ImageMagick Trick
Are your images taking up too much space on your server? Don’t delete them, shrink them. Here’s a little ImageMagick trick that worked perfectly for me.
for img in `ls | grep -E IMG_[0-9]+{4}\.jpg` ; do convert $img -resize 50% $img ; done
Disclaimer: If this borks your data, well, you should have tested first. And kept a backup.
Django on Shared Hosting
The following is how I got Django installed and working from my home directory on a shared hosting account. Your mileage may vary, however, depending on how your hosting provider does things.
An LDS prospective on CA Prop 8
California Proposition 8 is old news. It was passed by 52% of voters in November of 2008 and it was upheld by the California Supreme Court. So why this post? I wanted to give my view on why I (and many Christians like me) support Prop 8.
MySQL cleanup
I like to use my web hosting to experiment. Every so often I have to clean up tables inserted into my database by whatever the web software de jour happens to be. What follows is how I do this. There are better and more interesting ways of doing what I do, but this works. Read the rest of this entry »
Remembering Birthdays
I’m not very good about remembering birthdays, and when I do remember them, I’m usually too lazy to actually do anything about it. Enter Google Calendar and a little python scripting.
I created a calendar I can put everyons birthday on, and wrote a script that runs once daily and emails everyone who has a birthday that day. Here is my script, in case you want to do something similar.
A little more reason, please
OK, so my last post was a little heated. A knee jerk of sorts. I still feel the way I do, but I realize now that I need to apply a little more reason to my beliefs. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll take my rights back now, please.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Keeping that in mind, go read this excellent article from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91486191
Are you as outraged as I am? If not, you should be. Read the rest of this entry »
family fixit
I wish to express my concern over the disintegration of the family in California. It is generally agreed that the best situation for any child to be raised in, is a situation where a mother and father are present in the home. In fact, a quick Google search of the term “fatherless families” uncovers these disturbing facts:
Read the rest of this entry »
Artificial Intelligence
I’ve been writing this post on the shuttle to and from work. It has been in the works too long now, so here it is, in complete, but at least started. Hopefully, I’ll address further key points in future posts.
Humans are infinitely smart because we are intelligent. We can apply what we know about the world around us to solve problems that we have not encountered. That is the key to our ability to adapt. That is why we are such a successful species.
Artificially Intelligent entities that are man made cannot solve problems outside of their problem domain, and even if a problem exists with in the problem domain, if the designer of the system did not anticipate for a particular edge case, then the entity will never be able to solve that given problem. In short, the entity isn’t intelligent at all, it is only smart with respect to it’s given domain, and even then, it is certainly less smart than the individual or team that designed it, as they could not possible anticipate for all possible scenarios in a given problem space. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello world!
So, I’m starting this blog. I’m not really sure what will become of it. I’m terribly inconsistent with journals and things, so this may be the only post this blog ever sees, the again, it may not.