Technical stuff about Perl, Linux and computing & technology in general.
GNU Screen is a little-used but very powerful utility, allowing you to do more from a Linux console, whether from a “real” console or logged in to another machine via SSH.
It is “a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes (typically interactive shells)“.
This is a simple guide to getting started with GNU Screen.
Uh-oh. According to this security announcement from WordPress, a server hosting WordPress downloads was recently compromised, and a cracker modified the 2.1.1 download, adding code in wp-includes/theme.php and/or wp-includes/feed.php.
The announcement states:
It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.
This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.
If you downloaded 2.1.1 in the last few days, you may have a compromised version. However, for safety, even if you downloaded it before then, it’s probably worth upgrading anyway. Get 2.1.2 from the WordPress download page, then follow the upgrade instructions.
Continue reading WordPress 2.1.1 considered dangerous, upgrade now!
I’ve now taken over maintainership of Lyrics::Fetcher Perl module on CPAN">Lyrics::Fetcher, and just released version 0.3.2 to CPAN.
Lyrics::Fetcher is a CPAN Perl module to fetch song lyrics from the web. Lyrics::Fetcher itself provides a consistent interface, and can use a variety of “fetchers” – various modules in the namespace Lyrics::Fetcher::*