Category Archives: Tech

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all is well with wordpress 2.5

If you saw my last post, you saw I had some problems with my “one-click-install” from Dreamhost.  I finally got a response from their support folks.  Apparently, the installer thought my WordPress installation was a new one, and by default, new installations have a randomly generated table prefix.  I’d by that but that doesn’t explain how the first post basically took over my blog. changed the title, and changed the admin password and the admin email address. Oh well.

Other than that, I had some other weird things to check out.  My dashboard page was spewing errors and it seemed that my problems were related to the K2 theme… but I am not using the K2 theme now.  Somehow, the upgrade reactivated the K2 plugin that disabled the default WordPress sidebar widgets.  I did some mucking around in the files and commented out the offending functions, but then realized I should just disable the offending plugin.  I also had to “restore” wp-admin/index.php and wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php since I didn’t keep detailed track of what I did.  A md5sum and a diff helped me realize I should just restore the files from the WordPress 2.5 zip file.

The other thing I did was disable “SpotMilk,” which was an admin theme.  Now that it is disabled, I see all the functionality of WP 2.5.  My advice to you, if you are running SpotMilk, is to forget it.

I think WordPress 2.5 is really slick.  It will be great to those new users.  It’s the “Ubuntu” of blogs.

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wordpress upgrade… not so good.

So, Dreamhost offered a ‘one-click’ upgrade to WordPress 2.5. I hadn’t had problems with it before so last night I did the “one-click” upgrade. I went to bed.

This morning, I find a bunch of undeliverable emails in my inbox and notice that the from/return address is “email@gmail.com.” And the main page of my blog is a link to a comment on geni.com offering to sell viagra and it was the default WordPress theme with the “Hello, World!” post.

My questions, which I’ll ask Dreamhost about, are:

  1. Was the upgrade botched?
  2. Was my installation hacked?
  3. My “old” site (dreamhost will attempt to back up your old installation so you could revert back) didn’t work as many of the files were missing.

At this point, I had one of those “oh shit” moments were I’m thinking whatever happened, my database is gone and I don’t have a recent backup.

In my wordpress installation directory, all my files and plugins appear to be there and my wp-config file looks okay…

Then I find it. There is a different prefix on my mysql tables:

$table_prefix = ‘wp_ufgeai_’;

Sure enough, in addition to MY tables in MY database I see the “new” tables.

I had already dumped my other tables and saw they were still there, so I simply removed the ‘ufgeai_’ from the wp-config.php page and my site was back up.

However, there is still more to this story. I couldn’t log in via the wp-admin page since the admin password was in this new tables. I got really lucky since the email address set up was ’email@gmail.com’ and I was able to get the bounces, which allowed me to reset the password to get in a do some recon.

I wanted to mention the ‘ufgeai’ prefix because I didn’t find anything on Google referring to it, and something tells me that I am not the only one this has happened to.

Needless to say, I changed all my usernames and passwords to something cripplingly complex.

Then, when I was able to log in to the right instance of my wordpress, I was getting all sorts of errors from ‘wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php’ and had to comment out about 15 lines, all referring to sidebars and widgets. Later, I’ll have to fix all of this and read up, but I have to get ready for a birthday party.

Some notes or food for thought:

  • I got really lucky my database and tables weren’t blown away. I am going to make backups pronto!
    • First need to make sure there isn’t something that shouldn’t belong in the regular tables, like another admin account.
  • How did this happen? Is there something wrong with the Dreamhost installation or I was a victim of a brute force attack? I thought my passwords were good.
  • Why didn’t my previous, backed up installation not work?
  • Why did I get so many errors with the dashboard.php file? Was that file supposed to be “upgraded” or was it something I installed or was part of a plugin?

I’m going to open a ticket with Dreamhost and give them some forensic evidence since I made backups of the changed files and added tables.

Hopefully, this will help someone and prevent a long history of blogs posts from being lost. If you find yourself in this situation and think the only solution is a new, clean, install, check your tables since your old/current data might still be there.

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about damn time… Google Calendar + Outlook Caledar = Sync’ed Calendar with T-Mobile Wing and WM6

It IS about damn time. Most of the traffic I get to my blog is surprisingly from my T-Mobile Wing phone. Well, I still love it and like WM6. One of my biggest headaches, has been the inability to sync our family calendar, which we keep in Google Calendar, and my phone which uses Outlook.

Me, I am a Thunderbird man and have been for a while. Except when I had my Mac, I used Mail.app, but otherwise I use Thunderbird, even on my Linux laptop. There have been a few third-party apps that claimed to sync your Google calendar with Outlook, but I found them to either cost money or simply just not work.

Evolution, the Outlook clone for Linux, at least has the option to subscribe to a Google calendar, but I hadn’t really tried to sync my phone up with my laptop, yet.

Everything changed last week when I saw that Google released “Google Calendar Sync.” I was so happy; I had to try it as soon as I could.

So I installed it and it went off and did its thing. So far so good. It isn’t perfect and some of my appointments are doubled, but hey… I can live with that for now. It sits in your systray and animated whenever it is updating. I like it and was pleasantly surprised when I got an alarm for my next appointment… from my phone and NOT SMS from Google.

So, I recommend you load it up and try it. Based on my experience from Google, it is only going to get better.

Is there anything Google can’t do?

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one too many cabanossi

Yesterday, Valentine’s day, was a good day. After I dropped off the twins at pre-school, I wanted to find the German butcher and bakery near our house. We had been going to one European butcher nearby that we loved. In fact, it’s just like I remember growing up in Chicago. Patak Meats in Austell is unbelieveable. If you haven’t been you got to. Now, rumor has it the ex-butcher from Patak went to open his own place, called Weinerz. Our German friends said they prefered it to Patak so I have been wanting to check it out.

So, I found it. I stopped by Bernhard’s, the Germany bakery and picked up a loaf of German Sourdough Rye bread. The loaf weighed about 5lbs. Then I went over to the butcher and picked up some cabanossis, German ham, and a couple of beer brautwursts. I spent less than $10.

Then to top off the German morning I was having, I went to Aldi’s to pick up some other stuff. I got home, gave my wife her roses, and we both ate cabanossi’s and had a ham sandwich with some mustard; what a great way to start the day.

But I digress. I have been spending most of my time over the last few days becoming something of Drupal expert. I have volunteered to be the webmaster for our son’s school’s website. The website has potential to be a very effective portal. The PTO, teachers, and administration want to be able to post items to the site and have blogs. I looked at Joomla for awhile and finally I happened to see Drupal mentioned somewhere. The more I read about it the more I was convinced this could provide the solution I was looking for.

The last few days, I’ve been getting into theming Drupal. I modified an existing theme using mostly some heavy CSS. Remember when I said I learn best when I have a project? So, I was surprised to see how much I’ve learned about CSS in the last three days. Being obsessed and not having a job helps, but I have learned tons. I also found a whole bunch of great resources, but not just on CSS but also web design and XHTML. It’s been a great time.

When I was in art school, I love typography. When I was in art school, it was before computers were common place. When I was in art school, the Mac Quadra 800 just came out and was over $5k. But I still loved type and type faces. I was really good at kerning and even today, I like to do my own kerning in Photoshop. So one of the things I am really excited about is doing interesting things with type utilizing CSS. I think this is going to be very exiting for me.

In my reading of SEO one of the things that is recommended against it using images for content. To put it another way, if you have text in an image, that text will not be indexed by the search engines.

In my mind, using CSS will allow me to do some of the things I enjoyed about type in the print media, but have it rendered in a web browser.

My stomach still hurts after finishing off that last cabanossi; I don’t eat like that very often.

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Ruby, SEO, and CSS… or how I spent my time off…

If you have been following along, you’ll know that I’ve been out of work since October.  I’ve been really busy, though.  I’ve enjoyed spending time with my children and my wife.  I’ve worked on projects around the house, (I made a bench out of scrap lumber), played around with technology (getting around to all those software updates I’ve been putting off), and I’ve been hitting the books.  Oh yeah, I’ve been doing some consulting on the side, too.

One of the things I really wanted to sink my teeth into was the whole Ruby on Rails things.   It’s been a while since I did any heavy lifting in Perl or even shell scripts for that matter.  I used to be into PHP before version five, but with most things, if you don’t use ’em, you loseWeight Exercise them.  Now, it’s not completely wasted.  I can open a script in Perl and PHP and quickly figure out what’s going on and make changes to suit my needs, but writing something from scratch really made the rusty gears turn and cobwebs fall away.

One of my biggest challenges is coming up with a project to do.  There are so many “solutions in a box” out there by fantastically smart people released as Open Source.   It’s an easy temptation not to reinvent the wheel.  Okay, so back to Ruby on Rails.  I bought a book, that turned out to be pretty crappy.  Except I didn’t know it was crappy, I thought I was too dense to grasp it.  Then I had a friend explain the whole MVC framework.  A light bulb went off and I began to understand concepts that I hadn’t seen before.  The book was still a crappy book, but now I had better direction in trying to find a book that I would personally find useful.  I did.  I found two both by the Pragmatic Programmer series. They got to me.  I understood it.  And while I lack sheer experience, I know enough to be dangerous.  I know where to look in a reference to do what I want.  I also know how to search for answers based on my questions, (sometime you got to know how to ask).

In a completely unrelated conversation with a new friend, we were talking about web design.  He said, “Oh yeah… we use CSS for everything.  You know, instead of using tables and frames like they used to in the old days.” Like in the “old days?”  Was I really living in the old days?  HTML was one of the first languages I had learned.  I think that was around version 3.2 and I had one of those “Teach Yourself HTML” books.  And while I wouldn’t consider myself a complete master, I had chops.  But… this comment made me rethink myself… What did he mean “instead of tables and frames?”  I stopped using frames years ago.. but tables?  I used them all the time.  What on earth did he mean?  I became obsessed.  Now, I knew about CSS and how to change colors and fonts and alignments… but what was this… what sort of wizardry was he talking about.

Seriously, I became obsessed.  I tried to read all I could on CSS.  I found more crappy books.  Nothing gave me the answers I wanted.  Until, that is, I found the O’reilly book and that changed my life.  I got it, it was clear… crazy and zen-like webpages polluted my mind.  I can’t wait to get into some hight-art CSS’ing.  I have found what I was looking for… the missing piece in my webdesign toolbox!

This is all very exciting for you, I am sure.   If you manage to stay on this page, then you are in for a real treat.  One day, when I was the bookstore, a guy came up to me and asked if I knew anything about the Internet.  I smiled sheepishly and said something like, “Yeah, I know a little about it…”  It turned out, he was a contractor, like a handyman-type of contractor and he had a website.  He was interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  His “web guy” didn’t know anything about it, so he decided to take matters in his own hands.   We talked for a while and I tried to recommend him a book.  I found one, leafed through it and said it looked pretty good.  He asked if I had a card, and I said I didn’t and we parted ways.  I was worried I had given him a bum steer so I looked up the book on Amazon and I was surpised to see it was one of the highest rated books on SEO.  I felt good that I gave him some decent advice.

Since then, in my job search, I’ve seen posting after posting for “SEO Experts” so I figured this would be a skill I should learn about.  I was able to find the recommended book at the library and I just started reading it.  You know, I thought I knew a lot about that, but I was very happy to see  that I had lots more to learn.   I’ve enjoyed this book and am going to make some changes to my website, (as it is, I wasn’t far off.  When I view my stats for my website, I was surprised to see how highly I rank in the search engines for topics covered here!).   Am I an expert yet? No, I’m not.. but I think I know a heck of a lot more than a lot of people… read on…

Another thing I have been enjoying, is that I took over my son’s school’s website.  I didn’t do the initial design, which is very good and using CSS, but I did have to get up to speed on it and understand someone else’s code.  I got in the habit of using Subversion to keep whatever I am working on.  The few websites I have been working on, are all stored in my Subversion repository.   I make my edits and then upload my new pages, and then commit everything to subversion.

Now, to gain some additional features, we are moving the school’s website to a new hosting provider, and the new provider allows ssh/shell access.  I’ve used this before, but I had one of those “A-ha!” moments.  If I have shell on the server, why can’t I use subversion to publish my changes on the site?  Sure enough, it works!  It works like this:

  • I have a separate SVN server.  On my laptop, I keep a local copy.  I make all edits on my laptop, verify my changes, (since my laptop is LAM(R|P)), upload my changes to the remote site via FTP, and then commit my changes to SVN.

Since the new provider  has SSH access, I just realized my life is so much easier.

  • I make sure I have the latest revision on my laptop. I make my changes, test them, and commit to my SVN server.
  • On my new webhosting provider, I SSH in and change to my site’s DIR and run “svn update” and viola! Site updated!

Okay, I am sure there are a ton of people doing this and I didn’t make any sort of breakthrough discovery.  But, this IS cool, since I am midway in migrating between providers.  It does make my life easier.

I also got into CMS (content management systems).  I have committed to moving the schools website to a CMS system since so many parties need to updates specific sections.  But that’s another topic entirely and I am going to have to do some hand-holding on this one.

Oh, and I did mention I was doing some consulting.  I enjoy it.  I’ve made some people really happy with my contributions.  So much in fact, my wife and I are in the baby steps of starting a business.  I think for right now, it is on the back burner until I find a steady job; we need benefits.

My final point on is that my experience is somewhat unique.  I worked with some of the smartest and creative people I have ever met in my life.   I’ve been inspired by them and learned from them, but back in the day, I did some hump-busting, too.   In my time off, I’ve discovered that my sweet spot is some balance between creativity, technology, and problem solving.  That’s what I like.

And in case you are interested, I am listening to “Ian Brown” right now.  He’s great!

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Fedora (fc8) releases a new kernel

… and saves me a ton of work.  Tonight, I got the notification that there was a new kernel in FC8:  2.6.23.14-107.fc8.  If you have been reading a long, you might know I was trying to roll my own kernel and modules to get my super-compact wifi usb dongle working.  Well, tonight’s kernel release includes the elusive module, zd1211rw.ko AND my sounds is working, so I am really good to go.

We’ll see how the suspend / resume works on my laptop, since that’s been a little goofy.

I got to say I feel a little put off since I’ve put so much reading into how to build a customer kernel, modules, and recompile various the modules via the SOURCE rpm’s; sprms’s.  So a good learning experince nontheless, but I am just happy that it appears that it will work.  I can spend less time polishing my hammer!

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Sound on Fedora fc8… SOLVED!!!

I apologize for lack of a snappy post title. I am just giddy to get my sound working… better than I had before. In my last post regarding my sound issues:

I mentioned how I finally got the OSS sound driver to work. It worked okay… not perfect. No where near perfect. Finally, I had enough. I finally figured out how to get everything working natively.

In my previous post, I mention that I have an Azalia SB600 and it has an ALC268 chipset. I read somewhere that you can recompile the kernel modules for the ALSA drivers. I began searching for some more specific clues and found this:

# yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
# yum install mercurial
# cd /usr/src

# mkdir alsa && cd alsa
# hg clone http://hg-mirror.alsa-project.org/alsa-driver alsa-driver
# cd alsa-driver
# hg clone
http://hg-mirror.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel alsa-kernel
# ./hgcompile && make install

reboot!

I also modified the following line in modprobe.conf:

options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba

It worked! I couldn’t believe it. How easy! I spent hours on this in the past. Granted, finding this solution took some work, but I am very thankful.

Edit: 01.16.08: I happened to see others with Toshiba laptops that had sound problems over at the Fedora Forums. For reference, I have a Toshiba A215-S7411 with the ALC268 chipset.

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Fedora Werewolf (fc8) on toshiba laptop… the sound saga

Following up on my previous posts regarding my new Toshiba A215 laptop with the goofy sound card :

In my previous posts, I mentioned that I was having a hard time getting the sound working under linux/fedora. In case you don’t know, FC8 uses Pulse Audio which is new. There have been reports of various sound problems related to permissions, users, and other items.

  • Fixing Broken Sound in Fedora

Out of the box, Fedora is using ALSA sound drivers. For all intents and purposes, every looks like it should work.

  1. all daemons start
  2. sound card is detected
  3. kernel modules are loaded
  4. test sounds appear to be played, yet no sound is heard

I even went as far as downloading the source for the ALSA drivers since I had seen some mention of a bug with my sound card I have an Azalia SB600. I lived with it for a couple of weeks now and I was really missing my music. So, one a whim I tried the OSS (Open Sound Service) drivers. Any you know what? It works.

Now, it doesn’t work like you’d think. Pulse Audio doesn’t appear to use it and Gnome doesn’t find any sound cards, (Actually, Pulse creates a faux ESD process that Gnome uses). Who cares. I got sound and it works good. All apps I’ve tested work; stand alone and webbased.

Ah, but how to control the overall master volume to direct sound only out to the headphones. The OSS drivers some with their own utilities. There is an ossxmix‘er that works superbly.

Still, not as easy as a Mac, but a lot of fun!

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Fedora Linux (fc8) on my new laptop… the wireless saga

I love it when a plan comes together but hate it when I can’t think of a catchy title for a post. Oh well. In my last post regarding my new laptop, things have been progressing.

My last statement in that post said something about how there is something to be said about having a Mac “just work out of the box” but I’ve seen lots of people post saying that part of the fun of Linux, is trying to get things to work. It can be downright frustrating, of course, but when it works, it works well.

My laptop is a Toshiba A215 (which I just added another 2GB of ram). It’s a great laptop. Vista works well with it. I can’t complain about that, but I’ve been wanting to run Linux full time on it. One of the quirks of this laptop is that the wireless device shows up as an usb device, which is something very strange:

[jpabian@stoshua]~% lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

This wireless device is indeed a Realtek RTL8187B. Some people have gotten it to work and others have just given up on it. Those of the people who got it to work have hardcoded the wifi settings in a config file. I wanted to have the nifty wifi-selector that “NetworkManager” provides. I don’t want to hardcode anything (like the Mac). I searched and searched and tried everything I could find to do. I found a lot of really great resources but nothing worked. This was one of the best sites:

  • Realtek Linux wireless driver project

I mean it, I was pulling my hair out. It shouldn’t be this hard. I began to be disappointed with my otherwise ideal laptop. I started to read about other wireless USB devices that work with linux. I came up with a plan. I checked out Circuit City’s, Best Buy’s, and Office Depot’s websites to see what they had on sale AND what wireless USB devices worked under linux.

One page I had found (and you know, I can’t find it now!), had a list of pretty much all the wireless USB devices and if they had kernel support or if drivers existed. But it also had a column that reported if it “worked out of the box” or not. Each of the stores I mentioned above had a Linksys on sale, AND it was reported to “work out of the box!” I was excited but also very nervous whether or not it would work. I saw a few posts around where people where having problems with. I picked up the Linksys® WUSB54GC Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter for $50 after “instant savings.”

wusb54gc.jpg

So when the moment of truth came, I plugged in the WUSB54GC into one of my USB ports and say the following message:

Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> wlan1: Device is fully-supported using driver ‘rt73usb’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> (wlan1): exporting device as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Device/4
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Now managing wireless (802.11) device ‘wlan1’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Bringing up device wlan1

It worked! I didn’t have to do anything! Sure enough, NetworkManager presented me with both my wireless networks (and my neighbors’). I couldn’t believe it. It works great. It works good on the suspend and resume functions of my laptop.

Sure, I really wish that the onboard wifi worked under Linux, but from I’ve read, they’ve only just merged the driver support into the very latest kernel sources so I suspect that support will continue to get better. But for now, I’m very happy with this device.

Now, the only lingering item is sound. Fedora 8 went to using Pulse Audio for the default sound server. Sure looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work and I’m not the only one; there are several threads over at the Fedora Forums talking about it. But FC8 is still bleeding edge. It will work sooner than later, I’m sure.

I’ll save that for another post.

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Linux, Vista, and my new laptop

OH YEAH! (He says like the Kool-aid pitcher as he smashes through the wall!)

My new laptop finally came yesterday.  We missed FedEx on Tuesday and I waiting all day for them to come back yesterday.  I got a Toshiba with a dual core AMD 64 Athalon X2; it was a Thanksgiving day purchase (an early Black Friday deal that I happened to catch in time).  It’s a beaut and came with Vista Home Premium on it.

If I had my druthers, I would have told them to hold the OS; as I was going to install Fedora Linux on it as soon as I could.  I burned my x86_64 DVD with anticipation of its arrival.

It came right at 1PM.  By 2PM I was booting off the Fedora DVD and getting ready to install.  I knew on the Ubuntu LiveCD, it has Gparted on it, so I assumed this would to.  It did not.  A quick websearch recommended using a virtual term to use ntfsresize and fdisk.  I was too impatient and found the Gparted LiveCD and thought I’d use that.  The drive was 160G so I thought 40G for Fedora and 120G for Vista since I could always mount the NTFS partition in Linux.  I quickly downloaded and burned the image to disk.
Well, as luck would have it (or my impatience) the README on the LiveCD had something like this to say:

 You can’t use Gparted to resize Vista partitions.  You have to use nftresize and fdisk

It gave some basic examples and I followed them and it looked like it worked.  I rebooted and got the message that “No OS found” and the laptop tried to do a network boot.  So I began to install Fedora.

During the installation, I realized that I forgot to set the Vista partion to active/bootable.  I used fdisk to fix that and after the installation, I had a flawless dual-boot system.

It seemed like the install took forever.  My previous Fedora installations had been from CD not DVD so there was a lot more stuff installed locally.  After the install, I had something like 77 updates to download and apply.  That did take a long time.  I couldn’t install the other stuff while the package manager was running so I watch Mythbusters and chatted via Pidgin.

I  wasn’t getting any action from my wireless.  I was using ethernet cable.  Turns out, that Toshiba used a Realtek wireless card that shows up as an USB device.  WTF?  It’s a Realtek RTL8187B.

Poking around in the forums it seems some ingenious guy got the source for the driver and patched it for Linux, or Ubuntu specifically.  It seems to work, as it shows up as wlan0 and I can manually assign an IP to it, but wpa_supplicant doesn’t see it.  Honestly, I ran out of time to tinker with it, but I think I am about 95% of the way there.

I also installed the fglrx drivers for the ATI x1200 card.  This also works great and I got my tiny resolution I’ve been craving.  I now have a nice wide, large workspace.  I plan on getting about 1GB or 2GB of RAM; I’ll just wait until it is on sale.

So, here’s the links I found useful:

I’ll follow up if and when I get my wireless working.  I am pretty confident I’ll get it.  I also received a suggestion via the Skribit widget to do a post about Mac vs. Linux.  That’s a good idea.  There is something to be said about having everything “work out of the box” but I don’t mind the tinkering.