I’m related to a legend in the making. Baby sis’ has done another one of her epic restaurant reviews. If you’re in Cape Town or plan to travel there soon, you need to check out her blog. If you don’t know who Lyn is, she’s a chef, trained by two of Cape Town’s best restauranteurs, until recently was head chef at the Suprette and is (not sure if I can say this yet) about to open an epic restaurant of her own.
This is the other point of view. An interview the BBC probably won’t air again.
I don’t condone violent demonstrations and I think the the looting of small businesses is sad and immoral. But you should understand that sometimes when people hit the streets en masse and make some noise, it has a purpose. It can’t be explained away by labeling them “rioters”.
It happened during apartheid in South African where I grew up and it brought about a peaceful transition of power in the South African government.
Back then we used to call Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Today he is Madiba, one of the most loved humans on Earth.
If you’ve heard the music of Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), you’ll recognize Darcus Howe’s sentiments. Powerful stuff.
Update: Here is LKJ reciting Sonny’s Lettah, live.
If you run a reasonably high traffic blog on a small Linode server like this one, it’s a really good idea to set up an Nginx front-end proxy for your Apache server. It lets you handle relatively high traffic without running out of apache children while keeping keep-alive enabled.
You can read more about how to set up Nginx and other tips on my Basic WordPress Speedup page.
If you have set up Nginx, you’ll notice that your comments no longer have the real IP address of visitors to your site. They’re all 127.0.0.1 or something similar.
The way I solved this was to edit my php.ini file. On my Ubuntu server this lives in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
I modifed the auto_prepend_file variable to look like this:
auto_prepend_file = /etc/php5/apache2/mdm.php
Then in the mdm.php file I put this:
<?php
$mdm_headers = apache_request_headers();
$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] = $mdm_headers["X-Forwarded-For"];
?>
This assumes you have the following line in your Nginx.conf to forward the real IP address:
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
I just noticed Matt put a post up this morning giving a further update re TimThumb. You can read it here.
I have a sinking feeling there will be blood. Right now Dow is down 4.45%, S&P down 5.69%, Nasdaq down 5.7%, Gold up 3.87% and rising. The DAX closed down 5% and the worst drops happend towards end of trading, so I’m expecting the same for US markets.
Update: I hate to say I told you so. Ugh!
During a test in the Nevada desert of a miniaturized nuke called Scorpion, theoretical physicist and weapons designer Ted Taylor used a parabolic mirror to light a cigarette. Ah the good old days.
This is an extract from Under The Cloud by Richard Miller:
Extract from Under The Cloud by Richard Miller
I’ve done a ton of work on TimThumb this weekend and there are a few great enhancements. E.g. if you have pngcrush or optipng installed, it will now use 66% less disk space and give you comparable quality images.
Please grab the latest version of TimThumb on this page. Then let me know if you have any feature requests or find any bugs by reporting them here.
Here’s the TimThumb changelog since I released 2.0 about 48 hours ago.
This is a wonderful poem by Walt Whitman where he explores how the formalization of science and nature robs it of it’s mystery and wonder. If you’re a programmer who has done any time at a University, you’ll recognize Whitman’s sentiment.
It first appeared in the “By the Roadside” section of the standard 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
I did a ton of work on timthumb today. Download the latest version to get a whole lot of security and performance improvements and bugfixes. It’s available now.