early this morning – and I had problems with a single plugin – Audit Trail by John Godley.
The symptom was that on login you got a blank screen and Apache/PHP threw this:
[Fri May 29 11:59:05 2009] [error] [client 10.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method AT_Auditor::_weak_escape() in /www/<foo>/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 487, referer: http://<foo>/wp-login.php?redirect_to=/
The plugin itself is nicely written – and as part of the safety mechanism it uses wpdb::escape to explode out anything before injecting to the database.
One change in WP 2.8 looks like it affects this – login redirects are now urlencoded by default – http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9817 – and that looks like it’s clashing with the line above.
The temporary fix for me is to modify part of the plugin to not call into wp::db – and instead assume that the url has already been exploded out.
wp-content/plugins/audit-trail/models/audit.php
line 173
// $operation = wpdb::escape ($operation);
The risk for my implementation seems small – I’m only using audit-trail to track logins and logouts.
So if you are hunting down some generic <function>::_weak_escape errors in WordPress 2.8 beta – take a trawl through your plugins and see if there is a wpdb::escape call. There may be some relatively low impact fixes out there.
ZENworks for Toasters May 24, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , 2 commentsThis goes back a long, long way.
Summer 2000 I was talking to an audience of customers and resellers in South Africa about how the directory, identity-driven management and ZENworks specifically could manage anything. The concepts of management by exception and the extensibility of the Novell Directory Services (as it was then known) were ideal for this.
We were joking around concepts of management – and we came on ZENworks for Toasters.
Some Java fun in ConsoleOne – and we had a cool demo plugin for our internal Systems Engineers.
Adding movies to the family blog May 9, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , 1 comment so farI’ve finally got the movie to web thing down to a pretty efficient process.
Video (AVI or AVCHD) –> Sony Vegas –> Flash Video studio (convert to flv) –> Amazon S3
I’m using the Flash Video Player plugin for WordPress – it’s nice and clean. Using Amazon S3 lets me put video in a datacenter in the US or Europe for pennies. That means my servers at home and my uplink don’t get killed by family viewing the lastest videos; it also means a measurable improvement in their experience. Viewing a video served from Amazon S3 in Europe to grandpa via DSL in London is very acceptable.
System Center Partner Solutions Guide – April 2009 April 20, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentOriginally posted on TechNet blogs.
Finally the team got the Partner Solutions Guide to print.
Here is a proof copy (right) next to the 2007 partner guide on the left.
This will be printed and shipped to Las Vegas – in time for the Microsoft Management Summit.
A big thanks to all of the System Center partners who provided their information, proofed and re-proofed their submissions. I hope you all find this guide useful – and another benefit of being in the System Center Alliance.
Growing a partner eco-system April 17, 2009
Posted by evilzenscientist in : evilzenscientist , add a commentOriginally posted on TechNet blogs.
When I started in this role – just over a year ago – there were around 25 partners in the Microsoft System Center Alliance. Most of those were founder members of the Alliance which was announced at TechEd/IT Forum in Barcelona in November 2007.
The original members of the Alliance were a mix of the big, strategic hardware OEMs, a couple of larger ISVs with integration and then some smaller, focused ISVs who had been working with Operations Manager and Configuration Manager since the MOM and SMS days.
In the past year the System Center Strategic Partner and Alliance team have been growing in several ways.
First we added some significant additional resources last Spring – I was one of the new blood – we are focused on new partner acquisition, building a business and a technical relationship and also thinking about partnerships in non-traditional ways.
The second area of growth has been in our back-office procedures and processes – growing our capacity. Managing less than thirty partners is very doable in an Excel spreadsheet. Not so for eighty or the hundred or so that are ‘in flight’. I worked closely with my business manager on the process flow that we had, identified bottlenecks, inefficiencies – and we improved on the paper process. We added auditing, reporting and metric gathering capabilities. Most recently we moved this more efficient – but still manual – process online. We are now transitioning to a SharePoint based partner onboarding and management tool.
Finally we have used both of these investments to grow the number of partners in the Alliance.
We have gone from the twenty one founding members of the alliance to over seventy today. By the time of Microsoft Management Summit in just a few weeks we have have grown some more.
An example of this growth is in the System Center Partner Solutions Guide. When this was first created in late 2007 there were some twenty partners listed. Today I am just finishing up with the final proofing – and this edition has seventy three integrated partners listed. Such is the growth that we plan to revise this more regularly – not in 2010 – but before the WorldWide Partner Conference in July.
My next blog post will discuss some of the areas that have helped in growing the Alliance – technology, business and a critical mass of customers and partners.
