“The Best Party” has this campaign video where they won city elections in Reykjavik. This is amusing and campy. I especially like the line “A drug free parliament by 2020!”
The Best Party: Campaign video from Iceland
July 4th, 2010WordPress 3.0 update
July 3rd, 2010Update to 3.0 went pretty smoothly. I’m having some problem with images (added how to fix below)
- Ran my custom backup script:
$ cd ~/Desktop/wp-backup $ ./backup
- Downloaded wordpress 3.0:
$ cd ~/Desktop/src/downloads/pkgs $ curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz $ mv latest.tar.gz wordpress-3.0.tgz
- Make sure you know the WP administrator user password as WP 3.0 uses a “Super Admin” interface.
- No real special requirements for my site for wpmu upgrade most a lot of warnings about plugins and themes not necessarily being compatible.
- Follow the directions or these even better directions
- Disable plugins from site admin web page
- Remove (save somewhere else) wp-admin, wp-includes
- Extract the wordpress-3.0.files
- Fix permisions (this is Apple’s Snow Leopard Server)
$ cd /Library/Webserver/Documents $ mv wp-admin wp-includes ~/tmp $ tar xzvf ~/Desktop/src/downloads/pgks/wordpress-3.0.tgz $ chown -R _www:_www .
- remove blogs.php
$ cd /Library/Webserver/Documents $ rm wp-content/blogs.hp
Modify .htaccess to add the rule for wp-files (replacings blogsphp):
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.wp-content/plugins. RewriteRule ^(./)?files/(.) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]Upgrade the site (site.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php). Login as the administrator user, if you don’t see “Super Admin” you aren’t the right user.
- My site admin had some extra steps to perform like getting rid of blogs.php and adding some code for the cookies.
- Update the plugins
Upgrading from WPMU to WordPress 3.0
July 3rd, 2010I’m starting to do the upgrade from WPMU to WordPress 3.0 today. Important Things You Should Know Before Upgrading to WordPress 3.0:
WordPress MU has been merged into regular WP, which means whether or not you need multiple blogs (sites now) you will download it from the same place (http://wordpress.org/download/).
Jeopardy playing computer
June 16th, 2010From NY Times is this article Smarter Than You Think – I.B.M.’s Supercomputer Challenges ‘Jeopardy!’ Champions – NYTimes.com about how IBM has built a machine that does pretty well playing Jeopardy.
Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer.
Great map: “The Best Movies”
June 13th, 2010Great chart of the top movies laid out like a subway map with each line representing a genre like “Poltical Drama”, “Sci-Fi”, etc.
Budget Deficits
June 13th, 2010
Here’s how future US budget deficits are apportioned to various legislation and events from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Remember, the budget for 2000 was in surplus; in 2009 the deficit was $1.4 trillion. It’s not the stimulus spending that dominates deficit spending.
In the meantime, employment is still terrible. If the employment rate stayed at the same rate as 1999 67.1% then there are four million fewer jobs then 10 years ago. That’s a lot of unhappy people.
Unemployment
June 5th, 2010Here’s is Calculated Risk’s version of the scariest chart. It shows the change in employment as a percent since the peak employment near the beginning of the recession; for this recession, that’s Dec 2007. Don’t forget that the years up to 2007 weren’t particularly good as there was no net gain of jobs in spite of increasing population.
Inflation is at 2.2% which is lower then usual.
The dotted line is employment with the census workers taken out.
Purpose vs. Profit Motive
May 29th, 2010Daniel Pink has some surprising results about what motivates people. Mostly, if there’s any creativity, then more money doesn’t provide more motivation — and may even unmotivate.
Daniel H. Pink's "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us"
Doug Green has a detailed review of this book — I saved a copy.
You can also check out an animated version of a talk by Daniel Green: