Through the Rabbit Hole

Upgrading to PHP 5.3 on a RedHat System

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:41:37 -0400

Also known as a great way to waste a night!! :)

First, of course, prepare properly:

1. I assume you have yum on said RedHat system. If you do not, then call your sys admin and yell at them. May the universe have mercy on you, not to mention your sys admin.

# which yum

2. Shut down your apache server. Do it now, before you forget to restart it and go insane reinstalling php 14 times.

#httpd -k stop

3. Determine which php you actually have on your system. Type this into the shell prompt:

# rpm -qa | grep php

You will see a list of packages you have installed. Copy that list so when you reinstall php, you can remember what packages you need.

4. Grab your current php config.

The php config is useful just in case after you install your PHP 5.3, your entire web app will stop working. The config will help you retrieve the packages you need or dependencies you need, etc.

Uninstall existing php

1. Type this into the prompt for each of the packages you have:

# yum remove php

# yum remove php-common

and so on, and so on. To check if all php packages have been removed you can either re-run the rpm command from step 3 of the prep above, or just type ‘which php’ at the prompt. As long as any php packages are around, the php directory will be there too… although in a corrupt state. Anyhow, make sure all is gone.

2. Time to refer to your handy list of packages! For each package you need, make yum install it. Here is a pretty common basic package list that should get you mysql and xml functionality. Refer to the previous output of rpm and the old config file you saved to find the list of packages you need.

# yum install php53 php53-cli php53-common php53-mysql php53-pdo php53-xml

3. Boldly restart your apache server.

# httpd -k start

There is no need to modify the config file for apache - you should’ve had php module enabled before, and upgrading php doesn’t change it. You are fine.

4. Sanity check:

You can use

# php -v

on the command line to check the version of php you now have. You can also use php_info() in your code to dump all php config to a web page.

All done!

Why would you want to do this? By default, RedHat still comes with PHP5.1, which is fine in itself, but is not compatible with lots of yum-installed packages that your app may need. To install those packages (such as zip, for example) you have two options:

1. Recompile php5.1 with appropriate config options enabled

2. Install php5.3 which either includes those packages already, or can allow yum to get the packages and configure php

In many cases, option 2 is easier. You would know that you are having 5.3 compatibility problems when, after you try to grab a package in yum, you get error messages about php53-common not being compatible with php-common, etc.

505. Your career in politics should end in high school.

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:44:43 -0400

http://www.27bslash6.com/foggot.html

Mon, 09 May 2011 13:05:21 -0400

http://www.27bslash6.com/foggot.html

The Royal Wedding

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:49:00 -0400

yourwhoremoans:

How the media expected people to react:

How people expected they would react:

How people actually reacted:

Most accurate thing I have seen all night

Photo

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:15:42 -0400

Mark Bittman thinks we can save 1 trillion if we stop eating twinkies. If he is right, we are doomed.

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:46:59 -0400

Mark Bittman thinks we can save 1 trillion if we stop eating twinkies. If he is right, we are doomed.

From all over

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:06:00 -0400

The best poll of public opinion ever - with balloons! In Montreal. (Where else?)

How designers do everyday things. Hint: it’s not ‘simply’. It is prettily, though. :)

seawitchery: I started out clicking strategically… and by the...

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:38:44 -0400

seawitchery:

I started out clicking strategically… and by the end was just wildly clicking and dancing in my chair.

biancavirina:

CLICK THE SQUARES.

THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.

THIS THIS THIS THIS!

curiositycounts: Scientists develop StripeSpotter, a “barcode...

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 13:23:10 -0400

curiositycounts:

Scientists develop StripeSpotter, a “barcode scanner” for zebras – an automatic individual animal identification system for building biometric databases of photographs taken in the field

How to get a Real Education - by Scott Adams

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:13:12 -0400

See the original article at the Wall Street Journal.

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That’s like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.

The drinking age in those days was 18, and the entire compensation package for the managers of The Coffee House was free beer. That goes a long way toward explaining why the accounting system consisted of seven students trying to remember where all the money went. I thought we could do better. So I proposed to my accounting professor that for three course credits I would build and operate a proper accounting system for the business. And so I did. It was a great experience. Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they’d be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he’d be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

At about the same time, this same friend, along with my roommate and me, hatched a plan to become the student managers of our dormitory and to get paid to do it. The idea involved replacing all of the professional staff, including the resident assistant, security guard and even the cleaning crew, with students who would be paid to do the work. We imagined forming a dorm government to manage elections for various jobs, set out penalties for misbehavior and generally take care of business. And we imagined that the three of us, being the visionaries for this scheme, would run the show.

We pitched our entrepreneurial idea to the dean and his staff. To our surprise, the dean said that if we could get a majority of next year’s dorm residents to agree to our scheme, the college would back it.

It was a high hurdle, but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That’s the year I learned that if there’s a loophole, someone’s going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn’t mention it when classes resumed. We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone’s input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

For the next two years my friends and I each had a private room at no cost, a base salary and the experience of managing the dorm. On some nights I also got paid to do overnight security, while also getting paid to clean the laundry room. At the end of my security shift I would go to The Coffee House and balance the books.

My college days were full of entrepreneurial stories of this sort. When my friends and I couldn’t get the gym to give us space for our informal games of indoor soccer, we considered our options. The gym’s rule was that only organized groups could reserve time. A few days later we took another run at it, but this time we were an organized soccer club, and I was the president. My executive duties included filling out a form to register the club and remembering to bring the ball.

By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes.

If you’re having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn’t work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can’t manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn’t work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It’s not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I’ve given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn’t a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That’s my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn’t scare you, it probably should.

curiositycounts: How the brain stores information, in an...

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 21:01:51 -0400

curiositycounts:

How the brain stores information, in an infographic. Perhaps a future addition to the excellent Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century.

wnyc: Paws Day to-do: scan cat.

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:50:10 -0400

wnyc:

Paws Day to-do: scan cat.

This is so sad and so gorgeous and so very very Russian in that...

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 20:49:38 -0400

This is so sad and so gorgeous and so very very Russian in that way.

thefirstwaltz:

Grand Duchess Maria of Russia on the Standart.

Get your data from human-readable to normalized with this tool....

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:23:43 -0500

Get your data from human-readable to normalized with this tool. I wish I had this in my college days. I’ve always wanted a robot to figure out pivot tables for me in a human-understandable way.

470. Don't play the ace if you can win with the king.

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:22:12 -0500

Neuro Interestingness

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:38:45 -0500

Here is a roundup of cool links from around the web:

V.S.Ramachandran has a new book out: “The tell-tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for what makes us Human”. Ramachandran is very influential in the field of neuroscience, particularly with vision research (experiments on kittens, anyone?) He is also a great speaker; see his interviews in Face (with John Cleese) and his TED talks (below) for a sampling. This should be a great, informative and entertaining read.

Brain Pickings has a cool article on how to alleviate toothache by using pressure points. This probably won’t get you out of a root canal, but might be helpful the next time you bite into a stone-cold ice cream.

And here is a list of all articles that the authors of Nurture Shock have written, ever. This is a lot of excellent reading, covering everything from whether it makes sense to tell kids that they are smart, to why teenagers lie to their parents.

Finally, last week The New Yorker had a great article by David Brooks which put more recent biological discoveries into a context of an average yuppie’s life. Very well written, funny, lyrical and touching piece, and educational to boot! Take a look.

This word, "sacrifice", I don't think it means what you think it means.

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:42:35 -0500

What sacrifice means: Doing something to your own detriment, only to benefit someone else.

What sacrifice does not mean:

A) Bullying someone else to achieve a goal you forced on them and then using their achievement as a feather in your cap.

B) Entrapment.

*************************************************************************

Last week, Ms. Amy Chua, a largely unknown professor at Yale thrust herself into the flames of the blogosphere by writing this article for the Wall Street Journal. She did it, of course, for money, as she has just written a book and what better way is there to drive sales than 15 minutes of fame? Her article espouses the virtues of hard-line parenting approach, illustrated by her own method of raising her daughters. Highlights include telling her daughters that they are garbage, forcing them to play piano/violin and never letting them have a sleepover, among other arbitrarily despotic things. (Since the publication of the article, she has come out claiming that WSJ has completely misrepresented her book in the article. The article, for which she is listed as the author. A-ha. Sure.).

Many people gave strong opinions on the merits of this method, most notably Asian kids who have been raised so. Kristen has a great, articulate review, and Genghis Mom offers a brutal rebuttal. I do not want to add to their outrage, but I thought it would be interesting to compare the ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ approaches to parenting in the light of the recent literature (NurtureShock , here we go). Is there any merit to the Chinese approach? And is it true that by torturing her children in this way, Ms. Chua is being a conscientious parent, sacrificing for her children, as she claims?

Ms. Chua’s premise is right: many studies have shown that eastern and western cultures have fundamentally different approaches to intelligence. Easterners tend to see it as a skill. Westerners see it as talent. Easterners believe it can be developed to any extent just through deliberate practice; you can’t be “not good” at something - you must just be too lazy to practice. Westerners, on another hand, see practice as having limited utility: if you don’t have the innate talent, practicing is pointless as you’ll never improve. The truth is somewhere in between.

It turns out believing that intelligence is malleable has very powerful implications for your success - on this account, Ms. Chua is right as well. It has been demonstrated that when students are praised for “trying hard” and “practicing” instead of “being smart”, they work harder, stay with the problems longer and do better. They believe that the amount of effort they invest makes a difference in how well they do, so they expand more effort. This approach also has a secondary, interesting side effect: it separates how well you do from what you are. If you believe you do well because you are smart, then failure is evidence of your being otherwise - and you end up being terrified to fail. Such students will shy away from trying new solutions, from taking on difficult coursework, just because they are afraid to fail - a smart person wouldn’t get a bad score on a test, so if you do you must not be smart. On another hand, students who believe that their good performance is the result of their effort, not their innate talent, handle failure much better - they decide they must not have worked hard enough, and can walk away with their self-image intact.

So on the surface what Ms. Chua proposes is a good idea. Praise kids for effort, tell them to work harder and they will be more likely to succeed. Unfortunately, through the Chinese cultural prism, this approach becomes morphed into something counter-productive. In Chinese culture being lazy seems as bad a personal vice as being stupid. And if you are not good at something, you must not have worked hard enough, and therefore must be lazy, and therefore, worthless. Rather than allowing you to disassociate our performance from your self-worth, the Chinese Mom sends you back into the destructive spiral of “If I can’t get this, then I’m a worthless human being”, same as the western kids experience from feeling not smart.

To make things worse, the stance that ALL performance is due to your effort drives the child’s risk of failure higher. In any field, sooner or later you bump up against what your physical ability allows you to do. In playing the piano, a player whose hand is large enough to reach over 1 octave will always out-play you, given the same amount of practice. In ballet, a person with the right body type will always dance better than you, given the same amount of practice.

Even in intellectual fields, there will always be people who will figure out problems faster, understand concepts easier and learn new information more efficiently than you. They are simply better built do to this. You can expand exactly the same effort as those people, and possibly even more, and still never reach their level - simply because you are not as good of a computer. Usually such effects show up when you get to the very top of a field, and pretending they do not exist makes for very bitter disappointment. I was pretty good at dance when I was younger, but I had the presence of mind to realize that my body type was probably not going to be most suited for ballet. And, given how I turned out, I would not be able to dance ballet even if I had the best technique in the entire world. My body was going to look like it does no matter how many hours I spent in the dance studio, and I simply am not built for it. Prentending that this does not matter would have left me unemployed and exhausted after many years of training. Prentending that how well you can think does not matter leaves many Asian kids unemployed and exhausted after many years of school. In the words of Po Bronson, “Kids are being mislead into believing they’re capable of futures they’re actually unprepared for.”

The truth is, anyone can get high grades in high school with effort. Seriously, high school is easy. But when you use those high school grades to get yourself into a top-notch university, and a major in engineering, the game has changed. If you have been getting those high grades by spending countless hours on each subject, then guess what? You are going to run out of time. There are simply not enough hours in the week now for you to be able to learn by sitting and reading until you finally get it. Your classmates, being better computers, will understand this concept in lecture, without needing countless hours of studying just to grasp the concept. What your Mom told you is not true: practice is not all there is. Practice is necessary to become good at something, but on the path to becoming good in a subject, some people start farther ahead than others.

For this reason, it is counterproductive to pursue something you are not naturally good at: you are starting with a handicap, and the higher you make it in a field, the more pronounced and limiting this handicap is going to become. The Chinese Mom method is terrible not just because it tyranically forces the child to work, but because it pays no attention to the field where the child is most likely to succeed. Ms. Chua sets arbitrary, capricious goals for her daughters, and with a lot of expanded effort, her daughters achieve them. One has to wonder what her daughters are actually good at and interested in, and how many opportunities have they missed to develop those unique talents while they were pursuing more feathers in Ms. Chua’s cap.

But are Ms Chua’s actions at least in good faith? Is there really a sacrifice of sorts; is she doing this for herself and not for them? Pushing your child as hard as possible is often called ‘sacrifice’ by parents. No parents wants to be the mean guy, and you sometimes need to be to get the kid to achieve their potential. But this is only true if you are pushing the kid on a path he himself has chosen, or at least shown promise in. Shoving the child toward your own goals so that you can look good in your community is hardly sacrifice.

We also often hear ‘sacrifice’ used to get the child to pursue your goals in the first place. To get a kid to comply, I have seen parents use ridiculous arguments, like how many floors they had to climb back in Soviet Russia to get their groceries back for the kids; how cold the weather was; how many jobs they held; how many hours they worked. To the children of such parents, please understand: all of what your folks say is total bullshit. It’s not that they didn’t work hard; I’m sure they did. But they sure as heck did not do it for you or because of you. If you weren’t there, would your mother have had to climb fewer floors to get groceries? Or would she have been unemployed?! Would the weather have been different? Hardly.

You did not ask to be born - you parents chose to have you. The decisions they made are theirs, and theirs alone, and to blame their past challenges on you in order to get you to comply is not sacrifice. It’s a guilt trip of the highest order. It’s called entrapment. It’s very common, and a very low thing to do to your kids.

*********************************

I do have Ms. Chua to thank for being able to articulate what I have long felt - that I have the privilege of being raised by not just good but extraordinary parents. My parents are extraordinary, downright strange, because my parents have never asked me to be something I was not.

I did not realize how much of a rarity that was until now. All of my friends have been chided for not being what their parent wishes them to be. They were prohibited from going to the college of their choice, harassed for their pick of spouse, criticized for work status, ostracized for being gay, made fun of for the way they think.

Their parents do not see them as individuals. They see them as extensions of themselves.

My parents have never, not once, made such requests or judgements of me. They have always made me feel loved and supported as the person I am, and while they pushed hard to make sure I achieve high goals, they were goals on a path chosen by me. My parents supported me throughout my childhood; they honestly shared what they saw as my strengths and weaknesses and tried to help me make the best of myself. They encouraged me to think of what I wanted to become, which resulted in discovering that we had no connections to pull and no people to bribe to help me get into the right major in the right university (no matter how great you are academically, and I was pretty great, in Russia you must have connections to get anywhere). The realization that I was not going to be able to achieve what I said I wanted in Russia was a huge factor in their decision to come to the US. They left behind a very comfortable life, a guaranteed retirement, friends, success and everything they knew to give me a better shot in my life. (That, Ms.Chua, is a good example of sacrifice.)

I hope to be the parent that my Mom and Dad are to me. So to my boys, I solemnly swear that your father and I will never ask you to be something you are simply not. We will be hard on you. We will expect you to excel. We will demand hard work. We will not let you quit. We will be honest with you. But we will do all that to help you make the most of what you already are, not to mold you into something different. You are perfect the way you came. Work hard as you are, and you will find that is enough to succeed.

And, to Ms.Chua, remember: if you can’t understand this post, you are not working hard enough. I would be happy to come over to your house and yell at you till 5am until you finally get it. We can even start now: you are garbage. And a failure. You are welcome.

"16 questions for free agents If you’re starting out as an entrepreneur or a freelancer or a..."

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 13:56:45 -0500

“

16 questions for free agents

If you’re starting out as an entrepreneur or a freelancer or a project manager, the most important choice you’ll make is: what to do? As in the answer to the question, “what do you do?”

Some questions to help you get started:

1. Who are you trying to please?
2. Are you trying to make a living, make a difference, or leave a legacy?
3. How will the world be different when you’ve succeeded?
4. Is it more important to add new customers or to increase your interactions with existing ones?
5. Do you want a team? How big? (I know, that’s two questions)
6. Would you rather have an open-ended project that’s never done, or one where you hit natural end points? (How high is high enough?)
7. Are you prepared to actively sell your stuff, or are you expecting that buyers will walk in the door and ask for it?
8. Which: to invent a category or to be just like Bob/Sue, but better?
9. If you take someone else’s investment, are you prepared to sell out to pay it back?
10. Are you done personally growing, or is this project going to force you to change and develop yourself?
11. Choose: teach and lead and challenge your customers, or do what they ask…
12. How long can you wait before it feels as though you’re succeeding?
13. Is perfect important? (Do you feel the need to fail privately, not in public?)
14. Do you want your customers to know each other (a tribe) or is it better they be anonymous and separate?
15. How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to fly? (And while we’re on the topic, how open to criticism are you willing to be?)
16. What does busy look like?

In my experience, people skip all of these questions and ask instead: “What can I do that will be sure to work?” The problem, of course, is that there is no sure, and even worse, that you and I have no agreement at all on what it means for something to work.

”

- Seth Godin’s 16 questions for free agents

A robot that can be remotely controlled from the iPhone, that...

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:22:00 -0500

A robot that can be remotely controlled from the iPhone, that carries a camera and that can fly. He needs this.

Odds and ends: Science

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:20:22 -0500

No more gene patents? As NYT reports, the US federal government just announced that genes cannot be patented because they are part of nature. I can hear Monsanto’s lobbying force marching on Washington now. Also, I’m scared.

Scientific American reports that glial cells are finally getting the attention they deserve. Surprise! They are not just a waste of space in the brain. When they are the majority of cells in the brain (there are more glial cells than neurons), that argument never really made any sense to me.

Data from 311 calls to NYC is being analyzed to better handle services for citizens. More cities should do this.

And, just for fun: there is now a chatbot who automatically (yet cleverly) argues with global warming denialists. It really says something when your argument is predictable enough to be simulated.