Randomness Redefined

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  Has Something TechTVesce returned? I hope so!

“There
’s no need for further speculation: Google CEO Today at the Web 2.0 Expo Google CEO Eric Schmidt confirmed that Google will soon launch a PowerPoint clone, completing their basic office suite (they already have Word and Excel covered).”

I have not seen a huge amount of adoption for the current Google Docs offering but I have a feeling if it includes a powerpoint like app we might see some increase in usage. Most of the complains that I have seen indicated that people want their powerpoint. I am a huge fan of Google and I like their current offerings, and I have used docs in the past and it was pretty solid. What do you think about online office suites? Are they the future or just a fad?

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Now that I’m no longer violently ill its time for some updates!

First up is WordPress which I had meant to update last week but never got a chance. There doesn’t appear to be many changes listed on the Wordpress Development Blog but here is what they had to say:

We have a security update release now available for both the 2.1 and 2.0 branches of WordPress now available for immediate download. This update is highly recommend for all users of both branches.

These releases include fixes for several publicly known minor XSS issues, one major XML-RPC issue, and a proactive full sweep of the WordPress codebase to protect against future problems. Many thanks to Sumit Siddharth and Alex Concha for their help with reporting issues in this release.

As an update to the systems issue we had last month, we have taken dozens of additional precautions with the servers and systems that run WordPress.org and they appear to be working well, despite hundreds of hack attempts after we publicly disclosed there had been a problem. We are also now aggressively monitoring all downloads for any changes or modifications, and we are confident the same type of problem won’t happen again.

Sounds like its worth taking the few min. that it takes to upgrade just to make sure that you can keep undesirables from mucking up your Wordpress Install. As usual the upgrade went smoothly.

Mint 2.0.6

Next up we have a minor update to Mint. This release just fixed a few bugs but here is what The Pepermill had to say:

A bug fix release to address a potential drop in the total-to-unique Visits ratio and missing sessions in Crushes.

MintAcceptsCookies now lasts the duration of the session to prevent premature expiration of cookies (the original timeout was a tad unrealistic)

This update went smoothly as well and you might not have to update if you don’t mind Mint reminding you each time you view it. Did anyone have any issues with updating their copies of WordPress or Mint?

Introduction

The basis for this guide comes from a Knowledge Base article that can be located here. Most people that use this guide will not have any difficulties unless your site uses Apache’s mod_rewrite to make your URLs pretty. Before I get to gar into this here is my current setup on my (dv) 3.0 server.

(dv) Base
WordPress 2.1.2
MySQL 4.1.20
Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)

Also, before attempting this PLEASE be sure to backup the current state of your (dv) through your Plesk admin area. To back things up login as the admin account and click on the Virtuozzo link in the bar on the left hand side and then on the Maintenance icon when the main screen loads. Unless you are paying tor (mt)’s backup service you will only have one available slot for the backup. Click New Backup and wait until the process has completed. Once this has completed we can move on the the main event.

The Main Event!

Proceed down the guide through Step 1 and Step 2 and follow the recommendations of the support team accept when you get down to sub point 3 of the section entitled Running PHP via suexec. Instead of adding the following to your vhost.conf:

AddHandler fcgid-script .php5
SuexecUserGroup psacln
/httpdocs>
FCGIWrapper /var/www/vhosts//bin/php5 .php5
Options ExecCGI
allow from all

You will want to add in this:

AddHandler fcgid-script .php .php5
SuexecUserGroup psacln
/httpdocs>
FCGIWrapper /var/www/vhosts//bin/php5 .php
FCGIWrapper /var/www/vhosts//bin/php5 .php5
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
allow from all

Notice that you need to add in FollowSymLinks as an option for the Options ExecCGI section of your vhost.conf..

Conculsion

This should allow Plesk and mod_rewrite to play happily. These modifications appeared to work for my situation and I assume that they would work for other WordPress users. Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, success stores, etc. I hope your upgrade goes well!