paul schreiber » Blog

Maddow highlights Fox’s hypocrisy in Sherrod story

paul — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:31:45 +0000

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Why you should fix the bug

paul — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:54:18 +0000

Or “how I tried to save Apple $11,000,000”:

Avoids $1,000 in costs versus waiting until your customers catch the bug in the field, causing the team to remedy the problems, rush out a patch release, and/or go to heroic lengths to manage a PR problem.

Speed matters

paul — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:37:54 +0000

Performance is huge. We think of it as a feature. Speed is the best feature your product can have.

Last year Google introduced these performance enhancements to Picasa to make flipping through photos faster, and the usage more than doubled. When a site gets twice as fast, it often gets more than twice as much usage.

—Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager

How to install MediaWiki on a subdomain

paul — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:46:33 +0000

Here is how to set up MediaWiki on a subdomain and use pretty/short URLs. This was tested on July 1, 2010 with MediaWiki 1.15.4, PHP 5.2.8, MySQL 5.0.90 and Apache 2.2.11.

This assumes you are in a shared hosting situation, and do not have root access and cannot edit the Apache configuration files directly.

Your setup

Suppose you have a site, www.ilikefish.com. Its DocumentRoot is /var/www/ilikefish.com. You then create a subdomain, wiki.ilikefish.com, with a DocumentRoot of /var/www/ilikefish.com/wiki.

Configuring Apache

In /var/www/ilikefish.com/.htaccess, set up a redirect

RedirectMatch /wiki/(.*) http://wiki.ilikefish.com/$1
In /var/www/ilikefish.com/wiki/.htaccess, set up rewrite rules:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Configuring MediaWiki

In LocalSettings.php, set the following variables:

$wgScriptPath = "";
$wgArticlePath = "/$1";
$wgUsePathInfo = true;
$wgLogo = "/my_fish_logo.png";
$wgScriptExtension = ".php";

Journalists denied access to gulf

paul — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:44:31 +0000

I saved six cents

paul — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:33:05 +0000

Thanks, Bonktown.

Indexed explains the music industry

paul — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:29:38 +0000

how to delete .svn directories

paul — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:48:48 +0000

find . -name .svn -type d -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -fr

Finding Forrester (he’s not at JCCSF)

paul — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:51:46 +0000

One of my favourite scenes from Finding Forrester is when Jamal corrects Professor Crawford:

Prof. Robert Crawford: [to Jamal] Perhaps your skills do reach farther than basketball.
Jamal: “Further”
Prof. Robert Crawford: What?
Claire Spence: [whispered to Jamal] Don’t…
Jamal: [to Crawford] You said that my skills reached “farther” than basketball. “Farther” relates to distance, “further” is a definition of degree. You should have said “further”.
Prof. Robert Crawford: Are you challenging me, Mr. Wallace?
Jamal: Not any more than you challenged Coleridge.

The JCCSF’s new tagline is “Your Membership Goes Farther.”

You can see it on their yelp page and on their bus ads:

Where, exactly, does the JCC’s membership take you?

Spammer fail

paul — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:19:29 +0000