I enjoy the StackExchange model very much. It’s Q&A with a social twist, as your peers upvote your answers and increase your site reputation. I have been off-and-on active on StackOverflow, the programmer-focused Q&A site, for two years now, dropping in occasionally to answer a few questions when I need to switch gears. Participating in WordPress Answers (as it’s canonically known) has been a whole new experience, starting with the empty canvas of a website, participating in meta, being a more involved member of a community that is still in its infancy.

If WordPress is a part of your online life, I encourage you to help out by asking or answering questions. Do you have a problem with WordPress you just can’t figure out on your own? Can you remember a question from your past that could benefit someone else if it were archived on the site? Do you want to challenge yourself and improve your skills by helping others with WordPress?

Get in on the ground level.

“WordPress Answers,” the StackExchange-powered question and answer site for WordPress, has made it out of Area 51 and into a week-long private beta.

So what’s the legality around creating a new publishing platform that uses the same WordPress function names (but none of the WordPress code), effectively making it compatible with WordPress themes?

What if I already had written a publishing platform in the public domain, using different function names for themes, then wrote a compatibility layer so that someone could drop WordPress themes into my application? What if someone then wrote a theme intending it for my application and its compatibility layer, and WordPress compatibility was not a consideration for that developer? The theme would work in WordPress, but would not require WordPress in order to function.

I believe in open source and the GPL. I don’t believe you should shove it down peoples’ throats. Yes, the WordPress developers have put a lot of time and effort into creating this code base with the intention of it being open source. Obviously the Thesis folks shouldn’t have copied code, but don’t let that muddy the discussion: WordPress takes a lot of effort, but so does theme and plugin development. A commercial theme does not diminish the open source foundation it sits upon, nor does it make that foundation any less open.

Can’t wait to use the custom post types feature.

Red highlights added by me. I wonder if Google has policies regarding this type of ad layout. I think having this poor a ratio of content to ads dilutes all the advertising. Whatever the case, I hate wading through this many ads in search of the article.

The incoming traffic (blue line) was maxed out at my bandwidth cap, even though I wasn’t downloading anything. After a few failed attempts at figuring out what was going on, I started closing browser tabs, resulting in the sustained dropoff near the end of the graph. I reopened the tabs (small bump closer to the end) but the incoming traffic did not spike.

Gmail and a few other pages were open, but nothing that would explain the traffic spike I saw. Maybe the ghost in the machine was watching Hulu.

The ssh client included in OpenSSH includes a very easy to use SOCKS5 proxy server: ssh -D 9999 server.example.com opens a normal connection to server.example.com, but also creates a SOCKS5 server at localhost:9999 that routes traffic from supported applications through the remote server. Firefox includes support for SOCKS5, and add-ons like the Web Developer toolbar and FoxyProxy can quickly enable or disable the proxy settings. I’ve used this to great success in the past, but, as with most things, there is room for improvement.

Server names and IPs have been modified from their original values.

Fine-tuning Firefox

While you can provide Firefox with a simple SOCKS5 host and port, the software also supports proxy auto-config (PAC) files. Both Firefox (natively) and Safari (via Network preferences) support PAC. The following PAC file tells the application to route traffic for anything at example.com through the proxy server, and directly connect to everything else. This keeps your non-business traffic from routing through business servers, so you can stream Netflix and still access those servers behind the firewall.

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
	if(shExpMatch(url, '*.example.com/*')) return "SOCKS localhost:9999";
	return "DIRECT";
}

Proxy Everything

While ssh can create a proxy server, there is no built-in support for connecting to a host through a proxy. The same is true for many other applications, particularly console apps. Enter tsocks, a wrapper library that intercepts TCP calls and routes them through a SOCKS proxy. tsocks exploits something call preloaded libraries: when ssh is launched, special flags in the shell force a load of the tsocks library. My preferred way of running tsocks is to run it with no arguments, which sets up the preloading for any program run in the shell from that point forward.

Marc Abramowitz did some great work getting tsocks to compile under Mac OS X. I made a few tweaks to his patch, and release it here. To apply the patch, take the same steps that Marc mentions on his site, but use my patch instead.

After tsocks is installed, running something through your proxy is easy.

$ ssh -f -N -D 9999 host.example.com
$ tsocks
$ ssh firewalled.example.com

The first line creates a proxy server, the second prepares tsocks, and the third opens an SSH connection using the proxy defined in /etc/tsocks.conf. For completeness, here is my tsocks.conf:

local = 10.0.0.0/255.0.0.0

path {
	reaches = 129.21.0.0/255.255.0.0

	server = 127.0.0.1
	server_port = 9999

	server_type = 5
}

That’s all. Secure access to firewalled servers through HTTP and SSH. Works great, as long as you have one server that can be used as a gateway (available for SSH from outside the network, but able to access things inside).

This article was originally written for Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” and setup is identical for Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.”

I will begin taking this for granted immediately. Thanks, Firefox 3.5b4.

Update: Ogg Theora has been backed out of the HTML5 draft spec due to lack of consensus from the big browser makers. Like the <img> tag, support for formats will be left in the hands of developers. A bit sad, really.

Here’s a small sample of personas. I usually hide some toolbars for Firefox screenshots, but personas tend to look better with a larger canvas.