21 Apr, 08
Dropbox wurde von mir erst belächelt, aber jetzt, wo ich es ausprobiert habe, bin ich begeistert. Es funktioniert einfach, und das ist genau das, was ich von Computern will.
Wer es auch ausprobieren möchte, möge unter Angabe seiner E-Mail-Adresse hier kurz kommentieren, wieso Dropbox interessant für ihn ist.
17 May, 07
oder “Die Medienkompetenz der Universität des Saarlandes”.
Früher war alles besser. Die Universitäten waren Vorreiter bei der Vernetzung, Studenten wollten die Welt verändern, und Spam kam in Briefform.
Heute versendet die Universität Massenmails mit Links auf PDF-Dokumente.
Noch davor benannte sich die Universität Saarbrücken in die Universität des Saarlandes um, und entsprechend musste man dann auch den Domainnamen uni-sb.de durch uni-saarland.de ersetzen. Jetzt möchte man als erfahrener Systemadministrator denken - kein Problem, mod_rewrite rein, R=301 auf die neue URL, alte Domain behalten (wegen alter Links), alles wunderbar. Alle alten Links funktionieren, die Suchmaschinen updaten ihre Einträge, und wer schreibfaul ist, kann sb statt saarland schreiben. Die Universität Saarbrücken des Saarlandes hingegen, nun ja. Bis vor kurzem bekam man bei jedem Zugriff über uni-sb.de eine Seite gezeigt, die dem Besucher sagte, dass die Domain nun uni-saarland.de laute, und man doch bitte die URL ändern möge oder sich auf der neuen Domain durchklicken. (Mittlerweile wird jeder Zugriff auf uni-sb.de strikt auf uni-saarland.de/ umgeleitet.)
Und heute fällt mir auf, dass man die Webseiten der Universitas Saraviensis nur erreichen kann, wenn man schön das unnötige, veraltete, unsinnige ‘www.’ mit eingibt, denn:
uni-saarland.de. 86400 IN A 134.96.7.4
www.uni-saarland.de. 86400 IN CNAME webhost00.rz.uni-saarland.de.
webhost00.rz.uni-saarland.de. 86400 IN A 134.96.7.73
Freu ich mich jetzt, dass die Uni überhaupt sowas wie Internet hat?
24 Apr, 07
I will be participating in this year’s Summer of Code, working on WordPress internationalization. You can read my full proposal online. Of over 6,000 applications, about 900 were accepted. WordPress could only accept 10 out of about 90 applications. It’s bound to be an interesting summer with working on WordPress and Habari at the same time, plus $work, photography, and ‘real’ life.
The frenzy officially starts on May 28th, but I’ll likely start working on things earlier — as soon as I have some time at $work, that is — since the task is not quite as easy as it might appear. A big part of the trouble stems from the fact that WordPress uses third-party components which are maintained by their respective project groups, and, in the case of TinyMCE, aren’t even PHP, but JavaScript. The other problem is translating basically static texts like the README file, but also plugin and theme descriptions. Obviously, we can’t expect every plugin and theme author to speak several languages, and since metadata is stored in a plaintext blob, we can’t use gettext or similar tools (aside from the fact that we can hardly ship a giant gettext mo containing all translations for all known plugins).
And I haven’t even begun to talk about cultural localization…
General, Web, WordPress, Code, Language, Google, Internationalization, localization, i18n and l10n
01 Apr, 07
Okay, seriously. Habari 0.1.1 Developer Release is now available for download and hacking:
The 0.1.1 version includes a fix for the search XSS problem and removes the misleading warning in the installer. I don’t recommend using it on a public site without being aware of the problems! At the very least, you should put your Habari install on a different domain that does not hold any important data.
You’re welcome to drop by on irc.freenode.net #habari and join us in our inspired fork… barbe… hacking!
01 Apr, 07
Hey, don’t worry! We’re just kidding! You’re reading Habari’s April Fools joke.
Update: ForkPress made 20,070,401 downloads already! I can’t believe it!
It started with great promise, great promises, and at an opportune time. Everyone and their mother were starting to get disgruntled with WordPress - it had its share of scandals, its codebase contained a lot of baggage from ye olde times, some of Matt’s decisions didn’t go over so well with people, and some didn’t like the whole dot-com stuff going on.
Habari promised everything - a complete rewrite, using today’s technology, under a truly free license, and with a meritocratic development process. And it had a number of big names behind it.
It was a nice idea while it lasted.
It is now obvious to me that both the meritocratic process as well as truly free licenses absolutely and utterly fail to produce open, free software.
You might think this to be a strange thing to say, considering Habari finally released the Developer Review version today. Well, see for yourselves:
If I appear to be angry, it’s because I am! Scott (skippy) and Owen - both cofounders of Habari - have left the very project they founded in the dust, choosing to pursue commercial interests instead. The best part is that the codebase for their fork is probably Habari, and our choice of license allowed - encouraged - them to just take the code! Considering the timing of this decision, and the polish that went into their new projects already, it seems obvious to me that this move has been planned since quite some time — taking the hard work of volunteers, and going dot-com. And the worst part? They probably won’t hire me either, just like Automattic didn’t! In short: WTF BBQ.
I must say I feel happy about Habari’s Development Review release, but at the same time, I feel utterly betrayed. On the bright side, it is a statement about Habari’s quality, but still…
Skippy, Owen… good luck with your new ventures — ForkPress and bbqPress.
Hire me?
Update: Chris J. Davis also talks about the topic.
02 Mar, 07
Update: The announcement is out. The important part is:
[…] a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file […]
Nothing in the Subversion repository was touched, so if you upgrade and maintain your blog via SVN there is no chance you downloaded the corrupted release file.
This is the kind of thing you don’t want to happen to anyone. Kudos to the WordPress guys for their quick reaction.
Original entry below.
The following mail was just posted to the WordPress mailing lists, as a reaction to this security advisory. There are multiple XSS vulnerabilities in WordPress <= 2.1.1 — inserted by a cracker — and an upgrade is urgently recommended.
Subject: Upgrade to 2.1.2
From: Matt Mullenweg m at mullenweg.com
Date: Fri Mar 2 19:41:35 GMT 2007Hello everyone.
If anyone is running 2.1.1, or knows someone who is, I would recommend
upgrading to 2.1.2 as soon as possible. It is now available at
http://wordpress.org/download/The md5 of the tar.gz is b1ae0c152e60300cba8c40c030baafd4.
No announcement quite yet, but coming soon. Thanks for your help.
24 Jan, 07
As you may or may not know, I’m now part of the core development committee of Habari. Habari is a next generation blogging platform written in object-oriented PHP using the model view controller design pattern. There, enough buzzwords?
Not having to support a huge installed codebase with a lot of legacy, we have a chance to “do things right” with Habari. Using MVC is certainly a good start, as is using PDO (now programming SQL injections takes effort). But the nicest codebase still doesn’t make a good product …
… which is why I’m asking you all:
Please feel free to write lengthy comments, send me mail, etc.
We are currently aiming for a developers preview release at the end of month, but there’s still a lot of work left to do. If you’re interested, have a look at the mailing lists, or just drop by on IRC, in #Habari on irc.freenode.net.
13 Jan, 07
Wie kann man einen Artikel über eine neue Suchmaschine schreiben, ohne diese zu verlinken. SPON kann.