SecondVersion

Hey all, been a while since I’ve written a post. I’ve been busy with work and some personal things though.

Today I come to you because… basically, I need development ideas.

What kind of development ideas?

1. Is there some script or program that you just got to have but you can’t find it? Here’s your chance. The script would be coded in PHP/MySQL, and would be relased as a paid script, so keep that in mind when sending your ideas.
2. Website ideas. IE: webmaster, tools, etc - anything you can think of.

If I choose your idea, it’s a script, and I develop it; once released, you will get the first copy absolutely free.

Send your ideas to me by using my contact form.

Update, 12/16/07
Contact link should work now.

… thank everyone for the support for me, my mother, and family. My mother had her surgery today, and overall, things are good. They were able to remove the tumor, and it appears it did not spread to anywhere else. However, we won’t know for 100% sure until a few tests come in on Friday.

Thanks again everyone

UPDATE: 11/27/2007
My mother is now HOME!!!!!

UPDATE: 12/4/2007
My mother is officially cancer free!!!!!!

Today marks the anniversary of the end of World War I. And today we remember all the brave men who lost their lives fighting for our country.

The things that make a soldier great and send him out to die,
To face the flaming cannon’s mouth nor ever question why,
Are lilacs by a little porch, the row of tulips red,
The peonies and pansies, too, the old petunia bed,
The grass plot where his children play, the roses on the wall:
‘Tis these that make a soldier great.
He’s fighting for them all.

‘Tis not the pomp and pride of kings that make a soldier brave;
‘Tis not allegiance to the flag that over him may wave;
For soldiers never fight so well on land or on the foam
As when behind the cause they see the little place called home.
Endanger but that humble street whereon his children run,
You make a soldier of the man who never bore a gun.
What is it through the battle smoke the valiant soldier sees?

The little garden far away, the budding apple trees,
The little patch of ground back there, the children at their play,
Perhaps a tiny mound behind the simple church of gray.
The golden thread of courage isn’t linked to castle dome
But to the spot, where’er it be — the humblest spot called home.
And now the lilacs bud again and all is lovely there
And homesick soldiers far away know spring is in the air;
The tulips come to bloom again, the grass once more is green,
And every man can see the spot where all his joys have been.

He sees his children smile at him, he hears the bugle call,
And only death can stop him now — he’s fighting for them all.

About a month ago I posted about my mother having Stage III Pancreatic Cancer. The doctors have decided that she is a candidate for surgery, and have scheduled her surgery for November 19^th. The surgery will be the “Whipple“, which can be a dangerous surgery.

Please keep her in your prayers, especially on that day. I’ve gotten comments and emails from quite a few people, you’ll never know how much I appreciate it.

PHP 5.2.5 has been released, and I’ve already upgraded my server

[08-Nov-2007]

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.5. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

Further details about the PHP 5.2.5 release can be found in the release announcement for 5.2.5, the full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog for PHP 5.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 5.2.5:

• Fixed dl() to only accept filenames. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed dl() to limit argument size to MAXPATHLEN (CVE-2007-4887). Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed htmlentities/htmlspecialchars not to accept partial multibyte sequences. Reported by Rasmus Lerdorf
• Fixed possible triggering of buffer overflows inside glibc implementations of the fnmatch(), setlocale() and glob() functions. Reported by Laurent Gaffie.
• Fixed “mail.force_extra_parameters” php.ini directive not to be modifiable in .htaccess due to the security implications. Reported by SecurityReason.
• Fixed bug #42869 (automatic session id insertion adds sessions id to non-local forms).
• Fixed bug #41561 (Values set with php_admin_* in httpd.conf can be overwritten with ini_set()).

Here’s an interesting article/document on setting up a “secure” WordPress installation. It has some nice tips & tricks. I’ve not yet implemented any of them into my own, but I may soon. Try them out and maybe let me know how it goes?

Article, Securing WordPress

WordPress 2.3.1 Release Candidate 1 has been released, time to upgrade!

WordPress 2.3.1 is almost ready to go. Before we send it out the door, we’re making a release candidate available so everyone can give it a last look.

2.3.1 fixes over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• A login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address is fixed
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

More details will be provided in the final release announcement. Until then, download RC1 and let us know if it fixes a particular bug in 2.3 that was annoying you. If you find that something has broken since 2.3, please open a ticket so we can address the problem before the final 2.3.1 release.

Been a while since I last posted anything on here… figured I’d make a post about WordPress’ latest Beta - 2.3.1 Beta 1.

Over twenty bugs are fixed in 2.3.1. Get the full list here. Here are some highlights.

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• A login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address is fixed
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

Just upgraded my blog, no problems so far.

I don’t know how many actually read and/or subscribe to my blog, but…

I found out yesterday that my mother has Stage III Pancreatic Cancer. It is the 3rd or 4th most deadly cancer; and it’s the worst of all cancers on survival rate.

I’m mainly making this post to get things off my chest, but I’d also like to ask that any of you reading this.. please, please keep my mother in your prayers; you don’t even know how much I’d appreciate it, and how much it’d help.

Also, if any of you reading this have gone through something similar, I’d appreciate any information on this cancer you could give me. I’ve already gotten information on CTCA, PanCan, and org’s like that; but anything you think is helpful, please let me know. Every little bit helps.

Thank you in advance.

~Eric

Just upgraded today, things seem Ok - except I can no longer use the Permalink Redirect plugin.

Official Announcement:

I’m thrilled to announce that Version 2.3 “Dexter” of WordPress is now ready for the world. This release includes native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements, and much more. This release is named for the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The entire team is really proud of this release, and I’m happy that this is our second on-time release under our new development schedule. The grand experiment of a more agile WordPress with significant features in the hands of users more often is working. I could write a blog post about each new feature, but I’ll try to be brief:

1. Native tagging support allows you to use tags in addition to categories on your post, if you so choose. We’ve included importers for the Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins so if you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind.
2. Our new update notification lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress or when any of the plugins you use has an update available. It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what the latest and greatest is you can use.
3. We’ve cleaned up URLs a bunch in a feature we call canonical URLs which does things like enforce your no-www preference, redirect posts with changed slugs so a link never goes bad, redirect URLs that get cut off in emails on similar to the correct post, and much more. This helps your users, and it also helps your search engine optimization, as search engines like for each page to be available in one canonical location. More info here.
4. Our new pending review feature will be great for multi-author blogs. It allows authors to submit a post for review by an editor or administrator, where before they would just have to save a draft and hope someone noticed it.
5. There is new advanced WYSIWYG functionality (we call it the kitchen sink button) that allows you to access some features of TinyMCE that were previously hidden.

You’ll notice that two of those features are straight out of the most-voted for ideas list. That’s just the user facing stuff, if you’re a developer you’ll be interested in:

1. Full and complete Atom 1.0 support, including the publishing protocol.
2. We’re using the new jQuery whis is “800% faster.”
3. Behind the user-facing tags system is a really kickass taxonomy system which, which adds a ton of flexibility. It’s probably the biggest schema upgrade since version 1.5.
4. The importers have been revamped to be more memory efficient, and you can now add an importer through a plugin.
5. Through hooks and filters you can now override the update system, the dashboard RSS feeds, the feed parser, and tons more than you could in 2.2.
6. The new $wpdb->prepare() way of doing SQL queries.
7. Finally there were over 351 tickets in Trac closed for this release, with over a hundred people contributing. This is the polish, the hundreds of tiny bug fixes and features that make WordPress what it is.

You can view the Codex for more information about the release and some screenshots. And of course the place to download is always the same. Before you upgrade you may want to check out our Preparing for 2.3 post and the list of compatible plugins on the Codex.

A number of people are hosting upgrade parties around the world, including myself in San Francisco. If you are let me know and I’ll promote it on my blog.

Upgrade NOW!