Folks, there is a new version of WordPress available. This release is a security fix. All users are recommended to apply this fix. See here and here for details.
Category Archives: Geek Stuff
GIF Patent Expired
I forgot to mention in all the Harry Potter related excitement this wonderful piece of news:
“On Friday, 20th June 2003, the death knell sounds for US patent number 4,558,302. Having benefitted its owner, the Unisys Corporation for 20 years, the contents of the patent are entered into the Public Domain and may be used absolutely freely by anyone.
Officially titled “High speed data compression and decompression apparatus and method”, it is more commonly known as the LZW patent or Unisys’s GIF tax.”
This quote from a great summary and timeline by Stuart Caie over at Kuro5hin
It’s not quite all over yet:
“One down, seven to go:
So the US patent has expired. What does this leave?
* The European patent EP0,129,439 covers Germany, France, Britain and Italy and expires on the 18th June 2004.
* The Canadian patent CA1,223,965 expires on the 6th June 2004.
* The Japanese patents 2,123,602 and 2,610,084 expire on the 20th June 2004. “
But nearly…
T-Shirt
Cheap Bandwidth Anyone?
Someone (Wei-Yen) pointed this out to me on IM last night, A Geek in Tokyo said:
“Broadband access in Japan/Tokyo is ridiculous. Here you can buy up to 12Mbit ADSL or even 100Mbit fiber-to-the-home. My 8Mbit ADSL just got a price cut and is now ¥650 per month. Thats $5.56US, £3.47 (UK Sterling) or about $9.00AU a month. I can’t believe it.”
Neither can I. You know, I’ve always fancied learning Japanese! 🙂
WordPress Progress
I’ve just committed some huge changes to CVS for WordPress. There is some really cool stuff; most options are now stored in the database, b2config is gone, several path problems are now sorted out; option screens are now data driven, squirt a few rows into the database, and you have a new options screen complete with validation and help! Very exciting stuff. A word of caution, it may be worth waiting until I have written an update script before updating to the latest CVS version.
Way Too Accurate!
Woah! ROFLMAO! This Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers is way too accurate! I don’t read all the blogs parodied but, it’s really accurate for the ones I do.
Linky link from Patricia over at LunaNiña.com
WordPress 0.71 Released
Woot! Version 0.71 of WordPress is out!. There are loads of new features:
300% speedup (honest!), post status (publish, draft, and private), comments status, combined trackbacks, pingbacks, and comments, security fixes, opml import (including from blogrolling), ezsql database functions, cleaner, smoother administration, clean upgrades, links weblogs.com checking improved, and bug fixes galore.
So what are you waiting for? Go get it!
Official announcement (with more details) here.
The Story Of Slammer
Wired has a great writeup on the Slammer worm which hit the net last January. There is a really nice description in layman’s terms of how it works. Plus some awesome images of the effect of the worm on network traffic, one wittingly entitle Cisco Inferno!
Link spotted by Michael Heilemann
