It never worked. He just copied the code from another plugin, and it never worked there either. Test if for yourself at http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=301+redirect+checker&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 with and without the plugin enabled. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/ is the only plugin that successfully does 301 redirection.
