WordPress 2.2.3 was released a little while ago, and I finally thought I should say something about the upgrade process as documented. Can anyone think of a reason why I can’t just download the tarball and diff the contents against the previous version’s tarball, and then run the upgrade.php? That’s certainly what I’ve been doing so far, and have not had any problems. This way I also don’t need to “watch out” for dangling objects in my wp-content directory, since that stuff will get ignored by the patch file. I only wish the WordPress authors could issue a patch file so that I don’t need to do this myself (and it would be nice if the authors could also tar up each distribution from a directory named wordpress-x.y.z instead of just wordpress)
In other news, I decided to fly to Dallas, TX this year to attend the LISA conference, sponsored by the USENIX Association. It’s my first time going to LISA, mostly because of the expense of doing so. Fortunately, this year I have some Air Canada Aeroplan points to use, so my airfare is essentially free (except for the $131.02 in taxes that I have to pay), but registration is still costing me around $700 and the hotel will be $875. All in all, I expect to spend just short of $2,000 on the conference. Sadly, my employer doesn’t have a policy around paying for conferences. They only reimburse for training programs, and even those need to be approved via a lengthy bureaucratic process. Hopefully my manager and I will, at some point, manage to convince the HR folks that the best “training” you can give an IT person is to keep them up to date with new developments in the relevant field, rather than sending them on meaningless courses.