Hive Archive

Ditched Wordpress for Blogofile

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:31:31 PST

I'm finally tired of the Wordpress upgrade treadmill, and the zero-day exploits for poorly written PHP code causing my site to be compromised, and spammers to filling my blog with crap.

Since many of my posts have good Google juice, it was important for me to maintain my link structure. For awhile, I toyed with writing my own static site generator. I wanted to be able to edit my posts in Vim, and generate static HTML. The bar for hacking a blog through static HTML files and CSS is far higher than PHP backed MySQL driven sites. I did some searching and found one written in my language of choice, Python and which allowed me to seamlessly convert from PHP without breaking my links.

Though it's got some rough edges, I'm pretty pleased with how well Blogofile has worked. I highly recommend it! Now that Cloudfront supports a default root object, I will eventually end up serving my blog through AWS, eliminating having to maintain a server or muck with Apache at all. Win win win.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.9

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:39:32 PST

Tired of the Wordpress upgrade treadmill. I don't need any new features, but I'm terrified of all the lurking security holes. It may be high time to write my own blogging engine with only the features I need. Update: awesome, a spammer injected crap into my blog already. I hate wordpress.

Chinese Citation

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:14:05 PST

I came acrosssomeone citing an article I wrote for Linux.com back in 2002 about China's Red Flag Linux. It's weird reading stuff I wrote back then now. Back in the day, I thought I was pretty knowledgeable. These days I actually know more, and feel like I know less. In fact, it's hard to find anything worthwhile to write about as I don't feel like I can do it justice. One of these days I'm going to have to chronicle some of the event surrounding Linux.com. I made a lot of good friends working on that site, made a little bit of money for college, and learned a ton. Still, there were some decisions made by VA/OSDN that weren't in the best interest of the community or the people that volunteered their time, energy and passion to trying to spread open source and evangelize Linux. Maybe some day I will, but not tonight :) Happy Holidays everyone!

Attack of the Ubuntu Forks

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:53:35 PST

Why does Ubuntu inspire so many forks?

Why does Ubuntu have so many forks?

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:20:05 PST

Why do you need to fork an entire distribution to change the window manager, like Xubuntu, or to make the default KDE like Kubuntu? Ummm, could you just make it user configurable instead of duplicating this amount of effort? Guys, really? Really? Really?

Chimpanzee rides Segway and Wins at the Internet

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:32:58 PDT

I love you internets.

Need a private jet?

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 22:53:51 PDT

http://www.sentient.com/pricing/ Hope you got several thousand dollars per hour :)

Seattle relieved to lose its high-tech toilets

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:53:04 PDT

City officials have finally gotten rid of five high-tech self-cleaning toilets that cost Seattle $5 million — but sold online for just $12,549. The city installed the modernistic stand-alone toilets four years ago, hoping they would provide tourists and the homeless a place to do their business while downtown. But the automated loos became better known for drug use and prostitution than for relief. USA Today

Oh you clever headline writer you. It's rather unfortunate that these didn't work out. I remember seeing similar public toilets in Paris. This is a huge problem in downtown Seattle. It is difficult to find a public restroom anywhere, much less if you look like a transient. Living downtown, I have found a couple of strategic places that I can just jump into the bathroom without a code, or having to make a purchase, or being scrutinized before using it (and no I'm not telling where they are). The one truly open to the public restrooms exist in the downtown Seattle Library. The last time I walked in there, there were multiple homeless men practically camped in the bathroom, trying to wash up. One was shaving in the mirror. I have a lot of sympathy for their situation, but it was also a very uncomfortable place to be. There has to be a better way.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Model: Premiere

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:48:26 PDT

Project Euler and Prime Factorization

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:16:32 PDT

I have been doing some of the exercises at Project Euler lately. Project Euler describes themselves as:

A series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

It has been a lot of fun to code these up in my language du jour, Python. There are a couple of problems that Python's built in libraries have made trivial. I have to admit the most enjoyable part for me is having problems that require efficiency in algorithm. For the simpler problems, I usually just quickly hack together the "naive" brute force method, figure out that it doesn't scale and then start investigating how I can fix it. Doing this, you will exercise your mathematics, computer science and programming skills, something that a lot of programming doesn't do. I convinced my girlfriend to work with me on one of the exercises, and of course she picked one of the Prime Factorization problems. The naive brute force algorithm would not be an option for the large composite number given, so we ended up hacking together a Sieve of Eratosthenes. Ultimately, we got a version working, but it was still pretty inefficient, only returning the answer in about an hour. An optimal version should be able to do it within seconds. Obviously there is some "refactoring" to do.