Secure your Wordpress Blog! Now!

Took some time last night to read through Miss 604's WordCamp Fraser Valley Liveblog to see what I'd missed. When I read Kulpreet's question, "... how many people with websites can go to www.theirwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins and actually see the list of plugins", I thought, Okay, I'll give that a try. Whoops! Lookit that! There they are! Plain as day!

First I read and applied many of the tips in the WordPress Security Whitepaper which Kulpreet mentioned in his talk. I also installed and ran the WordPress Scanner, a WP plugin (from the same guys who wrote the whitepaper) that performs a number of security checks of the site.

I also had a read through the 9 easy ways to secure your Wordpress blog.

So I am feeling a lot better now that no-one can browse my plugins directory, guess my admin user name, or any number of other nasty hacks.

You should do this too. Go. Do it now.

WordCamping in the Fraser Valley

Thanks to a tip from my co-worker Bernie, I will be attending WordCamp in Fraser Valley | BlueFur.com to get some tips and ideas for this ol' blog. Good roster of speakers lined up, too!
[Edit: didn't make it to the meeting, but Miss 604's liveblog of the event is almost as good as being there]

THE most rational argument for global climate change action, period

I was a bit put off by Al Gore's fear-mongering, high-rise graphs. He tried to scare us into change, while peering pensively into his MacBook, or whatever model it was (p.s. - Al was an Apple board member at the time!).

Meanwhile, this anonymous guy makes the most compelling argument for action I've ever heard. No rhetoric, no fear, just listen to it & you'll be spreading the word, just as I am:

Not just Linux books

Although it's titled Free On-line Linux Technical Books and Tutorials, there's lots here of interest to Windows folk as well:

• Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++ Volume 1 and Volume 2 - Practical Programming
• C# Essentials
• Visual Basic Essentials
  

Produce, or consume, produce, or consume...

The Single Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself

How to get Vista to show the "Command Prompt Here" on a Folder List

For many years, on many PCs running various versions of Windows NT, 2000 and XP, applying the "Command Prompt Here" Powertoy was one of the first things I would do to customize the vanilla Windows environment (i.e. make it usable). Right-click a folder, select "DOS Prompt Here" or "Command Prompt Here" from the context menu, and voila, a DOS box opens, set to the folder you clicked on:



I was happy to find the same feature already baked into Windows Vista: hold down the shift key, right-mouse click on any folder in the view pane, then select "Open Command Window Here" from the context menu:



But try the same trick on a folder in the Folder Tree, sorry, the command's not there:


For some reason, in their wisdom the Microsoft UI engineers chose to omit the command from this particular menu.

Quite by chance, I discovered that the choice is available on the File menu in Vista, but it's not invoked in the same way: instead, select a folder in folder list, hold down the shift key then left-click (i.e. normal click) the File menu:



Vista then displays "Open Command Window Here" at the top of the menu. Okay, happy to have it back, even if it's in a place I didn't expect...

Deleting the .ncb file fixes Intellisense Crash in VS 2008 Express

Argh! Visual Studio 2008 Express was crashing every time I right-clicked on any code belonging to the C++ template class declaration I was writing for my C++ course assignment. Googling "2008 intellisense crash" turned up a link to an MSDN forum discussion about VS crash when updating intellisense, wherein one of the posters suggested deleting the .ncb file. Before launching my project for the nth time, I deleted the .ncb file. Voila! Intellisense works again.