Christopher Merle » Technology

Stop SOPA/PIPA

Administrator — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:59:20 +0000

Update—This was originally a page, and I made it my home page yesterday to show my solidarity that SOPA/PIPA need to be stopped. Online piracy is a problem and must be dealt with, but you don’t do it by creating laws that break the Internet and do more harm than good.

The blackout has begun: Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, reddit, and many others.

Click the link below and sign the petition if you want to help
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

XCloner

Administrator — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:28:59 +0000

I’ve been using WP-DB-Backup to backup my database for this website, but I’ve always wanted a solution that backs up everything. I think I may have found it in XCloner. It backs up everything and I do mean everything. I have given it an initial test run. Seems to be pretty straightforward. I did get a JSON error at first. Searching the XCloner site suggested I turn compression off. It was off. I did notice that my backup was huge. I found a folder full of podcasts so I excluded that folder, reran it and it went off smoothly.

I’m testing it for a client that also has a WordPress website. The nice thing about XCloner is that you can create a local backup or push it offsite to another server or store in the Cloud (like Amazon’s S3).

BOINC

Administrator — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 22:19:12 +0000

Yeah, I don’t know what it stands for either*. It’s the acronym for the Berkeley distributed computing project. Back in the late 90′s I participated in the SETI@Home project. You let the software use idle CPU cycles to search for artificial signals from deep space. I participated for a few years and ended up earning 2000 credits. I printed out my certificate and it’s laying about someplace. Anyway the distributed computing project was so popular Berkeley created a platform called BOINC and now there are dozens of projects. Tens of thousands of computers have participated creating vast networks of supercomputing power very cheaply.

I’ve got two old laptops I’m using as home servers (one is for web development work). Originally the laptops were used to play around with Linux and also to do development work for clients. I ended up turning the first one into a print server on our home network. Now we don’t have to take our laptops into my office to print. Since this server is on all the time heating up the room (slightly), my mind harkened back to SETI@Home. I knew there were other projects so I looked at the list to see what struck my fancy. I found two. MilkyWay@Home and climateprediction.net.

MilkyWay@Home uses data from the Digital Sloan Sky Survey to help generate an accurate 3D model of our own galaxy. The other climatepredition.net is to run climate models and test the accuracy of climate models up to the year 2100. I chose the latter first as it seemed to be more practical. Actually I ended up choosing both, and I’mÂ running each on their own laptop.

Although I accept the science for global warming, if I discuss it I don’t need to base my arguments on climate models. There’s plenty of hard evidence that humans have altered the climate. However, we do need to be able to predict the climate if people (mostly Americans) do not change the way they live to stop climate change. Computer climate modeling got underway in the 1970′s and those models have gotten more accurate and computers have gotten immensely more powerful since them. It would be useful to test to verify how accurate those models are. And if they are off then they can be improved.

If it turns out the climate models predict less serious consequences of human activity and those models have been made more accurate then that would be a good thing. I think it’s unlikely but we won’t know until we look. I suspect (and computer models have already predicted) that human caused climate change is going to be very bad for us. But we still have a window of opportunity to mitigate the worst consequences. We can’t stop it, but can slow it and eventually reverse it, but that will take centuries. However, that window is closing, and I don’t know how much time we’ve got.

Whether it’s for fun or serious reasons these distributed computing projects allow citizens to participate in large projects. And as computing power continues to improve these projects will help to solve pressing problems.

*Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Upgrade

Administrator — Tue, 04 May 2010 23:41:53 +0000

I finally upgraded my WordPress install to v 2.92. Was stuck on an earlier version because I was using MySQL 4.0. I exported all of my data. Imported it into a new MySQL 5.0 database. Changed the info in the wp-config.php and ran the upgrade. It went pretty smooth.

I wanted to change the theme and I installed a few new themes. Didn’t quite like the end result, so I reverted to an older one I already had installed. I will see what I can do to tweak one of those new themes to suit me.

Freelance

Christopher — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:54:44 +0000

I’ve started doing freelance work. At the beginning of the year I was helping a company get their feet wet with Plone. A lot of work and I learned a lot. I’ve set up a website for a an author who has a book coming out. I’m looking for other opportunities. Plone is a long term project and really requires me to be part of a team, but for solo projects I’m very good at helping people set up WordPress websites. It’s good for small websites with a small number of users and there are many many skins available that can be easily customized to meet the needs of a client. I’m also familiar with Django, but still have much to learn about it.

I’m a firm believer in content management systems. It allows non-technical people the ability to manage their own websites. Plone is by far the one of the best open source CMSs available. It can take time to set up one but if you have a lot of information to manage and a fair number of end users, it’s the way to go.