Technical – Page 4 – Ammon Shepherd

40th anniversary of the moon landing

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.

Convert WP to static HTML – part 2

This is a followup to this previous post.

So I’ve been converting some more blogs to static html files, and this time around things seemed to be so different, that I made up a new how to. Here are the steps that I’ve been using to convert blogs using the default Kubric theme.

Update the permalink structure for the site so that it uses the year, month, day, postname structure.

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

Make sure the blog does not block search engines. If the blog is set to block them, wget can only download the index.html file. And this took me a while to figure out. So, for the sake of search engines, if wget only downloads the index.html file or wget recursive gets only index.html file, then remember to check your robots.txt or similar settings. Either edit in the admin section (under Settings->Privacy) or via SQL.
```
UPDATE `database`.`prefix_options` SET `option_value` = '1' WHERE `prefix_options`.`option_name` = 'blog_public' LIMIT 1 ;
```
Add the .htaccess file if not already there, where
```
/path/to/wordpress/blog/
```
starts at the URL root, not the absolute file path. So http://sitename.com/path/to/wordpress/blog/ would have the .htaccess file below in the ‘blog’ directory.
```
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /path/to/wordpress/blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /path/to/wordpress/blog/index.php [L]
```
Get rid of the meta links through the sidebar widget in the admin, or delete the appropriate lines from the theme files (for default Kubric theme edit comments.php, sidebar.php, single.php, footer.php), or see the last step. Delete the code that puts in the search, comments, trackback, rss, and anything in the footer you want out.

When all is good, run wget to grab the files.

wget --mirror -P blog-static -nH -np -p -k -E --cut-dirs=5 http://sitename.com/blog/

Rename the blog directory. mv blog blog-old
Rename the static directory to be live. mv blog-static blog

Copy the images directory from the old theme to the appropriate static directory.

cp -r blog-old/wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/images/ blog/wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/

Alternative to get rid of unwanted links, etc. Use the find command to find all html files, then use perl to delete the lines. Don’t forget to escape forward slashes in the search field. Unfortunately, this method requires you to do it for every line of code you want to delete. It’s much better to delete the lines out of the theme files. The code below has an unnecessary space in the opening H3 tag so it will render properly.
```
find . -name \*.html | xargs perl -ni -e 'print unless /&lt; h3&gt;Leave a Reply&lt; \/h3&gt;/'
```
Also, if you want to just search and replace instead of remove, this handy find and perl one-liner will find and replace text in all html files.
```
find . -name *.html | xargs perl -p -i'' -e "s/search text here/replace text there/"
```
The above would search for all the “search text here” phrases in all html files, and replace it with “replace text here”. You can obviously substitute whatever you want in those to places. If you have a ‘/’ (forward slash) character, it will need to be escaped with a ‘\’ (back slash) character. Perl uses the regular regular expression syntax, so look that up if you need help formulating a search and replace structure.

Blast from the past

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.

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.”

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.

The history of abandoned things

Buried in sand: The abandoned Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse

I came across the site Artificial Owl this week. Artificial Owl finds images of long forgotten, man-made objects, locates them on a map and tells a bit of the story behind the object if possible. I was initially struck by the beautiful images of buildings, ships, airplanes, and automobiles left to deteriorate and crumble back to nature. I love the imagery of nature reclaiming her elements. It’s a definite reminder that man and his creations will not last longer than mother earth.

There were a number of images of airplanes, which I was glad to see, since I like them most. One of them was particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a picture of a B-29. I love B-29s and B-17s from World War II. The reason, besides them being beautiful airplanes, is because my grandfather was a belly gunner in a B-17 during WWII. He, and an uncle, had numerous models and paintings of B-17s and other WWII fighter planes in my grandpa’s basement. I even put together a model of a B-17 myself as a kid. So, naturally, my interest was peaked. Another reason I was interested in this picture is because I remember hearing about it. The very brief history of this airplane goes like this.

B29 Kee Bird near Thule, Greenland — B29 Kee Bird, on frozen lake near Thule, Greenland

In 1947 the Kee Bird (as it was called), was on a top secret spy mission. It made an emergency landing on a frozen lake near Thule, Greenland. The crew were all fine and rescued, but the airplane was left. In the 1990s, a few older gentlemen decided they would rescue the airplane. After lots of money and time (nearly a year), they repaired the engines and minor damage to the plane, and prepared to take off. As they taxied around the bumpy frozen lake, one of the generators used for power broke loose and started a fire in the airplane. All of the crew escaped, but the airplane was destroyed by fire. When the lake melted in the summer, the plane sank to the bottom, never to be seen again.

All of this got me thinking that this would be an awesome way to do history. There is so much information connected to this one airplane, that it could easily fill a book or documentary. I haven’t read either of them, but either would definitely be an interesting read. It would be fun to research the history of the plane, the details and reasoning behind the flight, the biographies of the crew, and all that jazz. There is so much history that can be incorporated into the story of this airplane.

This could be done for all of the images on Artificial Owl, in fact for any abandoned man-made object. As I reflect on that, this is precisely what I want to do with my dissertation. I want to focus on one abandoned tunnel in Halberstadt, Germany. It was used by the Germans before, during and after WWII. It think telling the story of this tunnel can incorporate many aspects of German history around it. Time will tell on how that works out.

Well, I’ll leave you with a few more pics of possible historical tales…

B29 Kee Bird, abandoned plane, near Thule, Greenland

Douglus DC-3 — Abandoned old planes at La Paz - Jfk International (El Alto) Airport - Bolivia

Shipwreck of the Galant Lady on Bimini island, Bahamas

(All images courtesy Artificial Owl, used without permission – thanks!)

Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets and Goodies #5

Well, so much for doing this weekly. But here’s another go at it!

For making some pretty snazy presentations, or graphical representations of data, you can use http://prezi.com/ From their site: “With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.” I imagine this being very useful for historians as a way to visualize their narrative. Move from quote to image to video to audio. You could take a book and condense it down into a 10 minute presentation, using appropriate quotes, some images, and movies if you got em. A good way to introduce a topic, I would think. Perhaps I’ll throw together something and post it back later.

Quietube – send links to youtube, but without all of the comments, ads, and other videos to clutter and distract. When you visit a youtube video, just click the quietube link you previously added to your bookmarks folder. All of the distractions vanish!

An interesting way to let others know where you are in a book, and which books you are reading. You can use it for yourself too, if you don’t have one of those old fashioned paper book marks.From their site: “bkkeepr lets you track your reading and bookmark on the go, via the web and SMS. Want to remember what you read? Want to share your dog-eared pages, and see what everyone else dog-eared? Love LibraryThing, but are always forgetting to add your books? bkkeepr helps you do it, wherever you are.” So, basically, a way to let a website keep track of what books you’re reading and where you are in the books, made simple by sending a quick SMS.

Major Update to Multiple SVN WordPress Installs

It’s been a while, but I thought it important to post an update to the wpupdate program I wrote to upgrade a whole mess of WordPress installs at one time. I took a cue from the program officially sponsored by WP, but think mine is much, much better. 🙂

Here are some of the features:

Specify a file with a list of svn WP installs, or update the current directory, or specify the directory to update on the command line
Use command flags or options. You can specify the program to update or switch, use tags or branches.
Automatically saves a copy of the svn update to a file so your terminal is not overflowing with text, but does output any conflicts that arise.
Automatically saves a backup copy of the wp-contents directory (just in case the update or switch screws something up).
Automatically saves a copy of the database, backing up only the tables used by the WP install (based off of the wp-config supplied table prefix).
Restores permissions to the original owner and group.

Anyhow, check out the new page devoted soley to this application: SVN WordPress Updater

License: Anyone is free to use this program however they want, as long as they give me due attribution. Also if you update or modify the program in any way, I need to know about it. That’s what free and open software is all about. Any updates should benefit us all.

Zotero's code_swarm

I finally figured it all out, and got a working version of Zotero’s development on trunk for the past year in code_swarm.

Next, I need to find or make some cool electronic music to play while watching it.

Lego History and the Rosetta Stone of the future?

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

lego_galaxy_explorer — 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.

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.

MediaWiki’s version information

I spent way too long looking for MediaWiki’s version information. Most applications store the version info in a file or in the database. MediaWiki is a HUGE mess of code and database. I finally found it in a file. It’s in includes/DefaultSettings.php and is stored as a variable – wgVersion. This is for post 1.3.7 versions of MediaWiki, perhaps even earlier versions.

I write this here because no amount of searching turned up this information. I found it through a series of lucky greps. So, to help out in Google searches:

where is MediaWiki’s version information stored?

locate MediaWiki’s version info

MediaWiki version file

MediaWiki version info

WTTGG #4

This week is much more historical…

Goodies #1: Traveler IQ Challenge – Test your knowledge of geography as it is today not 100 years ago (there’s the history tie-in). I’m not so good. I can’t get past the 6 level…

Goodies #2: New York Divided – This one is all about history. It’s even from the History Channel. It’s an amazingly beautiful animation about New York’s ties with slavery. Very well done.

Goodies #3: Randomwocky – You’ve all heard the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, and know of the many made up words. I thought it would be fun to re-create the poem using randomly generated consonant-vowel-consonant groupings. It makes the poem even more nonsensical in places, but some of the ‘new’ words are funny!