I’m currently at Blogworld 2009, learning about the latest trends about new media and blogging.  I am taking a break from the usual system administration and web programming posts. The highlight of the first day of the conference was the keynote by Chris Brogan. He had a lot of interesting points with what to do with your blog — how to set it up, branding, extending the platform, and the importance of trust.  Social media is evolving. Chris brought up the point that long form articles (old school newspaper articles) are on the way out. The reason why Twitter …

There appears to be an issue with cookies on Windows Safari that expires at UTC time and not according to the time zone on your machine.

I tested my PHP code

setcookie(“mycookie”, $sample_session_variable, time()+10000,’/mydirectory/’,'mysite.com’);

I verified that the cookie expires at the correct time for the following browsers

* Firefox 3.5
* Internet Explorer 8
* Safari (Apple OS X)

I recently installed Mailman with Exim4, which was a challenge considering all the manual configuration you have to do. I found a few guides on the install, but they didn’t seem to be “complete” enough to get the system working. Turns out, the biggest challenge was Exim4. The configuration files are confusing, especially since there are two sets of configuration files.

When coding your pages with Javascript/AJAX/CSS, one thing to look out for is the compatibility with your organization’s remote access device. One of the devices I have to consider is the Cisco WebVPN product. It has compatibility issues with things such as the @charset “UTF-8″; and @import command in CSS files. By default jQuery doesn’t work with WebVPN. In this post, I have a fix for making jQuery work with WebVPN.

VMWARE has two “free” options to get started into virtualization. VMWARE Server 2.0 and VMWARE ESXi. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. Notably, VMWARE server will run on many different operating systems (Windows/Linux/etc.) while the VMWARE ESXi is limited to certain hardware since it runs on bare metal (has its own hypervisor). No OS is required to run ESXi. Read more to see the comparison review.

Did you recently have a trial version of Office 2007 on your computer and decided to uninstall it? Often, the uninstaller in the trial version of Office will break. This leaves Office 2007 permanently on your computer, in an unusable state. I had this happen to a client’s computer today and had to run some tools in order to get Office 2007 reinstalled.

When I tried to install Office 2007 “over” the trial edition, the installer would get a vague error saying “Office 2007 encountered an error during setup.” Read more for the solution.

One thing I’ve encountered with Awstats is adding in old apache log files. This is useful if you are migrating data from servers. By default, Awstats will ignore ALL past dates in the log that occur before the most recent log entry date. In order to avoid Awstats from finding the “recent log entry date”, you will need move all Awstats cached files into a separate folder.

Here’s a quick tip to make cleaner looking URLs in CodeIgniter PHP framework. By default, if you have an application, the path of the application usually ends after index.php. Using Apache RewriteEngine, you can make cleaner looking URLs. You can have something similar to mysite.com/cigniter/MyApplication instead of mysite.com/cigniter/index.php/MyApplication

Here’s a few useful tools I have found for removing spyware, adware, popups from Windows computers. I recently had to help a client with a really bad case of popups and trojan horse software. McAfee and Symantec are good for catching viruses, but not so strong at cleaning up spyware and adware. Symantec Endpoint was good at detecting the threats, but not really good at cleaning them up.

So, what free programs are good right now for cleaning up spyware and adware?

1) Malwarebytes 1.4 – This is the best free anti spyware/adware program out there. I give it a 9 out of …

WordPress 2.8.2 has been released. This affects both WordPress and WordPress MU. I recommend upgrading your current version since it contains a security fix.

WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site.

For more details, visit:
http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/wordpress-2-8-2/

You can automatically upgrade WordPress within your control panel, or manually upgrade via:
http://wordpress.org/download/

WordPress MU download:
http://mu.wordpress.org/download/