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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Configuring Amazon Linux For Web Services

UPDATED: an updated installation cookbook is available. Amazon has introduced their own distribution of linux with tweaks to optimize it for their Elastic Compute Cloud platform. Like CentOS, it appears to be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though unlike the current versions of RHEL and CentOS, the packaged applications are up to date with […] » about 300 words

World’s Largest Canned Food Structure

Some records in the Guinness Book reflect outstanding accomplishments in hotly contested fields. Others reflect the imagination it now takes to create a new class of records. Food Industry Thailand‘s 150,000 food cans fall into the second category. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not suggesting anybody’s imagining new fields, just that they’re imagining themselves […] » about 300 words

Failed Hard Drive Noises

There’s nothing amusing about this list of failed hard drive noises if you’re looking through it for a sound matching what drive on your desk is making (which I am), but I’m sure there’s some good material for the click-hop crowd. Photos by Jon Ross and James Harvey, used under CC license. » about 100 words

Improving Will Norris’ Open Graph Plugin

Will Norris put together a nice WordPress plugin to place Open Graph metadata on the page. Today I patched it to address a few bugs I and others have found.

The patch switches functions that depended on globalizing $post to use $wp_query->queried_object and similar.

opengraph_default_url() is changed to try get_permalink() only when is_singlular() is true. Otherwise it uses the blog’s base URL. This isn’t perfect, but it’s better than having the front page and all tag/category/archive pages report their og:url as being the permalink for the first post on the page.

As suggested here, I changed the opengraph_default_description() to use the post’s excerpt if is_singular() and the post includes an excerpt.

I changed opengraph_default_image() to test if the theme supports post thumbnails before calling has_post_thumbnail() to avoid the Fatal error: Call to undefined function has_post_thumbnail() errors.

I submitted it as a bug report in the plugins Trac, but I don’t check there for tickets on my own plugins, so you might apply the patch yourself.

Things Learned About Natural Language Processing at THATcamp Bay Area

The first session I joined at THATcamp was Aditi Muralidharan‘s text mining boot camp, and the topic seemed to set my agenda for the rest of the event (though I wish Aditi had also hosted her proposed data visualization session). Aditi’s blog: mininghumanities.com. If I understood correctly, much of Aditi’s presentation and experience is based on the […] » about 200 words

Becoming Donna Reed

Sandee has just launched her new site, Becoming Donna Reed: Armed with a notepad and pen, my trusty MacBook, and the desire to be the best domestic goddess I can be, I will watch the show from the beginning and find the lesson in each episode. Consider this your Cliff’s Notes on household harmony. She’ll […] » about 200 words

What The Critics Are Missing About The Apple TV

It’s not just the critics, nobody seems to get the story on Apple’s new TV-connected device right. Darrell Etherington at The Apple Blog says it’s a non starter for him, and Ars Technica’s John Siracusa describes it as just the most recent entry in a product line that has been “a persistent loser” for the company. […] » about 800 words

Speed WordPress MultiSite With X-Sendfile For Apache

Like WordPress MU before, MultiSite implementations of WordPress 3.0 use a script to handle image and other attachment downloads. That script checks permissions and maps the request path to the files path on disk, then reads the file out to the web server, which sends it to the browser. That approach has some inefficiencies, and […] » about 400 words

Migrating From WordPress MU To WordPress 3.0 Multi Site

I’ve been running a few instances of WordPress MU for a while now, so I was more than a little anxious about the merge of the MU functionality into the core of WordPress. It’s a good thing, but sometimes such dramatic changes pose rocky challenges.

Not so in this case.

Pete Mall blogged about it in May, and I’m happy to say that I followed those instructions (summary: upgrade, it will work) to upgrade both this site and Scriblio.net recently. The biggest challenge I faced was in migrating my SVN checkout (not discussed in Pete’s post, but people who install via FTP or use the auto upgrader don’t need to worry about this), and Pete noted the only gotcha that I might have encountered: changing the .htaccess to use a different file that had been used in WPMU.

I tested the migration on this site, and it rocked so much that I decided to go forward with upgrading the other site, even though WP3.0 hasn’t been formally released yet. Rock n roll.

Donut Tour 2010: The Video

We planned the donut tour. We did the donut tour. We ate donuts. We made five stops on the tour, but this video only covers four of them. We were too stuffed to say anything about Japonais, even though the donuts there were delicious. Here’s the full lineup: Donna’s Donuts (Yelp!) Ziggy’s Donuts (Yelp!) Kane’s […] » about 200 words

Museum of Family Camping Closed

Memorial Day weekend is universally recognized as the start of summer. Tradition allows that we can start wearing white, gather family and friends for barbecue, and, for those so inclined, go camping. For the past many years it’s also been the start of the Museum of Family Camping‘s season. The museum told the story of […] » about 400 words