This building at 1515 Flagler Drive has been a bit of an eyesore since it took hurricane damage in 2004. It was brought down with explosives on Sunday, the third tallest building to ever be demolished so in the United States. And I was lucky enough to be there!
I set up my Canon G6 on multiple-shot mode for this—it did pretty well, especially given that I was just holding it above my head in the tightly-packed crowd.
So far I'm relatively satisfied with my new Mediatemple DV hosting service. I have, however, discovered a problem with the Mediatemple configuration of Awstats, the logfile-analyzing web statistics package I use. Awstats can't find its images because the path is broken in the standard Mediatemple installation - browser and country icons are missing, and the bar graphs are empty:
Here's how to fix it.
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.
First, let me preface this tale of User-Interface Woe with a disclaimer: I am far from an Adobe fanboy. I love open-source software. And of course, like everyone else, I really hate Adobe's prices. But I've learned to use Illustrator and Photoshop pretty well, so now, of course, switching to anything else causes work not-so-much to grind to a halt as to slam into a brick wall while I figure out all of the different metaphors, keyboard shortcuts, and little tricks I need to approach anything like my former productivity.
Trust me, I yearn to cast aside all Adobe products! Which brings me to Inkscape, the open-source vector illustration program. I really, really want to like it as a replacement for Adobe Illustrator. It's one of those open-source apps I install every couple of years to see if it's There Yet. And, yet again, I'm starting to think that it's not. Which brings me to the first problem I encountered on my most recent attempt at mastering Inkscape.
I recently found myself having to make some php configuration changes which are specific to a particular subdomain on my Mediatemple DV web host, and found that yet another part of subdomain setup is mildly broken out-of-the-box. This is the sort of thing that most people who need it can probably figure out for themselves, but I'm posting the solution hoping someone will find it useful.
On my DV the domain specific apache configuration is located in /var/www/vhosts/domain-name/conf/, where domain-name is of course replaced by your actual domain name. In this directory you should find at least httpd.include, and possibly vhost.conf as well. If you open httpd.include you'll find the following alarming warning at the top:
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.
UPDATE: Not anymore! I should probably fold them into the main line of the blog.
I recently took a workshop titled "Book Arts 101" at Florida Atlantic University's Jaffe Center for the Book Arts, which, besides introducing us to a world I had only barely-glimpsed before, that of artist's books, taught us to dabble in those arts themselves, using the techniques of letterpress printing and hand book-binding.
After ogling the extensive collection of the Jaffe Center, we printed covers on a vintage proof press (a Vandercook 4) set with wood block type, then bound them into neat pamphlets using needle and thread. The residents of South Florida are truly lucky to have such a world-class collection at hand. I extend my thanks to John Cutrone of the Jaffe Center and Lake Worth's Convivio Bookworks for teaching this workshop and allowing us to experiment with this at-once anachronistic and up-and-coming craft.