Archive for January, 2009
I went for a really quick photowalk at lunch, and wound up not taking any photos of the hordes of returning students. strange.
a skeleton luger crosses the finish line after finishing a practice run on the track at canada olympic park
a decapitated Polar Bear cookie at our local Global Caffeine Monopoly outlet, part of an apres-swim routine.
I’m working on my third year in a photo-a-day photography project, and there are days when it’s pretty near impossible to think of something to shoot. On days like that, you need an assignment – someone to give you a topic or subject, and you go hunting for (or staging) a photo to meet the assignment.
So, I cobbled together a simple web page to randomly generate assignments.
If nothing else, it might spark some ideas for you to create your own assignments.
If you use the utility, I’d love to hear about it! If you post to Flickr, throw a tag of “assignmentr” on the photo.
my entry for Alan’s “breakfast” 365photos theme of the week. A Friday Latte, pumpkin spice muffin, music cranked on the iPod, and news via the great iPod Google Reader client app Byline.
I spent 2 hours last night digging out the packed snow and ice that was blocking the driveway, so janice could back the car out without pulling any important bits off the bottom. The pile on the left wasn’t there before I started, and has a fresh twin on the other side of the driveway (behind camera).
I thought it would be prudent to test the plugins, mu-plugins and themes I run at ucalgaryblogs.ca on the latest prerelease snapshot of WordPress Multiuser 2.7, to check for any incompatibilities or strangenesses. I grabbed the .zip archive from the SVN repository, dropped it onto my desktop, and installed a new site. I then grabbed the contents of my mu-plugins and plugins directories, and a subset of the themes that are used. After farting around repairing some file permission errors (caused by FTPing the files from the server to my desktop under a different user than apache runs under…) it looks like everything Just Works™.
It wasn’t an exhaustive test – I didn’t try upgrading the databases for the sites that are running on ucalgaryblogs.ca – all I really needed to know was if the plugins needed some love before thinking of upgrading to 2.7. The good news is that they appear to be fine. Woohoo.
snow still piled up along the sides of calgary streets. drivers are too aggressive to share the remaining lane, so it’s unsafe to ride the bike for awhile…
A few times on Twitter, I’ve mentioned how “easy” it is to move stuff between servers using the rsync shell command. It’s actually an extremely powerful program for synchronizing two directories – even if they’re not on the same volume, or even on the same computer. To do this, you’ll need to login to one of the servers via SSH. Once there, invoke the geeky incantation:
rsync -rtlzv --ignore-errors -e ssh . username@hostname:/path/to/directoryWhat that basically says is, “run rsync, and tell it to recursively copy all directories, preserving file creation and modification times, maintaining proper symlinks (for aliases and stuff like that), compress the files as they’re being copied in order to save bandwidth, and provide verbose updates as you’re doing it. Use SSH as the protocol, to securely transfer stuff from the current directory to the server ‘hostname‘ using the username ‘username‘. On that destination server, stuff the files and directories into ‘/path/to/directory‘”
What you’ll need to change:
.– if you want to specify a full path to the source directory, put it in place of the.(which means “here” in shellspeak)username– unless your username on the destination server is “username” – you’ll be prompted for the password for that account after hitting return and starting the program working.hostname– the IP address or domain name of the server you want to send the files to./path/to/directory– I’m always a bit fuzzy on this. Can it be a relative path? from where? So I just specify the full path to where I want the files to go. Something like/home/dnorman/
Because it compresses files, it’s actually pretty efficient at moving a metric boatload of stuff between servers. I’ve used this technique to easily migrate from Dreamhost to CanadianWebHosting.com and I use it regularly to move files around on campus. I use a variation of this technique to regularly backup servers as well – the beauty of rsync is that it only copies files that have been added or modified, so backing up a few gigs worth of server really only involves transferring a few megabytes of files, and can be done routinely in a matter of minutes or seconds.
Best $50 I’ve spent in a long, long time. My music library is not pretty much DRM-free. What was that about the evil Apple lockin again?
Update: doh. looks like the process has a glitch or two. I’m sure that’ll get worked out really quickly though. This is what I get when I click the “Buy” button shown above:
Update 2: GAH! I tried to post a question on the Apple Support site to see wtf, but can’t seem to find the button to do that. No email link. No support available. My only option is to wait a day or so and try again. Fail.
Update 3: thanks to a friend who kindly pointed out that I had missed the Contact Us link on the iTunes support page, I’ve submitted a support message with Apple. Hopefully I can spend that $50 in the next day or so… 