Blog

  • Lo! ’tis a gala night….

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    …Within the lonesome latter years!
    An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
    In veils, and drowned in tears,
    Sit in a theatre, to see
    A play of hopes and fears,
    While the orchestra breathes fitfully
    The music of the spheres.

    This is the first stanza of the expectedly macabre, somewhat depressing, but beautifully crafted poem The Conquerer Worm by the great Edgar Allan Poe. The poem describes the inevitability of death, but on this dreary Halloween, revelers will pour onto the streets and into the bars and parties of their respective towns and celebrate–life, silly costumes, ghosts,  ghouls, probably more than a few occupy wall street protesters and Jersey Shore cast members, and of course, spirits. Spirits, that is, of a character most transformative to one’s disposition…

    If you can’t make it to the masquerades, then do yourself a favor and don’t let the mood of the evening pass you by. Pour yourself a glass of Amontillado,  and curl up by a fire with your e-reader and look through Project Gutenberg’s collection from the likes of Poe, Hawthorne, Shelly and Stoker [Linked content no longer available].

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  • WordPress Multisite (using subdomains) + Shibboleth authentication

    The WordPress Shibboleth plugin advertises WPMU support but does not seem to work with a WP 3.x Multisite/Network installation. Below is a patch to version 1.4 of the Shibboleth plugin and basic setup details needed to support sitewide Shibboleth authentication.

    Before we begin, I assume you’re already familiar with installing and configuring Shibboleth, WordPress, and the WordPress Shibboleth plugin. If you haven’t already set up WordPress or a Shibboleth SP, either bribe someone who has or find a carafe of coffee and come back in a day or two.

    Download the patch (wp-shibboleth-1.4-multisite.patch.zip)

    What’s in the patch?

    • Support for WP Multisite/Network with subdomains. I didn’t try this with a subdirectory implementation and don’t expect it to work.
    • A setting to specify the common email domain for users’ email addresses as a combination of their shibboleth username + “@” + the common email domain
    • Fixes for localization/gettext support.
    • HTML markup fixes on the admin control panel page

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  • “Where in the world are you…. exactly?”

    If you’re talking to a member of the degree confluence project, they really mean exactly.

    When you were young, did you ever look at those lines on the globe and wonder what it was like where two of those lines met? Well Alex Jerrett and Peter Cline did too, and they decided to find out.

    They did not find two lines drawn into  the earth (as a certain 5-year-old once imagined), but rather, this oddly-shaped tree in New Hampshire:

    43 degrees north, 72 degrees west

    Thus began the “Degree Confluence Project,” proudly hosted by ibiblio.

    In their own words:

    “The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, and stories about the visits, will then be posted here.”
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