Sneaky Bastard

I’ve had this video on my site for a while, but it wasn’t easily playable. Since moving to WordPress and using Viper’s handy video plugin, this should work with Flash in most browsers. Let me know if you have issues. Also, let me know if the video doesn’t play.

It’s been a while since Swine Flu (AKA Hamthrax) has been in the media, but I didn’t want the video to be lonely.

This little clip is the last scene in episode 702 – “I Dream of Jesus”. Enjoy.

The release of WordPress 2.8.1 was announced this week. I thought it would be useful to other WordPress users, and provide a good history for myself, to document how I do the update. I first visit the WordPress Download page and copy the URL for the tarball; currently it’s a link to latest.tar.gz, but who knows if that will always redirect to the correct release. With the URL in the clipboard, I switch to my SSH terminal window. I change to my ~/src directory and use wget to download the file and extract the tarball right there. I then use rsync to update the files from the new release to my production site. Here’s the process:

cd ~/src
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -zxf wordpress-*.tar.gz
rsync -niruW wordpress/ ~/websites/sneakybastard.com/
# looks reasonable, run it
rsync -ruW wordpress/ ~/websites/sneakybastard.com/


The -n options it to perform a dry-run. I like to see what it plans to do before committing. It’s not a bad idea to clean up the permissions on the wp-content directory too.

cd ~/websites/sneakybastard.com
sudo chown -R slappy wp-content
sudo chgrp -R apache wp-content
sudo find wp-content -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} \;
sudo find wp-content -type f -exec chmod 0664 {} \;


The permissions allow file uploads through PHP as the apache user, while the shell account user can make changes to theme and plugin files.

Wanna guess how likely it is that I’m gonna grant this application access to my data?

Good guess! Facebook has done a pretty good job preventing the site from becoming a cesspool like MySpace, but some of these apps are (almost) as bad as spam.