Personal Musings for Public Consumption

WordPress looks nice, but is a rats nest of code under the hood.  If you configure nginx* to proxy back to Apache*, you may find yourself with a nifty pile of never ending 301 redirects.  I've solved this before, but had long since forgotten.  Below I've got my recipe for fixing.

Here's a nugget from Facebook/Twitter than I'm keen on.  The Vet in the second video does a pretty good job of summing up my present attitude.  I'll be interested to see where this goes.

http://www.coffeepartyusa.com/

I'll clean up my XML blog and post it someplace here as an example of how you can use XSLT, but, I'm keen enough on my new setup that I'm pushing this live.

A few weeks ago I found myself in Tahoe with my VFF KSO Trek and decided to take 'em for a run in the snow. The snow was crunchy and had not been compacted. As a result, two out of every three steps you would plunge through the snow for 5-10". Probably some of the more dangerous running I've played around with because the ground was so unpredictable (sometimes your footing would hold, sometimes it wouldn't), but it was highly entertaining and exhausting (worse than running on a beach with dry sand). So if the VFF KSO feel very lightweight and like tiny wrappers around the pads of your feet, the VFF KSO Trek make you feel like you've got tank treads on that crush whatever you step on. A very different feel, but not a bad one. You can still "feel the ground," but the sensation is somewhat muted compared to running with VFF KSO. That said, it's still orders of magnitude better than traditional fail running shoes.

Here's my Run Keeper event for my run. Nothing fancy (certainly not fast), but I took a few pics along the way so you could see the terrain (click view details to see the actual photos).

 Was going through my daily news troll and stumbled across a very well written OpEd in The Philadelphia Inquirer that had a few choice paragraphs that bear repeating, at which point you should dump over to the original: Head Strong: Sorry, but for me, the party is over.

Where political parties once existed to create coalitions and win elections, now they seek to advance strict ideological agendas. In today's terms, it's hard to imagine the GOP tent once housing such disparate figures as conservative Barry Goldwater and liberal New Yorker Jacob Javits, while John Stennis of Mississippi and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts coexisted as Democratic contemporaries.

Followed by:

Collegiality is nonexistent today, and any outreach across an aisle is castigated as weakness by the talking heads who constantly stir a pot of discontent. So vicious is the political climate that within two years, Sen. John McCain has gone from GOP standard-bearer to its endangered-species list. All of which leaves homeless those of us with views that don't stack up neatly in any ideological box the way we're told they should.

And: 

I think President Obama is earnest, smart, and much more centrist than his tea party caricature suggests. He has never been given a fair chance to succeed by those who openly crow about their desire to see him fail (while somehow congratulating one another on their relative patriotism). I know he was born in America, isn't a socialist, and doesn't worship in a mosque. I get that he inherited a minefield. Still, the level of federal spending concerns me. And he never closed the deal with me that health insurance is a right, not a privilege. But I'm not folding the tent on him. Not now. Not with the nation fighting two wars while its economy still teeters on the brink of collapse.

If you wanted to get an idea of how the Facbeook economy works, or at least this concept of social games, this is a fantastic video that is both interesting, and a bit spooky in its implications (ps, if you're an educator, you need to at the very least watch starting around 19:30).

Rapid fire simple instructions to get APC 3.1.3p1 working on FreeBSD given the port only has 3.0.19.

Well said.

I'm just sayin', if you want to have a snowball's chance in hell of getting more than 30sec of my time, time your calls to be some other day of the week, other than a Friday afternoon.  Chances are, I'm on the phone who hasn't gotten this memo or am dealing with a pre-weekend crisis.

I think I may have found my blog software of choice for the foreseeable future.  I cranked out an XML/XSLT blogging system a few years ago, but it's a PITA to work with.  Having everything done through a web form... much nicer.  Anyway, we'll see.

I'm posting this simply because I had to go to the trouble of figuring this out.  Imagine a MySQL* database that has several databases, and only one admin account, but that admin account is bound to a particular database and not global to the entire server.  Don't ask me how, but there was no root user in the database.  Not a bad idea from a security perspective, but it's problematic to administrate the machine (read: try adding new databases, users or doing anything with the mysql database).  It may seem like the simple fix would be to reboot the database with --skip-grant-tables and fire off a: