There’s an annoying issue with the latest version of WordPress. If you use the XML-RPC interface to post blog posts (anyone using Windows Live Writer, w.bloggar, or any other desktop blogging software) you’ll notice that < and > tags are stripped from the output. This means formatting in posts will be screwed up, and you’ll see bits of HTML tags everywhere. If your paragraphs suddenly end with /p, then this is probably the bug which is causing it.

The cause of the problem is libxml2 version 2.7.0 and newer, which for some reason changes the way that some bits of text are stripped. Libxml2 is used by PHP to handle XML parsing.

There are a few ways to fix this, wait for the new version of PHP (it’s fixed in 5.2.9), downgrade your copy of libxml2 to a version before 2.7.0, or hack WordPress so it won’t get libxml2 to parse angle brackets. The third option is the easiest.

This patch will fix your XMLRPC issues. The only thing is you will need to update the code to check for libxml version 2.7.3 as well. This can be done by adding || to the end of the lines ending with 2.7.2 and adding a line underneath, "LIBXML_DOTTED_VERSION == ‘2.7.3′ ". Re-upload the new class-ixr.php and rss.php and you’ll be good to go.

–Ben

Well, it’s a bit pathetic that it’s taken until nearly the start of February for a new post to appear here. Sorry about that, I guess I got kinda lazy.

Anyway, I’ve updated a few things on the site here. Firstly, I’m running a much newer version of WordPress which isn’t as exploitable as the version I was running before. Secondly, I’m now on new hosting (thanks Stubbers!). I also decided while I was upgrading WordPress to tidy a few things up, get rid of useless plugins and stale site content, and add a few things. New additions include social networking buttons for Digg and such at the bottom of each post, and Gravatars. Another addition is Feedburner, which will give me some nice stats on my readers, and what pages they both found interesting. You don’t need to update your RSS feeds, they will redirect to Feedburner automatically, but if you subscribe now it’ll go to Feedburner anyway.

Let me know if anything on the site is broken… also, I am definitely going to start blogging again as soon as I have something interesting to write about.

–Ben

If you’re a Year 12 student in the Mildura area, and still trying to decide if you’re going to go to university, and when, and where… you might be interested in this: Swinburne University is holding an information session for Year 12 students who are thinking about going to university next year (or the year after if you choose to have a gap year). There will be people on hand to answer your questions about the courses Swinburne has to offer, the logistics of moving to Melbourne to study, living on campus, and university life in general. I’m going to be one of the people answering questions.

If you’re still a bit tentative about what university you’re thinking of going to, you should consider Swinburne. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of people don’t even think of choosing Swinburne when filling out their VTAC forms (as most people just tend to go to the University of Melbourne or Monash because of their reputation). This is too bad, because Swinburne is actually a really good university, depending on what you’re thinking of choosing for your career path.  There are a myriad of reasons to choose Swinburne, but since I don’t want this post to read like a brochure, I won’t start listing them here…but I’ll be elaborating on them at the session.

So, if you’re interested in checking out what Swinburne has to offer, or if you just want to come along to see the guy behind this blog, come to the Mildura Senior College Library on Thursday the 11th of December at 7:00PM. It should be good.

–Ben

Here’s an interesting article on how the IBM TrackPoint was developed, how it was dismissed and forgotten about, and how it suddenly became the feature that made IBM ThinkPads the best notebooks on the market. For those who don’t know, the TrackPoint is the pointing stick found on IBM, Toshiba, the business Dells, and a few other notebooks:

An interesting fact about the cliTrackPoint: initially it was integrated into some IBM desktop keyboards, before they realised it would be excellent in a notebook. IBM stopped making desktop keyboards with nipTrackPoints, but they later reappeared when UniComp bought out the keyboard manufacturing part of IBM (well, Lexmark at that time, since IBM spun off its peripherals business to Lexmark). They still make the excellent Model M-style clacky keyboards. I’m considering getting one, because they are really nice to type on. Anyway, their EnduraPro model is an old-school clacky keyboard .. PLUS a TrackPoint. It could very well be the best keyboard ever made. If all goes well I could be getting one for Christmas … but I’m still trying to decide whether to go for the Das Keyboard instead. Meh, i’ll figure it out.   

–Ben