Last night I had a dream that the republicans and democrats were backing hockey teams. The republicans were backing the capitols, and the democrats were backing the devil’s. Whoever scored the first goal wins, but there was one caveat — both teams needed to touch the puck before anyone could score. The game started and all of the capitols immediately exited the ice. So the devils are skating around and it’s just impossible for them to win. Then, one of the devils hits the puck down to the other side where nobody was. Some of the capitols got onto the ice, as if to tease, and a smart devil’s player quickly got to the puck and slap-shot it against the skate of a capitols player before shooting it into the net and winning the game. In my dream, I jumped up and started screaming “Yea!”. Funny thing is, I’m a Ranger’s fan. I don’t ordinarily like to see the Devil’s win. Funny how our sub-conscience works.
I was searching for a way to enable caching for WordPress and I stumbled across this great article. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/djcp/2010/01/nginx-as-a-front-end-proxy-cache-for-wordpress/ In the example that was given, there was an Apache server working the backend while an nginx server was working as a front-end cache. Those are too many services for me, so I wanted to use just one system. Nginx. Here is how I did it (much of this information was taken verbatim from the link above). First, install the WordPress Nginx proxy cache integrator into WordPress. You can download it from here: http://wordpress.org/plugins/nginx-proxy-cache-integrator/ Activate it after it is downloaded. Then create this file: /etc/nginx/conf.d/proxy-common.conf First, copy /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.proxy Then, I changed this line in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default from to this This basically tells nginx to listen on port 81 instead of 80, which...
For any doubters of evolution, look closely the next time you drive down a highway. Look to the side of the road at all of the debris. Look in between the lanes at debris. Is there more in those places than in the center of the lanes? Of course there is. That’s because as cars hit the debris, it moves around. And it keeps moving around until it rests in a place where nobody hits it anymore. In an abstract sense, the debris evolves. What makes anyone think that our bodies cannot do the same thing?
Successfully navigating through an IT crisis requires both successful problem solving AND successful communication. When it comes to a crisis, it is absolutely imperative to communicate effectively. People tend to fill in the details of what they do not know with their imaginations. Most often, those ad-lib details are inaccurate. Without good communication, you could experience the best, most ingenious solutions in the world, and you would not be the wiser. Seeing the ashes of a house that once stood might make you condemn a fire department. But knowing that the firemen saved everyone single living being in that house might allow you to focus on and appreciate the heroism, rather than to kindle any condemnation. The facts do not change, but your perspective does. Good communication yields more accurate perspectives and that is exactly what you want during a crisis.
Personal freedom is what is at stake here, or at least that is the concern of many. How can someone feel free to speak their mind on government matters if their anonymity is nothing but a transparent cloak in the eyes of the government? The ability for any person or organization to indiscriminately and discretely collect personal data about others is power, no matter how you look at it. As they say in the movies, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Trust is the real issue for most people. Do we trust our government to use good judgment and sufficient discretion with a tool as powerful as the one that they have in front of them? But this debate really goes even deeper than the previous questions. Without context, idealists on the right and the left will draw hard lines about this. But the challenges that our country faces are quite complicated. Working in the IT field, I have been presented with many real-world security challenges. Usually it boils down to the many vs. few...
After testing a virtual machine in VirtualBox, I decided to move to a different hypervisor. I removed the VirtualBox tools and after rebooting, I could no longer use my mouse. The following devices showed up with yellow exclamation marks in Windows XP. After much research, I could not find a solution online. In the end, I managed to fix the issue on my own. Here is what I did to resolve this issue. Open regedit as an administrator. Expand HKEY\LOCAL\MACHINE and then SYSTEM. Click on CurrentControlSet. Search for “mouse”. The first entry returned should have a string for “UpperFilters”. If it is not there, repeat the search until you see an entry for “UpperFilters”. Double-click UpperFilters and remove the reference to the VBox driver. It should only say “mouclass” at this point. Click ok to complete the changes. Reboot. At this time, your mouse should be working again.
First, you need to install the following. Next, you need to edit the file /etc/nginx/fastcgi\_params. It should look like this: Now, you need to create a new site. Here is an example site that should work: Take notice to the “root /var/www/html/;” line and how it is not inside the location tag. This is on purpose so that it is inherited by the other configuration blocks. Now you just need to create a /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi file with the following content: Now, let’s make sure that the php-fastcgi script starts with the server: And lastly, let’s start everything. That’s it! Your site should work at this point.
So you finally get around to buying that domain name for your WordPress site. You export a backup of your database and do a search and replace on the database file. But when you import the database back in, your widgets are not there. How do you fix it? This plugin is a lifesaver! Enough said. Widget Fixer