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Monday, May 25. 2009
I'm sure that all three of my regular readers will notice the long-in-coming change now visible at eikimartinson.com. Most of my friends are probably sick of telling me what they think of innumerable design mock-ups, so I just went ahead and implemented one of my ideas, and I'm actually happy with the results. It's not too fancy, but I think it'll get the job done.
All the pages are valid XHTML and CSS, or they should be; if there are any exceptions to that, I'm interested to hear about them. That contact page, by the way, is a new feature; I've implemented a mailer form and script for purposes of spam protection. The site is composed according to the vertical rhythm concept (click the check box in the footer to see for yourself) with a new addition of my own—a bit of javascript to maintain the rhythm across images of any possible height.
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Administration
Sunday, October 19. 2008
I recently created a subdomain on my Mediatemple DV service, but for various reasons, I wanted to have a separate user responsible for that subdomain, with FTP and shell access. The user can be created along with the subdomain in Plesk as normally. Unlike the creation of users associated with domains, however, there is no option in Plesk to give this subdomain user shell access.
Fixing it is trivial if you have root access. Just edit /etc/passwd, find the line that starts with the username you just created, then change the last field of that line from /bin/false to /bin/bash (or whatever shell you like). This will allow you to su to the subdomain user or login via SSH, as you prefer. Easy, I know, but I noticed the option wasn't present in Plesk and well, maybe this tip will be helpful to somebody else out there.
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Administration
Friday, November 30. 2007
I've been getting a few complaints about various sites not being accessible by Comcast users and discovered that quite a lot of domains are inexplicably not resolved by their DNS servers. Here is an extremely partial list, generated purely at random:
These are all popular blogs, and none of them work on Comcast's DNS. So I switched to OpenDNS, a free public dns service. You can sign up for an account, which gives you access to some features like porn-filtering and statistics on DNS usage. You don't have to have an account, however, you can just go ahead and start using the servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
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Administration
Saturday, June 23. 2007
As of yesterday this site is now hosted at Media Temple on my own "Dedicated Virtual" server. It's not exactly a true dedicated server, but it appears as such to me - I get a root login and the ability to reboot the "machine". I get statistics based on Apache logs (something my old service, csoft.net, did not provide for shared hosting). I'm a good deal more insulated from all the other users than I would be on a shared service, which is good for application performance, reliability, database security, etc. But best of all, regular users of this site will notice load times have shortened by a factor of 5!
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Friday, March 23. 2007
Not long ago I began writing my Master's thesis, and fortunately
took a moment to consider what might be formatting 'best practice'
before I got too deep into what will probably be the longest text I've
ever written. Of course, most students these days write reports,
theses, dissertations, and everything else in Microsoft Word, or (if
the student is poor or motivated by hatred toward Microsoft) one of
the free clones of the same. But I decided instead to try something
I've long been meaning to try: the TeX typesetting
system, or to be more precise, the LaTeX language
built on top of TeX. I learned some important lessons from this.
To use (tongue only somewhat in cheek) my new favorite metaphor,
Microsoft Word is like the Persian Empire: decadent, soft, corrupt,
encouraging of mysticism and lazy thinking. Whereas LaTeX is like
Sparta: cold, clean, hard, disciplined, rational. And outnumbered 2000
to 1.
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Administration
Thursday, March 3. 2005
I have added a new section to this site, intended to be a place to publish the results of all my smaller-scale one-day experiments, mostly involving explosions, destruction, and low comedy. These never really merited a entire page by themselves, so I'll be putting them all together onto this new page, named Bad Ideas as a not-so-subtle warning to the reader.
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