News Blogg

Seasons Greetings

mike — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 00:00:21 +0000

I would like to wish you all a “Merry Christmas”, “Happy Kwanzaa”, “Happy Hanukkah”, “Yule Blessings”, or just plain old “Seasons Greetings” whatever you may celebrate at this time of year.

All the best.

Starbucks Cheer Chain

Matt — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 23:28:54 +0000

At Starbucks people have been starting “cheer chains” where they pay extra money to pick up the coffee of the person behind them in the drive-thru. Some have gone 2 solid hours. The blogger is cynical, but some of the comments are from baristas that work at Starbucks. I want to believe.

Falling Snow Script

Matt — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:58:15 +0000

I’ve been looking around for a good falling snow script, as I’m a sucker for cheesy holiday javascript, but everything seems to be from the era of Netscape 6. I even found one on my own domain, but it doesn’t seem to work in Firefox. So where’s the state-of-the-art snow script for web 2.0? Time is running out!

Banned from Technorati Top 100

Matt — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:10:30 +0000

4 Ways to Get Banned from the Technorati Top 100.

Bug Hunt on December 19th

Ryan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:16:59 +0000

A WordPress 2.4 bug hunt is scheduled for Wednesday, December 19, 2007 at 17:00:00 UTC. We’ll be triaging bugs, committing patches, and cleaning up the bug tracker. The hunt will last 24 hours so that all timezones can join in the fun on the #wordpress-bugs channel.

The weekly IRC meetup is also on Wednesday at 20:00:00 UTC in the #wordpress-dev channel. We discuss the progress of 2.4 development and get updates on everyone’s projects during these meetups.

WordPress Hoodies

Ryan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:20:51 +0000

Maya set us up with some WordPress hoodies for the holidays. Visit the WP shop to order yours. These will be a bit warm for those of you in the southern hemisphere, but next fall you will be set.

Homegrown CMSes

Matt — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:16:49 +0000

WordPress vs. an army of clunky content management systems on ZDNet.

Secure Cookies and Passwords

Ryan — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:55:32 +0000

WordPress 2.4 will feature a new format for authentication cookies and a new password hashing algorithm. Cookies will be based on the secure cookie protocol described here. The cookie is structured like so:

user name|expiration time|HMAC( user name|expiration time, k)
where k = HMAC(user name|expiration time, sk)
and where sk is a secret key

The new cookie protocol will allow us to enforce expirations server-side, mass invalidate all cookies, and offer high-level confidentiality. Read the Liu paper for details on the protocol, and see ticket 5367 for details on our implementation of the protocol.

In conjunction with the new cookies, password hashing will be improved by moving to phpass. phpass provides password stretching and salting. These make brute-forcing your password hashes impractical should someone get access to your database. phpass is being considered for inclusion by Drupal and phpBB, which bodes well for integrators who want to auth all of these apps off of one user table. However, I’m not sure how well things like mod_auth_mysql play with the portable hashes generated by phpass. Anyone with experience there? While moving the code to phpass, we made password hashing completely pluggable should integrators need to switch to a different hash. Hopefully everything can place nice with phpass.

The new cookies and hashes are still under development but are available for testing by grabbing svn trunk. Don’t test on a production blog since reverting back to your previous version requires restoring your users table from backup to get your old password hashes back.

Jerusalem Syndrome

Matt — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:21:27 +0000

Apparently a number of people who visit Jerusalem are so affected they dress up in biblical garb, preach at holy sites, and then days later don’t remember a thing.

Web Apps with Class

Matt — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:40:50 +0000

It would be interesting to talk about web applications and services in terms of the year they “graduated” and went public to the world. IMDB was ‘90; Amazon.com was ‘95; Movable Type was ‘01; WordPress.org and Typepad were Class of ‘03; Gmail was ‘04; WordPress.com, Akismet, Youtube, TechCrunch, and pbwiki were ‘05; bbPress, Amazon S3, and Twitter were ‘06; Pownce was ‘07, etc. It’d also be cool to see a timeline of major web apps.