Or, in this case, a fuss about the captilization of WordPress.  In case you’re running WordPress and haven’t yet noticed this gem, you can’t spell WordPress with a capital W and small p any more, as version 3 filters this behaviour.  This filter crept into the release practically unnoticed, but the subsequent issues and community backlash has been fairly strong.  All sorts of things from trademark protection, through conspiracy theories and the impact of off-shore oil drilling have been mentioned around it – personally I’d have been happy if it were a plugin and people at least had some warning, so they knew what to fix when their images start breaking…

For those of you running WordPress as your blog software, you’ll most likely have noticed the automatic update bar suggesting that you click and update your software to version 3.0.  You should grab the new version now.  There’s many new features in this release, including a new standard theme and easy to use menus.  If you’re not using WordPress, but want to, you can go to the download page to get started.   Happy Blogging everyone!

It’s reported that Captain Pickard, or, in real life, Patrick Stewart, is to be knighted in the New Year honours list. I can only agree, and say “make it so”. A very varied and talented actor, he is.

In other news, we are hearing more confirmation that Schumacher is close to an F1 return with the Mercedes team – though nothing yet from the man himself, or the team. I’m in two minds about this return. I wouldn’t want it to be a damp squib, because he left on a high, but nor would I relish the return to his utter dominance. A good scrap would be interesting.

Loads of peeps were trapped in the Channel Tunnel last night, after freezing temperatures on both sides of the tunnel contributed to a mass break-down of the trains. It appears that on-board staff had not been properly trained in what to do, which is not great. Think everyone is out now, but they were stuck for some time. Not great at all.

Lastly, WordPress 2.9 is out, with bucket loads of new functionality. If you run WordPress on your blog site, you should upgrade now. Make sure your host meets the new requirements first, though – the MySQL and PHP version requirements have increased to 4.1.2 and 4.3 respectively.

WordPress 2.8.3 has been released as a security-related recommended upgrade. The changes fix some loopholes that allowed direct access to a few WordPress include files. Everyone is advised to upgrade their copies as soon as. (Remember with newer versions you can generally use the auto-upgrade functionality especially if your host uses PHP5.)

There seems to be growing evidence that the XSS vunerability in versions of WordPress before 2.8.2 is now being exploited for real in the wild. The manifestation seems to be that, after recieving a maliciously-crafted comment, affected blogs display a login panel

Title: Authentication Required
Text: The server (yourserver) at Magic requires a username and password

It would appear at the moment as though the malicious content can be removed by replacing wp-includes with a fresh copy from the WordPress source for your version. But if I were you I wouldn’t take that chance. I’d upgrade to 2.8.2 now. Otherwise you can’t really be sure that the hack hasn’t stolen any credentials, or caused other changes.