sandipb.net

> yours truly.

Wordpress XML-RPC bug and 1.5.1.3 Upgrade patch

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A Serious XML-RPC bug has been discovered in PHP XML-RPC applications. Upgrade your PEAR library. Wordpress has come out with a new version fixing the problem. Unfortunately, they still don’t provide an easy way to upgrade. Here is the patch file to upgrade your Wordpress installation How to upgrade Wordpress in one step Download the patch file somewhere in your server. Change your current directory to your wordpress installation. Verify that your installation will get patched cleanly: patch -p1 --dry-run < /path/to/patchfile If no error reported in last step, finally patch the file: patch -p1 < /path/to/patchfile Yeah, I know.

I was in a quandary. I wanted the long permalinks for my blog posts,which made links self-describing and also search engine friendly. And I also wanted short URLs that I could pass on in emails. I share the sentiments of Andy Wibbels regarding TinyURL. Nothing against TinyURL personally, just that when you have your own domain name for your blog, wouldn’t you prefer using tiny urls using your own domain name?

Biting the “broadband” bullet again - Tata Broadband in Delhi

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After my terrible experience with Sify broadband early this year, I decided to stick to dialup - Reliance rconnect over FWP actually. But the idea of keeping a phone busy all day doesn’t appeal to me much even if the plan I have (Platinum) doesn’t have download caps or per minute call charges. So today I decided to bite the “broadband” bullet once again, and registered for a Tata Broadband connection.

Here is an article that I have just written on using svnreplicate to replicate subversion repositories. svnreplicate allows you to have a single master repository, and multiple slave repositories. The document uses a walkthrough approach to explain how to configure svnreplicate. I must warn though that it only demonstrates the concept using master and slave repositories present in the same system(reachable using file:/// URLs). While I am sure that this should work over multiple hosts too, Yashpal Nagar, a friend of mine, is trying to get it to work over multiple hosts with svnserve.

Reformatted Bazaar docs

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foss

I have been converting the present Bazaar documentation to texinfo. At present I have converted two documents - Building Baz and Following Tux. The source is available at my Bazaar repository at . Under sandip@lug-delhi.org/bazaar-docs--devo--1.4 Generated PDF and HTML files are as follows: Building Baz: HTML PDF Following Tux: HTML PDF Bazaar howto: HTML PDF Update: June 8, 7:30 IST: I have converted all the present Bazaar docs.

Eugenics - The forgotten scientific travesty of the last century

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Most of us know about the crimes of Nazis against the Jewish population and the associated genocide, right? Fewer of the people saying ‘yes’ to my previous question, would know/remember that the Nazis did this because they considered Jews to be of an inferior race. But I wonder how many of you know that the theory of racial supremacy of Nazis was based upon a very widely popular scientific theory in that time - a theory which had caught the whole world on fire at that time.

Of Lawrence Lessig, and the very real menace of child abuse in the society

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For some time now, Delhites have been waking up to an almost daily news story of some sexual assault or the other on women in the city. Now here is the story of another very real menace in the society - sexual abuse of children. I would say the effect of this menace is not only as scarring in the victims, but it has another very disturbing effect - it can confuse a person who is just about discovering the world, and trying to understand how the world works.

The information divide: A new class war on the horizon

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Karl’s New Manifesto By David Brooks, NY Times (relax. no login required) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.

China - The country with balls

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General business / china / India / trade / usa

China has now become too big and heavy to be intimidated by any country or bloc of countries. The latest move by China against protectionists point to this. At first Chinese textile exports swamped markets world wide, causing countries like US or EU to protest. In an attempt to compromise, the Chinese government put in place export tariffs on textile products - tariffs to bring down their own exports. US and EU went ahead anyway and imposed further tariffs of their own against Chinese imports, like they do for every other country like India.

Nikon and the dangerous world of proprietary technologies

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The menace of proprietary formats and technologies, have bitten the photography community as well. The controversy started when an Adobe engineer mentioned on their forums that Photoshop will no longer support raw/NEF images from Nikon’s new D2X and D2Hs cameras, because Nikon has started encrypting them. Nikon confirmed this, mentioning that the unencrypted raw image data can be retrieved only by using their SDK. Michael Reichmann and Juergen Specht have written a wonderful essay (The RAW Flaw), explaining the dangers of proprietary raw image formats.