Me at the Archives

Last Friday was archival research day. I spent the whole day at the National Archives at College Park. Well, let me rephrase that, I spent half the day getting there and back, and half the day in the archives.

The only way for me to get there was to take public transportation. I took the Metro bus from my house to George Mason University. From there I took the CUE bus to the Metro Station. One change on the Metro in DC and then I was at University of Maryland. Then it was another bus to the Archives. That wasn’t so bad. It only took THREE HOURS!!! After getting my researchers card, I went to the fifth floor, got a quick tour on how to use the microfilm readers from the very helpful staff, and jumped right in to what I thought would provide the best sources.

After several hours of looking at microfilm I decided it was time to eat lunch, it was already 3PM. Everywhere I looked were reminders that the copy machines in all of the research rooms ONLY TAKE DEBIT CARDS, NO CASH! Well, I thought, I’ll just run down to their cafeteria and get some lunch. What? What’s that? The Archives are open until 9PM but the cafeteria closes at 2PM?!?!? Oh, they have some stuff to buy, still, like milk, and cake, and muffins, and one last bowl of fruit. Fine, I’ll get the fruit, milk, and chips. Yes, I’m ready to pay now. Oh, you only take CASH?!?!? You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me! Fine! I’ll use my last two dollars in cash to buy a danish and grape soda from the vending machines! Can’t use cash anywhere else, and can’t figure out how to let the cafeteria use debit cards. Now that’s some fine government work for ya.

National Archives at night

So after that huge irritation, I went back to searching through the archives. I ended up spending 6 hours looking through 10 rolls of film. After reviewing the 150 pictures I took of the documents, only 2 of them apply to my topic.

So here are some things I learned while at the National Archives at College Park.

1. Leave much earlier in the morning. It takes forever to get there. Half the day was travel, which was good reading time. But remember to have paper and pencil handy or the reading goes to waste.
2. Take food. They have free lockers, and microwaves. If you need to eat their food, do it before 2 PM.
3. Figure out what rolls of film, and approximate frame numbers you need before you go. Fortunately, I had done that. It saved hours of time. I only got through half of the rolls I need to look at. Fortunately there were some good indexes for the film I need. You can find them at the Archive’s site to purchase copies of film. Type in a keyword in the index’s title. Then click on the index you want. Usually there is a PDF version of the index you want. And best of all… The PDF is SEARCHABLE!  Man, that saves a bunch of time.
4. Figure out how you want to make copies of the microfilm. The College Park location doesn’t have the ability to scan the documents to a computer yet. You can print them on paper, though. But what works the easiest is to just take a picture of the screen with your digital camera.
5. Figure out a plan for referencing where the copies came from. It does you no good to take a bunch of pictures or make a bunch of paper copies if you don’t know which roll of film and which frame the document came from. I thought I had a pretty decent system. Take a picture, make a note in a spreadsheet which roll, frame, and a bit about the document. Looking back, the notes I made were much too vague. A much better system is to write the Record number, roll number and frame number on a piece of paper and tape it to the screen next to the document. Taking a picture automatically records that info right next to the document. You have to get paper and pencil from the Archives, hopefully they have tape too.

My next trip is this Friday. I won’t have the whole day, but with one day of experience under the belt, I think the next trip will go more smoothly. Now I just need to get some sources!

One last thing. Make a note of all of the interesting things you see, but don’t need. You might want to come back to those later. I saw a decree from Heinrich Himmler, outlawing the word “Partisan”, and some sweet pics of a Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II (below).

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II - 3

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II - 2

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II

I can’t wait for next time.

Albert Speer at Nuremburg Trials. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

So the dissertation is the Nazi tunnels, and this paper will be an important part of that. One of the two organizations that looked into, and actually built some of the planned tunnels was the Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kreigsproduktion (RMfRuK, Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production). This group was headed by Albert Speer, who incidentally was a very interesting man. Anyhow, my paper will now look at the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production. It will kind of be an historical overview of the organization and several key players in the building of the tunnels.

As we were discussing each others papers in class last night, the question kept coming around to what is the so what question, or why is this important for us to know. I went last, so we were all ready to just get out of class, and we didn’t really get to that part of mine. Which I’m kind of glad for, since I don’t really have one. Why is this important for us to know? Because it helps us understand the tunnel? Does that work?

At any rate, such is my new topic, it applies directly to my dissertation, and will be part of a chapter that discusses the organizations involved in building the tunnels.

US National Archives at College Park. Image from Wikimedia Commons

This, of course, means that all of my sources and bibliography need to be redone. I was a bit worried about sources, which is probably why I didn’t want to do the topic. Well, it turns out that Prof. Deshmukh has copies of the indexes to the Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, VA, which are the captures Nazi documents housed at the U.S. National Archives. It just so happens that there are over 1000 rolls of microfilm that reference the RMfRuk (with over 190 being the records of this organization directly)! What a find. Now my extra hours will be spent going over the hundreds of pages of the indexes looking for references to Speer, Himmler, Kammler and tunnels. And then it’s off to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to look at the actual documents. I have a lot to do before the April 12 deadline of the first draft (which should be as complete as possible).

So, if you didn’t get it yet, here are the steps to doing such a research paper:

1. Find an interesting topic. It has to hold your attention, or you will be miserable.
2. Talk to your Professors. They’ll point you on the right track for all kinds of things (sources, topic focus, secondary literature, encouragement, etc).
3. Find the sources. Best is to find an index or something that describes the sources. For my example, before I even go to the National Archives, I will have a list of specific rolls of microfilm I need, with particular documents I want to look at on the films. Hopefully my bank account can sustain the copies needed, or better yet, I’ll be able to make digital copies.
4. Find secondary literature about any aspect of your topic. In my case I need books and articles about Albert Speer, the RMfRuk, Nazi organizations, industrial and economic studies of Nazi Germany, etc.
5. Look the the secondary material for insights, information, and most importantly, more sources. I’m now see how important footnotes are, and can see what resources are most often used, what works are most often cited, and who makes what arguments. Harvesting the footnotes for sources is integral in historical research.
6. Gather information from primary and secondary sources and make an outline of the argument.
7. Write, write, write, and then do some more writing.

So, I am back to step 3, finding the sources. I’m going to the Archives on Friday. Wish me luck!

Library of Congress - John Adams Building

So I finally went to the Library of Congress for actual archival research. They have about ten years worth of the ‘Kosmos’ magazine from 1919-1927 that I will look at for my paper. It was really fun. The whole family went down. Jess and I both got new LoC cards, then they went to a museum and I went to read old books.

Up until this point my big worry had been in finding some primary documents. Now that I have them, I don’t know what to do with them. I proposed this dilemma to the class last night and they had some great ideas on how to use the source. I also have a great article to use as a template, in that the historian, Nick Hopwood, looks at the ‘Urania’ magazine used by the socialists in Weimar Germany. (Nick Hopwood, “Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic,” History Workshop Journal, no. 41 (Spring 1996): 117-153.)

Reading this article is my goal for tonight’s short two hour study session. I’m planning on going back to the LoC on Thursday to get some more data. But here are the ideas my classmates had:

• look at a particular author that continually prints
• look at one science/tech, follow how Nazi magazines and others treat the topic
• look at old and new to see if they deal with a subject
• what happened to the authors of the socialist papers
• study what kind of articles are being printed, what topics come up continually
• what happened to the authors/editors of the socialist papers, did they go to Dachau, were the scientists who published put to work in their fields?
• narrow down the so what question. What question are you trying to answer, that will help you know what to look for in the sources.

Library of Congress - John Adams Building - 5th floor

What the issue really boils down to is that I need to narrow my topic. I can’t have my topic be ’science and technology in Weimar Germany’. That’s way too broad. Too broad for a dissertation, even. I like the idea of focusing on one particular science or technology, and see how it is portrayed throughout the Weimar Republic, and even into post-Weimar Germany. Ideally, it aligns with my dissertation topic of Nazi tunnels.

This was a great exercise to help me figure out the structure of a scholarly paper. As we discussed in class, here are the common conventions in a scholarly paper as written in an historical journal. A good historical scholarly paper usually:

• opens with a catchy anecdote, quote, narrative, etc. This livens up the essay, provides a good basis for framing the time period, etc.
• discusses the most relevant historiography
• discusses the “So What?” question. Addresses why the article is worth reading. Provides a clear statement of the problem.
• provides a clear statement of the thesis.
• lays out the the themes and structure of article in the beginning so it is easy to follow.
• discusses methodology. This includes a discussion of primary sources; organizing the sources, what to expect out of them, address the limits and strengths of primary sources (who wrote them, what was their purpose).
• uses footnotes. Footnotes can be an integral part of a historical paper. Footnotes can be used to discuss other arguments not directly related to the thesis. They establish credibility by showing that the author knows more than just their narrow topic. Footnotes are a way of establishing legitimacy and knowledge of the subject and other tangential subjects. They can be a means to deflect possible criticism by addressing issues other historians would most likely raise. Footnotes can also build bridges to understanding by referencing other areas, or providing examples. If there are a bunch of letters, newspaper articles, etc., quote a couple in the text, but then to show there is more than just the two, do a “see also”, or reference that you read many more sources, in a footnote.
• has a length of 20-25 pages of text.
• has a format consisting of an intro, a body divided into three sections and a conclusion.
• has reference to the most prevalent historians in the field, and includes their articles/books in the footnotes as a reference. They just might be the ones reviewing your essay, and if they see their works referenced, they  might be more likely to approve yours for publishing.

So there you have it. Some easy guidelines for writing a historical scholarly article for a journal.

So I buckled down and wrote out the review to the essay this afternoon. It was actually a great exercise for learning what’s going on in the field, and will definitely benefit me on this paper. The article was about what makes Nazi science Nazi, or what’s the difference between the science done in Nazi Germany versus at other times in Germany, and even in other nations.

Volker Remmert describes three issues in the current (article was written in 2004, so pretty current) trends of writing about science in Nazi Germany. The first is that of organization. Historians like to discuss how the Nazis were or were not able to congeal a general policy and practice in regards to their science and technology. Current thinking, shows Remmert, is that the Nazis were very capable. He points to the many Allied agencies that swept into Germany post-WWII and took all of their scientists, engineers, research and projects. I’m most familiar with the United States’ Project Paperclip, and taking Wernher von Braun for their rocket development.

Second is about how Nazi science and technology practices, ideology, and policies were developed well before the National Socialists came to power. Some historians will contend even before World War I.

Lastly is the issue of Entgrenzung, or dealing with the issues of ethics and morality in scientific research, and whether scientists and researches knew their work was tested in inhumane conditions or not.

That’s my three pages in a nut shell.

I also found a few primary sources for the paper. Several books popped up on worldcat.org by doing a search for “wirtschaft AND tech*” and limiting the time frame to 1920-1940. What I really need is a bunch of popular magazines and newspaper articles that talk about science and technology in Weimar Germany. Particularly with some reader comments, would be nice.

Anywho, that’s were I stand on that.

I started out looking in JSTOR for ‘historiography German aviation’, and found a few possible leads on the historiography of aviation history in general (which means US aviation history). I could fit that in, comparing US and German aviation, or something like that, but I thought I should search elsewhere.

So then I went to Project Muse to see if they had anything better. They had the same stuff. But I did rethink an article that came up in both. I figured a historiographical essay on science in Nazi Germany was about as close as I can get. So I’ll be writing three pages on this article: Volker R. Remmert, “What’s Nazi about Nazi Science? Recent Trends in the History of Science in Nazi Germany,” Perspectives on Science 12, no. 4 (2004): 454-475.

So I’ve had some more time to think about my topic, and have searched for sources, and I think I have a better grasp on what to do.

Reconstructed Horton 2-29

Now the paper will be on science and technology in the Weimar period. More specifically, I’ll look at how popular, political and scientific attitudes about science and technology influenced German leaders going into World War II. Germany had some pretty incredible technology in World War II. They had the first jet aircraft, the first ballistic missile, and this awesome airplane (I have posted about before)!

I also found an interesting quote from Hitler, where he supposedly said “Germany’s technology, industry, and morale were sufficient to fight an indefinite war.” So was there something in the Weimar period that lead Hitler to believe this. Certainly he did, as did the scientists and researchers who were so innovative.

So now I’ll come up with a better one paragraph proposal, and I might feel comfortable enough about it to post it. And now it’s on to find sources (primary and secondary) about popular, political, and from the field itself, attitudes about science and technology in Weimar Germany! I’ll start by looking in the field of aviation, since that is my passion, if I have such a thing.

Tunnel at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (German: Markirch), in Alsace, France

So this is my last class before embarking on my dissertation. The Graduate Research Seminar should hopefully tie up any loose knots in our historical writing abilities. It’s a course on honing our skills. The syllabus looks great, and I’m excited for the class. One initial question I had was, why are we learning how to write like historians until the very end? Why don’t we learn how to write at the beginning or even in the middle? Well, there is a course or two on that, but nothing like this one proposes to be. We’re apparently going to learn all the behind-the-scene techniques and tricks to the trade. I’m actually really excited for it. Our Professor is great.

So for this class we’re supposed to write a 25-30 page paper that will hopefully become a chapter (or at least a bulk of one) of the dissertation. If nothing else, it can be a publishable paper. On the very low end, it will at least teach us something we don’t want to do for a dissertation.

Map of tunnel locations

My dissertation, as it stands now, is on Nazi Tunnels. The Nazis, towards the middle of the war, decided that they needed to move much of their war manufacturing underground. So they designed and built huge underground bunkers and tunnel systems for factories and depots. Go ahead, google it. There’s not much out there. Add the keywords, ‘melk ebensee’ and you’ll get a few more responses. The only scholarly works that I know of on this topic are two German books. One is an excellent work by Hans Walter Wichert, Decknamenverzeichnis deutscher unterirdischer Bauten(at Amazon, already have one), which lists practically all of the underground building sites during Nazi Germany. The second work is a dissertation by Bertrand Perz, Projekt Quarz: Steyr-Daimler-Puch Und Das Konzentrationslager Melk, Industrie, Zwangsarbeit und Konzentrationslager in O?sterreich (at Amazon if anyone wants to buy it for me), which is an in-depth look at one of these underground projects in Melk, Australia.

Anyhow, there are totally no sources available, to my knowledge, that I can use for the current project. That’s part of my dissertation work, is to dig up all of those sources. It should be fun. It’s also not manageable in a semester’s time. So for this semester’s project I had several ideas.

Projekt Quarz

First, I thought about doing a micro-study on just one of the tunnels. Unfortunately, in the two or three hours of looking for sources, I couldn’t find any. I haven’t checked with the library, yet, but I’m not hopeful. So my second idea is to look at a more broad topic that touches the issue of the tunnels. One obvious one is, why did they build them in the first place (the answer is to protect them from Allied bombings). But a deeper question begs, why did they think they could do that in the first place. It was a huge undertaking to move so many factories underground. They must have though they could do it. So a deeper question would be, why did the Nazi’s think they could undertake such a big job. Now let’s step back a bit, say, 30-50 years, and apply this question to Germany as a whole in the form of, what did German’s think of their technical and scientific abilities? So that will be my basis of inquiry for this semester’s project. I will look at what German citizens, German scientists, and German politicians thought about German science and technology from 1900 until the end of World War II. I post more on this as I think it through and find sources.

So, basically, I’m hoping to keep up the blog as I write the paper and take the class. I’ll post the methodology that I learn, and the troubles and trials, the triumphs and tackles about writing a historical paper.

First off, I feel completely unprepared because I have no sources. That’s the first thing to tackle.

Not too many people came by, so I only spoke with two people. I had this list of resources for working with and teaching with maps:

And this Keynote playing on my laptop:

Long-winded Introduction

It took me a couple of days to figure this out due to lack of decent tutorials and not enough confidence in my Linux skills to build programs from source. I think I have the hang of it now, and write this up with the intent on providing another, or the only, tutorial on setting up CentOS 5 with multiple instances of PHP using one Apache install. That being said, there are a number of good tutorials out there, just none of them explicitly for CentOS and some leave out some details that n00bs like me get confused about.

PHP4 and PHP5 on SuSE 10.1 – This was by far the most helpful of the tutorials. Even though it was written for SuSE, it works almost straight across for CentOS.

There is also a great list of instructions in the comments on the php.net site under installing PHP for Apache 2.0 on Unix systems (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php#90478).

I found this one after I wrote up this tutorial at http://cuadradevelopment.com. It’s a bit different, but should work as well.

There are basically two different ways I could have done this. 1- run a single instance of Apache, and run one instance of PHP as a module, and other installs as CGI. 2- run several instances of Apache, each with it’s own instance of PHP as a module. I chose to do the first method for no particular reason. Dreamhost has a post about the good and bad with running PHP as CGI.

So basically, the steps are: 1. Set up Apache and have PHP install as a module. 2. Configure and make another instance of PHP to run as CGI. 3. Add a virtual host to Apache running under a different port to access the PHP as CGI.

Set up Apache with PHP module

So here’s what I did to get the basic Apache, PHP and MySQL working. This sets up the first PHP install to run as a module in Apache:

From a clean install of CentOS 5 (virtually no packages selected during initial install), I installed the following packages:

From there I needed to get PHP 5.2.x, so I did the following to get PHP, Apache, MySQL and PEAR all set up.

1. Step 1: GET PHP 5.2.x
   Check out instructions and packages here: http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en

   $ wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-2.noarch.rpm
   $ wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/el5.i386/remi-release-5-4.el5.remi.noarch.rpm
   $ rpm -Uvh remi-release-5.rpm epel-release-5.rpm
   $ yum—enablerepo=remi update php-pear php

   Copy the /etc/php.ini file from the /etc/php.ini.default:

   $ cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

   Change the following lines:

   • 1. upload_max_filesize = 20M #line 573
   • 2. mysql.default_socket =/path/to/mysql/mysql.sock #about line 736
   • 3. mysqli.default_socket =/path/to/mysql/mysql.sock #about line 771
2. Step 2: Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf by changing the following lines
   • 1. Listen xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:80 #line 134
   • 2. ServerAdmin admin@email.org #line 251
   • 3. ServerName somesite.org #line 265
   • 4. DocumentRoot ”/path/to/htdocs” #line 282
   • 5. <Directory ”/path/to/htdocs”> #line 307
   • 6. AllowOverride All #line 328
   • 7. DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.html.var #line 392
3. Step 3: Create the /etc/my.cnf file for MySQL

   [mysqld]
   datadir=/path/to/mysql
   socket=/path/to/mysql/mysql.sock
   user=mysql
   # Default to using old password format for compatibility with mysql 3.x
   # clients (those using the mysqlclient10 compatibility package).
   old_passwords=1
   
   [client]
   socket=/path/to/mysql/mysql.sock
   
   [mysqld_safe]
   log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
   pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

4. Step 4: Start apache and mysql and set them to start on boot up:
   

   $ service httpd start
   $ service mysqld start
   $ chkconfig mysqld on
   $ chkconfig httpd on

5. Step 5: Set the MySQL password for root
   

   $ mysqladmin -u root password ‘XXXXXX’

6. Step 6: install Phing and other PEAR packages
   

   $ pear channel-discover pear.phing.info
   $ pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
   $ pear install phing/phing
   $ pear install PhpDocumentor
   $ pear install XML_Beautifier
   $ pear install PHPUnit
   $ pecl install Xdebug

Configure second version of PHP

From here we need to install a second version of PHP. Grab the version you want from http://www.php.net/releases/, and stick that any where you want to (usually your root’s home directory is fine). I’m installing PHP 5.2.4, so I’ll use that in my examples.

Unpack the tarball and enter the directory it created.

$ tar -xjf php-5.2.4.tar.bz2

Now, you’ll need to determine which modules you need to install. For this part I used the steps from the php.net comment under “my approach for determining required modules” (copied here, without permission, but with lots of gratitude and full credit going to the author of the comment).

my approach for determining required modules
------------------------------------
1. get the list of the modules
     $  php -m | grep -v -e Modules] -e ^$ > php-default-modules

2. create the configure script
$  for i in $(cat php-default-modules); do echo -n "--with-$i ">> phpconfigure.sh ;done

     2.2 add #!/bin/bash to the top line, and ./configure to the second line.
          Each of the --with-* need to be on the second line.

3. run the configure script, and iterate through the "Configure script errors"
    section below until it completes properly

    $ ./phpconfigure.sh

4. at the end of the output, look for a notice of unknown options

     Notice: Following unknown configure options were used:
     --with-date
     --with-gum-disease

     Check './configure --help' for available options

5. as suggested, execute '$ ./configure --help' and correct the options. The
     "for" command above indiscriminately inserts "--with-" for all modules,
     but bundled modules may require "--enable-" instead, so mostly you'll
     be changing those. For modules that are enabled by default you'll need
     to remove the entry.

6. Add anything else you personally want or need. I like to add "--enable-safe-mode".

After doing all of that, I had the following in phpconfigure.sh

NOTE: make sure you do not include ‘–with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs’. This is what installs PHP as an Apache module. Also, since you have the original PHP running, you can theoretically make a phpinfo file (with phpinfo() ) in it, and grab the configure entries from that, making sure to change ‘–with-config-file-path=/etc’ ‘–with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d’

During the configure, you might run into some errors. Again from the php.net comment:

Configure script errors
--------------------------------------------
In my experience, these errors have been due (with any software, PHP included) mostly to missing
development packages, which contain the libraries and headers needed to compile support for that
library's function into the application.

This becomes a process of:
-executing the ./configure script and looking at the error
-installing the devel package providing the resource referenced by the error (google using the error
     as search term as needed)
-repeat until the ./configure script makes it through without error

Upshot: identify the software referenced by the error, and install it.

Example
-----------
Example error:
     configure: error: Cannot find OpenSSL's
Example explanation
     configure is looking for a header (and probably a lot of other stuff) from a missing openssl package.
Example solution:
php-5.2.9]$sudo yum install openssl-devel

The previous yum command should take care of most of those dependencies.

After the phpconfigure script runs without errors, then simply run

$ make

As the JpGraph tutorial explains, there is no need to run “make install”. Just simply copy the php-cgi executable to the proper place. We’ll get to that step shortly.

Set up Apache VirtualHost and website directories

Now you need to create two directories to handle the PHP as CGI. They can be virtually wherever, but should be in the same directory where you have the main html content. So if you set the path to the website data (in the httpd.conf) to /path/to/htdocs/, then you’ll need to make a /path/to/php524/ and a /path/to/php524-cgi/

$ mkdir /path/to/php524/

and

$ mkdir /path/to/php524-cgi/

After you have those directories, you can add the VirtualHost information to the Apache config (httpd.conf). I like to have a separate file for the VirtualHosts, so I added this to the end of the httpd.conf file.

Include conf/XXXXX_vhosts.conf

And to allow VirtualHosts, uncomment this line:

NameVirtualHost *:80

To allow Apache to listen on (or accept requests from) different ports besides the default 80, add another Listen line to the httpd.conf file:

Listen XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:8524

I used port 8524 to correspond to version 5.2.4 of PHP

Now create the XXXXX_vhosts.conf file

Now, you need to copy the php-cgi binary/executable to the /path/to/php524-cgi-bin/ directory. The php-cgi file is located in the file where you ran the configure and make for the new php install. So if you did all that in the /opt/php-5.2.4/ directory, the php-cgi will be located at /opt/php-5.2.4/sapi/cgi/php-cgi.

$ cp /opt/php-5.2.4/sapi/cgi/php-cgi /path/to/php524-cgi-bin/

Finally, copy the php.ini file to the right place. And configure as needed.

$ cp /opt/php-5.2.4/php.ini-dist /path/to/php524-cgi-bin/php.ini

Test the apache configs to make sure they work:

$ /usr/sbin/apachectl configtest

If that returns OK restart Apache.

$ /etc/init.d/httpd graceful

You can make a phpinfo page to test that it’s using the new PHP version.

Then check out your new site: http://somesite.org:8524/phpinfo.php

In order to get the different versions of PHP to interact with MySQL, you’ll have to use the URL on port 80 as the MySQL host. So, for example, in a WordPress install at http://somesite.org:8524/blog, the wp-config.php will have to have the following for the MySQL hostname:

define('DB_HOST', 'dev.omeka.org');

There is some issue with mod_rewrite on the different versions of PHP. I’ll replace this paragraph with a fix when I have one.
UPDATE: 9/9/09 – I figured out how to get the .htaccess working for the Omeka installs we were working with. I needed to change the AllowOverride lines in the vhost.conf (or httpd.conf) file from None, to All.

Well, there you go. Hope that’s enough detail to get you going.

So here are a number of resources and articles describing some cool things about space flight.

Historic Spacecraft is an archive of space vehicles and other things space related. They have a lot of photos of vehicles, suits, and such. They also have posters and such for sell, if you’re inclined to have something on your wall. They also have stats and dates for all of the rockets and vehicles listed. A great source for photos for all your space history needs. Also really cool is a list of all completed Space Shuttle missions. Space Shuttle Discovery has flown the most missions, 36, so far (June 2009) with a total of 126 missions. The Space Shuttle Enterprise never made it to space, but you can see it at the Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, VA. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it is extremely awesome.

Next up from Flightglobal is an interactive timeline of sorts, with lots of information about the missions, flights, computers, physics and people who made it possible to put man on the moon. Most amazing about the whole flight, is that everything was based on theory. There was no way to test the actual theoretical physics without flying to the moon and back. “Although the theoretical physics of travelling to the Moon had been laid down before the advent of the Apollo missions, this was the first time a series of manned missions had put the theory into practice.”

Speaking of computers, Linux.com has a neat write up about the software used to guide the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon and back. It’s incredible to think that they were able to do such an amazing thing with technology comparable to today’s calculators. All of the code used punch cards and took hours to see if it was written properly. Jerry Bostick described the process in the Linux.com article:

“We would give instructions to the programs by punching cards,” Bostick said. “You had to wait at least 12 hours to see if it would work right.” The early programming was done in the real-time computing complex in Houston using IBM 7094 computers with 64K of memory. There were no hard disks. All the data was stored on magnetic tape, with each computer having about eight tape drives. Most programs used for the mission were written in Fortran, Bostick said. “After Apollo 1, we upgraded to the biggest and the best equipment that government money could buy, the IBM 360 with an unheard of 1MB of memory. We went all the way from 64K to 1MB.”

Moving from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a text-based game written by a high school student. It became popular and was later turned into countless graphical spin offs. I’m playing one on the iPod Touch a bit too much at the moment. You can see I made the top 20 players for a while!

Finally, New Scientist has a number of interesting articles relating to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. One article addresses with the ethics and issues with the moon being a historic spot. Wherever there is a piece of human debris or footstep, it’s historically valuable. Should all of these sites and artifacts and footprints be protected? What happens when/if tourists are able to visit the moon? Who’s going to be the museum curator and the tourist guides? I’ll take that job!

Another New Scientist article lists several reasons why the moon is still relevant to science, for government, commercial enterprise and the normal guy.

Lastly, New Scientist has a neat interactive map showing the many multi-national places on the moon where humans have left their mark and made exploration.

So I’ve been converting some more blogs to static html files, and this time around things seemed to be so different, that I made up a new how to. Here are the steps that I’ve been using to convert blogs using the default Kubric theme.

1. Update the permalink structure for the site so that it uses the year, month, day, postname structure.
   UPDATE `database`.`prefix_options` SET `option_value` = ‘/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/’ WHERE `prefix_options`.`option_name` = ‘permalink_structure’ LIMIT 1 ;
2. Make sure the blog does not block search engines. If the blog is set to block them, wget can only download the index.html file. And this took me a while to figure out. So, for the sake of search engines, if wget only downloads the index.html file or wget recursive gets only index.html file, then remember to check your robots.txt or similar settings. Either edit in the admin section (under Settings->Privacy) or via SQL.
   UPDATE `database`.`prefix_options` SET `option_value` = ‘1′ WHERE `prefix_options`.`option_name` = ‘blog_public’ LIMIT 1 ;
3. Add the .htaccess file if not already there, where

   /path/to/wordpress/blog/

   starts at the URL root, not the absolute file path. So http://sitename.com/path/to/wordpress/blog/ would have the .htaccess file below in the ‘blog’ directory.

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /path/to/wordpress/blog/
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule . /path/to/wordpress/blog/index.php [L]

4. Get rid of the meta links through the sidebar widget in the admin, or delete the appropriate lines from the theme files (for default Kubric theme edit comments.php, sidebar.php, single.php, footer.php), or see the last step. Delete the code that puts in the search, comments, trackback, rss, and anything in the footer you want out.
5. When all is good, run wget to grab the files.

   wget --mirror -P blog-static -nH -np -p -k -E --cut-dirs=5 http://sitename.com/blog/

6. Rename the blog directory.
   mv blog blog-old
7. Rename the static directory to be live.
   mv blog-static blog
8. Copy the images directory from the old theme to the appropriate static directory.

   cp -r blog-old/wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/images/ blog/wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/

9. Alternative to get rid of unwanted links, etc. Use the find command to find all html files, then use perl to delete the lines. Don’t forget to escape forward slashes in the search field. Unfortunately, this method requires you to do it for every line of code you want to delete. It’s much better to delete the lines out of the theme files. The code below has an unnecessary space in the opening H3 tag so it will render properly.

   find . -name \*.html | xargs perl -ni -e 'print unless /< h3>Leave a Reply< \/h3>/'

   Also, if you want to just search and replace instead of remove, this handy find and perl one-liner will find and replace text in all html files.

   find . -name *.html | xargs perl -p -i'' -e "s/search text here/replace text there/"

   The above would search for all the “search text here” phrases in all html files, and replace it with “replace text here”. You can obviously substitute whatever you want in those to places. If you have a ‘/’ (forward slash) character, it will need to be escaped with a ‘\’ (back slash) character. Perl uses the regular regular expression syntax, so look that up if you need help formulating a search and replace structure.

A few Nazi related items came up in the news lately.

Never before seen photo of Hitler

From the Telegraph.co.uk we have some never before seen photographs of Hitler. From the article:

“The colour pictures come from the collection of Hugo Jaeger, Hitler’s personal photographer, who captured him on camera him from 1936 to the final days of his rule in 1945.

They include a glimpse inside Berghof, his mountaintop estate in Bavaria, and his private apartments in Berlin.”

This will shed some more light on Hitler and life of top Nazis. It goes well with a find from a fellow PhD student at GMU who found similar photos at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/). The photos are of Hitler’s apartment at Berghof, Hitler mingling with the people and at parades, and other rooms and belongings of Hitler’s.

WWII German E-boat

Also in the news is a recently uncovered German E-Boat, the S130, which interrupted an allied D-Day training and killed over 700 American servicemen. It is being reconstructed and will be used as a memorial of those who fought in World War II. From the article:

“As owner the world’s largest privately held collection of military vehicles, Wheatcroft said he envisions the restored vessel as being a “living memorial to all sailors who died during World War Two.”

“It’s the only example of its type left in the world,” he said. “I want it to become like something brought back from the past.”"

And, finally, another World War II vessel making the news is the Horten 2-29. This was a stealth jet developed by a couple of brothers. It has the uncanny resemblance to our B-2 stealth bomber. Here is a site with a number of cool pictures. National Geographic has a cool documentary about a team of engineers at Northrop Grumman who reconstructed the airplane to test it’s stealth abilities. Most amazing of all, I think, is that the plane was made from wood! That and several layers of paint, aparently, are what make it nearly invisible to radar. I’ll have to do some research into this machine and write up a history of it.

Reconstructed Horton 2-29

World Digital Library

A great resource, hopefully, for scholars. From their website….

“The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.”

cuneform digital library initiative

Related to the WDL, is the CDLI. From their website….

“The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.”

John Harrison sea clock

And here’s a short read on an interesting historical topic. It seems the history of the longitude will need a small rewrite. What’s most amazing, though, is the skill and craftsmanship of the compass at the heart of this historical debate.  Created over 270 years ago, the original parts show no sign of wear and tear, while replacement parts broke down after 80 years. A remarkable piece of history.

The controversy surrounding this clock comes from recent work to replace broken parts from the initial attempt at restoration. It was originally believed that John Harrison created this clock all by himself. He being originally a carpenter, some scholars are a bit skeptic that he could create the intricate brass work needed to create the piece.  The most recent repairs have lead people to believe Harrison had help, and probably commissioned out certain pieces. Comprising over 2000 pieces, this sea clock is a marvel of itself, regardless of who made it.

Now it’s time for some timelines!

It was a shameless publicity post to slashdot, but the timelines got me thinking of other timelines, especially as I’m creating one of my own using MIT’s Exhibit builder, and have created one for a course. So, here are a few timeline tools mentioned in the article.

SIMILE’s Timeline: easy to use, just point it to a data file (which is the most dificult part)

TimeGlider: Looks like a flashed based version of SIMILE’s product. A few different features. Here’s one in action, Rosenberg Cold War trials.

Google’s News timeline: you can do searches on other things as well. Kind of like a modern timeline.

TimeRime: They’re in this for the money, and it doesn’t look all that great, but I didn’t spend but more than a couple seconds looking around.

Buried in sand: The abandoned Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse

I came across the site Artificial Owl this week. Artificial Owl finds images of long forgotten, man-made objects, locates them on a map and tells a bit of the story behind the object if possible. I was initially struck by the beautiful images of buildings, ships, airplanes, and automobiles left to deteriorate and crumble back to nature. I love the imagery of nature reclaiming her elements. It’s a definite reminder that man and his creations will not last longer than mother earth.

There were a number of images of airplanes, which I was glad to see, since I like them most. One of them was particularly interesting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a picture of a B-29. I love B-29s and B-17s from World War II. The reason, besides them being beautiful airplanes, is because my grandfather was a belly gunner in a B-17 during WWII. He, and an uncle, had numerous models and paintings of B-17s and other WWII fighter planes in my grandpa’s basement. I even put together a model of a B-17 myself as a kid. So, naturally, my interest was peaked. Another reason I was interested in this picture is because I remember hearing about it. The very brief history of this airplane goes like this.

B29 Kee Bird, on frozen lake near Thule, Greenland

In 1947 the Kee Bird (as it was called), was on a top secret spy mission. It made an emergency landing on a frozen lake near Thule, Greenland. The crew were all fine and rescued, but the airplane was left. In the 1990s, a few older gentlemen decided they would rescue the airplane. After lots of money and time (nearly a year), they repaired the engines and minor damage to the plane, and prepared to take off. As they taxied around the bumpy frozen lake, one of the generators used for power broke loose and started a fire in the airplane. All of the crew escaped, but the airplane was destroyed by fire. When the lake melted in the summer, the plane sank to the bottom, never to be seen again.

All of this got me thinking that this would be an awesome way to do history. There is so much information connected to this one airplane, that it could easily fill a book or documentary. I haven’t read either of them, but either would definitely be an interesting read. It would be fun to research the history of the plane, the details and reasoning behind the flight, the biographies of the crew, and all that jazz. There is so much history that can be incorporated into the story of this airplane.

B29 Kee Bird, abandoned plane, near Thule, Greenland

This could be done for all of the images on Artificial Owl, in fact for any abandoned man-made object. As I reflect on that, this is precisely what I want to do with my dissertation. I want to focus on one abandoned tunnel in Halberstadt, Germany. It was used by the Germans before, during and after WWII. It think telling the story of this tunnel can incorporate many aspects of German history around it. Time will tell on how that works out.

Well, I’ll leave you with a few more pics of possible historical tales…

Abandoned old planes at La Paz - Jfk International (El Alto) Airport - Bolivia

Shipwreck of the Galant Lady on Bimini island, Bahamas

Antonov An-8 at rest in Russian woods.

(All images courtesy Artificial Owl, used without permission – thanks!)