Ammon Shepherd

TTC #5 – Honour thy Father and Mother

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

This is the first commandment with a promise or consequence for following it (previous ones had consequences for NOT following). If you honor your parents you will live a long life. Since it seems just about every person who has lived on the earth didn’t want to die, that’s a great blessing. Well, what does it mean to honor your parents? The footnote to honor in the LDS scriptures suggests that we must respect and value our parents. Deuteronomy 5: 12 adds that it will go well with us as well as living long.

Honoring our parents puts us in a similar frame of reference as our relationship with God. Our parents gave us our lives. Your mother gave birth to you; that took a lot of time, energy, money, and personal sacrifice. You would not exist if it weren’t for your parents. That deserves respect. Similarly, we would not exist if it weren’t for God allowing our spiritual births and providing for our physical existence through the Plan of Happiness.

If everyone were to honor their parents, there would be greater respect for others generally as well. There would be less rejection of good traditions, less teenage rebellion and rejection of good morals, more honesty, and stronger families.

Poster Session at the History of Ed

At the beginning of the year I was asked to participate in a poster session for the History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting. I have done a few things with maps, so I was asked to share resources and ideas for using maps with teaching history.

Not too many people came by, so I only spoke with two people. I had this list of resources for working with and teaching with maps:

History and Maps

Selected Websites

http://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/mapsmain.html (CHNM’s site on using maps in the classroom)
http://echo.gmu.edu/search/node/map (A list of map resources on the web, collected by GMU’s Echo project)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/ (Library of Congress Map Collections)
http://www.besthistorysites.net/Maps.shtml (A long list of map related websites for teaching history)
http://explorethemed.com/Default.asp (Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ (Tons of maps sponsored by University of Texas at Austin)
http://www.flu.gov/whereyoulive/healthmap/ (US Gov. Flu Map)
http://www.unc.edu/awmc/index.html (Ancient World Mapping Center)
http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ (Hundreds of posts about strange maps. Very good discussion starters.)

Selected Bibliography

Brown, Lloyd Arnold. The Story of Maps. New York: Dover Publications, 1979.
Bruckner, Martin. The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Field Museum of Natural History, and Newberry Library. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Knowles, Anne Kelly, and Amy Hillier. Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Pap/Cdr. ESRI Press, 2008.
Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004.
Turnbull, David, and Deakin University. Maps Are Territories: Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Virga, Vincent, and Library of Congress. Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations. Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

And this Keynote playing on my laptop:

TTC #4 – Keep the Sabbath day holy

So, the 4th Commandment, the Sabbath day. This is perhaps my biggest pet-peeve about the Christian world. Everyone who claims to be a Christian should follow and obey the Ten Commandments. Jesus said, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven” (see Matthew 5:17-19). The “law” and the “prophets” that he refers to are the laws from the Old Testament, including the Ten Commandments. True he came to fulfil the law, to bring us to a higher level of living and being, but these basic Ten Commandments must still be followed. They are stepping stones, so that once we have mastered them, we can move on to mastering others.

Yet, most of the Christian world does not follow this 4th Commandment. Maybe I am harsh, but society used to be a measure of mainstream Christianity, and, well, society definitely does not follow this Commandment, nor any of them, really. I wonder if the teachers and preachers in other denominations, other than the LDS, teach the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. If they do, the people aren’t obedient.

There is so much to discover and learn about this commandment, that it’s a bit overwhelming. It’s so clear and plain in the scriptures, I’m confused how so many people can’t/won’t/don’t follow it. It is basic; don’t work on the Sabbath. In fact, don’t even make others work. If you have animals that work for you, don’t let them work either! Pretty simple.

Then there’s the issue of which day is the Sabbath. If the week has always been Sunday through Saturday, then at the time the Ten Commandments were given, the Sabbath would fall on Saturday. Saturday would be the seventh day, the day God rested after creating the heavens, the earth and all living things. It’s interesting, and important to note, that God says he rested from his labors. He proclaims the work good, even very good, but he doesn’t say it’s done. The creator is Jesus Christ, and his work is not done with the Creation. The last words of Jesus, as he was on the Cross and completing his earthly life and therefore the closing stages of the Atonement, where “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34), then “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), and finally, “It is finished” (John 19:30). That was when Jesus could say that he “finish[ed God’s] work” (John 4:34). With the Resurrection happening on the Sunday, the Sabbath was moved by the Christian believers to Sunday in honor and remembrance of the Atonement and Resurrection. Sunday is now the Sabbath, and should be a day of rest, a day of no worldly work, and a day to remember and honor and worship our Savior Jesus Christ.

Then there is the matter of what, specifically, one should and should not do on the Sabbath. Many a list can be made, but basically, we are to do that which worships and serves God. This, again, is a commandment for us to be able to focus on God.

So what problems can be solved when this commandment is followed? Well, I think our society here in America is suffering much from the lack of following this commandment. When the Sabbath has proper place in our lives, we will find that we are more focused on God and others rather than ourselves. What do most people do instead of worship and serve on the Sabbath? They work or do recreational activities. They work to get gain, improve their financial standing, they work to get money, money to buy things. It is something focused on self, the root cause is pride. Or they do recreational things, again the root of it is pride, being selfish. If businesses kept their doors closed on the sabbath, and if people worshiped God and served others on that day, then the businesses would do better (there are many a story of this), and people would be focused on others, people would be more happy, the family would begin to be more central in people’s lives again. The sabbath is about putting priorities in place, putting God’s ways above our own.

The Doctrine of Christ

I read 2 Nephi chapter 31 recently, and was struck by the simple and pure and direct way it explains the doctrine of Christ. The testimony of the doctrine of Christ in 2 Nephi 31 is this:

Jesus lived and does live
Jesus was a perfect example. He was even baptized to show the importance of baptism and the importance of being obedient. We might feel that some commandments and rules do not apply to us, but Jesus showed the example that we should obey all the commandments of God.
Follow God’s commandments.
Repent
Be baptized in the name of Jesus
Receive the Holy Ghost
Endure to the end.

The message is so pure and simple that it can be found in just two verses, 17 and 20. Again, the Doctrine of Christ is:

Repentence
Baptism
Holy Ghost
Press Forward – keep the commandments
Feast on the words of Christ
Endure to the end

What a blessing to have the Gospel, the Doctrine of Christ laid out so plainly and clearly. I’m not sure if it is so concise and clear in the other scriptures. Some day I’ll have to look through and see.

Multiple PHP Instances With One Apache

Long-winded Introduction

It took me a couple of days to figure this out due to lack of decent tutorials and not enough confidence in my Linux skills to build programs from source. I think I have the hang of it now, and write this up with the intent on providing another, or the only, tutorial on setting up CentOS 5 with multiple instances of PHP using one Apache install. That being said, there are a number of good tutorials out there, just none of them explicitly for CentOS and some leave out some details that n00bs like me get confused about.

PHP4 and PHP5 on SuSE 10.1 – This was by far the most helpful of the tutorials. Even though it was written for SuSE, it works almost straight across for CentOS.

There is also a great list of instructions in the comments on the php.net site under installing PHP for Apache 2.0 on Unix systems (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php#90478).

I found this one after I wrote up this tutorial at http://cuadradevelopment.com. It’s a bit different, but should work as well.

There are basically two different ways I could have done this. 1- run a single instance of Apache, and run one instance of PHP as a module, and other installs as CGI. 2- run several instances of Apache, each with it’s own instance of PHP as a module. I chose to do the first method for no particular reason. Dreamhost has a post about the good and bad with running PHP as CGI.

So basically, the steps are: 1. Set up Apache and have PHP install as a module. 2. Configure and make another instance of PHP to run as CGI. 3. Add a virtual host to Apache running under a different port to access the PHP as CGI.
Continue reading Multiple PHP Instances With One Apache

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.

Nazis in the news

Nazi history is always a good way to sell news, and get people to read.

A few Nazi related items came up in the news lately.

From the Telegraph.co.uk we have some never before seen photographs of Hitler. From the article:

“The colour pictures come from the collection of Hugo Jaeger, Hitler’s personal photographer, who captured him on camera him from 1936 to the final days of his rule in 1945.

They include a glimpse inside Berghof, his mountaintop estate in Bavaria, and his private apartments in Berlin.”

This will shed some more light on Hitler and life of top Nazis. It goes well with a find from a fellow PhD student at GMU who found similar photos at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/). The photos are of Hitler’s apartment at Berghof, Hitler mingling with the people and at parades, and other rooms and belongings of Hitler’s.

Also in the news is a recently uncovered German E-Boat, the S130, which interrupted an allied D-Day training and killed over 700 American servicemen. It is being reconstructed and will be used as a memorial of those who fought in World War II. From the article:

“As owner the world’s largest privately held collection of military vehicles, Wheatcroft said he envisions the restored vessel as being a “living memorial to all sailors who died during World War Two.”

“It’s the only example of its type left in the world,” he said. “I want it to become like something brought back from the past.””

And, finally, another World War II vessel making the news is the Horten 2-29. This was a stealth jet developed by a couple of brothers. It has the uncanny resemblance to our B-2 stealth bomber. Here is a site with a number of cool pictures. National Geographic has a cool documentary about a team of engineers at Northrop Grumman who reconstructed the airplane to test it’s stealth abilities. Most amazing of all, I think, is that the plane was made from wood! That and several layers of paint, aparently, are what make it nearly invisible to radar. I’ll have to do some research into this machine and write up a history of it.

TTC #3 – take not the Lord's name in vain

A couple of thoughtful questions first.

Why?

What do we learn or lose by following or breaking this commandment?

It’s not that the Lord will get his feelings hurt or anything like that. I think it has more to do with us taking control of ourselves. James 1:26 and all of chapter 3 are great reminders that what we say has important consequences.

“If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain.”

“If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.”

“Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.”

Speaking is an action, it is doing. It can’t be undone. And with Mormon 7:7 and 3 Nephi 27:19 in mind (only the guiltless and unclean are to dwell with God eternally and receive salvation), we see that if we can not control our language, or more specifically, if we talk bad or misuse the name of the very person who is giving us eternal life, then we do not deserve to receive the gift of Atonement from him.

If everybody were to practice control over their language, beginning with not taking the Lord’s name in vain, then there would be less harsh words, less vulgarity, less mocking of things sacred. More importantly, we would have to acknowledge our dependence and relationship with God. We would show proper respect to our God and creator by not misusing his name. Our relationship with God and with others would be better if we practiced self-control of our language. Our communication would be clearer and more accurate, there would be less misunderstanding between people, and more respect for others.

TTC #2 – No graven images

In the Topical guide, I see two messages regarding “graven images”.

Image worship was the religion of the people who were not God’s chosen, the Israelites, in the time of the Old Testament. So we must be wary to not practice the religion of the “others” in the sense that it is not the religion of Jesus Christ. Everyone that does not worship Jesus and Heavenly Father provide opposition, an alternative choice, to test and prove. We must decide not to worship idols.
The New Testament marks a transition in the Topical Guide where “image” goes from referring to idol worship to referring to the mold or ideal that we were modeled after and should be striving to achieve. Romans 8:29 starts it off… “conform to the image of his Son”. D&C 1:16 reminds us that everybody walks after the image of their god. That means that they seek to emulate, they strive to become like, look like, talk like, think like, act like the person, place or thing that they hold up to be ideal. Everyone does it. We pick an ideal and seek to emulate it. We do this consciously and subconsciously.

Continue reading TTC #2 – No graven images