Upgrading WP

Last week I upgraded the blog soft­ware to Word­Press 1.5.1 from 1.5. Here­with a few notes for oth­ers plan­ning to do this.

The upgrade was mostly unevent­ful, with only two prob­lems of any note, under­scor­ing that you really should deac­tiv­ate any plu­gins you have before start­ing the upgrade process:

  • BAStats does­n’t work, as it appears some of the func­tions it calls have been rearranged into dif­fer­ent files. The author seems to be think­ing of releas­ing a new ver­sion at some stage, so for the time being I’ve just turned it off. 
  • The feeds were empty, but search­ing on the WP sup­port for­um came up with a patch (update: no longer avail­able, or needed) which fixed the problem.

Of course, now the Word­Press team have released 1.5.1.1, which includes that bug-fix, so I just spent the last 10 minutes (lit­er­ally) installing that. The 10 minutes includes back­ing up the com­plete data­base, deac­tiv­at­ing all the plu­gins, installing, react­iv­at­ing the plu­gins, and check­ing the results.

All in all a rel­at­ively pain­less upgrade. I gath­er there are a lot of secur­ity fixes, which alone make the upgrade worth­while, and it also meant I could install Spam Karma 2, which is a big improve­ment over the pre­vi­ous ver­sion, both in being able to get rid of old com­ment spam and not have it clut­ter­ing up your data­base, and in its fil­ter­ing abil­it­ies. Both of these factors made upgrad­ing worth­while. Now I just have to find the time to write more!

Friday the 13th

I spent a cer­tain pro­por­tion of Fri­day morn­ing watch­ing the web­cast of the Scott and Steve show — the update of the col­lab­or­a­tion work that Microsoft and Sun star­ted a year ago. Lots of oth­er people have blogged about what was shown and the implic­a­tions (try Tim, Eve, Pat, Robin, Greg and Jonath­an for some dif­fer­ing Sun views; CNET, The Register, and Slash­dot for some out­side-Sun views).

I had a spe­cial interest in watch­ing the demo (starts at 17:19) as I did the CSS for the Sun part. What happened was, I’m new to all this iden­tity man­age­ment stuff, and asked wheth­er I could help in pre­par­ing the demo for the eGov for­um at the Liberty Alli­ance meet­ing in Dub­lin in April, in part to help me try to get the con­cepts straight. Pat said the inter­face to the demo could do with some work; I took a CSS that I’d done for my blog (really must move it into WP 1.5 format some time to reuse it!), spiffed it up a bit, and voila! a CSS cus­tom-built for iden­tity man­age­ment demos. So it made sense for me to con­tin­ue spiff­ing up the demos for this press event. Unfor­tu­nately you only see about 2 seconds of the actu­al demo on the web­cast and it’s pretty blurry (the web­cast shows more of the demo presenters than the demo they were present­ing), but Pat assures me it looked great on the big screens in real life.

I took what I’d done for the eGov for­um, made some changes to make sure it would work on IE 6 on Win­dows XP as well as the JDS browser on Sol­ar­is (which, being basic­ally Moz­illa, does­n’t have the CSS “incon­sist­en­cies” that IE 6 has) and then pinched the col­ours from the new Sun brand­ing. Pat sug­ges­ted using some of the Sun images to add some piza­zz to the site, while Tim made the fake com­pany logos. 

Joint demo devel­op­ment takes a lot of coordin­a­tion. We dis­cussed small things like which logos we should show (we settled on Sun + Sol­ar­is / Microsoft + Win­dows) as well as big things like the pre­cise script that would be used, which defined how many links should be act­ive, and how many dif­fer­ent web pages each com­pany needed to pre­pare, which determ­ined how much cod­ing needed to be done. And a bunch of oth­er stuff, of course. We had daily phone calls with­in the Sun demo team, and daily phone calls with the Microsoft demo team, just to nail down all those little details.

In the end, we got there, the demo looked good and worked, and, I hope, made sense to people. Spiffy CSS or fancy images aren’t much use if people don’t get what’s being demon­strated. The write-ups I’ve seen indic­ate that they did. 

Dublin Liberty

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Liberty spon­sor meet­ing in Dub­lin, a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been to Dub­lin before, in October/November 2003, to assist in the Reach PSB Phase 1 pro­cure­ment, and I like the city, so I was glad to get back again, even if it was only three days. Three days is enough time to get to a couple of decent res­taur­ants and a Dub­lin pub (these being upstairs at the Chamele­on Indone­sian res­taur­ant, upstairs again at the Mer­cant­ile pub, and down in the cel­lar at the Thai Papaya res­taur­ant). There was anoth­er res­taur­ant but that was on the first, jet­lagged, night, so I’ve for­got­ten the name. Of course, no vis­it to Dub­lin would be com­plete without the end­less trek through Heath­row Air­port (see Tim’s exeges­is on Heath­row); for­tu­nately this time the escal­at­ors worked and the air­port was mostly empty so the lines for secur­ity and buses were much short­er. My weak knee also decided to be kind to me and not play up so I guess the new Pil­ates exer­cises I have are doing some good!

Back on top­ic… Dub­lin seems to have a lot of old bank build­ings that have been nicely revamped to be pubs (the Mer­cant­ile above) and hotels (the West­in, where the meet­ing was held) but maybe that’s just the way it appears when you first notice the phe­nomen­on. Unlike in many cit­ies where banks were taken over for oth­er uses, the Dub­liners don’t try to hide the her­it­age of the build­ings. I still remem­ber the first McDon­ald’s in Auck­land, New Zea­l­and, which was also in an old bank build­ing. They did a good job there as well (undoubtedly assisted by some loc­al by-laws for­cing the issue), so it is pos­sible to reuse old build­ings and keep the her­it­age aspects con­gru­ent with the new uses.

I’m new to the Liberty meet­ings, so I’m still learn­ing who’s who and how the sys­tem works. Com­pared to W3C and OASIS there appeared to be more Europeans and Japan­ese, and more women. The former makes tim­ing phone calls tricky (Europe, North Amer­ica, Japan pretty much span the globe); the lat­ter enables a cer­tain amount of knit­ting and needle­craft to go on dur­ing the dis­cus­sions (as well, of course, as the typ­ic­al email­ing that always goes on dur­ing meet­ings). The work is done in a slightly dif­fer­ent way to OASIS and W3C. There are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent groups in the Liberty Alli­ance (see Liberty Alli­ance Activ­it­ies) which share the work. So, for example, instead of one tech­nic­al com­mit­tee doing everything from dis­cuss­ing use cases to design­ing the tech­nic­al solu­tion as hap­pens in W3C and OASIS, the Busi­ness & Mar­ket­ing Expert Group comes up with the use cases (the mar­ket require­ments) and the Tech­no­logy Expert Group cre­ates the spe­cific­a­tions to meet those require­ments and sat­is­fy those use cases. This is an inter­est­ing way to split up the work; it seems to work well (syn­chron­iz­a­tion between the two Expert Groups is a neces­sary part of the pro­cess, of course). Over­all, a good crowd of people with lots of tech­nic­al and mar­ket know­ledge about import­ant prob­lems; this is going to be a fun part of my job at Sun.

New XML Conference Site

Up till now, the XML Con­fer­ence web sites have been HTML-based with no con­tent man­age­ment fea­tures. For this year, we decided to take the plunge, so we can more eas­ily add fea­tures such as RSS feeds, col­lab­or­at­ive pages, and news aggreg­a­tion from spon­sors, exhib­it­ors, and speakers. 

With help from Bor­is Mann we have a Drupal-based site, hos­ted by Bryght. The site has been up for a week, and I think we’ve caught most of the bugs, but let Dave Kunkel know if you find any problems.

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to hav­ing these fea­tures for a while. We have aggreg­at­ors that hook to Pub­Sub feeds on “xmlconference.org” and “XMLConf2005”, so if you use one of those your blog entry should show up in the aggreg­at­or. We have an RSS feed for the front page to make it easi­er to keep up with changes. We can put up sub-sites for exhib­it­ors or speak­ers a lot more eas­ily than before. There are lots more fea­tures that we’re still fig­ur­ing out how best to use; sug­ges­tions on what we should do to make the site more use­ful to exhib­it­ors, speak­ers, and attendees, are welcome!

Enabling Thumbnails

A few pit­falls on the way to enabling the thumb­nail func­tion­al­ity in WordPress.

I decided I finally wanted to track down why I could­n’t get the thumb­nails work­ing on Word­Press. I always get the mes­sage “File type not sup­por­ted. Thumb­nail not cre­ated.” even when the file­type is sup­por­ted. I run a stand­ard Debi­an stable sys­tem, with a back­port of MySQL, so my first assump­tion was that it should work. A long week­end is a good chance to try to track down these things, espe­cially when it’s rain­ing as much as it is this week­end in Van­couver. Of course, I start at the Word­Press sup­port for­ums. This leads me to try apt-get install libgd2; the thumb­nails don’t work. As a next approx­im­a­tion, try apt-get install php4-gd2; this also does­n’t work.

I dig a bit deep­er in the for­ums and find that a new­er ver­sion of PHP might solve the prob­lem; the Debi­an stable ver­sion is 4.1.2 and a ver­sion > 4.3 is recom­men­ded as the GD lib­rary is included by default. The oth­er advant­age to upgrad­ing PHP4 is that there are quite a few secur­ity holes fixed in ver­sion 4.3.9 and up; these may have been back­por­ted to 4.1.2, of course. So I look in backports.org because I already know how to use those; no new­er ver­sion of php4 there. Next I try dotdeb.org; this back­port site has a new­er ver­sion of PHP4 and a new­er ver­sion of MySQL. I add the magic line deb http://packages.dotdeb.org ./ to the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I also change the pin pri­or­ity in the pref­er­ences file to use dotdeb.org rather than backports.org. This upgrades my MySQL to dot­de­b’s 4.0 ver­sion nicely, but does­n’t touch the PHP4 install­a­tion. Seems odd to me since they should both be upgraded in the same way, I would have thought. Edd Dum­bill (Debi­an guru) gives me a couple of oth­er things to try in the pref­er­ences file; noth­ing seems cap­able of rais­ing the pri­or­ity of the dot­deb php4 install over the cur­rent stable installed ver­sion. Edd sug­gests installing each .deb by brute force; that breaks on unmet dependencies.

So I think about installing the unstable ver­sion of PHP4; maybe that will work bet­ter. I set up the pin pri­or­it­ies in the preferences file, and use apt-get -t unstable install php4. It threatens to install lots of things, so I decide to install a little at a time and make sure noth­ing breaks, or at least ensure I know what has broken if it does. First off, I make backups of httpd.conf, access.conf, the fire­wall script, and the PPPOE set­tings. Just in case. Not that I’m para­noid or anything.

  1. I install the unstable ver­sion of libexpat1; this installs libc6 and talks about hav­ing to restart the X11 serv­er. Since I’m not run­ning X, this isn’t a prob­lem. Then it decides it also needs to restart apache but the restart fails so I have to start apache by hand. For a while it looks like that failed too and I’m men­tally curs­ing but it does even­tu­ally restart.
  2. Then I decide, rather than the piece­meal approach, to do the full install with apt-get -t unstable install php4. As a side-effect it looks like I also get perl updated to 5.8.4, and it upgrades apache (just as well I saved those conf files!). The install script tells me about changes to apache con­fig files, which has me a little wor­ried… I decide to install the pack­age main­tain­er­’s ver­sion of httpd.conf and add in any needed changes later. Everything seems to keep on run­ning after­wards, though, so this upgrade was bet­ter than the last dist-upgrade I did, which did­n’t apply my changes to httpd.conf.

Now phpinfo.php shows that I have php4.3.10 installed on my sys­tem; time to try out the thumb­nail func­tion­al­ity. It still does­n’t work. Rein­stall php4-gd2. Thumb­nails still don’t work. Try apt-get -t unstable install php4-gd, which also seems to uninstall/reinstall/install a whole bunch of pack­ages. I con­sole myself that I’m half-way to sarge, if and when that ver­sion of Debi­an ever makes it to stable. Hmm, the install script just asked me what size paper should be the default on my sys­tem. I guess it has some reas­on for want­ing to know.

Since the thumb­nail gen­er­a­tion still does­n’t work, and I have no idea what to try next, I decide to give up and post on the Word­Press sup­port for­um. I hope someone there knows what the prob­lem might be! In the mean­time I cre­ate the thumb­nail I need using Imagema­gick­’s convert func­tion. This takes one com­mand line and approx­im­ately 0.01 seconds.

Later… on the Word­Press sup­port for­um someone tells me to search the for­ums. Since I’d star­ted by doing that (and quoted for­um searches in my post), that was­n’t par­tic­u­larly help­ful. Then I remem­ber I have SpamKarma installed, which has a captcha script (not that I want to use it, but it should be a good test). The error mes­sage on the captcha test page says the GD lib­rary isn’t enabled. A bit of Googling turns up the idea that maybe I need to restart apache yet again. I had­n’t thought of this before because the Debi­an upgrade/install pro­cess usu­ally restarts everything that needs to be restar­ted, includ­ing apache. I run apachectl restart and find I can finally click the magic but­ton on image upload to cre­ate thumbnails!

So the les­son appears to be: if in doubt, restart apache. Three times, prefer­ably. Any less just may not work.

Inspiration 5443

My first post about knit­ting — item 5443 from Inspir­a­tion 75 (and no, I guess they could­n’t come up with a bet­ter name for it).

I’ve been knit­ting for most of my life, except for a long gap in the 1990s. I took it up again about 3 years ago and, due in no little part to Eve’s encour­age­ment, am going to start show­ing off some of what I’ve done and am doing. Maybe blog­ging will even encour­age me to fin­ish things soon­er — I tend to do most of a piece but not get around to fin­ish­ing it for some time.

my version of 5443 pattern view of 5443 All that being said, here’s my first blog entry on the sub­ject of crafts, my ver­sion of item 5443 in a pat­tern book called Inspir­a­tion 75. One would think that a book that calls itself “inspir­a­tion” could come up with inspired names for the pat­terns with­in it, rather than just num­bers. In the book the top looks like the image on the left (note the link leads to an online retail­er for the pat­tern books and yarn; I have no idea wheth­er they’re any good or not but they did have all the images). Instead of the recom­men­ded yarn, I used Schoeller­’s Micro-Cablé in col­our 23 (yet anoth­er unin­spired name). The link there is to Wise Needle, a great site if you want to fig­ure out which yarns to sub­sti­tute for that hard-to-find yarn from Europe. Tim took the photo of the res­ults on a mini-golf course in Maui, hence the “shot on loc­a­tion” look.