Bread for the World
On the off chance that there’s anyone actually watching these updates–I’ve moved to a new job. I now work as the Online Communications Associate at Bread for the World, a collective Christian voice urging our nation’s decision makers to end hunger at home and abroad.
Incidentally, you can also now find me on Facebook and Twitter.
Interviewed on CNN
Yesterday evening I had the fascinating experience of being interviewed, along with several friends, by CNN International. We watched Michelle Obama’s speech at the opening of the 2008 Democratic National Convention and gave our thoughts on it. You can find the full story on CNN’s website.
WordPress, Lighttpd, and Permalinks
Lighttpd is a wonderful webserver if you don’t need all the power that lurks within the enigma that is Apache. (And don’t even mention IIS to me, I don’t want to hear about it.) But when setting up WordPress on Lighttpd it can take a little tweaking to get the permalink URLs right. And, of course, we want to use permalinks so that our URLs don’t look like a string of swear words with &s, ?s, and /s.
My first resource was the WordPress Codex, which pointed me to this post. I couldn’t get his suggestion to work, however, and didn’t like having a separate .lua file in my WordPress directory. Thus I wrote my own rewrite rules. Read more…
How to Import Xanga into WordPress.com
NOTE: This article is now nearly 2 years old. WordPress has moved on significantly since then, as have some of the other tools employed (such as XAMPP). In theory the process still works, but the instructions may not be exact anymore.
I told a friend that I would help her move all her old Xanga posts to her new WordPress.com account. Little did I know how much of a difficulty that would be. After extensive searching via Google, I finally found what I believe to be the best way. For the benefit of those coming after me, blow-by-blow instructions are below.
Before I begin, you may want to look at Tim Wylie’s Xanga to WordPress Exporter. I could not get this to work on my friend’s blog, but it did work on a few random strangers’ blogs that I tried. Please let me know if you get this to work.
Now, on to my method. This is a bit complicated (ok, it’s really complicated), but I’ve tried to lay out everything clearly. The problem is that WordPress.com doesn’t let us import from Xanga directly so we have to install WordPress locally, import our Xanga archives, then export to a WordPress file and upload it to WordPress.com. So here we go: Read more…
Warcraft II Multiplayer LAN Setup
Warcraft II is one of the best computer games ever created. It is relatively simple, has an interesting plot, and has a challenging single player mode. It is, however, a few years old and doesn’t “just work” on modern LANs. If you’re having trouble, here are a few tips.
First:
- You’ll want to make sure you have the Battle.net edition of the game installed. Modern processors are literally too fast for the original version, but the bug is fixed in Battle.net. It also adds a few upgrades and enhancements.
- It runs at least through Windows XP (I don’t know about Vista), but you’ll need to have Mac OS 10.4 or lower, as you need classic.
Quicken, rsync, and resource forks
Summary: Instructions for how to recover data from Quicken Files after using rsync to backup on OS X causes Quicken to give an “unable to load file” error.
The other week I took my iBook to the Apple Store to have a hinge replaced and they had to send it off for repairs. For some reason Apple decided to replace the harddrive while they were at it. Luckily, I keep a backup of my files on an external harddrive–as you should too–so it was time to recover them.
However, when I went to open my Quicken file, it decided to inform me that it was “unable to load file.” After a number of hours of research (I’d had this problem before, but just restarted my file instead of fixing it), I discovered that it had to do with the fact that I used rsync to backup my data.
Evidently Quicken uses resource forks to store data in its files in OS X, which are not preserved by rsync. After even further research I discovered a page that vaguely described how to fix the problem. So I decided I should post a description of the solution for those who follow me. Read more…
