by ezs | May 29, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Hunting around for the ‘right’ theme – my hacks to Regulus by Ben Gillbanks are still doing an admirable job.
I’ve dragged the theme through a miriad of WordPress alphas, betas and releases; and added a stack of plugins and widgets to the side.
My ideal is a clean, two-column, widget-ready theme. Fast to load – and able to support the Gallery2 integations.
by ezs | May 29, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’m hoping this saves someone some searching.
I upgraded a couple of blogs to WordPress 2.8 beta early this morning – and I had problems with a single plugin – Audit Trail by John Godley.
The symptom was that on login you got a blank screen and Apache/PHP threw this:
[Fri May 29 11:59:05 2009] [error] [client 10.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method AT_Auditor::_weak_escape() in /www/<foo>/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 487, referer: http://<foo>/wp-login.php?redirect_to=/
The plugin itself is nicely written – and as part of the safety mechanism it uses wpdb::escape to explode out anything before injecting to the database.
One change in WP 2.8 looks like it affects this – login redirects are now urlencoded by default – http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9817 – and that looks like it’s clashing with the line above.
The temporary fix for me is to modify part of the plugin to not call into wp::db – and instead assume that the url has already been exploded out.
wp-content/plugins/audit-trail/models/audit.php
line 173
// $operation = wpdb::escape ($operation);
The risk for my implementation seems small – I’m only using audit-trail to track logins and logouts.
So if you are hunting down some generic <function>::_weak_escape errors in WordPress 2.8 beta – take a trawl through your plugins and see if there is a wpdb::escape call. There may be some relatively low impact fixes out there.
by ezs | May 24, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
This goes back a long, long way.
Summer 2000 I was talking to an audience of customers and resellers in South Africa about how the directory, identity-driven management and ZENworks specifically could manage anything. The concepts of management by exception and the extensibility of the Novell Directory Services (as it was then known) were ideal for this.
We were joking around concepts of management – and we came on ZENworks for Toasters.
Some Java fun in ConsoleOne – and we had a cool demo plugin for our internal Systems Engineers.



by ezs | May 9, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
I’ve finally got the movie to web thing down to a pretty efficient process.
Video (AVI or AVCHD) –> Sony Vegas –> Flash Video studio (convert to flv) –> Amazon S3
I’m using the Flash Video Player plugin for WordPress – it’s nice and clean. Using Amazon S3 lets me put video in a datacenter in the US or Europe for pennies. That means my servers at home and my uplink don’t get killed by family viewing the lastest videos; it also means a measurable improvement in their experience. Viewing a video served from Amazon S3 in Europe to grandpa via DSL in London is very acceptable.
by ezs | Apr 20, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Originally posted on TechNet blogs.
Finally the team got the Partner Solutions Guide to print.
Here is a proof copy (right) next to the 2007 partner guide on the left.
This will be printed and shipped to Las Vegas – in time for the Microsoft Management Summit.
A big thanks to all of the System Center partners who provided their information, proofed and re-proofed their submissions. I hope you all find this guide useful – and another benefit of being in the System Center Alliance.
by ezs | Apr 17, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized
Originally posted on TechNet blogs.
When I started in this role – just over a year ago – there were around 25 partners in the Microsoft System Center Alliance. Most of those were founder members of the Alliance which was announced at TechEd/IT Forum in Barcelona in November 2007.
The original members of the Alliance were a mix of the big, strategic hardware OEMs, a couple of larger ISVs with integration and then some smaller, focused ISVs who had been working with Operations Manager and Configuration Manager since the MOM and SMS days.
In the past year the System Center Strategic Partner and Alliance team have been growing in several ways.
First we added some significant additional resources last Spring – I was one of the new blood – we are focused on new partner acquisition, building a business and a technical relationship and also thinking about partnerships in non-traditional ways.
The second area of growth has been in our back-office procedures and processes – growing our capacity. Managing less than thirty partners is very doable in an Excel spreadsheet. Not so for eighty or the hundred or so that are ‘in flight’. I worked closely with my business manager on the process flow that we had, identified bottlenecks, inefficiencies – and we improved on the paper process. We added auditing, reporting and metric gathering capabilities. Most recently we moved this more efficient – but still manual – process online. We are now transitioning to a SharePoint based partner onboarding and management tool.
Finally we have used both of these investments to grow the number of partners in the Alliance.
We have gone from the twenty one founding members of the alliance to over seventy today. By the time of Microsoft Management Summit in just a few weeks we have have grown some more.
An example of this growth is in the System Center Partner Solutions Guide. When this was first created in late 2007 there were some twenty partners listed. Today I am just finishing up with the final proofing – and this edition has seventy three integrated partners listed. Such is the growth that we plan to revise this more regularly – not in 2010 – but before the WorldWide Partner Conference in July.
My next blog post will discuss some of the areas that have helped in growing the Alliance – technology, business and a critical mass of customers and partners.
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