WordPress Plugin: “Block Countries”
April 16, 2007 by Jason · 64 Comments
As was mentioned in my "To the jerk stealing my content" rant, I've recently developed a WordPress plugin that can be used to block certain countries from accessing a blog. After a few days of tweaking, I believe that it's finally ready for a public release. I give you... "Block Countries"!
I'm actually surprised at how quickly this plugin was completed. I started with ZERO idea as to how to build a plugin for WordPress but within a couple hours I had a bare-bones plugin that accomplished what I needed it to do. Of course, it then took most of the weekend to clean it up to the point where I would feel comfortable telling someone, "Why don't you try this out on your blog?".
To the jerk stealing my content…
April 11, 2007 by Jason · 4 Comments
You! Yeah, You! You know who you are... Cut it out!
Not only are you the biggest tool on the planet for stealing other people's content, but you don't even seem to have the decency to NOT hotlink files from my server. Bandwidth isn't free you know! If you'd only asked if you could use some of my content on your site I would have gladly said yes, provided that you gave credit where credit is due and provided a link back to the real article.
In any case, your lack of consideration has caused me to spend my lunch break today writing a plugin for Wordpress that allows me to block users from certain countries. It's a little rough around the edges right now but I'm going to polish it up over the next couple days and I'll probably release it to the public so that others can block your thieving-self...
MySQL 5.0.38 packages updated
April 6, 2007 by Jason · 14 Comments
I've rebuilt the MySQL 5.0.38 binaries in my yum repository to take care of a small bug that I introduced for new installs.
It seems that the database initialization script that runs on the first launch of mysqld (part of the 'mysql-server' package) has changed a bit between 5.0.37 & 5.0.38. Unfortunately, not noticing that, I tossed a couple of new .sql scripts in the wrong package. This, as it turns out, only affected users who were trying to do a clean installation of mysql. If you were upgrading from the stock EL4 version, from the 'centosplus' repo, or from one of my earlier releases then you weren't affected.
New Repository Addition: Subversion
April 5, 2007 by Jason · 8 Comments
There have been a few requests in the post comments and via email for a version of Subversion that works with my updated version of httpd. Well, after ripping my hair out for the past couple days trying to get around a few blocking issues, I finally built Subversion packages for 32- & 64-bit systems.
First, unlike my httpd, PHP, and MySQL builds, I wanted to stick with the version of Subversion that came with RHEL & CentOS 4. I really didn't see the point of upgrading to a newer, less tested, version on this particular package. That said, the version of Subversion that comes with EL4 didn't particularly like the version of apr that is included in my repo. That meant that a straight rebuild of the src.rpm wasn't possible (it was failing the apr-related tests during the build).
New PHP packages available by popular request
April 2, 2007 by Jason · 8 Comments
Since there have been a few requests for some of the less-common PHP modules (and because these modules are available in the 'centosplus' repo) I decided to build them and have them added to my repositories. The 32- & 64-bit repos now have packages for php-dbase, php-mcrypt, php-mhash, and php-tidy. A few dependencies for those packages popped up (such as libmcrypt, tidy, and mhash) so those have been included as well.
I've also received quite a few requests for a subversion binary package that will work with the newer version of httpd. I'm a bit busy right now, but I'd expect that I'll be able to get to those requests within the next few days.
Upgrading to MySQL 5.0.38 on RHEL and CentOS
March 26, 2007 by Jason · 14 Comments
Well, MySQL has released another Enterprise-only version. Not only are there no binary packages for the community, but they haven't even bothered to post a link to the source on the download page. Why they do this, I don't know, because it would really only take another 15 seconds to update the link to the source package on the community release page. As it stands, in order for someone to find out about this release they'd either have to be crawling the MySQL FTP site or watching the Enterprise edition release logs.
In any case, not to be left behind just because I "can't afford"/"refuse to pay" $600 (minimum) per server, I have once again built packages to provide a community release of the newest stable version of MySQL.
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apr, apr-util, & pcre Updated
March 20, 2007 by Jason · 6 Comments
The files in my yum repository (32- and 64-bit) have been updated to the newest available versions of 'apr' (1.2.8), 'apr-util' (1.2.8), and 'pcre' (7.0). 'httpd' has also been rebuilt to take advantage of the newer versions. I would suggest that all users apply these updates.
We’ve got 64-bit binaries!
March 17, 2007 by Jason · 7 Comments
Well, I've finally gotten VMWare working again. Now that I've got a suitable 64-bit development environment running, I'm finally able to compile both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries for httpd, PHP, MySQL, etc.
If you run a 64-bit system and you haven't already taken a look, now might be a good time to check out my yum repository.
Announcing the Utter Ramblings EL4 repository
March 14, 2007 by Jason · 33 Comments
If you're a regular reader of the site, you may have noticed the "Yum Repository" link at the top of the page. If so, congratulations, you're one of the first to try out a new service I'm offering on this site.
As it appears, most of the posts on this blog thus far have been how-to's on updating your RHEL & CentOS servers to use the newest versions of httpd, PHP, and MySQL. I'm still planning on creating those articles as needed, but only the source packages will be linked to the page. Binary releases for i386 (x86-64 coming soon) will now be available for easy updating through my brand new yum repository (and yes, before you ask, 'up2date' can read a yum repo).
I'm hoping that this will cut down on not only the effort required to update your systems, but also on the possible glitches that can come from updating a complex set of packages like PHP (where, with prior provided methods, you'd need to type out all of the file names that you wanted to install all at once, otherwise you'd have dependency issues with upgrading from an earlier release).
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Upgrading to MySQL 5.0.37 on RHEL and CentOS
March 9, 2007 by Jason · 11 Comments
Well, I'm back again with yet another release of MySQL. Coming only a few short days after the Enterprise release of 5.0.36 under the Monthly Rapid Update program, MySQL has decided to release 5.0.37 as a community edition.
As with my last release, this one is based on the latest Fedora src.rpm from the development tree and has been modified to use the newest source package, package new files that didn't exist before, remove patches that have been integrated into the main code-base, and, as a first for me, to add a patch to reverse part of a recent commit that breaks regression testing.
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