Back again with another roundup of websites promoting some history. This weeks focus is on the computers and other machines.

Technologizer has come through in the past year or so with some really fun looks at technology of the past. Here are three:

15 Classic PC Design Mistakes

Weird Laptop Designs

132 Years of the videophone

It’s amazing how ugly and non-functional computers were in the early stages. They don’t seem to be anything like cars. Old cars, some of them anyways, become classics. They were made to look good. Somehow, I guess, computer manufacturers didn’t think computers would need any style. Sure they were made for businesses, but beige…. for everything? One of Apple’s biggest successes has been to transform the look of personal computers. No matter what you think about Apple as a company and Steve Jobs as a person, at least their stuff has some style (which has it’s own interesting history in that many styles come from old Braun products by Dieter Rams).

Old Computer Database

Small Gallery of Old Computers

Speaking of old computers… The Obsolete Technology Website has a plethora of information, a veritable archive, of old technology. It’s good to see someone is keeping the history of our tech junk. Newscientist also steps in with a small gallery of ancient (read older than 30 years) technology.

Macintosh Startup Chimes

Finally, a trip down memory lane with all of the old Macintosh start up sounds at Geekology.

What space junky, almost historian, geek would I be without posting a little bit about some of the best type of history in existence. I refer, of course, to the history of man’s endeavors to explore space. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step on a celestial body other than Earth. Michael Collins waited in the Command capsule as the two American astronauts made human history.

So here are a number of resources and articles describing some cool things about space flight.

Historic Spacecraft is an archive of space vehicles and other things space related. They have a lot of photos of vehicles, suits, and such. They also have posters and such for sell, if you’re inclined to have something on your wall. They also have stats and dates for all of the rockets and vehicles listed. A great source for photos for all your space history needs. Also really cool is a list of all completed Space Shuttle missions. Space Shuttle Discovery has flown the most missions, 36, so far (June 2009) with a total of 126 missions. The Space Shuttle Enterprise never made it to space, but you can see it at the Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, VA. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it is extremely awesome.

Next up from Flightglobal is an interactive timeline of sorts, with lots of information about the missions, flights, computers, physics and people who made it possible to put man on the moon. Most amazing about the whole flight, is that everything was based on theory. There was no way to test the actual theoretical physics without flying to the moon and back. “Although the theoretical physics of travelling to the Moon had been laid down before the advent of the Apollo missions, this was the first time a series of manned missions had put the theory into practice.”

Speaking of computers, Linux.com has a neat write up about the software used to guide the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon and back. It’s incredible to think that they were able to do such an amazing thing with technology comparable to today’s calculators. All of the code used punch cards and took hours to see if it was written properly. Jerry Bostick described the process in the Linux.com article:

“We would give instructions to the programs by punching cards,” Bostick said. “You had to wait at least 12 hours to see if it would work right.” The early programming was done in the real-time computing complex in Houston using IBM 7094 computers with 64K of memory. There were no hard disks. All the data was stored on magnetic tape, with each computer having about eight tape drives. Most programs used for the mission were written in Fortran, Bostick said. “After Apollo 1, we upgraded to the biggest and the best equipment that government money could buy, the IBM 360 with an unheard of 1MB of memory. We went all the way from 64K to 1MB.”

Moving from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a text-based game written by a high school student. It became popular and was later turned into countless graphical spin offs. I’m playing one on the iPod Touch a bit too much at the moment. You can see I made the top 20 players for a while!

Finally, New Scientist has a number of interesting articles relating to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. One article addresses with the ethics and issues with the moon being a historic spot. Wherever there is a piece of human debris or footstep, it’s historically valuable. Should all of these sites and artifacts and footprints be protected? What happens when/if tourists are able to visit the moon? Who’s going to be the museum curator and the tourist guides? I’ll take that job!

Another New Scientist article lists several reasons why the moon is still relevant to science, for government, commercial enterprise and the normal guy.

Lastly, New Scientist has a neat interactive map showing the many multi-national places on the moon where humans have left their mark and made exploration.

What I have for you this week are just a few websites that give us access to the past, an historical artifact that uncovers a mystery, and some new ways to do timelines.

World Digital Library

A great resource, hopefully, for scholars. From their website….

“The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.”

cuneform digital library initiative

Related to the WDL, is the CDLI. From their website….

“The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.”

John Harrison sea clock

And here’s a short read on an interesting historical topic. It seems the history of the longitude will need a small rewrite. What’s most amazing, though, is the skill and craftsmanship of the compass at the heart of this historical debate.  Created over 270 years ago, the original parts show no sign of wear and tear, while replacement parts broke down after 80 years. A remarkable piece of history.

The controversy surrounding this clock comes from recent work to replace broken parts from the initial attempt at restoration. It was originally believed that John Harrison created this clock all by himself. He being originally a carpenter, some scholars are a bit skeptic that he could create the intricate brass work needed to create the piece.  The most recent repairs have lead people to believe Harrison had help, and probably commissioned out certain pieces. Comprising over 2000 pieces, this sea clock is a marvel of itself, regardless of who made it.

Now it’s time for some timelines!

It was a shameless publicity post to slashdot, but the timelines got me thinking of other timelines, especially as I’m creating one of my own using MIT’s Exhibit builder, and have created one for a course. So, here are a few timeline tools mentioned in the article.

SIMILE’s Timeline: easy to use, just point it to a data file (which is the most dificult part)

TimeGlider: Looks like a flashed based version of SIMILE’s product. A few different features. Here’s one in action, Rosenberg Cold War trials.

Google’s News timeline: you can do searches on other things as well. Kind of like a modern timeline.

TimeRime: They’re in this for the money, and it doesn’t look all that great, but I didn’t spend but more than a couple seconds looking around.

LEGOS

The lego minifig (the little human figure) is celebrating its 30 year birthday today. Yeah Lego! Gizmodo is running a contest for best picture or short film using the minifig. The first and second prizes are the best Lego sets of all time! My brothers and I got these sets as kids. So many memories

Yellow Castle Set

Galaxy Explorer Set

So many, many meomories come flooding back when I see these pictures. Most of the pieces of these sets are still at my parents’ house.  Check out the videos on Gizmodo for a quick history of the world, told by Legos.

ROSETTA STONE

I heard through Slashdot about a project to create the ultimate Rosetta Stone of the future.

Rosetta Front

The disk will contain text inscribed in nickel, making it impervious to water and all but physical destruction. Written in eight languages, the disk contains over 15,000 documents. The only technology needed to view and decode this disk is a magnifying glass… with a magnification of at least 1000x. From the website…

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,000 human languages assembled in the year 02002 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 15,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

Rosetta Top

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 500X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The idea is to replicate this disk as many times as possible and distribute it to as many places as possible to ensure survival of knowledge if modern civilization were to be destroyed. You can put yourself on the waiting list to own one of these disks, for the relatively low price of $25,000.

I like to imagine if the civilization of today were to disapear and the people of the future were to grab hold of this disk, they would be able to learn how the world was at this time. I wonder, though, if the prevalence of information makes such a disk necessary. It’s hard for me to imagine that all of the data in the plethora of different formats (print, digital, textile, etc) will be destroyed. I do, however, wonder how digital media (text, image, video, etc) will be available in the future. We can already see the trouble of getting data from older media formats like laser disk and 5-inch floppy disks. If the data is properly brought forward with technology (ie. nowadays the best storage media is hard drives, particularly external drives attachable via USB or FireWire) it should always be accessible.

Check out THAT podcast (THAT = The Humanities And Technology). It’s a new video pod cast put on by a couple of co-workers at CHNM. They interview someone in the technical field about software that helps those of us in the humanities.

The first episode includes an interview with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress (the software running this site!) and shows you how to install and configure ScholarPress (a plug-in to WordPress written by Jeremy Boggs).

It’s great stuff, check it out!

50 years ago Sputnik was launched, and ever since children all over the world have dreamed of becoming an astronaut.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/july-dec07/sputnik_10-03.html

UPDATE: Check out the new post on a better way to do this here: Convert WP to Static HTML Part 2. Or see the page devoted to the script here: Make WordPress Static.

Usually people are wanting to convert their static html pages to some dynamic content management system. I’ve run into the issue of needing to go the other way.

A few professors at GMU love to use WordPress for their classes. It’s a really great way to get more student participation and involve some of those who aren’t so talkative in class.

But these blogs are usually only needed for one semester, and then just sit there. This can be a security risk if they are not kept up to date, and is cumbersome when trying to update many of them (one professor had over 30 blogs!).

Sometimes the content should still be viewable, but the need for a whole cms type back-end no longer exists. Sometimes the professor would just like a copy of the pages for their own future research or whatever.

So, I figured out a way to convert a dynamic WordPress site into static html pages.

Here are the basic steps I used:

1. Change the permalink structure in the WordPress admin section. Alternatively, directly in the database change wp_options.permalink_structure.option_value to “/%postname%.html”.

   UPDATE `database`.`prefix_options` SET `option_value` = '/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/' WHERE `prefix_options`.`option_name` = 'permalink_structure' LIMIT 1 ;
   

    

   UPDATE (2.12.08): Reading a post from Christopher Price (who linked to this post) about WP permalinks, I’m thinking using this structure (/archives/%post_id%.html) might afford the best results. I often found a page that displayed the raw HTML instead of being rendered. This just might fix that issue.

   UPDATE (3.11.08): I did some more dynamic to static conversions today, and found out the best permalink structure to use is just the post name. No extra categories and such. So the best structure to use would be this (/%postname%.html). The benefit is that the every page is unique with a descriptive name for the url (albeit sometime very long), and there are not as many subdirectory issues that arise.

   UPDATE (7.17.09): This time around, I have found that the following seems to work best for permalink: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ And cleaned up the SQL statement.

2. Add the .htaccess to /path/to/wp/ if not already there (where /path/to/wp/ is from http://somedomain.com/path/to/wp/ ). If there already is a .htaccess file and it is set to have permalinks, then you can probably leave it as it is.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /path/to/wp/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /path/to/wp/index.php [L]

3. Use wget to copy all of the files as static html files.

   wget --mirror --wait=2 -P blogname-static -nH -np -p -k -E --cut-dirs=3 http://sitename.com/path/to/blog/

   *** Change –cut-dirs to the appropriate number associated with how many directories are after the domain name. The trailing slash plays a part too. ****
   UPDATE (03.11.08): I found that the –cut-dirs doesn’t really do anything this time around.
   UPDATE (7.17.09): This time around, I find the following to work best, even the –cut-dirs. 

   wget --mirror -P wpsite-static --cut-dirs=3 -nH -p -k -E https://site.com/path/to/wp/

   This has the bonus of making the directory for you, thus negating the make directory step. Make sure to use two dashes and not an em dash.

4. Copy the contents of wp-content to save uploaded files, themes, etc. This way copies a lot of unnecessary php files, which could be potentially dangerous, but is really easy if you’re just converting to archive. To remove the security threat, just pick and choose the files you need.

   cp -r /path/to/wp/wp-content/* /path/to/static/wp-content/

5. Sometimes the files are created with folders in the archives folder. To fix this run the following three commands in the archive folder to fix that up. To get rid of the feed file in all of the directories:

   rm -f */feed 

   To delete all of the now empty direcotries:

   find . -type d -exec rmdir '{}' \;

   To rename the files ###.1 to ###

   rename .1 '' `find . -type f -name "*.1"`

   That’s two single quotes after the first ‘.1′

UPDATE (03.11.08): I have found that the old ‘rename‘ command [rename .1 '' *.1]only works on the current directory. If you want to do a recursive renaming you have to use the ‘find‘ command. The above code has changed to reflect this.
UPDATE (7.14.09): When the rename with find doesn’t work, it’s probably because the post has comments, so there is a folder with the same name as the post’s filename. In this case, just move the file (with the .1 extension) into the folder of the same name, but change the name of the file to index.html

6. move to wp folder. make a backup of database:

   mysqldump -u [userfromwp-config.php] -p --opt databasename > databasename.sql

   UPDATE (03.11.08): I found I needed to backup just a few tables from a database that contained many copies of wordpress. To do this more easily, I used a little script I wrote earlier to dump tables with a common prefix. This could also work if you just put in the full name of only the tables you wanted to backup.

7. move one directory above wp install. make tar backup of old wordpress folder:

   tar -cf wordpress.tar wordpress/

8. rename the old wordpress folder

   mv wordpress wordpress-old

9. move the static copy into place

   mv static/wordpress/ wordpress/

10. test out the site. If it’s totally broke, just delete the wordpress directory and restore the original from the tar file.
11. remove the tar file and wordpress-old directory as needed.

What’s with these multiple posts in a day…

Today marks the completion of my Multiple WordPress Updater Script. I’ve already posted a bunch about school stuff, might as well post about work stuff too.

We host over 55 blogs at CHNM. It’s up to me to update them when security patches or new versions come out. Doing them each by hand is a pain. I did a bit of searching but didn’t find anything that would help me update so many sites automatically. So I wrote a bash script that will do it for me. It reads a file that lists all of the wordpress install paths or prompts you for the path to one, prompts for the version to switch to, and a mysql user/pass that has permissions for all databases.

Then the script creates a copy of the database, makes a copy of the wp-content folder, updates the wordpress install using subversion, fixes some permissions, and saves the subversion output to a file in your home directory (which I’ll probably change to somewhere’s else).

I run this via sudo as root for easy updating. What I’m really pleased with is that I figured out how to get the script to pull the database name from the wp-config.php file, and grab the owner and group for later fixing of the permissions.

I hope it can be useful to someone. If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know.

Latest Version: 1.2.3 – 04/29/08
Download file

UPDATE 24.4.08: WordPress Updater has been updated. I also updated this post, took out the code in the post, and put up a link to the file for you to download instead.

I’m facinated with why things are designed the way they are. I recently found a blog about the history of the electromechanical button.  In class tonight I was introduced to a series of books about the design of everyday things.  I’ll have to check them out at a latter date.