Upgrades

Written By: - Date published: 6:19 am, April 27th, 2008 - 73 comments
Categories: admin - Tags: , , , , , ,

I upgraded the site tonight. There have been a lot of security fixes since we pushed a test site together in August 2007. It was only meant to be a trial (as I keep saying plaintively to the posters), and it sort of got away on us.

This version is meant to be much more secure, and considerably faster. But I’m confident that the post and comments will ensure that doesn’t show up on your side. Verbiage seems to fill the space available – especially in an election year.

The biggest visible differences are in the Dashboard for the posters and anyone who logs in. That is because I wanted the site to look much the same, at least for now. Getting the similarity has deprived me of some needed sleep because I needed to move hacks to css.

I know about the missing selection of posts in the top right, but let me know in here if anyone sees any problems. It seems to work in all of my browsers. But the first set of comments in here will be a final test for common browsers.

Cheers
Lynn.

Update: Internet Explorer version 6 has problems with the layout on the reCaptcha. This will not be fixed until tuesday. If you are using Internet Explorer before version 7, you should upgrade or move to a better browser anyway – help your developers.

I’d suggest Firefox or Safari. Both confirm to the standards a lot better than any Internet Explorer.

73 comments on “Upgrades ”

  1. lprent 1

    Testing Safari 3.1.1 on windoze

  2. lprent 2

    Testing firefox 2.0.0.14 on windoze

  3. lprent 3

    Testing IE 7.0.5730.11

  4. lprent 4

    Testing Opera 9.24 on windoze

  5. lprent 5

    Test image

  6. Anita 6

    Safari 3.1.1 Mac

  7. Anita 7

    Vienna 2.2.2.2212 Mac

  8. r0b 8

    Vienna 2.2.2.2212

    Quite a version number!

    Safari 3.0.4 on an old mac looks good.

  9. r0b 9

    Firefox 2.0.0.11 on an old mac.

  10. big bruv 10

    I see you have the poppy in your banner, can you tell me what DAWN service dear leader attended last Friday?

    Or is she still refusing to show the old diggers the respect they deserve?

    [lprent: I’m working in this thread.
    Why don’t you do the same and simply query google to find out. Or is that beyond the capabilities of a mindless troll such as yourself? Do not disturb me again with your pathetic level of incompetence.
    Did I mention that I get short tempered while working?]

  11. lprent 11

    There is an interesting behaviour after you save a message. The entry box goes away and then comes back. Has to be javasxript.

    I must have a look and see what they’re doing there.

  12. lprent 12

    Firefox 2.0.0.6 on OpenSUSE

  13. lprent 13

    Konquerer 3.93.00 on OpenSUSE
    Konquerer complaining that I haven’t configured its dictionary.
    Entry box goes grey when not active

    and it crashes the browser – usually after saving. Looks like it doesn’t like the javascript

  14. lprent 14

    Epihany 2.20.0 on OpenSUSE

  15. r0b 15

    There is an interesting behaviour after you save a message. The entry box goes away and then comes back. Has to be javasxript.

    Call it a feature. Helps remind folk that they need to reload the page to see if their comment actually posted (survived captcha).

  16. lprent 16

    Ummm seems to work well on any reasonably modern browser. I don’t have IE6 available at present, and I’ll skip the older browsers on the Mac Mini. They worked adequetely last night.

  17. big bruv 17

    A bit touchy this morning Iprent?, I guess I can take it that dear leader did not bother getting up early to attend any of the numerous Dawn services for Anzac day.

    I wonder what Judith was doing?

  18. lprent 18

    Konquerer on slackware 12 does the same thing. So it is a problem with the javascript engine. Interesting, but everyone should have moved to Safari or Firefox on *nix anyway.

  19. r0b 19

    Well you broke iCab 3.0.5 on MacOS 9 – what an outrage! ttfn.

  20. Anita 20

    Firefox 2.0.0.14 Mac (10.5)

  21. Anita 21

    rOb re Vienna

    I’m looking forward to 2.2.2.2222 🙂

    I like the way the comment box goes away, it forces people to take a breath before commenting again (and again and again 🙂

  22. lprent 22

    I didn’t even know there was such a browser. But I short of went from MacOS about 5 or 6 direct to OSX.

  23. Lyn 23

    Safari 3.1 (4525.13) on Mac OSX Tiger

  24. lprent 24

    BB: Just look it up.

    Actually you can be useful for once. There – added you to moderation. That allows me to test how that operates in this new version.

    What do you expect. I’ve had 4 hours sleep. Now go away and be a parasite elsewhere. You’re irritated me three times this morning.

  25. big bruv 25

    So free speech is not allowed at the standard now?

    [lprent: Thank you for the test. In case you hadn’t noticed – the site is private property. Your rights are limited to the ones I choose to give you. For the most part they are quite liberal, which is why you haven’t been bounced previously.
    However this morning you have been guilty of a cardinal sin – pissing off a sysop. Stupidity carries its own rewards]

  26. lprent 26

    Well thanks everyone (even big bruv if he comments again). I think this version works OK.

    rOb – you login – have a look at the Dashboard using the link in the top right of the menu. Does that look ok?

  27. Anita 27

    Vienna’s an RSS aggregator that is a bit fussy about the pages it renders *sigh* Theoretically it uses Safari bits, but in practice it sometimes munches pages.

    I reckon anything Vienna doesn’t mess up will survive just about anything 🙂

  28. IrishBill 28

    This is Lyn. Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7) on Mac OSX Tiger seems to think I’m IrishBill. Not sure if I’ve got a browser issue this end – the page also doesn’t seem to be finishing loading either.

  29. lprent 29

    I wondered what Vienna was. It probably uses the WebKit engine

  30. big bruv 30

    “Private property”?

    How can a site hosted and funded by tax payer money be private property?

    [lprent: It is funded by me, as I’ve commented to you on another thread. Ban yourself for a week. If I hear from you before that then we will lose the pleasure of your company permanently.]

  31. lprent 31

    Lyn – now that is wierd. I’d assume it is a cookie.

    See if there is a Logout just under Leave a Reply. Try that and see what happens.

    BTW: I had to confirm it wasn’t IB pulling my chain – definitely your IP.

  32. Absolute Power 32

    “Lyn – now that is wierd.”

    What chapter was that?

    [lprent: good – another candidate for moderation. Has to be useful for something. Thank you for your assistance]

  33. randal 33

    hey bb..what dawn service did you attend? and feel free to make an idiot of yourself any time you like you piece of dogturd…crawl back under your stone.

  34. lprent 34

    off to lunch – be back in a couple of hours. I have to fix a friend’s computer link after the ponsonby exchange cabinet fiasco.

  35. Absolute Power 35

    [lprent: good – another candidate for moderation. Has to be useful for something. Thank you for your assistance]

    That is quite a bizarre statement.Where have I broken the rules of this blog ? Hardly fair considering the present touchy climate on blogosphere.

    [lprent: Do I care? You plugged an inane comment into the middle of a conversation about possible problems with an upgrade. In doing so you annoyed me, the second one to do it in that discussion.

    You should have looked further up in the conversation before writing a smartarse comment. So I used you to test the moderation tools – it was of much more use to me.

    Don’t annoy a sysop. Turning off moderation now – but find another thread to moan in. This is a working thread.]

  36. Draco TB 36

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080418 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.14
    It’s actually Kubuntu rather than Ubuntu but I’m sure that there’s little difference.

  37. Draco TB 37

    Konqueror 3.5.8 in Kubuntu 7.1

  38. Draco TB 38

    Konqueror actually crashed when I posted that but I would point out that I’ve never found Konqueror to be all that stable anyway.

    And I lost login although it was still showing me as being logged in. Had to delete cookies for this site.

  39. lprent 39

    Thanks Draco. Konquerer was adequete on the last version of the site, but seems to have a problem with the updated posting javascript. I prefer firefox on linux anyway.

    I’ll have a close look at the cookies and server side session objects. It has to be in the php.ini because the session api’s aren’t called in wordpress php at all. That is a bit surprising because it is looks like it is using ajax to do the post in the k2 theme. Ummm I should check there.

    I’ll have a look and see if anyone has used a IE6 to comment. That is the only major browser I haven’t tested

  40. lprent 40

    Looks like either noone uses IE6 any more apart from the spammers that proport to be running IE6 (but aren’t), or they have been unable to post.

    If anyone has that browser running – please add a comment here. Otherwise I’ll have to virtualbox a win2k or winxp installation to test it. I gave up coding for it last year.

  41. lprent 41

    Figured out the cookie problem as well. I’ll have to tinker this correctly as it uses the defaults from the php.ini, which is a bit perplexing.

    I found old cookies on my clients that expire in 2010, that it appears to be using to detirmine login status. Other cookies that expire in a session that it appears to be using for the post.

    Looks like a slight conflict between recaptha and wordpress

  42. bill brown 42

    This is what I get when trying to use IE. Could be my set up but it seems ok on other sites:

    Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might be temporarily unavailable.

  43. lprent 43

    bill: IE6 or 7?
    I’m having no real problems with IE7 apart from its usual quirks

  44. bill brown 44

    6

  45. r0b 45

    I’m looking forward to 2.2.2.2222

    Anita – should be a keeper!

    rOb – you login – have a look at the Dashboard using the link in the top right of the menu. Does that look ok?

    A tab at the right of the banner called “site admin” takes me to my Dashboard, which looks fine. First up in Dashboard is an orange banner “Right Now” which tells me “You have 879 posts, contained within 66 categories and 0 tags”. There’s a short list of recent comments (could be longer) and a list of incoming links, and so on.

  46. lprent 46

    Looks like a change to what is used to hash the cookies. There is a new security feature that stores a seperate key. I turned on all of the security features. Means that old cookies are likely to be invalid.

    I’ll probably need to get a forced cookie name change. That will be configurable. Just a matter of finding where it is.

  47. lprent 47

    bill: Darn. Could you try something out. Find the cookies for thestandard.org.nz and delete them. You can get at it from the menu under something like Tools/Options. I can’t remember IE6 menus at present.

    I’m pretty sure that is what is causing the problem

  48. lprent 48

    Ok – Bill got through on IE6. But there is a layout problem with recaptcha. He sent through some very helpful screenshots.

    I think I’ll catch up on a bit of sleep while win2k upgrades itself in a virtualbox so I can put in some IE6 kludges.

    Should get IE6 operational tonight with a bit of luck.

  49. burt 49

    Random way to run a server guys. Test it live!

  50. Anita 50

    burt,

    Old style sysadmining – a damn fine way to live and work 🙂

    I kinda miss this on commercially hosted sites; feeling that the net is a co-operative space seems on the way out 🙁

  51. r0b 51

    feeling that the net is a co-operative space seems on the way out

    Imminent death of usenet predicted, film at 11.

    Or in other words, right on Anita. I think it goes pretty much this way with every new frontier…

  52. lprent 52

    burt: I don’t have time to do it any other way. All of this system is built with open sources. I needed to get the security patches in place to stop the bloody spammers. I really only have a day to do the task because I have a lot of other things to code.

    The updates I needed were in wordpress 2.5. But it just got released so the themes and plugins haven’t caught up. It is running with a nightly build of K2 and a version of recapcha that may be compatible with 2.5.

    Open source means that the users wind up doing wide-range testing of new releases. In this case across a vast range of possible browsers. I tested a pile of them already before putting the system up, and encoraged people to test with whatever they had lying around. This is a very cooperative site.

    So far it looks like konquerer and IE6 are the only problems. I’ll have a closer look at IE6 and see if I can fix its problem. I’ll report both back to the writers with possible fixes and/or problem scopes. Besides ultimately all systems are tested live.

  53. lprent 53

    While looking for data on the net about the issues, found this gem – Save the Developers! from IE6.

  54. Lyn 54

    As a regular reader I just want to say a big thanks for all the hard and unpaid work. I know what that’s like and I just wanted to pass on some appreciation.

  55. r0b 55

    Hear hear! Not only the volunteer time, but Lynn also pays the ($70 month?) hosting charges. Lynn, have you considered a Paypal link or similar so that we can contribute?

  56. lprent 56

    I have a fix for IE6 that makes sure the reCaptcha goes into the right place.
    /* bloody IE6 strikes again */
    #commentformbox
    {
    position: absolute;
    }
    According to the reCaptcha techs this fixes a problem in IE6 where it gets confused by too much relative positioning. But it causes too much disruption to the other browsers (apart from IE7 of course).

    I’ll talk to a css guru to find out how to add this with a css hack. But for today the IE6 people are out of luck.

  57. Matthew Pilott 57

    I.E 6.0.2900.2180

  58. Anita 58

    I’m assuming you’re aware there’ve been at least two patches of “no database connection” this morning?

    If not, you’ve got a new fault 🙂

  59. IrishBill 59

    And unfortunately I just had to delete a very Franksian piece of spam.

  60. outofbed 60

    a new word is born

  61. lprent 61

    Anita: I saw the one early this morning, and I know what that was. A process didn’t like the new database structure and went into a high-cpu loop at 2340. Restarted it about 0730 (??).

    Has there been one since then? I can’t see it on the log. Could be the operators kicking the system at power level. I asked them to do it last night, and never sent a request not to.

    Give it a day or so and the system should shake back down. At least it will be easy to upgrade from here on out.

  62. lprent 62

    Matthew, 2 questions if I can take your time on IE6.

    1. Did the recaptcha look ok (complete with entry box) or did it have layout issues.
    2. Did the little popup at top left show saying it’d be a good idea to upgrade.

  63. Tane 63

    Hey Lynn, I have noticed that after you post a comment the comment box disappears. Not a big deal, unless for some reason you want to make two comments in a row.

  64. Matthew Pilott 64

    Hi Lynn,

    Recaptcha looked fine to me (no change from last time I was on here, Friday 25/04) and I haven’t had any problms posting.

    I did see a pop-up (top-right) about upgrading – helping developers!

    Currently on a work PC where upgrading is a big thing i.e. above my head, so there’s always going to be a few stragglers…

    Cheers for the work you put into this site BTW, you seem a handy man to know!

  65. Matthew Pilott 65

    Lynn, just a further note – the pop-up is fixed to the top of the page. It appreared only when I refreshed after posting (my standard practice to ensure cap was correct) and is only visible when I’m looking at the banner. This might mean most people don’t notice unless they return to the top of the page withing a few seconds of refreshing.

  66. lprent 66

    Tane: seems to be a feature on IE7 only. It is on my list, but low priority for the reasons you described.

    Matthew: Just had a look at the site with a guy that does websites here (for me it is just a sideline) in his IE6. Seems to be ok – must just be a problem with bill’s IE6 browser. I saw my updater for the first time. I’ll leave that in, but shift to just the ‘blog’ page.

  67. Matthew Pilott 67

    All good. Just thought I’d test to see if all I.E. Six was out for the day…

  68. Tane 68

    Lynn, I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.14 if that’s any help.

  69. outofbed 69

    Yes same thing happens on my firefox 2.0.0.14

  70. lprent 70

    On mine, it disappears from “Leave a Reply”, then reappears 5 seconds later. That is an upgrade from recaptcha. I looked at the code and it is intentional. During that time it validated everything, checked it for spam, etc etc, and eventually filed it.

    On my IE7, it disappears, then reappears 5 seconds later, and then the text box down to the recaptcha just disappears again. It looks pretty weird because the space for it is clearly there.

    The IE6 works correctly if it has had the updates. Been using
    http://browsershots.org to look at various browsers. That would have saved me a lot of time if I’d known about it on the weekend. So I’ve removed the I hate IE6 dropdown from the webpage.

  71. Tane 71

    You’re right Lynn, it does come back.

  72. lprent 72

    Testing IE7 on different system. Does recaptcha on this one come back?

    Nope…..

  73. Te4stIt 73

    Testing Gavatar + identicon