Man oh man, got to work early this morning and walked into a big mess. Right off the bat I had to deal with bugs in the phone system AND in the computer network. And sorry, I’m a little ticked off that I’m the one who had to deal with it all. In my book this is the responsibility of the Office Manager.

The phones were offline when I came in. Thank GOODNESS it was easy enough to fix by pushing the reset button on the box in the closet.

The network was another problem. The printer/fax/copier that everyone shares was offline and the new color laser printer that we all share was also offline. Since almost no one was at work yet, I just turned off everything related to computer and printers thorughout the whole office and then rebooted the main computer. Hooray – that worked, too.

I have no idea how all these problems came up over the weekend. Everything was fine when I left on Friday.

WordPress 2.3.2 is an urgent security release that fixes a bug that can be used to expose your draft posts. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure, and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

Get 2.3.2 now to protect your blog from these disclosures.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

I saw an article via reauters blog post that talked about this so called “storm worm” “bot net” has beceom so powerful, that collectively it has the power of the top 10 supercomputers in the world. You know, super, ultra powerful computers that can calculate information faster than a combine 10,000 pentium 4 pcs. Well doing a little searching it seems that many people are quite concerned about the power of this bot net.

It seems that someone has managed to use a rootkit type of attack to infect computer all over the world, and using various techniques, not just virus infected emails, but also malicious code on a web page to infect tons of computes worldwide. This basically gives the owner of this virus system control over your computer, and many other people’s systems as well.

Doing some searching it seems that many computer geeks are worried that such a powerful system of zombie machines combined into this bot net will give someone unprecedented power to send out a huge amount of spam emails, which would clog up not just email inboxes and filters, but seriously slow down system across the internet. There is also some discussion about the pure brute force power of using all the zombie systems to attack a web site or web sites which would take them all down.

I’m sure the military and government see this as a threat at this point, and I bet microsoft will be reconsidering leaving rootkit back doors in it’s system, even if the music industry will play nicer with microsoft for having these types of holes in our computer systems.

I’m sure the standard defenses apply – have currently updated anti-virus software running, and make sure you have applied the latest windows updates.

Wordpress Bug Hunt 

On March 7, 2007 at 01:00:00 UTC (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=3&day=7&year=2007&hour=1&min=0&sec=0&p1=0,), the latest WordPress Bug Hunt will commence. The fun starts when you show up, so please be prompt

The goal of a Bug Hunt is to find, confirm, and fix bugs, then submit and test patches for those bugs. A WordPress Bug Hunt normally commences with a session on the #wordpress-bugs (irc://irc.freenode.net/wordpress-bugs) IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. There are always numerous bug hunting opportunities available for Bug Hunters. PHP coding experience is not necessary — all participants are welcome to join!

Successful bug hunting means familiarizing yourself with the WordPress Bug Database (http://trac.wordpress.org/). You also need the latest version (http://wordpress.org/download/svn/) installed and ready to go. Please do not use your main, live blog for participation in the Bug Hunt — things can and will break as we resolve bugs!

Having as many participants as possible during WordPress Bug Hunts greatly enhances the ongoing development of the beta releases and provides WordPress users with a more stable product! Good Luck on your Bug Hunting and thanks for joining in!”

Good luck on the hunt I can not make it to this years event but wish you all the best just the same. Maybe someone will see this blog post and make it to the hunt I hope. Would be nice to get funding from one of the CEO’s of a big technology company to help fund open source projects like Wordpress

My friend and long time web developer is taking her stores mobile. She owns and runs about twenty online stores that sell everything from novelties to dvds and other iteams more eccentric for adults. She also wants to open up several more stores around the same themes but with more focus on one type of product instead of a general store and she asked for me help in creating this new type of store so I agreed to give her a hand to bring her stores onto mobile devices accross the globe. In my opinon this will take up quite a bit of my spare time over the next couple of weeks and probably will not get much blogging done but who knows I may just use this as a chance to blog about some of the plans and bugs we run into while creating this next generation of sites.