I just saw some weird traffic on this blog. Last week, I was testing a plugin when it went a little haywire and automatically created a bunch of posts (based on my NewsGator clippings, including a lot of law related and gadget related topics — things I read about but don’t write about). And then… Continue reading Weird Traffic
Category: post
Character Encoding Help
Tom Morris is pulling his hair out dealing with XML character encoding issues. I’ve gone through this myself. I found that the SimplePie feed parser has great logic for dealing with this, so I adapted it to my needs in my PHP class XMLParseIntoArray. I think I’ve expanded on SimplePie’s approach a bit, but it’s… Continue reading Character Encoding Help
FreeNX with Fedora 8
Just finished installing Fedora 8 on one of my machines, only to find that one of my favorite tools, FreeNX (a VNC-like remote desktop protocol), would not work. Turns out Fedora 8 ships with a known bug. More info here. PITA.
Twitbin Fixes Security Flaw
Brian Breslin, of Twitbin, left a comment saying that Twitbin fixed the security flaw I previously pointed out. Cooool! 😎
Twitbin Fails Basic Password Security
UPDATE: FIXED. See the comments below. A couple weeks ago, I installed twitbin, a Firefox extension that loads twitter in a sidebar. But, I just happened to be checking my browser cookies, and I noticed that my twitter username and PASSWORD were stored in my browser cookies in plaintext! This is not even a session… Continue reading Twitbin Fails Basic Password Security
New York Times Home Page RSS Feed Driving Me Nuts
The New York Times is doing a lot of great things with its website and RSS feeds. But somewhere along the way, they’ve introduced a bug in their code that generates the RSS feed for the home page. The bug is that the channel title switches back and forth between “NYT > NYTimes.com” and “NYT… Continue reading New York Times Home Page RSS Feed Driving Me Nuts
WordPress 2.3 Upgrade
Just finished upgrading to WordPress 2.3. Went off without a hitch — even converted my categories to tags. I did have one issue with that, though. For some reason, certain posts were marked “Uncategorized” while other retained only my default “Miscellany” category. I couldn’t detect the pattern. I had to “hand” edit the database to… Continue reading WordPress 2.3 Upgrade
Comments on OPML 2 expanded Attribute
In response to Dave’s proposal to add an expanded attribute to the OPML 2.0 spec, I have the following thoughts. Typo: “Its optional” should be “It’s optional” As a general matter, I’m not convinced that this belongs in the spec. It seems to me that display properties are the application’s problem, not the file format’s.… Continue reading Comments on OPML 2 expanded Attribute
Podcast recommendation
Just finished listening to the The Traneumentary podcast. Fantastic! 33 episodes in all. Subscribe
PHP command line mode detection
Use a block like this in PHP code to detect whether or not it’s running in command line mode as opposed to web server script mode. // if $_ENV['SHELL'] exists, we're probably in command line mode if (array_key_exists('SHELL', $_ENV)) { $this->setOutputMode(MYSQLICIOUS_OUTPUT_CMD); } else { $this->setOutputMode(MYSQLICIOUS_OUTPUT_HTML); }