JeffreyBarke.net

At http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/dig/, you can download Windows 2000, XP and Vista binaries for dig and WHOIS. The page also includes installation instructions and examples of how to query the DNS with dig.

WordPress 2.6.1 was released yesterday. This is a maintenance release only, and, if you're happy using 2.6, you can continue to use it.

• Learn more
• Full list of over 60 fixes
• Full diff and list of changed
• Download 2.6.1

I found it surprising that in a new study authored by IBM, Apple was rated the number one software most vulnerable to attack, ahead of Microsoft!

I also found it curious that Webmonkey's post (where I read about the study) was titled "Apple, Microsoft Top List of Most Vulnerable Software," which, although true, implies that Microsoft is number two. This isn't true: Microsoft is number three, after Joomla!

Unfortunately, the report notes two worrisome trends:

• The number of vulnerabilities in our software is increasing.
• Attacks have largely shifted from operating systems to web applications, hence the inclusion of Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal.

Via Webmonkey. Read the entire report in PDF format.

Sweet—can't wait for this!

From Signal vs. Noise:

Outpost (coming in August 2008 from Morfunk) promises to let you manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone: "Take notes away from the office. Delegate tasks from the train. Check on deadlines. Upload photos to projects. Anywhere."

Sign up to get notified when it launches.

Working with Microsoft SQL Server for the first time in two years, so a few notes to self:

1. Escape single quotes with two single quotes, not with addslashes().
2. @@TEXTSIZE returns the current value of the TEXTSIZE option of the SET statement, which specifies the maximum length, in bytes, of text or image data that a SELECT statement returns.

An example of using TEXTSIZE:

SELECT @@TEXTSIZE
SET TEXTSIZE 2048
SELECT @@TEXTSIZE

Which results in:

------------------------
64512

————————
2048

From Journey to SQL Authority with Pinal Dive and MSDN.

Version 2.6 "Tyner," named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Read all about the updates at the WordPress blog and download 2.6 here.

My favorite new feature in WP 2.6 is support for Gears: WP uses the LocalServer module to speed up the loading of pages by several seconds!

I just finished upgrading myself!

As Jan Odvarko notes, "I was surprised how many Firebug extensions … exist out there." Check out his list of 12 extensions at http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/list-of-firebug-extensions/. All extensions include a brief summary of what they do, a screen capture and a link to the download page.

Two that I use are YSlow and Odvarko's own Firecookie.. YSlow analyzes Web pages and determines why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites. Firecookie makes it possible to view and manage cookies within the familiar Firebug UI.

I'm an avid user of Basecamp, but had never heard of ProofHQ until I read this 37signals blog post: ProofHQ and Basecamp: Offer your project team richer review and approval tools. It seems ProofHQ is a "web-based design collaboration, proofing and approval tool for brands, agencies, designers, print and production" which can be integrated with Basecamp. Cool!

I just signed up for a free account with ProofHQ and am going to attempt an integration.