arotau

I’ve been planning to do some software updates to my web server for a while. Over the last couple of days I’ve been slowly doing bits and pieces - slowly because I had an operation for carpal tunnel syndrome and can’t use both hands. So far I’ve done the following:

• Upgraded Wordpress to the latest version - fairly simple process.
• Automated backups of the site and databases.
• Added Xcache to my PHP installation, which Ubuntu makes a very simple process.
• Installed Awstats - again very simple under Ubuntu.
• Added Google analytics, just to try for a while, using the Google Analyticator WP plugin.
• Added the Google XML sitemap generator WP plugin - Google doesn’t seem to have picked this up yet.
• Switched my web server from Apache to Cherokee. Cherokee is designed to be small and fast, and as I’ve been having some memory usage issues on the server I decided to give it a try. It’s a bit of a pain to get working with Wordpress, but I eventually figured out the correct redirection rules and got it up and running. Pages are now being served much faster, and memory usage on the machine is significantly lower.
• Added the TanTan Flickr plugin for Wordpress, which seems to be better maintained than Falbum (which I was using previously).

Years ago I worked for Ross Ihaka at on the R project, a free software statistics environment that has become pretty popular (if you visit the website you can see my name in the contributors list - though my contributions were not exactly central to the project!). R has now featured in a New York Times article entitled R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts. There are some great quotes:

“R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.”

It’s nice to see a great piece of free software recognised like this, and kind of cool for me to have something I worked on getting that kind of publicity. I’ve asked someone in NY to send me a copy of the print edition from that day, so hopefully I’ll have a memento to keep.

If you use Windows Media Center Edition (not a situation I hope will continue as I want to switch away from Windows back to Linux on my media centre computer), have a look at MCE Tunes. It synchronises your iTunes library with MCE, insulating you from MCE’s annoying inability to read tags in from iTunes ripped music. Unfortunately it still can’t provide a better navigation structure for MCE, which means that once you’ve chosen a genre you can’t browse by artist - you just get a list of all the albums in that genre.

I’ve been working on a web site for the last couple of weeks for a book that will shortly be published by IVP called Pierced for our transgressions. One of the authors is a friend of mine called Andrew Sach, and it’s on the subject of penal substitution.

I dug up my ancient Toshiba Portege 3480CT laptop, and installed Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 on it by connecting the hard to my desktop PC (as the laptop doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive). Then I found that the wireless card I had, a Cisco Aironet 350, doesn’t support WPA. After trying and failing to get a Belkin card to work at all, I tried the Linksys WPC54GS-UK. With some help from the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki, which I’ve summarised in a new wiki page, the card works perfectly and I now have web access all around the house instead of having to go and sit in the study.