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Gym Color Temperature

dave — Sun, 06 May 2012 23:35:12 +0000

Processing pix from the Sarah McCullagh Memorial Scholarship. Took Nikon NEF (Raw) format to avoid problems with color balance, which is horrible in the gym.

From here, “Mercury vapor color temp is around 4200K and CRI in range of 50.”

Looks much better now.

Git Alias – ignore all whitespace

dave — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:31:02 +0000

A talk at last year’s Chicago Code Camp spoke about Git aliases. Up until now I used shell aliases in the (wonderful) MINGW32 Git Bash shell, so “$ gs” is $ git status.

$ git diff is something I use a lot, but sometimes you want to ignore whitespace, say when you reformat an XML config file.

$ git config alias.di 'diff --ignore-all-space'

now, $ git di does what I want.

The Genius Continues : Instructable : Replacing the shock absorber in a Felco 7 Pruner

dave — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:55:46 +0000

See my Instructable if you are rebuilding a Felco 7 Pruner…

Centos Fun with a locked Boot. Thanks, Hudson 2.1.1.

dave — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 21:55:29 +0000

Say the Hudson script locks up during boot, for example, after you upgrade to 2.1.1 and it does not work and someone said removing the –daemon argument makes it work and something else fails so you roll back the hudson.war and restart and it now locks up on boot. No SSH – sshd is the next service to load. I had to “power down” the VM, and tried to “force the runlevel“: several ways, say, using “init=/bin/sh 3″. Nothing worked.

The obvious thing is to do the Interactive Boot (type I). Someone said this didn’t work, so I didn’t try. Liars. Worked great. Said “Y” until I hit Hudson, typed “N”, and then “C”ontinue… voila!

2.1.1 has some problems. Wait until 2.1.2 at least.

Upgrading Atahualpa

dave — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 02:00:33 +0000

Did you know that if you upgrade the Atahualpa theme from the Update page in the WordPress Admin, it deletes all the custom header images in your website?

Me neither.

Pruning Tomatoes

dave — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:41:34 +0000

For a long time if have suspected pruning tomatoes would be beneficial, but, after examining the rat’s nest of green on my plants, it just looks too hard.

This year, I have an Earthbox with two cherry tomatoes, heirloom Black Cherry and Tomato Berry, from W&M Land Corp from the Woodstock Farmer’s Market. Note the mechanics creeper which allows me to push it around the deck for cleaning and access. Of course, in the recent 70-MPH derecho we had, it tipped over, so I now have a bungee cord to hold it to the deck.

And I found a great article on tomato pruning with a clear drawing, so I gave it a try.

Once you start pruning, it’s hard to stop. Make sure you look at the pile and you should only take off stuff in 30% chunks.

Upgrading WordPress in Bulk

dave — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 15:05:54 +0000

Of course there is the old faithful Updating_WordPress_with_Subversion and Upgrading_WordPress_Extended, but there is a lot of fluff there. Old blogs are “You are using WordPress 2.9.1″. Show me the command lines.

Certainly.

“Backup your database. Read Backing Up Your Database for a detailed explanation.”
- Use Plugin WP-DB-Backup from http://austinmatzko.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-db-backup/
- Download it – make sure the copy is here. Open it up.
“Backup ALL your WordPress files in your WordPress directory. Don’t forget your .htaccess file.”
- Make a local shadow directory
  - $ rsync -vur ./sarajane/ ./backups/sarajane-snapshot-20110416/
- Make a tar file for download for archive
- $ tar cvf sarajane-snapshot-20110416.tar sarajane/
- $ gzip sarajane-snapshot-20110416.tar
- Verify the backups you created are there and usable. This is essential.
“Deactivate ALL your Plugins.”
“Ensure first four steps are completed. Do not attempt the upgrade unless you have completed the first four steps.”
Gotta upgrade the MYSQL Database? I did… The nice thing is, use two different ones. Since you saved the original directory, you can switch back to old state and db by replacing the directory.
- Per Backing_Up_the_Database
  - $ mysqldump --add-drop-table -h mysqlservername -u mysqlusername -p dbname> ms-db-backup-20110416.sql
- Per Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
  - $ mysql -h mysqlservername -u mysqlusername-p dbname< ms-db-backup-20110416.sql
edit wp-config.php (save the old one)
$ cp wp-config.php wp-config.php.save
$ vi wp-config.php ...
Use new SVN install into new folder

$ mkdir sarajane2
$ cd sarajane2
$ svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.1.1 .

Copy these files from your old site to the new
- $ export OLDBLOG=$HOME/sarajane
- $ export NEWBLOG=$HOME/sarajane2
- $ cp $OLDBLOG/wp-config.php $NEWBLOG/
- $ ls $OLDBLOG/wp-content/cache
- $ rm -rf $OLDBLOG/wp-content/cache
- $ ls $OLDBLOG/wp-content/plugins/widgets
- $ rm -rf $OLDBLOG/wp-content/plugins/widgets
- $ rsync -vur --exclude=.svn/ $OLDBLOG/wp-content/ $NEWBLOG/wp-content
# this only is in older WP installs
- $ rsync -vur --exclude=.svn/ $OLDBLOG/wp-images/ $NEWBLOG/wp-images
- $ cp sarajane/.htaccess sarajane2
Swap directories
- $ mv sarajane sarajane0
- $ mv sarajane2 sarajane
Hit the upgrade link
- http://localhost/wp-admin/upgrade.php

Atualhalpa stores settings in the database, so you don’t have to copy anything.

Final ledger entries

dave — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:49:24 +0000

For three days now I have been trying to figure out how to account for payments to the Clinic via PayPal. The money goes into my personal PayPal account, and credits against money owed me for expenses, but I just don’t want to post the delta, I want to track what happened so the cash flow report is accurate. I tried a lot of accounts, but always ended up with the debits and credit balances fighting so the cash flow was backwards. Then I read this post who recommended that I treat the PayPal account like a bank account. I created “PayPal Bank”, receipts were deposits, and actual transfers into the account were transfers. Works like a charm.

So how do I account for donations of cash? Duh. Contribution Revenue.

It’s so nice when things work out. Now I can actually finish the books and work on my OWN taxes.

Why Unix Rocks – cat

dave — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:12:14 +0000

I got an email from a friend where the Word doc attachment was broken into 19 pieces and Base64 encoded. I started to open each file and copy out the payload, then got bored and considered a Perl script.

What’s the simplest thing?

First have a batch file:
copy p1 + p2 temp1 copy p3+temp1 temp2 copy p4+temp2 temp3 ...

Nuts. I gave up typing. Too much thinking.

Create a small batch file via dir /b:
cat "Stained Glass Book StAnnsStainedGlass.docx [01_19].eml" > fred.docx cat "Stained Glass Book StAnnsStainedGlass.docx [02_19].eml" >> fred.docx .. cat "Stained Glass Book StAnnsStainedGlass.docx [19_19].eml" >> fred.docx

Then edit fred.docx using Scite, looking for an X-header to remove the headers. Probably could have used grep or sed, but for 19 edits, why look up the command line options?

Then run base64 -d -i fred.docx >ff.docx. The -i handles stuff I missed.

Works great. Of course, you need the Unix utils via cygwin. It should be built into Windows. Or we should just use Ubuntu…

Or maybe type filename >> target would work. Whatever.

WP 3.0.1 and Atahualpa

dave — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 20:56:23 +0000

So I upgrade to WP 3.0.1 using Atahualpa and cannot edit pages. Page, edit, left menu but no text, no nothing. Bad. Have to hold off upgrading all the other blogs. Upgrade Atahualpa to 3.5.3. No good.

After weeks of search, found this post which sez PHP4 does not cut it.

What does 1&1 supply by default?
(uiserver):xxxxxx:~/xxxxxx> php --version PHP 4.4.9 (cgi) (built: Aug 12 2008 13:28:34) Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group Zend Engine v1.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2004 Zend Technologies

Update .htaccess. Add:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

Works nice. Thank you very much.