Archive for August, 2007
Wordpress updater
What’s with these multiple posts in a day…
Today marks the completion of my Multiple WordPress Updater Script. I’ve already posted a bunch about school stuff, might as well post about work stuff too.
We host over 55 blogs at CHNM. It’s up to me to update them when security patches or new versions come out. Doing them each by hand is a pain. I did a bit of searching but didn’t find anything that would help me update so many sites automatically. So I wrote a bash script that will do it for me. It reads a file that lists all of the wordpress install paths or prompts you for the path to one, prompts for the version to switch to, and a mysql user/pass that has permissions for all databases.
Then the script creates a copy of the database, makes a copy of the wp-content folder, updates the wordpress install using subversion, fixes some permissions, and saves the subversion output to a file in your home directory (which I’ll probably change to somewhere’s else).
I run this via sudo as root for easy updating. What I’m really pleased with is that I figured out how to get the script to pull the database name from the wp-config.php file, and grab the owner and group for later fixing of the permissions.
I hope it can be useful to someone. If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know.
Latest Version: 1.2.3 - 04/29/08
Download file
UPDATE 24.4.08: Wordpress Updater has been updated. I also updated this post, took out the code in the post, and put up a link to the file for you to download instead.
History of special effects.
Who doesn’t love a good special effects movie? Of course, when you can’t tell that there are special effects, that’s when you know it’s a good movie.
I stumbled upon this article at AmericanHeritage.com, that describes the beginnings of Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ personal special effects company, makers of all cool films (especially Star Wars). This article also describes another sort of paradigm shift in the film industry.
Personally, these types of effects are my favorite. Using real things in innovative ways. I think it’s unfortunate, in a way, that so many of the stunts and effects are digital. I like the good, old fashioned effects where objects are real, made from real things, like the mother ship on “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” (the movie I haven’t seen, but the ship I have).
Anyhow, it was a good article.
And, just as a side note, I always fear losing these web articles, until now. I use Zotero which allows me to store, sort, tag and view web pages, books, and all sorts of stuff. I’ll be using it to collect data for my research projects this year. It’s also made by the good guys at the Center for History and New Media, where I work. 
- Shameless plug!
Nazi board games
Another rare double-day post.
I heard this on a PRI show “The World”. From the site: “The World’s Clark Boyd tells us about an auction taking place tomorrow in Britain. Some of the items up for bid are children’s board games made in Nazi Germany.”
The seller has to sell them in Britain because Nazi memorabilia is illegal in Germany.
Here’s a link to the show, complete with mp3 for your listening pleasure.
Yesterland - history of what’s not at Disneyland anymore.
My brother pointed me to “Yesterland, a theme park on the Web.” This will be the Disneyland I will remember. The last time (and only time?) I went to Disneyland was back in 1985-ish.
A different history of computers and Linux
Wow, two posts in a day…
I just skimmed through this interview with Con Kolivas a major Linux kernel developer who has quite the Linux development world in frustration. What caught my attention was his ‘history’ of computers. His recollection of the computers history is truly different than I had ever learned or thought of. Basically, he paints the picture that computers could have been extremely different if the hardware had ruled instead of software. While computers were in their nascent state, the hardware being developed was ever changing. New and different ideas were used in each computer company. Then a software operating system came out that changed all that. By becoming the default OS, there was no more need to create better, different, new hardware. Instead all of the hardware was built and developed to suit the software.
It makes one think, what would computers be like if hardware ruled? What would they look like, how would they perform, how would they work, if they were not limited to one operating system?