Speaking of the TSA, here are some statistics that don’t really look too favorable…
Created by: OnlineCriminalJusticeDegree.com
BeetleCam vs. Lions
No, no – not those lions.
But these ones are still pretty incredible, too!
The teaser for the video is pretty cool, but what really blew me away were some of the super-close-up stills that this little robot captured before the lions decided to use it as their play toy! I love the ones of the male lion gnawing down on the remains of some carcass, in particular – beautiful resolution, and a shot that a photographer would probably have to be absolutely insane to try and actually capture in person in the field!
It reminds me of one of those documentaries that Disney did recently in that nature series of their – I’ve honestly never actually watched any of them because I don’t really have much desire to watch 90 minutes of just any random nature documentary, but if they’re anything like this…
No time for Old Netflix…
I feel kinda bad about it, but I guess I’m just not really that into Netflix anymore.
At least, I haven’t used it for the last 3 months and I don’t plan on using it for the next 3…
Truth be told, I actually wasn’t using it for a long time before I put the account on hold. When we moved right around this time last spring, we brought our current DVDs with us and I don’t think I ever ended up actually watching those. No clue how long I had those ones from the old address, but it just took me a long time to finally bite the bullet and login to put my account on hold so that they would stop billing me from the service that we weren’t really even using anymore.
I’ll bet a lot of people are like that. I remember an app at one point that used Netflix’s API to calculate how much each of your DVDs from Netflix actually costed you based on how long you kept each one, and I’m sure I could’ve bought season 3 of Californication several times over in the amount I spent on subscription fees before I finally sent disc 2 back unwatched…
Part of it is honestly just a lack of time – I’ve been so busy with writing projects lately that I hardly watch any TV at all anymore, and so when I do it’s typically one of a select few shows that I have piled up on the DVR. Same goes for movies – Sara and I rarely go to bed at the same time anyways, so most movies that we watch together these days are via the theater instead of Netflix. Occasionally we might rent something on-demand, but the timing is so sporadic that it wouldn’t make sense to rent a DVD at $14.99/month that I’ll maybe get around to watching sometime. I’d either feel guilty and blow off something to watch it, or eventually just write-off the $15 and let it sit there collecting dust.
I guess the reason that I feel “bad” about it is that I really did like Netflix as a company. I mean, despite some of their really stupid knee-jerk decisions lately regarding Qwixster or their gigantic rate hike (that actually saved me money by dropping streaming … oops), I always thought that they have a neat business model that disrupted that of Blockbuster, who I absolutely loathed renting videos from simply because they were infamous for providing such a lackluster, overpriced customer experience. But Netflix is simple – you just go on their site and make a list of movies you want to watch, then they mail them to you one at a time, as long as you need to watch each one.
I think another part of it might be, though, that I myself am finally starting to see more value in the concept of digital delivery for movies , and what I mean by that is that I don’t really buy that many new DVDs nowadays. We have a huge rack (ok, three racks) in the living room jam-packed with movies, and 95% of them probably never get watched. And the few that do get watched ad nauseam to the point where I worry the discs are going to get scratched and worn out, and so I’m starting to lean in the direction of a centralized media server to hold digital copies of everything again rather than relying on the physical discs to watch my favorite shows and movies.
And granted, that might be construed as an argument for Netflix streaming if the selection wasn’t so horrible, but in the meantime I guess it just leaves me kind of up in the air … sad to turn my back on Netflix, but also not so rich as to be able to continue blindly paying for a service that has outlived its need in my life. Maybe some day once again I’ll have a little more free time on my hands and give them another go around, or maybe they’ll just let me keep extending my account hold indefinitely … either way, it was still fun while it lasted, old friend… 🙁
Form Blazing Sword!!!
This is awesome. And now that I finally have an Xbox, I can actually play it!
Here’s another trailer with lots more gameplay – looks pretty sweet…
Now one thing that isn’t really shown in either of the official trailers, but I found in someone else’s play through that the actual forming of Voltron – arguably the coolest part of the entire show – isn’t actually shown, instead substituting in the original sequence from the cartoon and adding some controls for bonus points over that. It makes me kinda curious to see how much footage from the show they actually used – on one hand, some of it could be a neat story-telling device, but too much and it kinda screams that they just didn’t feel like animating more of it themselves! 😯 And I don’t expect everything to be animated because I certainly get that this franchise is 20 years old and all, but the formation of the hero character in all its glory would’ve been cool.
Holding judgment until I get a chance to download it on XBox Live and check it out for myself, though. Go lions!!!
breaking down the server door…
They say that ignorance is bliss, and maybe that’s what made it a little easier dealing with stuff like this…
That’s a log of brute force attempts that have been made against my new server in the last couple of days – something I just didn’t have access to see on my old accounts, but now can through the dedicated server. And I guess it’s one of those things that for the most part you just have to accept as something that happens on the Internet … bots randomly scouring IP blocks in search of systems that have insecure passwords or open accounts. Like I said – I’m sure that just as many of these types of attacks hit my old servers as well and I just never knew it because I didn’t have the rights to see.
The only thing that bothers me is that I wish I could change the login for root to anything else that would be less of a given, but apparently in the particular configuration of software that is used on my new server, that’s the one account that cannot be changed. It’s something that I finally got around to doing to all of my WordPress installs once I figured out how easy it is to go into the tables and rename the admin account to a different username, but I guess I just would’ve thought that with the account that can literally control everything on the entire server, there would be a little extra protection built in!
At least the brute force protection that’s built in seems to function ok, though. It auto-bans IPs after a set number of misses, and my password is pretty solid, so hopefully that’s enough??? 😕
Thin Post : The Green Giant Challenge
I think I’ve been sabotaging myself with my weight loss efforts the last couple of weeks.
Not on purpose, mind you – I certainly really do want to lose the weight and someday be a not so large individual, but despite having been really pretty good about my exercise schedule as of late, I’m still not losing as much as I would like and my best guess at this point is to point the blame squarely in the face of snacking.
Pop-Tarts. Single serving bags of chips. Candy.
All vending machine-type foods that are easily accessible while I’m working – short, quick bursts of sugar that are gone far too quickly and often lead me to wanting even more once the original package is empty. And I’ve tried to justify a lot of them by citing that somehow they still fit within my calories, but I still know deep down that an apple or something would be much more filling (and less calories to boot!) than a 400-calorie package of Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts! 🙁
Like I mentioned earlier today, I’ve just got to ramp up my losses to more than 0.4 pounds/week if I’m ever going to reach my goal, so for the next week I’m issuing myself a challenge … a vegetable challenge!
For the next seven days, I want to avoid these kinds of detrimental, sugary snacks completely and instead, when I hit that hunger point in the mid-afternoon when I would normally grab something bad for me, I’m going to try to go nuke a package of frozen vegetables instead. I may take a bit of a hit with the sodium, but the drastic reduction in calories/sugar/fat/etc… should by far still make it worthwhile, and I can guarantee that I’ll be a lot more full after eating a bowl of vegetables than I am after eating a mere candy bar or something like that.
I hate making these kinds of sacrifices (snackrifices?), but even now I just end up feeling guilty about them 10 minutes after I finish, anyways. And if it ends up having the effect on the bottom line like I think it might, then it’ll definitely be worth it! 😀
Thin Post : Quick Review, Week #8
So despite still technically going down, today’s weigh-in was a bit of a disappointment because the last three weeks I’ve lost less than 1 pound each week. I have a theory about this, which I’m going to take some time to write about later on today, but I’ve got to do something different because at this rate I’ll only be halfway to my goal by the time it’s time to set sail this fall…
Today’s Weigh-in: -0.4 pounds from last week
Net Loss for 2012: 7.4 pounds
Last Week’s Exercise:
- 5 days of cardio (16.8 miles of walking & 1 elliptical day)
- 2 days of strength training (up to an uncanny 80 push-ups as of last weekend!)
Last Week’s Diet: so-so – meals were good, but snacking was not-so-good
Last Week’s Sleep: I honestly don’t even remember, which can’t be good! 😯
Goals for Next Week:
- Exercise – continue to maintain 5 solid days of cardio; work up to 3 days of strength training
- Diet – get the snacking back under control (I’ll write more about this later)
- Sleep – I don’t even know why I have this goal because it seems so impossible, but I guess try to find a consistent bedtime, even if later than it really should be? Other than the obvious productivity impacts, I wonder how bad weight loss can really be affected by a lack of sleep… 😕
The Problem with “Acceptance” of Being Fat…
So Disney caught some flak last week over a new Innoventions exhibit at Epcot called Habit Heroes, aimed at teaching kids about childhood obesity and why it’s important even for kids to eat right and get a moderate amount of exercise every day.
Let’s face the facts – it’s a real problem these days, with more than 1/3 of our kids either overweight or obese, rapidly catching up with the adult statistic that over 35% of adults in America are obese.
Of course, it doesn’t help much when we’ve got Congress arbitrarily decreeing pizza to be a vegetable for the purpose of planning school lunches…
Now I get what the, ummm, National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance is gunning for here – it’s never nice to make fun of people or discriminate them for anything, but what I do have a problem with is sort of an ulterior motive to their agenda in that their actions here seem to want to halt any efforts to teach kids that being health-conscious is important because in their eyes, anything that depicts fat people in a negative light is demeaning to them … but pray tell, how are you supposed to teach someone that being obese can have devastating results to ones health if you’re not even allowed to show cartoon characters being overweight without worrying about offending anyone???
Frankly, I think this is where I would have to err to the side of “Sorry, but you’re just gonna have to be offended by this then…” because like it or not, obesity is a problem and it’s not one that we can afford to be overly sensitive about in light of actually helping people to not become obese in the first place. And yes, I know that some people are obese for purely medical reasons and that there are entire movements organized about fat pride where those involved simply have no desire to shed a single pound … and for those people who make that decision for themselves, that’s all fine and dandy, but considering that 1 in 4 deaths in America today are due to heart disease, it’s irresponsible for educational efforts like these to be swept under the rug simply because somebody is insecure enough to consider them harassment.
If you’re so accepting of your own obesity, then what do you care what other people even think about it???
Because the problem with sensitivity in such a diverse country as ours is that there’s the potential for people to be offended by just about anything. We have groups of people who think that environmentalism is a waste of time and money, so should we just scrap all of those efforts in the parks because we wouldn’t want to offend anybody who believes that climate change is a farce? We have people who think that no animal should ever be held in captivity, so to appease them we’ve got an awfully big fish tank over in The Seas that might as well be drained. I’ve seen people that pay the money at the gate just so that they can walk around complaining all day about how expensive everything is – should we maybe just scrap the whole thing because a few people feel slighted that they can’t still buy a cheese burger and fries for the same 49-cents that they used to spend at the malt shop down the street after school on Tuesdays?
Disney does a lot to help educate its guests during their stays in Orlando, from promoting energy saving practices at the hotels, switching to biodegradable shopping bags, and even doing a lot to clean up the kids menus in their restaurants the last couple of years, believe it or not. They’ve increasingly cut back on the areas in which smoking is allowed at the parks and resorts, and especially they use the exhibits around Epcot to really share new ideas and get people thinking about better ways to live their lives through technology, ecology and conservation, and imagination and creativity, though one that I’ve really felt has been lacking since they shut down the Wonders of Life pavilion back in 2007 is health and understanding the human body.
Though we say that no one should ever be picked on or discriminated against for the things that they say and do, there has to come a point where overwhelming evidence leads us to ease up on our sensitivity just enough so that we can adequately help the people who will actually still listen to the voice of reason. We run ads and print warnings right on cigarette containers that smoking is bad and causes cancer, we do our best to remind patrons of alcohol that their actions have consequences even when inebriated, and these days even restaurants are becoming more open about the actual caloric contents of what they serve, with some even putting those often cringe-worthy stats right there on the menu to help you make your choices. So in that same vein, what’s the harm in a Disney attraction aimed at teaching kids that sitting around all day doing nothing but watching TV and eating Twinkies can have a negative effect on their long-term health?
Good for you if you’ve opted to cast aside the medical evidence and just blindly embrace your obesity, but let the kids make their own decision regarding the same – it’s their future that’s at stake when you’re shielding them from the truth that the habits they form today are going to be a hell of a lot harder to break when they’re 31 years old and still struggling to work off a gut that has been haunting them for the better part of the last decade…
Plugins, and syncing, and name servers, oh my!
So anyways, purely from a technical perspective, although things have gone a little rocky, it’s certainly nothing to complain about and mostly nothing really too difficult – maybe just some annoyances to sort through thus far…
For what it’s worth, I think part of it is simply the planning, though – if I had demanded that the other accounts got cut off just as soon as everything was copied over to the new server, most everything would actually be dark right now, but because I’m giving myself a few weeks to slowly move things over one site at a time after they’ve been tested on the new server, it should really help to minimize the actual downtime that anyone will see by just redirecting the name servers from one working server to the other. Sure, it means I’m technically paying double for hosting this month until I cancel the other accounts, but the peace of mind while we work through weird, little issues here and there is well worth it! 
Anyways, the layout is a total of three accounts right now:
- a shared hosting account with InterServer (most of my sites are here)
- a shared hosting account with Host Gator (a couple of random projects here)
- the new VPS account with InterServer (everything ultimately needs to end up here)
The first couple of days of the transition were actually pretty easy (I actually purchased the account on Thursday), as InterServer offered to migrate my shared account with them over to the new VPS server themselves. I found after browsing around the new server interface that this is actually a feature built right into cPanel where you can migrate entire accounts from one place to another, so I was very happy to find that all of my mail, FTP, distribution lists, DNS settings, etc… were all copied over identically because I had a feeling that was going to be a pain in the ass if I had to do it manually. Files are one thing, but I really didn’t want to have to recreate all of that other stuff all over again.
Next was switch over a couple of domains at the registrar level to test the waters – luckily, I found that I had one for an old project that had an empty WordPress install that I just never got around to using, so that became my test domain because nobody would notice or care if it was unavailable anyways! Ended up getting some weird WordPress errors that only worked by manually upgrading to the newest version (mind you, I had already done this automatically – like I said … weird!), but now by the end of the day, I’ve officially got four sites moved and plan to do the real ones spaced out over the next week or two.
A summary of weird stuff that I’ve had to work through:
- Sometimes cPanel doesn’t like me moving entire directories with WordPress installs – it will copy everything, but then error out trying to delete them afterwards. Or if I do delete them, when I refresh some select sub-folders and files will just magically reappear.
- Solution: Login to the server via SSH and delete them from the command line. This can be done recursively for deep directories by using rm -rf /mydirectory/.
- In copying files from my other shared account, rather than copying it all locally and then re-uploading it to the server, I found this cool command (again, via SSH) to remotely connect to the other server to mass-copy files. Final result: Downloaded: 4056 files, 113M in 3m 49s (504 KB/s) – woohoo!
- Solution: wget -r ‘ftp://username:[email protected]/path/to/your/files/’
- Another weird thing I’ve been seeing with cPanel is that there are a couple of folders that were migrated over from my old site that just flat out aren’t visible when I try to access them via the web, even when permissions for readable folders are exactly the same.
- Solution: No idea why this works, but simply creating a new folder and moving everything into that seems to work, although I still ended up having to delete the files manually via the command line like I described above.
- A bizarre one for WordPress – after moving two sites, one worked completely fine and the other threw this error all over its admin interface – Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in /home/…/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php on line 738. I tried everything from upgrading to the latest version (3.3.1), copying class-simplepie.php over from the working install, disabling all of the plugins, changing themes, looking into RSS (because simplepie is a parser for RSS) – no luck.
- Solution: Did a complete manual upgrade of WordPress and the errors just disappeared. Mind you, it wasn’t really an “upgrade” because that install was already on the latest version, but it flushed out something that was causing problems.
- Speaking of weird WordPress stuff – even more bizarre, I had an install where I couldn’t add tags to any of my posts. I tried the trick I described previously, as well as adding some PHP Pear modules that weren’t enabled on the new server, but no dice.
- Solution: Surprisingly, a plugin that had absolutely nothing to do with the admin interface was somehow still interfering with it, because disabling them all and then adding them back until I eventually found the culprit made it go away. Luckily, it was one that I wasn’t even using anymore, so I was able to just delete it and move on without looking back!
One other thing that I’m trying to do through all of this is really clean house and take care of some bad practices like directory structure, database naming, unnecessary FTP accounts that I’ve slowly built up over the years. I’ve got data for well over a dozen sites when you count the ones that are no longer around, so I’ve started by organizing the files themselves into a number of categories – personal, writing, justlaugh, etc… This completely breaks the original add-on domain routing that cPanel had for most of them, but it’s no big deal now to just re-create them pointing to the new home directories for each site.
I’ve also got sites that were for whatever reason setup in sub-directories of other sites, so whenever possible, I’m pulling those out and categorizing them in the same buckets as their parents.
Databases … I’ve got 21 MySQL databases between these two shared accounts, so I’m not only weeding out the junk ones that I don’t need anymore, but also renaming them to match the domains that they belong to as I go. Same with users – there’s no reason that I need a separate WordPress user for every single one, so I’m creating one master ID that has access to all of them and them updating the individual WordPress installs as I move them over. All of this is a little tedious, but definitely necessary if you saw my MySQL menu in cPanel!
FTP accounts … well, I don’t use FTP to get into the individual sites, as I have a master account that has access to the whole server, so these are all just an unnecessary security risk. Apparently cPanel automatically creates an FTP account for each new domain that you add to DNS, so I’ve had to go through and delete them all manually afterwards. Also learned that apparently anonymous FTP was enabled!, so I killed this in WHM (cPanel Web Host Manager).
I think that’s basically all of the nuts and bolts of it for now. After the first four, I feel like I’ve got a fairly decent groove built up for knowing what to look out for and moving things where I ultimately want them, so now it’s just a matter of finding the time to knock them out one by one. I’m only doing one or two this week – mainly because I’ve got another project that really needs to get finished up first – but slow and steady, at this rate by the end of March everything should be running smoothly in its new home and not only will I be able to cancel both of the other shared accounts, but we’ll also truly find out if I actually bought enough CPU to handle all of this stuff running in one place on its own!
server migration, phase 1
The last couple of days have been a little hectic, as I recently started a long-anticipated effort to migrate all of my websites to a new server.
It’s still the same host – InterServer has been very good to me over the last decade and I have absolutely no reason to seek hosting elsewhere, but I discovered a couple of months ago that in addition to the shared hosting plan that I’ve been on since I first moved Just Laugh to InterServer back in 2002 (?), they also offer what they call a Virtual Private Server (VPS) that is kind of a step up from shared hosting, but with prices that are still a lot more affordable than an actual, full-fledged dedicated server.
For me, the biggest selling point is getting away from the shared environment and into one that’s officially dedicated solely to my needs. A lot of people don’t realize that even though their host may offer Unlimited Bandwidth, there’s also usually a provision stating that your account can’t monopolize the server and put undue strain on its resources, meaning that “unlimited” in reality is actually far from the fact because chances are even with a cap of 1 terabyte per month, you’re likely going to eat up such a huge chunk of the memory and processing power of the server with that much traffic that you’ll be “asked” to upgrade or leave long before you ever actually hit that upper limit!
Now mind you, I’ve never really hit that point with any of my sites before, but Just Laugh itself still pulls a surprising amount of bandwidth each month all by itself even after sitting dormant for 8 years, so as I continue to build new sites and take on new projects, it’s definitely always been something that sits in the back of my head – in the event that I do publish enough things that go viral and start getting passed around the Internet like pictures of kittens enjoying delicious sandwiches or something, how much would it suck to find that 12 hours in my account got suspended for tearing up all of the resources on the server that I share and that all of the rest of that traffic just fell flat on the floor???
That’s kind of what I like about this new VPS thing – it’s dedicated, but it’s still a virtual environment, meaning that I technically still have a section of a shared server partitioned off for me, except this time it’s solely for me. I pay for a specific amount of memory, disk space, CPU, and bandwidth, and the cool thing is – if I get an alarm that one of my sites went viral and the server is maxing out, I can call up InterServer and just pay for some more resources and they’re allocated to help with the demand in a matter of minutes … rather than it being purely reactionary where I’m either a) hunting for a new server after the fact, traffic lost; or b) begging my provider to reinstate my account AND upgrade me to a new server, traffic still lost!
Anyways, overall it’s going to be a good thing because it’s a more reliable environment, it gives me a chance to consolidate another hosting account that I have hosting a couple of things off on the side, and not to mention, it’s also just kind of fun playing with the technical stuff of migrating files over and getting to see a new side of the control panel that normally was reserved exclusively for my host. Maybe I’ll write a little more about the technical side of it later – so far things have been more or less smooth, but I’ve also been able to focus on low-key stuff that nobody ever actually sees as test transitions before moving my actual sites (i.e. this site you’re on right now is still on the old server and will probably be for another week or two).
More later – back to trying to remember unix shell commands… 😮