When Knitting Was a Manly Art

Very interesting optical illusion. Are A and B the same color. Yes, of course they are. Explanation here.

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As some may know, there was a major problem with earlier versions of WordPress that allowed a registered user to gain administrative access and place a backdoor into the database.

Since I was way behind in updating, I was vulnerable. The upgrade was successful, but I’ve decided as a precaution to remove all external, registered users and disallow any further registrations. The blog is completely usable without registration and nothing gained by registering.

Obligatory Knitting Content: working on a pair of toe-up socks from Cat Bordhi’s newest book. Cast-on toe using local knitting maven, Judy Becker’s invention. Any easy cast-on, but I’m not fully happy with my implementation of it. Pictures when I’ve made real progress.

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Seeif this works.

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Disabled plugins and added them back one at a time, limiting to stuff I think I really need. Still haven’t found the culprit, but things are working without database error. Now need to massage the theme until I’m happy with it again. Considering I upgraded from version 2.1x to 2.8x, things went much smoother than I expected.

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Back up with latest Wordpress. And it ain’t pretty. At least I can still post. Much work to do.

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Another busy week. Not much on the little sweater. Did pick up stitches for second sleeve and added a couple rounds.

Having way too much fun with my new iPhone. Phone, music *and* the internet at all times. What more could a geek asked for.

Since I’m getting fiber urges again, I’m planning on attending Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival this year. First time in a few years and I’ll only be to be there on Saturday, September 26, but I’ll probably be out on the lawn knitting on and off during the day. And I’ll probably be bringing my Gearhart sock knitter along and see if I can find someone to help get it working or maybe point me at someone to restore it.

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Last night we had a little weather incident. Lots of lightning, a couple of near strikes, loss of power. Computer came back up this morning, but when I got home this evening, I found that drive one of my two drive desktop system was making very nasty noises. Very nasty noises. It’s dead and the system won’t boot. But…. With a Linux rescue disk, I’ve confirmed that the second drive is good and that’s where most of my data is and as far as I can tell, all is well with that drive. Unfortunately, I can’t easily get at the drive. I’ll need to replace the primary drive and figure out a way to get to boot and access the second drive. Meantime, I’ll be using my laptop.

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I use Firefox for my web browser on my Linux box. I’ve tried most of the various browsers available and always seem to come back to it.

One of the things I like is the ability to extend the capabilities of Firefox with “Extensions”. One of my latest extensions is Smiley Xtra plugin. It allows me to add any of more than 2000 smilies to my blog or anyplace else I post regularly.

Light snow this morning, but I took another walk around the yard anyway. Laurie asked for a close up of a filbert/hazelnut male blossom. If you look closely, you can see each of the individual flowers down the length of male catkin.

And just a the top of the male catkins are the *little* female flowers that will become the nut. Just below center are the tiny red petals of the female.

And bit more of the yellow crocus. Still nothing open yet, but a few more buds enjoying the chilly sunshine.

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A young lady with much insight, who writes about the web, blogging and WordPress in particular has put up her list of Things She Wants Gone From the Web in 2007.

While you might not agree about with everything on her list, if *most* were gone by the end of 2007 the web would be a much nicer place. *I’d* love to see everything on her list gone, but then I’m just a crotchety old fart….

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I’ve upgraded one of the two tools I use on my WordPress blog to block comment spam.

Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts that attempts to block spam bots from even getting access to the comment area of my site. Unfortunately, it sometimes blocks real users. If you’re a real person and you are blocked from adding comments, please let me know. There’s a mailto: link in the left hand column in the ‘Links’ section.

Between Akismet and Bad Behavior, I’m preventing more than 1,000 spam attempts each week. Less than a dozen have managed to bypass the filters and actually get posted, but none have survived more that a few hours before being deleted.

Technorati Tags: Geek

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