Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

The Path to Enlightenment
March 21, 2007

I am working on finishing up Habari’s WordPress importing facilities. This is the middle step in a long chain of personal development that is probably being done somewhat out of order, just because some things need to be complete sooner than the things they depend on.

For example, I need to have a working body of sample posts to test any work I do on a database independent library for Habari. Habari is database independent now, but we’re intent on building an abstraction class so that you can plug in new databases as needed instead of having to code any database-specific stuff directly into the core. In all, it’s a good idea. So I need test data.

The End of the Paper
March 20, 2007

Over this past weekend, Berta and I trekked through the snow to the March WordPress Meetup at the Ten Stone Bar and Restaurant on South Street in Philly. We entered into an interesting conversation with Johnathan, who works on the blog section of philly.com.

Johnathan was concerned with getting readership to the blogs. He asked many questions about what it would take to get any of us as a reader. The general answer among the group in the conversation was “a minor miracle”. Our conversation has me questioning why news media is failing to do its job, on both the front of reporting actual news and evolving with the advent of blogs and user-generated content.

Visions of the Apocalypse
March 19, 2007

In my teens, I was plagued by nightmares of nuclear annihilation. I’m not sure what brought it on, but I would frequently have nightmares usually ending in seeing missiles flying through the air, the sounds of them falling from the sky, and then wake up just at the point of impact. And the worst part of this is I would usually end up laying in bed awake, eyes wide staring at the window, through which he morning sun was doing a great impression of a nuclear explosion. There’s nothing like waking up from a dream about atomic destruction to a pretty realistic visual approximation of atomic destruction.

The nightmares have subsided. Maybe with the end of the cold war? But I haven’t had any nightmares like that in a while. So, last night…

Create an Apache Testing Server on Windows
March 17, 2007

Every so often, you want to see how some code will look on your server before you actually deploy it there. Without setting up an identical server at identical cost elsewhere, you might consider testing locally on your desktop computer.

This setup describes what I’ve found to be useful, which is a system that allows you to host multiple sites on your local system, all resolving to different domain names, and configurable by adding a simple single line to a file and creating the directory to host the site. You don’t even need to restart Apache to configure a whole new virtual host with this method.

Shocking Basket Raffle
March 16, 2007

Every year, Abby’s school does a basket raffle to raise money for the school association every year. They mention that it’s a popular event at the orientation meeting, but you don’t really get a sense of why until you actually see the basket contents.

They sent home a green packet and an envelope with Abby one day. In the envelope were ten raffle tickets, which we had the option to buy at $1 per ticket. The greet packet of paper described the contents of the baskets. There are 21 baskets in all, and a ticket must be purchased for a specific basket (you write the number on the ticket when you return it with payment).