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Future updates – watching, waiting – and thinking about change

by | Oct 14, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Gallery is undergoing a major revision.

Gallery v3 is in beta right now – I expect it will be RC then released by the end of the year.

Couple of things to look at here on the migration from Gallery 2:

  • migration of hundreds of thousands of photos from G2 to G3
  • permissions
  • post-migration clean-up
  • storage and CPU churn
  • big one – there is no plugin for WordPress right now – and the WPG2 plugin is no longer maintained with no plans for upgrade.

    • The other set of updates is around WordPress itself.

    Three interesting updates – first WordPress 2.9 is going to go beta soon; release in maybe December. That’s going to need some poking and investigating. I’ve already found a couple of changes in alpha that break some plugins.

    The other WordPress change that I’m going to look at is the merge of WordPress MU into WordPress core; also the new features of BuddyPress on top of WordPress (MU or core).

    The BuddyPress/WPMU will let me offer multiple blogs to Rachael’s cubs and other leaders. 

    PHP XML parsing bug – a workaround and a fix

    by | Aug 5, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

    One thing I didn’t find in my testing and change control was a PHP and XML parsing bug.

    Documented in several places – libxml2 2.7.x and greater have a known issue.

    One workaround is to force in libxml2 version 2.6.x

    Not the most glamorous fix – but opensuse.org has the old libraries from openSUSE 11.0

    The better (but more complex) fix is to upgrade PHP to 5.2.9 and libxml2 to 2.7.3

    opensuse.org has the correct pieces from openSUSE 11.1

    http://www.peteware.com/blog/2009/01/fixing-libxml2-php-wordpress-and-the-missing-angle-brackets/

    http://www.peteware.com/blog/2008/12/wordpress-libxml2-bug/

    http://josephscott.org/archives/2008/12/problems-with-libxml2-for-wordpress-xml-rpc-users/

    http://josephscott.org/archives/2009/03/conclusion-of-libxml2-issues-use-php-529-libxml2-273/

    WordPress filesystem abstraction – and automatic updates

    by | Jun 11, 2009 | patching, Uncategorized, wordpress

    Way back in the not-so-distant past the only way to update WordPress was to download (wget/ftp) updates, plugins and themes, unpack them and perform the update/install.

    It is possible to pull the latest builds from subversion – but that’s really focused on the core hacker.

    New in WP 2.7 was the ability to update automatically.

    There were a few challenges with this – permissions, PHP modules, various host implementations – but I found it generally quite successful.

    I found a great FAQ here – http://dd32.id.au/2009/02/20/wordpress-filesystem-abstraction-faq/

    From the same author is a very cool plugin – core-control – it lets you enable and disable various transports – and shows the status of them.

    Consolidation and acquisitions in the Systems Management space

    by | Jun 3, 2009 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

    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.