Dear Mockingbird customers,

Mockingbird’s taking flight

We’re excited to announce that Mockingbird will launch on August 15, 2010 — with multi-user collaboration!

Details on the paid plans:

	Active Projects	Users	Price/month
Personal	2	Unlimited	$9
Team	10	Unlimited	$20
Pro	25	Unlimited	$40
Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	$85

There will also be a free account available that allows 1 project with 3 pages.

You can archive finished projects, which won’t count toward your active project limit. You won’t be charged for months during which you have no projects active.

What you need to do

Projects made with beta accounts will be automatically archived and will not be accessible after August 15, 2010. Customers who choose to upgrade to a paid plan may re-activate beta projects, but free accounts will not be able to access old beta projects, so please make sure to log into your Mockingbird account to export PNG or PDF versions of any projects you need.

Beta discount

Your feedback has made Mockingbird better, and we’d like to thank you by offering a coupon for 25% off the first three months of any paid plan. Keep your eye out on your inbox for the coupon code when Mockingbird launches.

Questions or comments?

If you’ve got questions about the transition out of beta or want to get in touch with us for any other reason, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at contact@gomockingbird.com.

Thanks for all your support, and we look forward to continuing to help you make great wireframes.
- The Mockingbird Team

In a nut shell they are saying thanks for testing, all projects are now archived so export them. If you want your old projects back, pay us. Wow.. Awesome. Thanks!

I jumped on Twitter, first off I never use Twitter but I figured it might be worth a try.

Wow. Didn’t expect that.

I guess I just have to tweet a complaint to get my projects extended, so everyone else that is in the same boat as me has to ask? What’s the harm in letting your free beta testers to keep their current projects? Oh… right.. Mockingbird doesn’t want casual users that could see the benefits of a quick HTML5 mockup tool so they won’t eventually become paid users and tell friends and colleagues alike how great of an application it is.

My project is exported.. who knows what they will do in the future but don’t consider your projects safe with this startup.

namebench DNS Benchmark Results

Like me, you’ve probably read all sorts of great things about the public DNS service OpenDNS, but one thing you should find out for yourself is how it will impact the speed of your web browsing.

After using OpenDNS name servers for months at work I started to notice that page load times at home (on a much slower connection) were considerably more “snappy” with my ISP provided DNS servers. A quick Google brought up the comprehensive Open Source namebench DNS benchmark tool.

A run of namebench resulted in a pretty html file with numbers and graphs that confirmed my suspicions. My ISP’s (Comcast) DNS servers were 174.4% faster than OpenDNS on average, with Google’s Public DNS coming in a close second place.

It should be noted that namebench is rather smart and it rifles through your browser history in order to compile a personalized set of domains for its testing, so my results are potentially unique – and this is just one test (actually I did three, I also used Alexa top domains for a source to avoid DNS caching – and the results were all similar), at one location. Although once I switched to my ISP’s DNS servers I experienced a noticeable difference in page load times.  Not to mention that my results may change in the future due to server load, poor caching, etc. But with OpenDNS, there was always a slight wait before a page would even start to load, and now that wait is gone. And that’s on a 36Mbps downstream connection.

My points are simple:

1. Switching to OpenDNS (or any other DNS service) may be a bad thing.
2. Your DNS server does matter.
3. namebench is awesome.

It may be a matter of milliseconds but it all adds up, many large websites require dozens of DNS queries for ads, images, scripts and more. Do your own testing before believing the hype.

Regardless, OpenDNS is still a great service: if I ever have the need for a basic content filtering system I will turn to OpenDNS.

Download namebench (for Windows, Mac, or Linux/Unix) and see for yourself how your current DNS stacks up.

• Session: Jason Grigsby – Speed Up WordPress. Make Readers Happy and Your Site Green
  1. Setting expires headers really does matter in the battle for page loading speed/efficiency.
  2. SpriteMe makes CSS sprite implementation so easy there’s little excuse not to try it.
  3. There’s a promising SQL query stats plugin for WP available:  SQL Monitor
• Session: Woopra intro w/ Lorelle VanFossen (who is very friendly!)
  1. Woopra provides real time analytics via a cross-platform desktop app.
  2. Woopra is free while in beta but will continue supporting most existing accounts when they go full release and start charging for the service.
  3. Woopra utilizes javascript embedded in the site in order to track (line Google Analytics).
  4. Woopra’s real time capabilities provide insight into the results of social networking + marketing campaigns.
  5. Woopra’s interface is snazzy!
• Session: Matt Mullenweg – WordPress Q&A
  1. Matt is a funny guy in person too!
• Session: Unconference discussion of the WordPress Codex (I suggested this topic)
  1. The Codex’s short comings are well known and being addressed!
  2. A new “handbook” documentation system is in the works and volunteer help is needed.
  3. The plan is to approach many help topics from multiple points of view such as Theme Designer, Core Developer, Plugin Developer, etc. as well as having “lessons” for particular tasks.
  4. The new docs will be standardized, version controlled, community driven, and overseen by the WP team.
  5. We can contribute to the current Codex (it’s MediaWiki driven) and our good stuff won’t be lost in the change over.
  6. A jobs board for WordPress.org is in the works – community cred will be associated with contractors offering their services.
  7. There is a passionate accessible open source community behind WordPress! It may be hard to find but it’s definitely there, and they need volunteer help from anyone involved in WordPress – even if you’re brand spanking new, they need your perspective! Some resources for contributing to WordPress:
     • List of mailing lists to join: http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo
     • WordPress.org Forums (of course): http://wordpress.org/support/
     • Codex article series on contributing: http://codex.wordpress.org/Contributing_to_WordPress
     • #wordpress-dev IRC channel at irc.freenode.net (not sure on regular meeting dates/times)

On another note, there was an interesting mix of MacBooks and NetBooks at the con and from what I was seeing the WiFi was a little flaky (had some issues getting an IP).

If you would like to talk to me at the conference Sunday I will be wearing the below pictured yellow Kool-Aid Man Web 2.OH YEAAH!! t-shirt from Mule Design. I may appear to be derisive or zombie-like but I assure you it’s because I am trying to kick the energy beverage habit and suffering the side effects.

If you can’t read my badge on Sunday, my name is Sam.

Why might you want to talk to me?

1. You enjoy my dry sarcasm.
2. You have something to say about the WP plugin I wrote: TAC (Theme Authenticity Checker)
3. You are curious why I only mentioned the above topics and not others.
4. You take pity on me and want to inflate my ego.
5. You want to meet a real live person you found on the web (even though I may lack celebrity).
6. You enjoy the non-WordPress related content on this site and want to give me a high-five.
7. You think I am a blundering idiot and don’t deserve to live (kindly warn me before you open fire).
8. You really like the below t-shirt and want your picture taken with me. (I’m pretty good looking as well).
9. You are having technical difficulties with you computer; Mac, Windows, or Linux and would like my help (I spend my daylight hours as a support technician).

BOOBS!

Yeah, that’s my Twitter avatar (and my Twitter username is embeded in the img tags’ title and alt attributes – making it viewable on hover) and yours could show up next.

This is a total breech of privacy, now everyone gets the chance to jump to conclusions and think I’m a freakin’ pervert – just because I viewed an image (which could have been from a link, with me having no prior knowledge of the the contents).

So TweetPhoto’s recently viewed feature is cute and all but MAYBE EVERYONE DOESN’T WANT TO BE TRACKED?

The fact that there isn’t even a setting to turn off user tracking is even worse, did they not realize that people like anonymity?

Just thought I’d share this great “feature” before someones wife accuses them of cheating or something even cooler.

Have a super day!

• Platform: Windows XP Pro SP3 + Java 1.6.0_13
• jEdit Version: 4.3pre16

Utilities -> Global Options -> jEdit -> Text Area:

Anti Aliased  smooth text: subpixel

UNCHECK: Fractal font metrics (for better smooth text display)

The combination of subpixel antialiasing (a must) and Fractal font metrics (makes little difference) causes the unbearably slow scolling.

Thanks to the jEdit Community Forums.

Source:

http://community.jedit.org/?q=node/view/4148

I love the FTP client FileZilla, and I used to share my filezilla.xml file between machines because it stored all my recent servers and passwords (encrypted). Recently I tried to do the same and came to find out that the most recent versions of FileZilla version ~ 3.0.9.2+ (and possibly older) store all saved FTP account connection info in plaintext .xml files. This applys to both Linux and Windows installations (Mac OS X has yet to be tested but I would bet the same applies).

In some cases this is convenient – often I connect over FileZilla then don’t have access to the password but need to use it in a different app/machine, I could just look it up in these plaintext config files.

But in other cases this is a serious problem. From a practical standpoint, let’s say we connect to our FTP server using FileZilla on a semi-public machine like at a buddy’s place where you may not be concerned about keyloggers but don’t necessarily want your stuff available in plaintext after you walk away.

And let’s not forget that someone could write an app that runs in the background, slurping up that info and putting it in the hands of people you may not trust.

Personally, I am not gonna stop using FileZilla at my primary FTP client on my Linux and Windows boxes, it really is a great app – one of the best clients if not the best. But I feel that awareness pertaining to storage of sensitive data should be a major concern to any serious user.
Text to be displayed
The following files are what you need to know about:

filezilla.xml – Stores most recent server info including password in plaintext.
recentservers.xml – Stores all recent server info including password in plaintext.
sitemanager.xml – Stores all saved sites server info including password in plaintext.

These files can usually be found in the following directories:

Windows XP/2K: “C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\FileZilla”
Windows Vista: “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla\”
Linux: “/home/username/.filezilla/”

It seems that this has been brought to the developer’s attention but it also seems that this won’t be changing any time soon. There seems to be a bit of a dispute as to how this should be handled, but I say why not use weak cryptography/obfuscation like they used to, at least that way it would take someone some minor effort/know-how to get to these passwords.

If you have further information regarding the subject, please comment.

Related resources:

Security posting: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2008/Apr/0511.html

FileZilla Password Recovery Apps/Scripts: (may only apply to older encryption scheme)

http://www.reactive-software.com/filezilla-password-recovery.html

http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2008/01/05/decrypting-filezilla-passwords-with-php/

Structure is as follows:

print_r $contents;

([Cutbacks.jpg] => Array
(
[time] => 1207637110
[hash] => 05dee882129fe1574bcc8379ad3a40ac
[size] => 43928
)
[matrix3.zip] => Array
(
[time] => 1208040588
[hash] => 5f317404880304b82e9502fb399f2737
[size] => 46790
)
)

Code:

foreach( $contents as $key => $list ) {
echo 'Filename: ' . $key . "\n";
echo 'Time: ' . $list['time'] . "\n";
echo 'Hash: ' . $list['hash'] . "\n";
echo 'Size: ' . $list['size'] . "\n";
echo '----Next File----' . "\n";
}

Outputs:

Filename: Cutbacks.jpg
Time: 1207637110Hash: 05dee882129fe1574bcc8379ad3a40ac
Size: 43928
----Next File----
Filename: matrix3.zip
Time: 1208040588
Hash: 5f317404880304b82e9502fb399f2737
Size: 46790
----Next File----

The below is a MySQL query to update all of the products’ names in an osCommerce catalog to uppercase - you can copy this into phpMyAdmin.

UPDATE products_description SET `products_name` = UPPER( `products_name` )

OR GENERICALLY:

UPDATE table_name SET `column_name` = UPPER( `column_name` )