Original ExistDifferently.com Weblog of David, a Christian Network and Systems Manager, with topics ranging from Apologetics to Worldview, and some crypto, open source, programming, opinion, and daily life thrown in between.

Sun, 2007-03-04 (Mar 04)

WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, upgrade!

Filed under: Blog,General,In The News,Open Source,Programming,Security,security WordPress blog tech,Tech (General) — David @ 00:59

The official WordPress development blog is reporting that WordPress version 2.1.1 was compromised by a malicious hacker and anyone who downloaded that version in the past several days needs to upgrade immediately to version 2.1.2. Many more details at that link; I checked the two files they mentioned (feed.php and theme.php in the wp-includes folder) and I got one of the infected versions! If you do a “diff” and compare an infected file with one from the 2.1.2 download the infected line becomes obvious. The vulnerability, as far as I can tell, allows an attacker to easily execute any command on the system that’s allowed by the user PHP is running as by using a specially (but easily) crafted query string.

I’m still running 2.0.3 here as I write this, but I’m going to upgrade to 2.0.9 soon; I can’t run the 2.1.* series yet because I don’t have MySQL 4+ installed on my server yet.

Thanks to a post from security blogger Martin McKeay that was my first warning!

Tue, 2006-10-24 (Oct 24)

Firefox 2.0 is out

Filed under: General,In The News,Internet,Mozilla,Open Source,Tech (General) — David @ 22:16

Yep. Mozilla Firefox version 2.0 was released today.ร‚ย  I’ve been running it since yesterday.ร‚ย  I agree with Martin McKeay about tabs resizing vs. scrolling I think, I’m not sure yet.ร‚ย  I probably won’t try the Tabbrowser Preferences plugin he mentions yet, I’ll try and get used to the new way for a while first.ร‚ย  The spell check in form fields is nice, although writing this post is the first time I’ve seen it in practice.

One thing I missed at first was the del.icio.us plugin which wasn’t updated for Firefox 2.0 when I installed it, although I just checked and they appear to have released version 1.2 today with updated compatibility.ร‚ย  Firefox refuses to install it however, perhaps the old version is cached?ร‚ย  I’ll have to play with it, but the fact that they updated it makes me happy!

My favorite thing about 2.0? The look of the tabs and buttons look much more polished. The search function is improved, spell check I mentioned, phishing protection is good but I haven’t seen it in action yet (not likely to see it unintentionally!), RSS support slightly improved, and maybe something else I forgot.ร‚ย  Oh yeah, they seem to duplicate IE7’s new features and look in nearly every important way. Which is good, in my opinion…I tried IE7 the day it came out (last week), too, and although I’m sticking with Firefox, IE7 is much improved over IE6 and compared to Firefox 1.5, I was a tad jealous!

Fri, 2006-06-30 (Jun 30)

Firefox, MSI’s and the Enterprise

Filed under: Mozilla,Open Source,Software — David @ 23:28

Well, I was going to post this as a comment over on Robert Accettura’s Fun With Wordage blog. It’s really long. So now it’s here, with a link :-) (Since I remembered my password to this blog and have a bit of time…I suppose I’ll have to post some more now, it’s been a while!)

Read this post first as this is a reply (originally written as a comment on his site, addressed to Robert directly, and moved directly here due to length):

Interesting post, given that I spent a decent chunk of time investigating similar solutions for the church where I’m the Network and Systems Manager! I found some good info, not relating to updates necessarily, but on MSI installs in particular since I want to deploy with Active Directory.

It took me some Googling, but I ended up at a really useful page called Firefox:2.0 Institutional Deployment. I tried implementing nearly all of the MSI-related options on this page today to some extent. The documentation of details (an FAQ) for each solution is pretty sparse in general so I had to test to see it in action.

The most fully developed solution for deployment seems to come from Front Motion, with their two releases, Mozilla Firefox MSI, which is an AD-deployable MSI of the straight Firefox install (just a repackage), although it has some really nice features, such as (pulled from their site): (more…)

Thu, 2004-12-16 (Dec 16)

Firefox Ad Hits New York Times!

Filed under: Blog,Mozilla,Open Source,Tech (General),World News — David @ 03:35

This may be one of the few times I can agree with something in the New York Times…figures it would be an ad :-) Anyway, over at “spreadfirefox.com”:http://www.spreadfirefox.com they’ve posted the “announcment about the ad”:http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/8769 and of course “Robert Accettura beat me to posting”:http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2004/12/15/firefox-ad-is-out-2-full-pages/ about it becuase I wasn’t at the computer to catch the post!

Check it out though, my name’s in the ad somewhere! Also…a nice surprise is that the ad is two pages in size instead of the promised/expected single page!

Update: I found my name in the PDF…it’s down to the right of the light “x” in Firefox at the bottom of the first page. About a third of the way above the center of the “x” and over a little ways to the right (not touching the “x” and separated by some names). The names are alphabetical, and my last name starts with “Sz”. So far I’m not directly giving it away on this blog though…some of my readers know me though :-) (If you do, please don’t post it in the comments…thanks.)

Tue, 2004-12-14 (Dec 14)

Firefox’s Google homepage…a ’suggest’ion?

Filed under: Blog,General,Mozilla,Open Source,Tech (General),Web Development — David @ 20:57

Now that “Google Suggest Beta”:http://labs.google.com/suggest has been released, and seems to work really well…why not add it to the “Mozilla Firefox Start Page”:http://www.google.com/firefox that Google hosts? Then I wouldn’t have to choose between leaving the nice Firefox start page (my current choice) and Google Suggest set as my home page. Google can go ahead and add the Suggest technology to its main homepage, too, as far as I’m concerned!

Now if they would just listen to me…

Sun, 2004-11-21 (Nov 21)

Fixin’ Family Computers

Filed under: General,Internet,Open Source,Software,Tech (General) — David @ 20:40

Found a good post about what software people are installing on their parents/relatives computers when they go home for thanksgiving. One benefit to me of living at home still: I can keep the family computers set up and in tip-top shape so they never get to the “spend five hours fixing everything that’s wrong” phase (and five hours is sometimes an understatement!).

Anyway, the “post is over at Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/19/2331210.shtml?tid=126 and it’s interesting when some of the comments are about why some people won’t fix family/friends computers any more. They have some pretty darned good reasons, too. I can sympathize, although I am blessed to have an immediate family who has really learned a lot about what to do and not to do on the computer. Friends run the gamut though, as far as tech-savvy goes. But, I don’t mind helping most people out if it doesn’t take a huge amount of my already limited time, and I especially don’t mind if they are willing to learn how not to cause problems in the first place, instead of me cleaning up and them re-trashing. I especially like those that I’ve convinced to switch to “Firefox”:http://firefox.scriptek.com/ but I do have a couple of utilities that will lock down IE a bit more to prevent some spyware/adware. I’ll have to put together a little “install this stuff to help fix your computer” post here sometime; now’s not the time.

I do like that some people have started supporting Linux only (at least when they do free support), as it’s really more secure in my opinion, or at least easier to get that way from a default install. It can be just as bad, true, but I won’t get into that argument here. For now, Windows runs too much stuff that Linux either won’t run or would take a lot of time to get running, for most of my uses (however Linux rocks as a server!).
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