February 14th, 2008

WordPress API Bug

Some users of the Breadcrumb NavXT plug-in have noticed that upon trying the enter the administrative interface they are greeted by an error. Earlier version presented a “Bad user, no cookie for you” error, which should only be seen by malicious individuals. As of 2.0.1 this error was refined to letting the user know that part of the WordPress API on their blog is not working correctly. In particular, the get_currentuserinfo() function is malfunctioning. This is due to a shortcoming in WordPress in which the developers have know about and passed off as a plug-in problem since version 2.2. The cause is when WordPress is first installed, the default user that is created is set as an administrator, yet it has no usermeta in the database, hence has no user_level. This problem seems to be resolved by the upgrade functions in WordPress when upgrading from one version to another. Hence, fresh WordPress installs will have this bug, while older/upgraded ones will not. The best solution is to under the Users section and edit the user that is used primarily and make sure administrator is selected under role, then save. That should make the problem go away.

Tom Klingenberg has been working with me to fix some things up with the Breadcrumb NavXT. Our collaborated work will be present in version 2.0.2, which features several bug fixes. Included in 2.0.2 is the official German language file for Breadcrumb NavXT. Other major reworkings of the administrative interface will be included in 2.1.0. For all the users out there that need localization support, it is fully working in 2.0. thanks to the work of Tom. If there are any polyglots out there who could or have translated this plug-in, via the .po/.mo system, and would like their work to be included as part of the official package, leave a comment below. You can take a sneak peak at the 2.0.2 code by clicking the “Breadcrumb NavXT Latest Build” download link, be aware that the version number on this code may be incorrect and some things may be broken.

Lastly, anyone out there still using Breadcrumb Navigation XT of any version, please upgrade to Breadcrumb NavXT soon. On the 19th I will no longer offer any support for Breadcrumb Navigation XT and it’s project page may mysteriously vanish.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

February 9th, 2008

SMS Spammer

Posted by John Havlik in Enemy of the Spammers

Didn’t see that one coming. Now that proxy dialers exist on the internet, it’s no surprise that some internet to SMS services exist now. The sad thing is they are being abused at the expense of the message recipient.

Back on the 24th of January, a spammer by the name of Giovanni@instantmash.com sent a text message to my cellphone advertising getwellwontyoust.com. Usually e-mail spam’s only cost is time and bandwidth, in which for the end user bandwidth is usually unlimited. For SMS, the cost is 50 cents per a message received, plus an additional 50 cents for connection (with Verizon as SMS is not part of my plan as I don’t text people). Luckily, I believe Verizon will be removing the charges as it was a Spam, otherwise I’ll use the WHOIS information for both the spammed address and the sender and send them a bill.

A quick Google search reveals that istantmash.com has been suspended and that getwellwontyoust.com is a sex spam site. Looks like the latter is registered to a one Natalie Wood, of Sacramento California. Natale Wood is most likely as pseudo name as the fax number is invalid (area code 555) and I have doubts on the legitimacy of the provide phone number of (916) 742-3301. Under federal law and a precedent set in the class action lawsuit Shen v. Distributive Networks LLC. No. 06 C 4403 the offender may owe me and any one else he or she SMS spammed up to 150USD in damages.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 26th, 2008

Back to Berry Basics

Posted by John Havlik in Word* > Themes

I’ve reverted things back to the original Berry theme. Since I have not received word from a client about a non-web project that I’m working on, some work on mockups for Cran-Berrry will be worked on today. Later this weekend a major improvement to Attachment NavXT may be made and will become available for public download.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 19th, 2008

Breadcrumb NavXT 2.0.0

Posted by John Havlik in Word* > Plugins

¡Acebo ideomas diversos Batman! Si mi Espanol es un poco malo ahora, lo siento. With this new version many of the problems involving languages other than English should be resolved. A new filter at the end of the plug-in should hook into the WordPress Polyglot plug-in. Full support of the gettext localization standards used in WordPress has been added for the Administration interface. The documentation was not very clear on how to implement it, so it may or may not work, if someone can let me know if it works or not, or has worked with this system before and can help get it working that would be appreciated. Improvements over the old 1.x branch of Breadcrumb Navigation XT include hierarchical category support, rewritten core that should be easier to maintain, and total removal of custom wpdb queries. Keep in mind that this release is very much like the KDE 4.0 release. Some features may still be broken, and I’m planning subsequent bug-fix releases as bugs are reported.

There is a new, and separate page for Breadcrumb NavXT, file all bug reports in the comments of that page. The documentation is not ready yet, however the old Breadcrumb Navigation XT documentation should cover the bulk of the features in Breadcrumb NavXT.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

January 18th, 2008

Oops, I Broke It

Posted by John Havlik in Word*

It seems when I was playing around with Compiz, Compiz-Fusion, Emerald, and Avant Window Navigator, something in Gnome broke, now nautilus won’t load. I did however get some work done on Breadcrumb NavXT. Nautilus was not the only thing broken, poEdit broke as well. With poEdit broken I could not produce the .po file needed for the localization of the administration interface. Thus, I had planed on releasing something last night, which will be pushed off until tonight. I can’t say if it will be 2.0.0 or RC 1, right now I’ll refer to it as RC 1. I’ll do an actual release tag in the SVN for this release, and hopefully it will work nicely with the plug-in update notification built into WordPress 2.3.

One last word on RC 1, I know some documents may have stated that there will be uninstallation support for it. Since I in particularly do not like the current plug-in for doing that, I’ve decided to wait until WordPress decided to include it into their API (where it belongs I believe). What I don’t like about the current method is that it adds more work on the part of plug-in developers. The developer should not have to register with a separate entity the wp_options that it sets. Any of the values set using the set_option method should automatically register to the generating plug-in, as should any new entries created by update_option. Then the uninstallation part would be occur after the plug-in is deactivated, an uninstall button should pop-up, which will remove all of the DB entries used solely by the plug-in. The only entities that should have to be registered is any custom db tables created by the plug-in. Thus, 2.0 will not support this, and I will wait until things mature a bit before adding support in a future version of Breadcrumb NavXT which will correspond to the release of WordPress 2.5.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]