I've finally joined the 21st century, and gone to serving the site on https. On NearlyFreeSpeech, it should be easy: just run tls-setup.sh from an SSH terminal. That sets everything up to use Let's Encrypt, but that was failing because I use the Apache httpd RewriteEngine to host kavanot.name, with that domain redirecting to a […]
Nearlyfreespeech.net has been great, but their security settings make it hard to update WordPress automatically. I just discovered that WP now has a command line interface that works fine over SSH. wp core update wp core update-dp And done!. You can do wp db export to back up the database first. And updating plugins (for […]
The way browser history is implemented, with the History interface, is useful for other things than site navigation. The same idea, basically an extended stack that allows going back and forward, is the same algorithm used for undo/redo, and command line history. It would be nice to be able to do const h = new […]
(It's been almost a year since I've posted. My intellectual life is busy with other things) I use H&R Block software to prepare my taxes and have been generally very happy, but this year it would not update the program after January 1. Using the automatic update downloaded the updater but it silently failed. Manually […]
I figured out how to get all the pages from screen-scraping the Amazon wish list. Basically, look for the "Next" button (it's in a <li class=a-last> element). If that element is present, look for the next page. function getwishlistitems ($listID, $page=1){ // ignore parsing warnings $wishlistdom = new DOMDocument(); @$wishlistdom->loadHTMLFile("http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/$listID?disableNav=1&page=$page"); $wishlistxpath = new DOMXPath ($wishlistdom); […]
It's been almost a year since I last posted. I'm still programming, but it's mostly visible on github, especially my trying to help with jquery/globalize by implementing nongregorian calendars. I finally solved a bug that was, um, bugging me. In order to test my Julian Day routines, I needed to create a javascript Date at […]
I'm sure there must be an easier way to run a program from PowerShell, but I haven't found anything simpler than & "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe" with the ampersand and the full path. I could add "C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++" to $env:PATH, but I'd still have to type notepad++.exe file. I wanted some way to make a […]
We love playing Scribblish. It's like the old Telephone game but with pictures, with players alternating writing captions for pictures and drawing pictures for the captions. It's most fun as a non-competitive party game, just reading the cartoons at the end of each round. It's useful as well: we taught it to my daughter's then-boyfriend […]
I wanted to run some of my old games (notably Riven) on my shiny new Windows 8.1 machine, but it wouldn't even try to install on a 64-bit operating system. Luckily, Oracle offers VirtualBox to run virtual machines, and Microsoft offers a Windows XP virtual hard drive (.vhd file) through its Windows XP mode for […]
gitNow that I have my computer working, I want to get back at my github repositories. I could type my password with every push, but it's easier to use SSH with a key pair. Since I'm using Putty for shell access, I use Puttygen that comes with it. The problem is that Puttygen's format is […]
