Hacker News Reader

adoyleon Why WordPress Should Not Have Won the Open Source CMS Award

Another area WordPress wins is in upgrades. A few years ago I was burned by a Plone upgrade that failed. That made me stop upgrading the site because I couldn't figure out how to move forward. I finally pulled the plug on the site. I have a bunch of WP sites and upgrading may be a pain because of having to disable the plugins, it's always worked (knock on wood!).

WordPress also has an understandable database structure (it may make any serious DBMS person gag, but it's simple and malleable) and there's enough info out there that you can learn how to do just about anything if you look hard enough.

Unfortunately, I'm about to need something more CMS-like than WP for some upcoming sites, so I have to figure out what to do.

adoyleon Harold "Doc" Edgerton

From the home page of the site: The Edgerton Digital Collections project celebrates the spirit of a great pioneer, Harold "Doc" Edgerton, inventor, entrepreneur, explorer and beloved MIT professor. This site is for all who share Doc Edgerton's philosophy of "Work hard. Tell everyone everything you know. Close a deal with a handshake. Have fun!"

The site includes access to all of Doc Edgerton's notebooks, scanned in as PDF's.

adoyleon Claude Shannon

There's currently an exhibit on Shannon at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn Germany: http://en.hnf.de/Special_exhibitions/Shannon/Shannon.asp

He built some very cool toys for his kids, some of which are on display there. Here's a video of him with some of his juggling machines http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBHGzRxfeJY

adoyleon Review HN: 1clickwebpage - the easiest way to build a webpage

I created a page but it seems to be tagged at the bottom as "Copyright © Groupped 2009". A bit of a disincentive to put real content in. It would also be nice to have a "delete" button. I'd free up my page again.

adoyleon Richard Stallman nominated to be in MIT 150 exhibition

I actually had a hard time deciding whether to nominate Stallman or nominate the GPL. Then I realized that the MIT License could also deserve a nomination. But when push comes to shove, if you figure only one representative icon of FOSS might be included in the actual MIT150 exhibition, it seems like it should be Stallman.

adoyleon Happy 15th Birthday to Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

Tcl gave me my first taste of scripting, but even more of a revelation was that I could bury a Tcl interpreter in a C program and use Tcl to control all the C modules. It made it really easy to dynamically change the behavior of a running server. Of course security was a bit of an issue, but in 1992 the net was still relatively calm.

adoyleon Where Did All the Documentation Go?

Maybe a little OT: there was a time when you would get complete schematics for hardware you bought. I remember getting reams of circuit diagrams for DEC computers and peripherals. DEC also had great little handbooks with info on how each I/O register in the interface cards worked. Of course, those were also the days when their field service engineers would show up with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron to fix your computer.

adoyleon Stop pouring hot water down the drain

Unless you're refrigerating your water, the water going down the drain will always be warmer or at the same temperature as the incoming supply. Since these things don't hold water, they exchange the heat as the incoming and outgoing streams move past each other, thus the effect is essentially null when you're using cold water (brushing teeth) and positive when you're using hot water (shower). When you're using water "asynchronously" (bath, toilet), there's no effect since the incoming and outgoing water move at different times.

adoyleon The Ecodrain: How a simple, non-moving part can reduce hot water consumption by 40%

Wastewater heat exchange is not a new concept. Here's a 1986 paper on it. http://www.gfxtechnology.com/Pravda.pdf

The GFX "falling-film counterflow" system is mounted vertically, in-line with the plumbing drain, and has a wide-bore drain pipe. It seems to me that this is inherently less prone to clogging than the horizontally mounted Ecodrain would be.

adoyleon Do Not Demo Naked

I was at an international technical meeting where someone was about to show a web site on a projection screen. The browser's autocomplete tried to fill in the names of what were very clearly NSFW sites he had been visiting during off hours. It's easy to forget how much info your browser knows about you.

adoyleon Ask HN: Help me make HN work well on the iPhone

Bigger upvote arrows. Everything else is largely ok as is. I don't recommend a wholesale style change. Tweak one thing at a time and see how it looks.

adoyleon Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what's your setup?

I run a vncserver (from MacPorts) on my MacBook. Then inside there I do all my coding with Emacs, generally two frames side-by side. I access it via Chicken of the VNC. I set up the same vncserver setup on all the machines I do work on, and can access each one from any other without losing context. I rarely find the need to cut/paste from the OS X desktop into/out of my vnc windows, but it can be done.

adoyleon Can Dropbox Be Trusted?

If dropbox were to offer encryption, it would not make things more secure since I'd have to hand them unencrypted bits.

If I were to store bits that need encryption on a service like this I would encrypt them before I hand them off.

adoyleon Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads

Oddly enough, I was reading my copy today and was thinking that I much prefer print ads to online ads. I actually enjoy bumping into things I would not normally see. My only gripe are the ads that try to disguise themselves as editorial material and have to have the word "Advertisement" on the top of the page. Online, I ignore ads and the ones I do notice are rarely interesting.

adoyleon 40K Ferrite core for sale (auction closed)

We've got a 64K-word TX-2 core memory on display at the MIT Museum. [update - here's a link http://tinyurl.com/5mve8b]

Back in 1975/6 I was using a DEC LSI-11 that had core memory. I forget how much but it was enough to run FORTRAN.

adoyleon Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on moon

http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/photos/moon_images.htm

Something tells me we're not going to see images of the MIP and the moon at the same time since the impact would likely wipe out the camera.

adoyleon Adobe CS4: Yet another lousy Adobe installer

Swell. I just got install media for 19 computers' worth. I'm not looking forward to helping people install these. :(

adoyleon Chandrayaan-I Impact Probe lands on moon

Here's an ISRO page with more details - http://www.isro.org/pressrelease/Nov14_2008.htm

adoyleon Pivotal Tracker: The iPod of project management software

It seems to have gone semi-closed source. Apparently http://www.projectpier.org/ is the open source fork/successor.

adoyleon Ask HN: What's your Twitter rank?

Remember the study where people gave away their passwords for a candy bar? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/20/password_surveys/

That would clearly not work with the HN community. Instead, we need a geeky screen with a disclaimer and the promise of learning how we rank compared to others.

What's next? gmailrank?

adoyleon GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

Basically that Google is aware they are using robots in conjunction with AdSense and despite the fact that Google understands this is an art project, Google has to defend its AdSense program as well as its advertisers from harm. Based on the material on the web site itself, Google believes the GWEI people give the impression that their project is violating the AdSense TOS. Google will unequivocally defend its rights and this generally includes shutting down the AdSense accounts of violators. Google also reserves the right to take additional action.

I.e. not quite a takedown letter. More like "we're watching carefully".

adoyleon Ask YC: What web hosting service do you use?

I used interland.com (bought out a while ago) and serverpronto.com, but now I use business grade Verizon FIOS in my basement with a Mac Mini on a 2 hour UPS. Uptime has been 100% over the last year (except for the reboots I did for software updates).

I used to run a lot of mailman lists and have discovered the hardest thing to do is to get a set of "clean" IP addresses. Serverpronto was tough, they were blocked a lot. Interland was ok. My Verizon address block (I get 5 static IPs) is not on any RBLs but they sit in the middle of what are generally dynamic IPs so some big sites (esa.int, notably) reject email from my system.

adoyleon Email Deliverability is crucial to achieve consumer Internet virality

Amen. Any company that doesn't understand this pretty much makes itself ineligible for "going viral".

adoyleon Mandelbrot set discovered in 13th century by Benedictine monk

"This was a labour of faith, and Udo was prepared to work for years. Some slowly-converging pixels must have taken weeks."

Actually, what he doesn't take into account is that in the early 1200's, Brother Elias of Cortona developed MapReduce, which allowed the calculations to be spread among the vast network of monasteries that existed in that time. Monks willingly took breaks from the painstaking work of illuminating manuscripts to each calculate a few pixels' worth of the solution.

adoyleon The Internet? Bah! - hilarious 1995 article by Clifford Stoll

The irony is that if he had been right, there would not be a bunch of people reading that article right now.