WordPress Child Themes

I’ve been using WordPress for this site for about 6 years and am generally quite happy with the fact that it “just works”.  I’ve been using a simple default theme (Twenty Twelve) for much of that time as well.  Recently I’ve been trying to be a bit more active on the blog and there are few (very minor) issues and personal taste differences I have with the theme which I’ve hacked out it of it.

I was doing some reading on how best to integrate SmugMug with the site since I’m on the verge of switching from Flickr for my personal photos and while I was doing this reading I discovered that there is a correct way of modifying themes for WP!  It’s actually quite elegant and avoids several potential problems.

I give you WordPress Child Themes.

World of Warships

A while back I joined the World of Warships alpha test.  Unfortunately part of the deal is that I can’t say anything about the testing prior the the beta phase that recently started, but now that the NDA is lifted, I just wanted to say that it’s been pretty fun so far.  The game itself seems to be in fairly good shape considering that it’s still under heavy development.

One of the best things about closed testing games is that the community tends to be much more pleasant than the average players in most online games these days.

I’m not as much of a gamer as I once was, but these semi-realistic shooters (Wargaming also makes the popular World of Tanks game as well as the sadly less popular Warplanes game as well) are good fun and a pretty decent mix of realism and playability.  This means there are plenty of departures from historical accuracy, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a certain sense of immersion that you get.  The last time I had this much fun in a naval game was probably during one of the first few Silent Hunter games.

So far there are ships from the Japanese and US navies implemented in the game and eventually all of the major WWII navies are supposed to be implemented.  Maybe I’ll see you in-game!

My Favourite Thing About Spring

I woke up this morning and looked out the window and it struck me that the weather is finally nice enough that I can wear my favourite sneakers on my walk to work. Time to put the winter clogs away and be a 7 year old for a little while.

Whee! I get to wear my favourite sneakers!

Modifying the login text on Debian (or Ubuntu)

I’m getting back into the Debian world after years of being pretty much a RHEL guy and I’ve bee dealing with an annoying “feature” which I was at a loss to resolve. Every time I log into the EC2 instance that this server runs on, I get a “No mail.” message which clutters up my login scripts and shouldn’t be there since I’m not receiving mail on this instance in the first place.

Today I finally decided I’d get to the bottom of it since it clearly wasn’t coming from a login script and even though it’s a minor thing it bugs me and I find it somewhat distracting!

It turns out that Debian and it’s derivatives have what is a rather elegant, if initially opaque, way of setting up the login info: it’s managed in a PAM module for the SSHD which can be found at /etc/pam.d/sshd.

Not only does PAM load a module that checks mail by default, it also does a couple of cool things with the MOTD info (this is where the kernel version info comes from when you login).

Here’s the relevant section:

# Print the message of the day upon successful login.
# This includes a dynamically generated part from /run/motd.dynamic
# and a static (admin-editable) part from /etc/motd.
session    optional     pam_motd.so  motd=/run/motd.dynamic noupdate
session    optional     pam_motd.so # [1]

# Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login.
#session    optional     pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1]

As you can see I’ve commented out the mail check, I’ve decided to leave the MOTD piece, I think I’m going to play around with it.  It’s the first time I’ve ever encountered the pam_motd module and I’m curious what I can do with it.

Hopefully somebody else finds this helpful, there seems to be little information about this available when I did a quick Google search.

A Blast From the Past

So this is a bit of a take 2 (3?)…  I recently recovered the database for the old community forum that used to be hosted on quay.net.  I had thought that it was completely lost due to a bad backup and crappy hard drive, but it turned out that I had a copy of the backups stored on my old laptop!

I don’t know if it’s something worthy of full resurrection yet, but at the very least I thought I’d migrate the data to BB software that was supportable and put the old content back up in case people would like to get at their old posts.

For the time being at least it can be found over here.

I’ll likely share this with people via some social media as well once I figure out what to do with the data.  If you’re returning, I’d encourage you to take a look at this post.

Let’s Encrypt!

I started to write a draft of an article about Let’s Encrypt back in November, but quite finished it to my satisfaction.  In any case I would like to draw attention to the project as it gets closer to becoming live.  They just posted the draft of their certificate management policy so things are starting to heat up a bit which is kind of exciting!

If you’re not familiar with the project, here’s an overview of how it works.  But basically it’s an automated tool that web server administrators can install and use to generate, sign, manage, and revoke TLS certificates for sites they host.  It takes most of the human factor out of things and also helps implement some of the more esoteric features of modern TLS for HTTP.

In light of the news over the past couple of years and the complete ubiquity of the Internet and WWW at this point it’s fairly obvious that proper encryption of All The Things is long overdue.  There are a number of steps in that direction taking place right now (HTTP/2 standard is more or less final, 1024-bit roots have been widely superseded, OCSP stapling and HSTS are becoming much more widely deployed), but the biggest challenge I see is that, particularly for small website owners and businesses, properly implementing X.509 certificates for TLS is still enough of a pain that it’s largely avoided unless you’re somewhat savvy or paranoid.

I’ve read a few good blog posts and articles on the Let’s Encrypt project but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be getting that much mainstream coverage.  At first I was a bit leery of the idea that I hand certificate management over to a 3rd party system, but the more I’ve looked at it the more the idea seems solid.  Basically their assumption is that their tooling can handle certificate management better than the average web administrator can.  Combined with the fact that the project has major backing from folks like Cisco, Akamai, the EFF, and Mozilla I’m hoping that it gets major traction.  I know that I’m planning on adopting it early even though I have a couple of years left on the RapidSSL certs I’m currently using.

Oh and did I mention that it will be entirely free?

Moving the Dock on OS X

I just learned something about OS X that I didn’t realize was a feature. Then again, sometimes these days the difference between a feature and a bug is marginal!

At work I routinely run my Macbook connected to a second monitor, either at my desk for extra screen space while preparing the latest round of paperwork or when presenting at a meeting. From time to time, the dock (which I just keep at the bottom of my screen) seemingly snaps to the second monitor. This can range from mildly amusing to completely enraging depending on my state of mind and or caffeine level at the moment.

I just learned that this is actually a feature that I’ve been accidentally triggering with sloppy mousemanship. It turns out that you can move the dock on OS X to another display device simply by briefly holding your mouse cursor at the bottom of the device in question.

Now that I know this, what used to seem like a really annoying desktop environment bug has become a cool feature!

The more you know...