Ingredients

• 14-18oz Pumpkin*
• 8oz (1 stick) Cream Cheese
• 3/4 Cup Heavy Cream**
• 2 eggs + 2 egg yolks
• 3-4 Tbsp Butter (firm)
• 2/3 Cup Brown Sugar
• Generous Pinch Grated (or Ground) Nutmeg
• Pinch Grated (or Ground) Ginger
• Pinch Salt
• Splash Vanilla
• 1 Pie Crust

Example of "Real Pumpkin"

* Note on Pumpkin: If you’re using fresh pumpkin, consider adding an extra quarter cup of cream, depending on the consistency of the pumpkin meat. IF only canned pumpkin is available, find a brand which consists of pumpkin and nothing but pumpkin. Many brands contain butternut squash, sugars and various spices.

** Note on Cream: Don’t substitute half and half for heavy cream. It’s fat content is too low, and it will produce a burned mess instead of a delicious filling.

Preparation

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Pre-cook the pie crust by lining with aluminum foil and filling with rice. Bake the crust for 5-10 minutes until the foil pulls free. Bake another 5 minutes until the crust is just starting to dry out.

Weight a pie crust with rice while pre-baking.

Mix all of the filling ingredients together in a food processor. I prefer to leave mine a little “chunky”. If you want a very smooth pie, you can process longer, and consider adding a little extra cream.

Fill the pie crust up to the top with filling. Put any extra filling in an oven proof ramekin. Bake for 40-50 minutes until the filling is puffed up, and set. If the top of the filling begins to crack, the pie is on the verge of ruin — take it out immediately.

The Pumpkin Pie ready for the oven.

Note on Convection Ovens: The flow of air in the convection oven causes the top of the pie to puff and rise early, in as little as 20 minutes. I have ruined more than one pie thinking it done when it was only half baked because of this phenomenon. Avoid by either a) baking without the convection turned on or b) checking by pricking the pie with a knife.

Variation: Some people like cinnamon in their pie. They’re probably wrong, but a pinch of cinnamon will not ruin the flavor balance of this pie.

Serving

Serve the pumpkin pie with whipped cream or heavy cream. Bourbon makes an excellent accompaniment.

Extra pie filling baked in an ovenproof dish.

The completed pumpkin pie on a cooling rack

The Problem

timthumb.php doesn’t know how to deal with the blogs.dir directory in which WordPress stores images in Multisite. Ideally, you should update your theme to point to the correct directory, or even use WordPress’ built in thumbnail handling. However, if you don’t want to mess around with all of this then simply download timthumb.php and replace your timthumb.php. Problem solved.

How it works

This slightly modifies the function which timthumb uses to find the path to the specified image file. If it detects a blogs.dir directory, it looks through each individual “site” directory until it finds the one which contains the image in question.

There is one potential gotcha in this implementation. If you have identically named files, uploaded in the same month in two different “sites”, this script will use the first one it finds, which may, or may not be the one you intended.

Download

Head over to Flig.ht Data and check it out!

UPDATE: Yeah, that didn’t go anywhere on it’s own. But stay tuned for a serious aviation player to re-launch it.

1: Overuse of the options table:
get_option() and set_option() are wonderfully useful features, if used in moderation. If not used in moderation, they result in a hellish jumble of entries in the wp-options table. Instead of using many discreet entries, an “options” object or array should be serialized into a set_option() call. While this may be overkill for a very simple plugin, once you get to any number of options it is a necessity.

2: No NONCEs
This is such an offensive mistake it makes me cry a little. As I(and Mark Jaquith and Vladimir Prelovac and many others) have written, using nonces is a must for any plugin which takes options from a user. Strangely enough, the nonce field is included, but then never checked (WTF?). Without the use of nonces, a nefarious user can arbitrarily change your plugin settings, and possibly even take over your database. Particularly if there are

3: No SQL Injection Security
Not having nonces is one thing. It’s bad, but I’ve forgotten from time to time myself. But not even escaping input before putting it in the database is, to quote “Yahtzee”, pants on head retarded!. Escaping user input is probably the single simplest and most basic security. It’s the last line of defense against people replacing your header image with horrific porn. Don’t write code without it.

4: Unnecessary use of global variables
This exists on two levels:
A) In purpose.php, both $wp_query and $post are called into the function via global. While this probably won’t do any harm, globally including everything everywhere is what made earlier version of php such a nightmare and it looks messy. If you don’t need a variable, don’t include it.
B) $var1-$var4 are declared to static values at the top of the file where they will clutter up the global namespace. They are never accessed from their global context, they are always get_option()ed. In fact, the only reason they are declared here is so that they can be add_optioned into options. EVERY TIME THE CODE RUNS. That’s four superfluous function calls every single time the file loads. This should be done once, on plugin install. Not every single time WordPress loads a page.

5: Include vs. Require
I realize that this is pretty nit-picky, but, when including files that are required for the program to function, the appropriate function is require() (or better yet, require_once(). If the file is missing, the code to break while trying to include the file, instead of mysteriously throwing messages about redeclaration of functions.

In conclusion, while the concept of a plugin framework is laudable, Fire Studio’s implementation falls far short of any reasonable mark of best practices, and only serves to encourage worst practices.

1) Static JavaScript. Instead of using the *.js.php which I have been using, javascript templates are being parsed by a small JS templating engine and stored as static files. This should significantly cut down on the amount of time spent processing php. Each file is stored as filename-hashcode.js.

2) Bootstrapper. People have told me a) They don’t think it’s fair to count the size without jQuery (it probably isn’t) and b) They don’t want to load jQuery on every pageload. To that end, the default install will now include a tiny bootstrapper (hopefully under 200 Bytes) that doesn’t load the player until and unless someone actually wants to use them.

3) Single audio player. For legacy browsers, there will only be one player, the awesome Sound Manager 2 player. User interface will be provided via jQuery based controls. Using a single “invisible” player allows a consistent JavaScript interface for all the players, and, should help to

4) <audio> tag based player. This will probably be beta only in 0.7, but I want to move towards using the native browser implementation instead of flash. Using a javascript interface and sound manager means it should be a seamless user experience, and the only difference is whether the JavaScript is calling the sound manager js or the <audio> tag.

I’ll be at WordCamp in San Francisco this weekend, anyone who wants to bend my ear about a feature can do so. Twitter at jwriteclub to get together.

In addition, there’s now a forum where groundschool students can ask questions and one of the instructors (mostly me) will do our best to answer. Anyone can read the forum, and you can sign up for a free account to post questions.

As always, head over the the µAudio page at WordPress.org or grab a copy from my µAudio page.

Head over the the µAudio page at WordPress.org or grab a copy from my µAudio page.

Those of you waiting for the 0.7 release with the new sidebar widget shouldn’t have too much longer to wait. It’s coming with some major changes to how µAudio handles javascript. There will probably be a 0.6.2 release in the next week or so to fix any lingering bugs with the current implementation, and then 0.7 will have the new code.

Head on over to WordPress.org or grab a copy from my µAudio Page.

• New Dashboard Widget
• Better number formatting
• 2.7 Compatible

Mosey over to the µMint page at wordpress.org or grab a copy from my µMint page.