The Binary Circumstance

Richard Silverstein and I have been following parallel paths, at least as far as blogging goes.

We both started out at Blogger, moved to Typepad and then on to WordPress, where we have suffered “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Hamlet would say. The big challenge comes from converting URLs so that as many links can be preserved as possible.

I originally saw something that he wrote about Apache mod_rewrite and in that post he offered to send the file of RewriteRules to anybody who was facing the same challenge.

This began a dialogue back and forth and he, having always been a few months, weeks, or days ahead of me, has offered valuable assistance each step of the way.

We both have suffered the temporary loss of our .htaccess file upon our first attempts to update it. My problem was been compounded many times over by the fact that I was unable to view hidden files on my DreamHost server.

On Friday, when I used the WordPress editor to update the .htaccess file, it blew up and I got a 500 server error when I tried to view my site explaining what had happened. It was impossible to get into my site at all.

The tech rep, in respose to my e-mail, very promptly put the .htaccess file back, but deleted all the rules first, believing that all the rules were the problem, instead of just the last one. So I was able to get into my site up but none of the permalinks worked.

So I asked him if he had a backup, which he did. He promptly renamed it htaccess.backup and put it in my root directly, suggesting that in the future I acccess the .htaccess file and edit it myself.

Only problem is I couldn’t see any hidden files on the server.

After going back and forth with a few e-mails, he suggested that I download CuteFTP, an ftp client that he said had much better hidden file support than IE. I downloaded and installed the program and even after reading all their documentation about how to view hidden files and choosing the settings they suggested, I still could not see any hidden files.

I related my frustrations to Richard and asked him what ftp client he used. He suggested FileZilla, a free, open-source program.

So I download the program. The download was fast and the install a breeze. The interface is so intuitive and easy to understand I had it connected to my ftp site very quickly. I set it to view hidden files and it couldn’t see any hidden files either.

DreamHost tech support just kept suggesting that I must be doing something wrong because they could see the hidden files from their end. After several hours of this, it was late an I just sent them an e-mail asking them to restore the old .htaccess file for me, since they could see the files. That would make the permalinks work again and I could deal with the hidden files problem later.

I also suggested that since three ftp programs could not see any hidden files on the those, the problem was at their end, not mine.

I watched the DVD of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest“.

By the time the movie finished they still hadn’t restored the old .htaccess file. I was late so I went to bed hoping that by morning they would have gotten around to it.

But Noooooooooooooooooooo. When I got up, the permlinks still didn’t work. By this time I’m thinking DreamHost is a nightmare.

I logged into my ftp site using all three programs again. I did not change any of the settings from the night before. The results were very interesting.

Friday night:
MSIE could only see regular files, no hidden files.
CuteFTP: could only see regular files, no hidden files.
FileZilla: could only see regular files, no hidden files.

Saturday AM:
MSIE could only see regular files, no hidden files.
CuteFTP could see local files only, no host files at all (hidden or otherwise)
FileZilla: could see regular and hidden files on BOTH my local drive and the DreamHost server.

Hmmmm….

Since DreamHost tech support still had not replaced the .htaccess file with the backup that had the rules in it, I quickly took the opportunity to restore the backup and every thing started working fine on my site again.

I later deleted the connection in CuteFTP and after I set it up again, it could see hidden files on my local drive, but still no hidden files on the host.

Today, I’ve been very successful in writing some additional Rewrite Rules and have had no problems with the .htaccess file at all. Each rule that I’ve added has worked the first time.

I think the first time I added a rule it blew up either because I didn’t put the [L] flag at the end of the line or because I change a command early in the file that skipped to a particular rule. Maybe I skipped to the wrong one. At any rate, I would have though that .htaccess would have just ignored any rule it couldn’t make sense of rather than bringing my entire site down.

Now, categories in the old format will link directly to the right categories on my new site as will monthly indexes. Indivdual posts, unless they have a name that’s no more than 14 characters and with no underscore (a TypePad convention), will be thrown into the monthly archive for the post.

All traffic that is going to the old TypePad domain name http://www.thebinarycircumstance.com/(permalink) is currently being automatically rerouted to the home page of this site. I’m still trying to figure out if I can somehow parse the incoming HTTP_REFERER (sic) variable to at least direct some links into the correct month or category archive. I think there must be a way to do that.

TypePad truncated the names of posts at 15 characters, so there’s no way for me direct permalinks longer than 14 characters to individual posts because WordPress uses the whole post name in their permalinks. Most names are much longer than 14 characters and I have no way of knowing what characters to add without doing it manually for each post.

I’ll pass.

So progress has been made and I owe Richard a lot of credit for helping me get through this.

In addition, FileZilla looks like a great progam. I like it’s ease of installation and use. It’s very easy to drag and drop files between my local drive and the host, hidden or not.

Another useful tool I found along this journey is this Apache mod_rewrite cheat sheet. You can print it out on one page and it’s a great quick reference guide.

Thanks to some help from the WordPress support bulletin board, I was able to fix that trackback problem.

This Black-Letterhead template is a little buggy for my tastes.

Also, when you click on the comment link, it will take you directly to the comments box, instead of the top of the page like it was doing before.

The reason I spent hours looking for the code yesterday was that the single.php file doesn’t show up on the template editor page for some reason. So I looked at the code in every other file, except the one I needed to change. If I hadn’t been advised to look at that file (I could only get to it through the general file edit page), I never would have found the problem.

Now if I could only figure out why that file name is not showing up where it’s supposed to.

So thanks, ansgman.

The Houston Chronicle [article from the NYT] has two articles about the death of Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit.

The integrated circuit that Kilby designed shortly after arriving at Texas Instruments in 1958 served as the basis for modern microelectronics, transforming a technology that permitted the simultaneous manufacturing of a mere handful of transistors into a chip industry that routinely places billions of Lilliputian switches in the area of a fingernail.

His achievement — the integration — yielded a thin chip of crystal connecting previously separate components such as transistors, resistors and capacitors within a single device. For that creation, commonly called the microchip, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000.

During his career at Texas Instruments, he claimed more than 60 patents and also was one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator and the thermal printer. But it was Kilby’s invention of the integrated circuit that most broadly shaped the electronic era.

“It’s hard to find a place where the integrated circuit doesn’t affect your life today,” Richard Templeton, Texas Instruments’ president and chief executive officer, said Tuesday. “That’s how broad its impact is.”

A related article by Loren Steffy tries to convince us that Kilby was great because he was “selfless.”

Kilby didn’t care about fame or money or status. Friends tell stories of tattered old cars and of large honorarium checks left uncashed in a desk drawer for years. What mattered to Kilby was the challenge of invention, the yen to solve a problem, the thirst to find a better, more efficient way of doing things.

That commitment to science made him a folk hero among engineers. At a company party before he left for Sweden, Kilby was mobbed by employees asking him to sign T-shirts or slices of silicon containing the descendants of his invention.

Kilby was inspiration far beyond his field. At a time when society chooses its heroes from those obsessed with celebrity and fortune, it’s worth remembering a time when heroism was about advancing human achievement, not pursuing personal gain.

The fact that he pursued what he loved most was a great example of what Ayn Rand called being selfish. When she speaks of pursuing one’s own “rational self-interest” she is talking about pursuing your own happiness while not depriving others of the their right to do the same.

There are plenty of people who do not pursue power, money, fame or fortune and they also make no contribution to their own happiness or to anyone else’s. They never invent anything or do anything to make life better for themselves or others.

The freedom of Kilby to use his genius in solving problems is what made him happy. It was the pursuit of his happiness, his love of science, that resulted in inventions that made life better for so many.

Had he been truly “selfless,” not having his own identity, rational values, or the desire to pursue them, the world would never have benefitted from the fruits of his genius.

We also benefitted from the fact that many people were so selfish that they acquired wealth and invested it in Texas Instruments in the hope of making more money. That investment enabled his genius to flourish.

SOLO (Sense of Life Objectivists) has a joke site.

And you thought Objectivists had no sense of humor.

Check out The Real Meaning of Common Words.

A few examples:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

There’s more…