Posts by ianmjones.

Yikes, I’ve Been Hacked!

Guess who got hit by the WordPress worm that’s been doing the rounds?!

Ironically, it all kicked off as I started to work on the site in preparation for moving to a brand new format.

While Integrity was doing it’s thing, checking that I’d converted a load of fully qualified links to relative ones before doing a wget archive for posterity, I started to notice a lot of bad requests for pages that really should be fine.

When I hopped over to my site it was blank. Uh oh.

Luckily I still had another tab with the WordPress console open from where I’d been updating a few posts, and that seemed fine. As I browsed around I noticed a few strange things though.

First I noticed that I was getting some weird text in the upper right of the admin console, that later turned out to be the “Hello Dolly” plugin, which had been activated (not by me).

I then noticed the most scary thing, my post count was less than I expected. Instead of 173, it was 145, where had all the rest gone? Within a minute the count was down to 133, someone/thing was deleting all my posts.

I quickly killed Integrity, which stopped the deletes, and continued looking around the WordPress console. I found that all my themes bar the one I had had active were gone, and the one remaining was inactive. That’ll be why the site was blank then, there was no theme to render the site with.

Having remembered that Andy Ihnatko had been hit by the worm I went to his site and gathered as much info as possible about what the problem was and how to recover from it.

Luckily, I’d done an export from WordPress just the day before, so I was able to simply drop the infected database and create a clean one, download WordPress 2.8.4, install and configure from scratch, import the WXR file and copy across my unaffected images.

If you’re running anything less than WordPress 2.8.4 do yourself a favour and go directly to your WordPress console / Tools / Export and get yourself an export without looking at your own site. Get a copy of your wp-content folder quick smart. Then upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4.

You don’t want to waste approx 4 hours of your life to this mess, and you definitely don’t want to lose all your posts.

Tomorrow (actually, that’ll be later today considering the time) I’ll be going ahead with the move to a simpler site setup I had planned and was gearing up for already.

See you when the dust settles.

CaseDetective for FogBugz permanently discontinued

CaseDetective128.pngI am sorry to announce that as of 9th July 2009 CaseDetective for FogBugz
has been permanently discontinued.

I wish I could continue to develop and support CaseDetective but this has proven impossible for a number of reasons.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for supporting CaseDetective for FogBugz.

For further assistance please contact support@imij.co.uk

CaseDetective 2.0.d56 Released

CaseDetective128.pngIf you downloaded CaseDetective 2.0.d53 when I announced it the other day, please updated to v2.0.d56 at your earliest convenience.

There’s a few important updates.

1) Fixed a problem with logging on when there is only one user set up in FogBugz.

2) There was a potential problem with running CaseDetective in Windows with AIR 1.5.0.

3) Fixed a problem with auto-updating under Mac OS X.

The third fix is particularly tricky, if you’re running Mac OS X it would be best to update to version 2.0.d56 by visiting the hidden (for now) downloads page and using the Install Now/Upgrade Now button.

Getting FogBugz data into Excel / CaseDetective 2.0 Sneak Peek

Having seen an increase in tweets and support requests to the FogBugz guys about getting data from FogBugz into Excel, I wasn’t surprised to see Fog Creek finally write a blog post explaining how to use the FogBugz API from within Excel to get a basic spreadsheet.

It’s not the nicest of mechanisms for getting data into Excel from FogBugz, but it works.

Over the last few months I’ve had quite a few inquiries about using CaseDetective with FogBugz On Demand.

At first my standard response was basically “sorry, CaseDetective 2.0 will do this but I can’t tell you when that’ll be available”. But it’s really frustrating, knowing that you’re in mid-development with something that’s waaaaay too basic and not at all ready for release, but already has the exact functionality most people are looking for, namely CSV export.

One day I caved, I let on to someone that there’s a development release out there on that there interweb that I use for testing, it was a bit old, but would do what they desperately needed.

It worked for that person, they got the job done, they were happy, and I got a nice warm fuzzy feeling out of helping someone in a bit of a bind.

Then I mentioned it to the next person, and then the next, and the next … you get the picture. Each person was asked to keep it a secret, and must join the CaseDetective Beta Test Team in order to continue using it.

I’ve had some great feedback, much of which is now in my FogBugz database waiting for me to actually get the time to implement, but some critical bugs have been squashed, and I think it’s now reasonably stable, if very very very slow and missing many features.

I’ve decided that seeing as so many people are simply looking for CSV output, and might be interested in using something a bit lot more user friendly than the raw API XML data into Excel method, I’m going to make the development version of CaseDetective 2.0 semi-public, anyone who reads this can give it a bash.

And what’s more, I’m not just going to make CaseDetective On Demand available, I’m also going to make CaseDetective 2.0 Desktop available too.

Try CaseDetective On Demand

Install CaseDetective 2.0 Desktop

Please send any feedback, big, small, nasty or nice to support@imijsoft.com

CaseDetective Logon.png
CaseDetective Cases.png
CaseDetective Pie Chart.png
CaseDetective Line Chart.png

Enjoy!

Thanks Mike Chambers, and Merry Christmas to one and all!

Thanks to Mike Chambers, Christmas has come early as I’ve just received a nice envelope in the post! :-)

IMG_1241s.png

It’s an updated RIA Guide, eboy stickers and Adobe AIR 1.0 Launch postcard. Thanks Mike, the guide is very handy, and the stickers and postcard are cool.

So, it just leaves me to wish you, the reader of my humble blog a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Here’s hoping you have a healthy and prosperous 2009.

Excited about the next version of Flex Builder and it's friends

I’ve just been reading about the next version of Flex Builder (code named “Gumbo”) that some lucky people have just got their hands on at MAX NA ‘08, it sounds like there are some great new features.

I’m looking forward to the FlexUnit integration and new network monitoring functionality, they’re the kind features that could make some serious improvements to development efficiency. The network monitor is particulary important to me, as my Flex development is all about sending and receiving data over the network, much like 99% of Flex apps out there.

But, what could be a real winner for future product development is the new Client Data Management (CDM) in Flex Builder, if it works well it sounds like it could be a very useful integrated and supported way of managing large data sets on the client from a remote source.

The new name for the designer -> developer product that was code named Thermo is “Flash Catalyst“, which is a great name for this product. Flash Catalyst will be used to take the output of traditional application design such as multi-layered Photoshop files and turn them into working Flex prototypes. It’s the kind of thing that could seriously aid in the designer -> developer transfer, I expect we’ll see an abundance of great looking Flex and AIR apps with wonderful user interation as a result of the developer being able to better use the designer’s output.

CoCoMo has also been officially released, which looks like a fantastic collaboration SDK. I hope to make use of CoCoMo in the future.

We're back!

CaseDetective128.pngYes, it’s true, we’re back and developing CaseDetective for FogBugz again!

It must be true as the IMiJ Software and CaseDetective websites have had a bit of a face lift. There are further changes in the wings, but both sites are looking good, even if I say so my self.

There’s no date for when CaseDetective 2.0 will be available just yet, but be assured development is well under way.

If I had an iPhone 3G…

If I had an iPhone 3G, what apps would I have installed by now?

iPhoneAppsS.png

AIM: Got to get me some realtime chat.

BA Flights: It’s always a pain trying to find a place to sit down and wait where you can keep tabs on the status board for your delayed flight, hopefully this app will solve that.

Evernote: I’ve recently started using Evernote for all my archiving of web purchase receipts and various other scraps of information and pictures that I need to keep at hand. This app should be a great addition to the already excellent Mac desktop and web based Evernote clients.

Exposure: I’m not much of a flickr user, but I keep meaning to start using it properly, maybe having this app at hand would help me get started.

NetNewsWire: I love NetNewsWire, I use it every day to keep tabs on the World at large. With all the NewsGator feed status and clippings sync goodness it promises, this app could easily be my most used on my iPhone.

PayPal: Quick and easy access to PayPal seems like a good idea to me, especially as this version is made by PayPal, so I don’t feel like I might be getting spoofed or something.

Pownce: I follow a few peeps on Pownce, so this could be a neat app to have, once the notifications functionality is released by Apple.

Remote: This should be great, looking forward to testing it out.

Truphone: In the absence of a Skype client, this looks like it could save a few quid on long distance calls, certainly while abroad.

Twitterrific: While I’m a twhirl user on the desktop for all my twitter needs, I’m sure Twitterrific on the iPhone would be just the job.

Apps missing from above screenshot:

Aria Touch: This could be an interesting app for a FogBugz user like myself, it’s just a shame that it hasn’t shown up on the iTunes App Store yet. But as I expect it isn’t free, I couldn’t download it just yet anyway, seeing as I don’t have an iPhone it would be a waste of money!

Things: I’ve started using Things for managing my general to-do lists, it’s a great Mac desktop app and I’d love to give the iPhone version a spin, if I had an iPhone 3G!

Why do I not have an iPhone 3G just yet? Because:

a) O2 isn’t releasing it’s Pay & Go tariff until “later this year”. I simply don’t use the “phone” part of my phone anywhere near enough to warrant paying £30 per month, but if the rumoured Pay & Go deal includes 6 months free 3G data and wi-fi hotspot usage, followed by £10 per month after that, I’d be all over it.

b) O2 has run out of iPhones!

Oh well, hopefully O2 will get a few boat loads of new stock and release the Pay & Go contract option soon, then I can spend my money!

RBScoutSubmit is being used in REALbasic IDE

How about this, some of my REALbasic code is being used by REAL Software in their REALbasic IDE!

Aaron Ballman recently blogged about how they are now capturing any exceptions thrown in the REALbasic IDE to be submitted as bug reports to their FogBugz install. Turns out that they are using RBScoutSubmit, with just a couple of modifications.

Aaron was kind enough to tell me about the couple of improvements that they’ve made, I’ll see about adding them to RBScoutSubmit along with a couple more improvements I’ve thought about as soon as I get some time.

RBScoutSubmit now on Google Code

I’ve moved my RBScoutSubmit REALbasic classes onto Google Code in a project called rbscoutsubmit.

If you’re looking for some simple open source (MIT licensed) classes that enable submitting crash logs from your REALbasic application to your FogBugz bug tracker, please check out the rbscoutsubmit project.

There’s a download available of the latest version, and as with most Google Code projects you can check out the source with Subversion.

There’s also a discussion group and read-only commit log list hosted on Google Groups too.