I just noticed that I moved this blog to WordPress 1.5 some four years ago!
Prior to that I had several online things – including a static html status and news diary.
Here’s a post on this from April 2005 – my first online web page was in 1993!
WordPress 2.8 RC1 is out – looking very good.
Also John Godfrey updated the audit-trail plugin.
Never a dull moment watching Systems Management.
I remember talking with Ronni Colville from Gartner in early 2000 about how what was then known as “Enterprise Software Distribution” would always keep evolving – but would never really change.
Today the challenges are many – mobility, bandwidth, expectations of users, privacy, security, compliance – all tied into a real budget squeeze.
At the same time there is a continuing trend towards consolidation.
In the past week or so we have seen Configuresoft, Solidcore and most recently Cassatt be acquired.
My gut feeling – most of the virtualisation management, run-book automation and niche players will be gone by year end.
A wave of smaller ISVs are rising to replace them. I’ve met with some great new talent in this space – and just as I discussed with Ronni in 2000 – it’s still the same problem to solve.
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.
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.
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.
Recent Comments