Apr
Swine Flu Outbreak Resources
Posted by jerry as World
The recent discovery of the swine flu and the number of people that have apparently become infected and died is becoming quite concerning to many. We can see that there are many people taking quite seriously. The price of oil has dropped $3 per barrel on this news.
The good news is that it the deaths seems to be few and contained to Mexico.
Below are some resources that I have found useful for tracking the swine flu.
- Pink markers are suspect
- Purple markers are confirmed
- Deaths lack a dot in marker
- Yellow markers are negative
CDC Page on Swine Flu - Includes a current table of confirmed cases and their locations.
Friends, please be safe and well.
Dec
Fix for WordPress “Could not remove the old plugin” error
Posted by jerry as Uncategorized
I had been seeing the error “Could not remove the old plugin” any time I tried to auto upgrade a plugin. A search of the wordpress forums revealed that this is apparently a common problem that does not appear to impact everyone, and there isn’t a known fix. The error looked like this:
Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/related-posts.zip
Unpacking the update
Deactivating the plugin
Removing the old version of the plugin
Could not remove the old plugin
Plugin upgrade Failed
So, I spent some time last night trying to find out what the problem was. As it turns out, some upgrade or plugin along the way created a bunch of nested wp-content directories. It looked list this:
/home/mydir/public_html/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/wp-content/plugins
The filesystem driver code in wordpress doesn’t handle this very gracefilly.
It turns out that the fix needed is to delete the extra wp-content directories.
rm -r /home/mydir/public_html/wp-content/wp-content
works quite nicely. After deleting this directory, rerun the auto upgrade and it should complete successfully.
NOTE: You should make a back up before you perform the above operation. Deleting the wrong directory will result in a dead site.
Nov
Ideas For Getting The Economy Back On Track
Posted by jerry as finance, politics
I was driving my family to lunch yesterday when my 8 year old son asked “Dad, why are so many stores going out of business?”. I thought for a second and gave him an 8 year old appropriate view of what has happened. As I was talking to him, I couldn’t help but think that he is living through what may well turn into the second great depression.
A lot of insanity has transpired lately. We have seen an unprecedented level of government intervention trying to stop the economic bleeding. The US has declared handfuls of companies “too big to fail”. The US was already spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, now nearly a trillion dollars more to save some key companies.
With all of that in mind, here are my humble ideas for getting the US back on track:
Stop spending so much damn money
1. Discontinue the practice of injecting money into troubled companies.
Instead, let bankruptcy work the way it is designed to. In extreme cases, facilitate an orderly unwinding of a dying company, such as AIG.
GM does not need $25B from the US to stay afloat. It needs to fundamentally restructure itself. This is what chapter 11 bankruptcy is for. It is possible, even likely, that one or two of the “big three” will not emerge from bankruptcy. Yes, it will be a terrible set back for the economy, but it is inevitable. The US automakers have been slowly dying for decades now.
2. End the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to save money
3. Unwind a majority of the new, post 9/11 surveillance infrastructure and foreigner harassment programs to save money and start making the US a world travel destination again
Leverage the savings from 1 through 3 above to establish the following programs:
4. Establish a program to offer new mortgages at a rate of 4% for a set period of time
The near nationalization of the US banking system, and having Freddi and Fannie in a conservitorship should make this possible. Note that I am not recommending the relaxing of lending requirements.
We do not want to try to re-inflate the housing bubble, but at the same time, the broken and dysfunctional state of housing is likely to be the weight that carries us in to another depression.
5. Establish a series of large scale, nation wide programs to address specific infrastructure issues, such as bridges, water distribution, or power.
For some reason, economic stimulus in the US has to come in the form of a check from the government. I think that is a fundamentally bad approach to the problem it’s trying to solve.
I generally identify myself as a Libertarian, and some of these ideas are uncomfortable to me, but in many ways, the direction has already been set, now we have to find a way to undo the damage and get back on the right track.
Aug
How are you preparing for Gustav?
Posted by jerry as news, politics
I was glued to my TV and computer 3 years ago when Katrina hit, and watched the disastrous aftermath unfold. What struck me, other than the incompetence of managing the situation at every level of government, was the sheer futility of a inhabiting New Orleans. So, as we watch this storm lining up to deal NOLA a blow through it’s still unrepaired levees, we have politicians announcing that the country stands beside the people of New Orleans. After I tired of the spectacle of Katrina, I started to resent New Orleans. Residents and officials have known for decides, if not hundres of years, that New Orleans is in a precarious place.
Aug
More Troubled Ideas To Reform Social Security In the US
Posted by jerry as finance
I read this blog post recently, proposing an idea for social security tax reform. The net of the story is that the FICA tax is regressive – it impacts the poor more than the rich, so lets turn it around. Put a lower limit in place for salaries, below which there is no FICA burden. Remove the cap that is currently in place where FICA drops off after the first $97,500. Then, lower the overall FICA rate from 6.2% to 3.2%, making the people in the middle income brackets happy as well, but sticking it to the rich.
I don’t agree.
Aug
Using SSL To Improve Internet Security – A Simple Idea
Posted by jerry as Security, technology
I was headed out with my son today to one of the local jump/bounce places for the birthday party of a neighborhood kid. Having been to these places before, I know that they generally offer free wifi access. I packed up my laptop, thinking that I could work on some web site issues I have been trying to fix.
I got to thinking about the risks of someone sniffing my logins to the sites. That reminded me of a post I wrote recently about an idea to conserve IP addresses. Most of my sites are hosted on a shared IP address on my server. I simply don’t have enough IP addresses to cover all of my sites. Without dedicating an IP address for each, using SSL is simply not possible.
The vast majority of web sites do not have SSL capabilities, in the same way that mine do not. At the same time, the instances of hacking, snooping and data theft are spiraling out of control. As well, the “Starbucks” culture of camping out in a restaurant to surf the web on a laptop is growing, leading to many more opportunities for the trivial capture of passwords and other sensitive data.
Certainly, financial data such as credit cards and logins to financial institutions are generally well protected by SSL. The types of information that can be lost at the local coffee shop is more likely to be a facebook username and password, or the username and password to a webmail account. Useful to the hacker, and damaging to the victim, but not at the same level of severity as a credit card number.
So, in a nutshell, modifying the SSL protocol to allow for the negotiation of the requested domain *before* the SSL tunnel is established has another advantage – allowing sites on shared IP’s to use SSL to protect the private information of the users of a site.
It seems to me that the certificate authorities would jump at supporting this idea – it opens a substantially large new market.
Aug
How Do I Get More Traffic To My Website?
Posted by jerry as Internet Promotion
Increasing Traffic To Your Web Site
There are now tens of billions of web pages on the Internet. Driving traffic to your site can be very difficult. This post is meant to serve as a basic primer to increasing the amount of traffic on a site.
Aug
How Do I Add Pictures To Google Images?
Posted by jerry as Internet Promotion
There is no obvious way to add images to the Google Image Search for the beginner. Google Images search results come from the pictures that Google’s web crawlers find on the Internet. To get an image included in GIS, you will need to:
- Find a place to host the image, such as photobucket
- Place a link to the photo on a web site using the <img> tag.
Alternatively, images can be uploaded to a blogspot or wordpress blog when writing a page or a post by using the “add an image”.
Additional suggestions to allow GIS to properly categorize your images:
- Label the picture with a caption.
- Use the “alt” phrase in the <img> tag
- Name image file to relate to it’s contents. i.e., pictures-of-lilies.jpg vs. DSC001.jpg
Getting Google to crawl your site is another trick.
Aug
Internet Marketing Terms
Posted by jerry as Internet Promotion
This is a list of common terms and acronyms and their definitions.
- Back link
- A link placed on a different site that links back to the target page or site.
- Dofollow Link
- By default, back links are considered ‘do follow’, if the link code does not contain the tag “rel=nofollow”. Do follow links are processed by search engines and used in the calculation of site relevance.
Aug
Search Engine Optimization For The Simple Machines Forum
Posted by jerry as Internet Promotion
There are several simple but effective SEO tricks to optimizing a Simple Machines forum.
URLs
First, is the URL structure. Search engines value the descriptiveness of a URL. By default, SMF uses URL’s that are worthless for SEO. An SMF mod, called Pretty URLs, will rewrite your URLs to be far more useful for a search engine. Pretty URLs is very simple to install, but a common problem is to ensure that .htaccess is writable, and that the root directory is writable.
Notice the difference (these links all go to the same post):
- Default SMF URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php?topic=2969.0
- Search Engine Friendly URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/index.php/topic,2969.0.html
- Pretty URLs: http://www.cyvin.com/offtopic/unleaded-gas/
Pretty URLs use the title of the post topic as part of the URL. This will help search engines to properly classify the page and build a stronger connection between the the page and the title of the post in search results.
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