Upgrading the OS this site (and a few others including https://www.vogonswiki.com) runs on was one of my goals for the Christmas break this year.

Unfortunately there is a lot of old scripts running on it; making it difficult to move past PHP 7.0.

I've finally fixed a lot, most were pretty easy (including this site), mediawiki was the worst so far.

• Bluetrait Blog now works on PHP 8.2!


• Media Wiki upgraded (ish, still a super old version, extension hell there)


• The Board (old recipe tracking system)

I've been able to switch over to PHP 7.3 now which is great. Hopefully I can get to 7.4 this year?

Also had to rebuild the raspberry pi zero running our gate recently. That was a pain. The SD card died so I replaced that and upgraded to Raspbian/Debian 12, that broke all the GPIO libraries I was using :/

Isn't upgrading fun? Actually I'm pretty happy how well things are working considering I ignore them for years at a time.

Next I'm actually thinking of upgrading this blog to replace the theme with something new, although not sure yet.

I've had a chance to work on Bluetrait Board today. I'm hoping to have the next version out in a few weeks.

Version 0.6 should include the following updates:

• All new interface (thanks to Matthew)


• Full login system


• Pie chart break down for money spent


• Full Installer (I hope)

Yah should be cool. The program has been really useful in tracking what we spend. Maybe I should setup a full hosted version that people can sign up and use...I do have some spare web hosting.

I had a play around with PHP 5.3. The main new feature is namespaces. I am looking forward to using this in future.

Unfortunately PHP 5.2 isn't very common so using namespaces in my code will need to wait.

This is a good website if you want to learn about how namespaces will work in PHP 5.3

I've made public the search plugin I wrote for this site.

It can be downloaded from here and is under the "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License".

The plugin requires Bluetrait 2 and MySQL.

It probably won't be any use to anyone as Bluetrait 2 isn't even in Beta yet ;)

The problems with PHP

To enable php:

1. open terminal


2. cd /etc/


3. sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini


4. cd /private/etc/apache2/


5. sudo nano httpd.conf


6. uncomment the two modules: php5_module and fastcgi_module. They were at line 114 and 115 for me.


7. Use ctrl and o to save


8. reload apache (can be done from system preferences).

After hacking my ipod, I installed Apache and PHP. I was successfully able to install the sqlite version of Bluetrait 2 onto my ipod!

There were some small bugs, I haven't yet pin-pointed them down yet but I believe it may have been due to the setup of PHP.

So yeah that was pretty cool, pointless but cool :)

Bluetrait Event Viewer has been updated to support WordPress 2.3

Josh created a custom index.php way back in WordPress 1.5 days that removed the RSS feeds on the WordPress dashboard.

Up until now it wasn't really possible to this with a plugin nicely. WordPress 2.2 has added an API hook that although not relevant to the Dashboard it is in the right place!

So I've created a simple plugin, which you can download here, that removes the RSS feeds. Please note it requires WordPress 2.2.

I just read an interesting post here about what data is sent to the Akismet servers. A surprising amount, including the whole $_SERVER array!

I wouldn't be too happy with that myself. Bluetrait's implementation of the Akismet client sends the following information:

Comment Author

Comment Author Email Address

Comment Author Website Address

Content of Comment

Author's IP Address

Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Bluetrait's implementation sends the following information:

Comment Author

Comment Author Email Address

Comment Author Website Address

Content of Comment

Author's IP Address

Type of Comment (i.e Trackback, Comment etc)

Plus the $_SERVER array with the following information removed:

'HTTP_COOKIE',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_HOST',

'HTTP_MAX_FORWARDS',

'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_SERVER',

'REDIRECT_STATUS',

'SERVER_PORT',

'PATH',

'DOCUMENT_ROOT',

'SERVER_ADMIN',

'QUERY_STRING',

'PHP_SELF' ;

Unfortunately this is more than I first stated, I'm going to review the data being sent. It shouldn't contain any extra data that is personal.

EDIT: Some more info here. Looks like Akismet sends the all cookies that are from that domain. i.e anything the client (the person posting the comment) is logged into. The post is a bit old (2005) so this behavior may have changed.

EDIT2: I just checked the source code from WordPress 2.1.2 it looks like cookies are no longer sent, everything else still is.