Chris’ Blog

So I’ve been fairly quiet for the past month, whoops. I’ve had a fairly relaxed holiday, not doing much of anything, its been the break I’ve needed though. I’ve got a while to go before I am back to university which I hopefully can spend doing some items on my list of things to do. I can’t say that life has been all sunshine and smiles, firstly because its been raining lots and because I keep getting various shit thrown at me when I least expect it which is occupying my time much than I would like. I’ve got some work on phpBB to do, which is really bugging me because I haven’t had the mindset or time to sit down and do it, its starting to make me feel bad inside. I’ve also got some X-Media work I should do, once again not enough time. I hoped I could get some stuff done this weekend but I’ve not been able to sleep too well the past two days so I am fairly tired.

So this time last weekend I had just arrived in London, after driving around the hotel twice and Heathrow once, for Londonvasion. Which was the first of its kind for phpBB, a conference bringing together not only the teams for the first time, but users as well. Sadly I was unable to attend the team meetings on Saturday to work commitments and my late joining preventing me arranging time off. Annoyingly my plans didn’t get executed exactly as planned, and I didn’t arrive until about 10:30pm. I had no idea where anyone was, so I checked in and got my laptop out and jumped on IRC somebody heard my distress call but my laptop overheated (serves myself right for using it on a bed I guess) so I decided to return to aimlessly wondering around the hotel lobby and corridors hoping I might bump into someone. I did AdamR from the Support Team who showed me to the room were some people remained. I met quite a few people that I don’t recall who there were.

The next morning was the big event, users and team members alike gathering to listen to other users and team members talk and engage in discussions amongst one another. I must say it was extremely insightful to meet the other people that I am forging relationships with as I settle into the teams and some of the users that turned up. Meik gave a presentation detailing the route the project has taken and where its planning to go, which apparently required pulling the rest of the development team up to join him. I was most pleased to meet DavidMJ who I have known since late 2003 when we were both involved in another project. We learned a lot from Londonvasion and because of this some features are under discussion, which will become available in good time. It was good to see some outside presentations one given by Noth who sung praise of phpBB 3.0 even though I haven’t contributed as part of the development team (I have filed numerous patches and bug reports) I felt his presentation was touching. Andy Miller, a guy working on integrating Joomla! and phpBB 3.0 gave a presentation on some of his styles for phpBB and Joomla! that give an integrated look and feel to both applications and in combination with his bridge offer almost seamless operation.

To wrap up I think the event was an outstanding success and should definitely be at least a bi-annual event as a lot more can be done face to face than via IRC and forums and meeting new people is also fun and helps build relationships and morale in the teams. Many thanks to Marshalrusty who arranged everything and the phpBB users who give us a reason to do what we do. Finally would implore every phpBB administrator to try and attend the next conference!

It’s about time I wrote an entry about this amazing opportunity I have been given, I have joined the phpBB development team and I will be helping them with their journey towards the next major release, 3.2 or Ascraeus. Sadly I am currently quite busy with stuff that needs finishing off before I can jump in and start committing, but I am immensely looking forward to being in the thick of it so to speak.

I am currently enjoying the visual refresh Wordpress has been given in version 2.5. Its quite cool.

So it is the other side of the festive period and I am slightly better for it, financially. Next pay day should be even better, worked over 70 hours plus in 2 1/2 weeks. I bought myself a new phone over Christmas, it is a Nokia 3110c, and I got it for cheap using staff discount - not complaining. I’ve filled it up with a 2GB SanDisk MicroSD card from the ever fantastic SVP and now use it as my music player as well.

I started up a little project after I got a new phone with the basic aim to write a basic webmail client in PHP optimised for portable devices, its untitled so far. But it is very light on resources making use of PHP 5 with the IMAP Extension, and memcached for caching of IMAP data. I will make the source available via Subversion soon enough.

Over the holidays I have just had a made some serious changes to my server configuration, doing away with my reliance on Linux-VServer because it is just not stable enough. One of the instances crashes it generally will not sort itself out in a reasonable time without a reboot of the entire host, what I was trying to avoid. So instead I have moved most stuff back onto sandman proper now, the exceptions are a couple of things which need Debian Testing which still run on a VServer host. I hope to remove the need for these and then remove VServer totally and install OpenVZ which appears to be much more robust.

I am now using Lighttpd to serve the bulk of my web content because it has much lower resource usage than Apache and is fairly extensible and customisable, certainly more so than Apache until I discovered mod_macro. It does have some draw backs to Apache, like I cannot do PAM authentication or run Subversion without piggy backing it through Apache and certain configuration drawbacks. But considering the only VHost that really needs PAM authentication is my Subversion repository and that cannot move away from Apache I think I am okay.

I just upgraded this blog using a Subversion patch, seems to be working ok, will keep and eye out for any 404s see if I missed any new files and the like. I also started to burn my feed.

I made the Akismet plugin a little more sane after discovering it sent the entire $_SERVER array to akismets servers. I changed:

        $ignore = array( 'HTTP_COOKIE' );

        foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
                if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
                        $comment["$key"] = $value;

To:

        foreach ($_SERVER as $k => $v)
        {
                if (strpos($k, 'HTTP_') === 0 && $k != 'HTTP_COOKIE')
                {
                        $comment[$k] = $v;
                }
        }

I have made the decision to disable Akismet, after reading some hype about the new Wordpress 2.3’s plugin version check API, which turned out to be negative but reveals something interesting with regards to Akismet. The following code is taken from the official Akismet plugin for Wordpres.

        $ignore = array( 'HTTP_COOKIE' );

        foreach ( $_SERVER as $key => $value )
                if ( !in_array( $key, $ignore ) )
                        $comment["$key"] = $value;

        $query_string = '';
        foreach ( $comment as $key => $data )
                $query_string .= $key . '=' . urlencode( stripslashes($data) ) . '&';

        $response = akismet_http_post($query_string, $akismet_api_host, '/1.1/comment-check', $akismet_api_port);

The bit that worries me is the use of $_SERVER, the only item from this array not sent is HTTP_COOKIE, fair enough. But why do you need to know the full paths to the files on my server and other server environment variables Akismet? I do not have a problem with sending data to Akismet, just not this data!

Source

I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.2.2, again using a patch. I have put together a page on patches for the benefit of others.

I don’t get people who moan about upgrading web software, I suspect these are all fairly dumb people who do not have or know how to use terminal access to their server. I just upgraded Wordpress from 2.2 to 2.2.1 in 5 minutes, patch for anyone else like me with brains.