Oh yes I know that I just wrote about this the other day, however I have to jump in and say I have tried it and by gawd it worked so smoothly it was a tad scarey. I followed the instructions and uploaded it to The Barrel and just like advertized 5 clicks and I had updated the software. Now that was the easiest update I have ever done and I have used a couple of software packages that were easy but nothing like this. I have to say this is one plug-in to keep in your basket of Word Press tools.

Visit the Site

Move over, Microsoft Singularity. There’s another microkernel, .Net-based operating system in town. And this one’s available under an open-source license.

Cosmos: An open-source C# microkernel OS is bornKnown as Cosmos, the new, independently developed operating system (OS) is the brain child of former Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism team member Chad “Kudzu” Hower. Unlike Singularity — version one of which Microsoft released last year (and only to university researchers and academics) — Cosmos is available to anyone, Hower said. The developers released Milestone 1 of Cosmos at the very end of January.

Read the Rest of the Article

Are underseas telecom cable cuts the new IEDs?

After two underwater cable cuts in the Middle East last week severely impacted countries from Dubai to India, alert netizens voiced suspicions that someone — most likely Al Qaeda — intentionally severed the cables for their own nefarious purposes, or that the U.S. cut them as a lead-in to an attack on Iran.

Then two more cables failed in the same area, one in a segment connecting Qatar to an island in the United Arab Emirates, and another in a link between Oman and the UAE. The former wasn’t even a cut — it was a power failure, but you can’t keep a good conspiracy theory down; some news sites are even reporting incorrectly that Iran is cut off from the internet, and claiming that there’s a fifth cut, which turns out to be an unexceptional cable failure from weeks ago.

Read the Rest of the Article

WordPress put out an urgent security release today. If you are using an older version of WordPress you should consider upgrading to version 2.3.3 as soon as possible.

I was about to do the manual update when I was pointed to this tool from Scott’s Twiiter. It’s the WordPress Automatic Updater plug-in (GPL). WAUP is an easy point-n-click way to upgrade WordPress versions. It not only upgraded my copy of WordPress, but made backups first in case something went wrong. Very slick.
Heres is hoping that this really does work that would fix one of the biggest hassles with WP the update, Baldy

For more Mark Hinkle, visit his Socialized Software blog.

Storing backups on optical media such as DVD-R discs suffers from two major drawbacks: DVD discs are easy to scratch, and the media itself degrades after a while. You can deal with the scratching issue by careful handing of the media, but even expensive media becomes unreadable over time. Dvdisaster aims to help you recover the information off scratched and aged media.

Read the Rest of the Article