So I put it off for a few days.

Today I decided to try it.

The automatic upgrade program is called preupgrade, presumably because it downloads everything you need in order to prepare for the upgrade. It downloads everything while your system is up and running, then sets it up so that when you reboot, it will launch the installer. It installs everything, makes the changes, then reboots into the newly upgraded system.

And then it’s done.

It’s network aware, and works through yum, so it will actually take into account both third-party repositories and anything that’s been updated since the new release. It actually went out to livna.org RPM Fusion and picked up the appropriate NVIDIA display drivers.

Download while you work. Reboot. Wait. Done.

The only snafu I ran into was that it removed my copy of the Flash plugin, but I think I was using the experimental 64-bit one anyway, so it’s not terribly surprising.

I get the impression that Ubuntu has had a similarly smooth upgrade process for a while. And after my experiences moving from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10, I was seriously considering jumping ship. (Hazards of living on the bleeding edge.) But it looks like I won’t have to.

Now I just have to find time to play around and see what’s new!

The built-in plugin installer is very convenient as well.

The Flash 10 upload bug is fixed!

As with Speed Force, I’ve dropped the plugin I was using for avatars in favor of the built-in feature. It still generates Wavatars for those of you who leave your email address but don’t have Gravatars, but it seems to generate them differently, so you get a new and different monster.

All my plugins work as far as I can tell (official plugin compatibility list), but there are a couple of glitches:

WP-Super-Cache doesn’t seem to be deleting expired pages on schedule. And the spot for the convenient clear-cache-now buttons for that and WP Widget Cache doesn’t exist anymore, so if I do need to clear them out I need to go to the plugin’s settings page — which is what I had to do until a month ago anyway, so no big deal.

Also, Twitter Tools doesn’t seem to be able to pre-check the “Notify Twitter about this post” checkbox. But the important stuff works.

I’m still getting used to the new admin layout, but the only thing that really bugs me is there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to get to scheduled posts from the dashboard.

Other than that, so far so good. As always, let me know if anything seems broken.

As usual, let me know if you see any weirdness.

Then I discovered that some of the display problems actually were the fault of the monitor.

So I went out and bought a new monitor while Fedora was installing, and I took the opportunity to go widescreen.

My criteria were simple: The resolution and physical size both had to be as big or bigger than the old one (17″, 1280×1024), and it had to be under $300. That meant at minimum a 22″ display at 1680×1050, and I found a Hannspree 229HBP for about $190.

There was a Dell right next to it, same size & resolution and comparable specs, and the Best Buy employee had been talking both of them up. The Dell was on sale for $290. I asked what the difference was. He thought about it for a few seconds. “Well, this one [the Hannspree] does run a little bit hotter. But mostly it’s just the name.” Thank you, Best Buy employee whose name I’ve forgotten, for helping me save $100.

The biggest difference, aside from actually having room to show both the toolbox and document windows on GIMP, is that I don’t maximize windows anymore. Not that I maximized apps that often before, not counting the stuck-in-low-res period. I’ll occasionally run a video or slideshow fullscreen, but the only program I regularly maximize is my email client, and that’s because I can put it in three-column mode (Folder tree on the left, mailbox listing in the middle, message content on the right).

Something to watch out for: At first I left the monitor off-center, because there wasn’t enough room on my desk for it. I figured as long as I worked mostly on the right part of the screen I’d be fine. But I ended up having neck problems shortly afterward, and Katie suggested I check the placement of the monitor. I shifted things around so I could center it, then set it on top of an Amazon box to raise it a couple of inches, and the sore neck cleared up.

I’ve only run into two problems (not counting the placement): There’s one dead pixel, but it’s off in a corner so that it’s not really an issue. I almost didn’t notice it at first when I was still setting things up, because the default GNOME layout has a Mac-style ever-present menu bar, and it falls right on the edge. Usually it ends up either on the edge of a window border or lost in the wallpaper noise.

The other problem: the built-in speakers pretty much suck, but I had external speakers already, so again: no big deal.

* It stopped displaying any resolution past 1024×768. I could tell it wasn’t the monitor because it was perfectly happy to show another computer at 1280×1024. And not the drivers or OS because I had the same problem booting from a LiveCD. And not the video card because plugging in another one didn’t solve it. This was particularly frustrating since it was an LCD monitor, so running at less than native resolution made everything blurry. Still, I put off replacing the mobo for months since it’s such a pain to do.

It now shows two lists: one for updates, and one for new software. This takes care of one of the three easy steps that I culled from discussions back in March:

1. Separate updates from new software and label them clearly. Done.
2. Leave the new stuff unchecked by default. Bzzzt! Try again!
3. When run automatically, don’t pop up a notice more than once for each piece of not-installed software. [Edit:] Done.

Unfortunately the new software is still checked by default, but one hopes that the separate list would be enough to make people stop, look, and make a conscious choice as to whether or not to install it.

I don’t know yet how it handles new software when run automatically, or whether they’ve made the ignore option apply to an entire piece of software rather than a specific installer. I’ve taken iTunes off the ignore list and set it to check daily so that I can find out. [Edit:] I haven’t seen it pop up in the last 24 hours, and according to eWeek, “Apple will now only prompt the user if there are critical security updates available.”

Apple Software Update on a system with up-to-date Safari and QuickTime, but no iTunes.

At work, I have QuickTime and Safari for development purposes. I don’t have iTunes. I don’t need it. I don’t even have speakers hooked up to the computer. But every time a new version gets released, it shows up in the Apple Software Update list, and I have to tell it to ignore it until the next time they update iTunes.

Now that Safari for Windows is out of beta, it’s doing the same with Safari*. And people are complaining. People like John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, who sees it as an anti-competitive measure that dilutes users’ trust in software updaters.

Personally, I think there is a problem, but I hardly expected it to turn into the firestorm it has, with Asa Dotzler, c|net, digg, Techmeme, [edit] and now Slashdot, [edit 2] Daring Fireball and Wired (it just keeps going!), and dozens hundreds of commenters entering the fray.

There’s a simple solution, and it’s one of those rare cases where Microsoft gets something right in their software that Apple gets wrong.

1. Create a separate section for software that isn’t already installed, and label it clearly. It can be in the same list, as long as there’s a separation and a heading.
2. Leave the new stuff unchecked by default.
3. Added: If set to check automatically, don’t pop up a notice more than once for each piece of not-installed software.

That’s it. Done. Apple still gets to leverage their installer to make people aware of their other apps, but there’s no chance of someone accidentally installing Safari (or iTunes) by accident because they didn’t read the list too closely. Take a look at Microsoft Update and how they (currently) offer Silverlight. It’s in a list of optional software, and it’s not checked until you choose it.

That’s all this really comes down to: sensible defaults and proper labeling.

*I have to admit getting a kick out of the title, “Apple pushes Safari on Windows via iTunes updater,” because my problem is that they’re pushing iTunes on Windows via their Safari updater. It’s a matter of perspective.

The closest thing to a problem was just that I didn’t know I had to run the tag importer manually. I assumed it would be run during the upgrade. No biggie, I went to Manage/Import, ran the importer for Bunny’s Technorati Tags, and waited a few seconds. (I already knew I’d have to adjust the theme.)

I guess fewer things can go wrong if it waits for you to tell it which tag format to import, the one time you actually need it to, instead of having the updater try to guess between 5+ structures (and no structure!) every single time you update for the foreseeable future.

Anyway, I’ll probably be trying out some new themes over the next few days, so don’t be surprised if the site changes appearance wildly. It seems about time for a change.

Theme Testing:

• Blue Box, with a custom logo & splash image (one of our photos from Waikoloa) & some minor tweaks. (Sep. 24)
• Still tweaking Blue Box. Trying to condense the extraneous splash image with the title bar. (Sep. 25)
• I think I’m going to stick with this theme for now. I’ve added some workarounds for IE6 to (mostly) handle the changes I made. (Sep. 26)

To do: small-screen compat, put recent links back in the sidebar, fix the duplicate IDs in the Links widget. Maybe clean up the 60-item list of monthly archives. (Sep. 27)

• Cleaned up the giant archive list via Flexo Archive Widget. Unlike others I’ve tried, this one won’t hide all the links if JavaScript is disabled. (Sep. 29)

Last Friday saw the release of PHP 5.2.4, on the Friday before—in the US, anyway—a 3-day weekend. This morning Apache released security updates for all three supported branches of their webserver. And this evening—yes, Friday evening—WordPress 2.2.3 came out.

Which reminds me, I’m going to have to start looking at the betas for WordPress 2.3. I think it’ll be a good time for a redesign. Maybe pick a new theme and tweak that one, maybe try my hand at actually designing one. I wonder if the new tagging system can import Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

1. Case: You have to take everything out, completely disassembling the machine.
2. Motherboard: Disconnect every data cable, pull out every card, and sometimes even move the spacers that connect it to the case.
3. Power Supply: Disconnect power from every drive and from the motherboard, and possibly move stuff out of the way so you can get at the power supply.

Then, of course, you need to do the whole thing in reverse.

One reason I haven’t upgraded my processor lately (a simple procedure by itself) is that whenever I do, it seems to need a new socket, which means getting a new motherboard. Which also needs new memory…

I also upgraded the comments preview plugin, which now uses the actual post+comment page to show you the preview instead of showing a page that’s almost the same, but sorted in reverse.

At some point I need to test current versions of WP-Cache again, and see if WordPress’ internal cache works with PHP5 yet. And maybe it’s time to try a new theme. I’ve been tweaking this one pretty much since WP 2.0 came out.

It turns out there’s been a known problem since WordPress 2.1 was released two months ago. Some plugin hooks have changed, and plugins that used to only get called during post editing are also getting called during comment publishing. I grabbed an updated version of the plugin, and it seems okay now.

Oddly, most (but not all) tags survived unscathed during the two months running earlier 2.1 releases. It’s only since moving to 2.1.3 that it’s been consistent. Oh, well, at least it prompted me to find the fix.

Things worth noting:

• The SVN source that the developers use was not altered.
• Older versions, such as 2.0, don’t seem to have been affected.
• If you downloaded 2.1.1 when it was first released, it’s probably okay.
• 2.1.2 also includes a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability discovered a few days ago, so it’s worth updating anyway.

I still had the tar archive of 2.1.1 from when I grabbed it the day of the release, so I compared its contents to the 2.1.2 archive. The two files mentioned in the announcement, feed.php and theme.php, aren’t any different, confirming that the initial release was unaffected. That’s also where I saw the changes for that XSS bug.

*sigh* It’s always something…

After fixing it manually—again—I’m still getting broken pages and seeing this in the error logs:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function get_row() on a non-object in /path/to/wp-includes/functions.php on line 211

Is it just my imagination, or does no one at WordPress actually test it with current versions of PHP?

Update: Switched back to WordPress 2.1 and it’s working again.

Update 2: For some reason, diffing a plain 2.1 against a plain 2.1.1, then applying the patch to my site, seems to have resulted in a working site, even though uploading the new files and manually fixing things didn’t. Presumably I have another manual fix in there that I didn’t label.

Update 3: I’ve re-uploaded the new files, which resulted (as expected) in a broken site with the fatal PHP errors on get() in cache.php on line 32. So I re-applied the manual fixes from that bug which wasn’t actually fixed in 2.1.1. And now it seems to be working.

I’m still seeing the errors on get_row() in functions.php, but they don’t seem to be associated with broken pages. A little further digging and they seem to have started on Monday, with the upgrade to PHP 5.2.1. Spot checking the error times against the access log suggests it’s only happening with hits from bots, so there may be something going on with Bad Behavior. Update 4: Strike that, it just happened on the preview for this post. GRRRR.

Update 5: Found the problem! I’d forgotten the other change I made on Monday, which was to enable WordPress’ internal cache in wp-config.php:

define(’ENABLE_CACHE’, true );

That explains why it would seem to work at first, and then stop working. At first, WordPress would be pulling info from the database, but then it would start pulling it from the cache instead… and something about the way that functionality works doesn’t agree with PHP 5.2. The first instance of the error coincides closely with the timestamp on the config file.

So the old fix still works…unless you’re using WordPress’ internal data cache.

Update 6: On a related note, I tried Reiner Saddey’s fix for getting WP-Cache to remember the content-type on feeds, but it had the same problem my fix did, which was to break conditional gets (it would send a full 200 OK response, with the entire feed, instead of just a 304 Not Modified code). And with something that gets requested as often as a feed, you really want conditional gets to work.

According to the announcement, WP 2.1 should be out by the end of the month. Looks like it’s almost time to see how many of my customizations will work with the new version.

It’s also October, the month leading up to Halloween.

I hereby declare today to be Pumpkin Patch Tuesday.

Update: Mozilla’s Josh Aas has carved the perfect pumpkin to go with this declaration.