Michael Burns is Unemployable

Wolfram Alpha, despite its backlash in underwelmed reaction, is a great piece of technology. But it sure leaves a lot to be desired. For Business Finance class, I have to plug-and-chug a number of almost-identical equations, with only 1 or 2 variables changing each step. Being able to ad hoc define equations could eventually be automatically recognized.

One thing I wished W|A did better was handling equations with variables in them. Let me
define a variable and use it (more than once) in my equation! This could all be javascript, just to make seemless the interface. The above (and below) screenshot show the printout for the same algorithm, which uses the 0.09% “rate” value three times.

Something like Soulver.app, at the very least, would go a long way into minimizing user error and increase organization. Maybe it is time to write a GreaseMonkey script?

Finally got around to it. I tweaked the updated Drupal -> Wordpress sql script to migrate blog posts and pages over without having to delete existing posts in my Wordpress MU blog. And Success! My blog posts dating back from ‘07 and earlier are now nicely imported from my old Drupal 6 site and into Wordpress.

INSERT INTO mburns_drupal.wp_posts
(post_author,
post_date,
post_date_gmt,
post_content,
post_title,
post_excerpt,
post_name,
post_modified,
post_modified_gmt)
SELECT node.nid,
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.created),
node_revisions.body,
node.title,
node_revisions.teaser,
concat('node/', node.nid),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed),
FROM_UNIXTIME(node.changed)
FROM mburns_drupal.node, mburns_drupal.node_revisions WHERE node.nid = node_revisions.nid;

In conjunction with taking lessons with John Matylonek of Oregon Hang Gliding I’m working with him to administer his web servers. Mid-Valley Hosting is hosted in Philomath with Alyrica and is interested in working with Corvallis e-tailing businesses on website management and internet presence.

Lesson 2 complete. It kicked my butt, but I had a lot of fun.

Mirwin has used a number of hosting providers in the past (from Dreamhost and GoDaddy to GNi and Host Virtual). We are currently running with Host Virtual and looking to expand back into an PDX datacenter and possibly in Texas. The added redundancy is for Mirwin’s new service offering: Web and data hosting for our customers. Starting at $6/month, we provide full-service administration and redundant website hosting. Our web design team has produced enough sites that the need for a hosting plan grew out naturally. more…

This is my new site, unemployable.me! I’ve started this site just 2 weeks after Justin and I founded Mirwin Consulting LLC. My goal is to have this site be a workspace for all that fancy web design stuff I’m supposed to be making money doing.

Mirwin’s homepage ad, for me, are showing a test feature of Google’s AdSense ads: the ones that bloggers put on their site. At the top of the each ad are up/down arrows to scroll through a series of ads.

The context of this is a story for another time. In evaluating forum software packages, I had a need to import to Vanilla a phpBB2 database. There was a third-party script that was suppose to do it. After grabbing the source, walking through the logic, I found several simple bugs and places to improve it. So I did.

My improvedphpbb2 to Vanilla migrator script handles things like apostrophes in the names of forums and threads as well as actually working, which version 3 did not out of the box. To use this version, download it to a web directory, unpack it, edit the database authentication info in the mysqldetails.php file and visit the folder (”example.com/forum/migrator/”) in a browser. Click each link once from top to bottom. Clicking it more than that will be detrimentally start duplicating entries.

So what the heck is going on, anway? Well, Justin and I purchased a server in a great colocation facility down in the Bay Area. This is to give us a clean workspace to design, prototype and deploy web applications that we dream up. We have a nice, new multi-site setup with Drupal 5, which hosts the Mirwin,net site, along with Justin’s, Akey’s and my own professional site. Mirwin will be the hub of projects and information that it always has been. This is the first time we are professionally using the isfound.at (get it?) domain name. My site is hosted here, and we are about to launch a fun, free web redirect service. Imagine, “Your name”.isfound.at (eg. “Mburns Is Found At”). It is an great way to get use an easy-to-remember URL for your blog or web site. Next up is launching the work of Kevin on a collaborative bill-sharing site, perfect for college housing (frats, sororities, or like us: a group of friends in a house that always split bills in odd ways). All that to say, this box will play host to those and many more new projects of ours, so sit tight. Woo!

Fun news came to my iPhone’s Inbox today, the Schmap map guides of Boston have chosen a picture I took while on the Duck Tours to be included in their next guide. How exciting is that? So, go check out my picture for Schmaps and remember that I will never forget you when I am rich and famous. I promise.

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The new OLPC Community Forum is now up and running. This is a month-in-the-making process that combined the olpchelp.org and olpc.osuosl.org forums. With the new site, the OLPC Support Gang is able to better support the users with more modern forum software while maintaining a more secure website. In one move we have more than doubled in site the community supporting the XO users in North America and Canada. 800 users, 4000 comments and we’re just tipping the iceberg!

You may notice that the forum is really EN.forum.laptop.org, this is because it is for english speakers. Just like Wikipedia, the community forum hopes to have a wide selection of local forums in the native tongues of every deployed location the XO finds itself.

To get your feet wet, look at the current list of unanswered questions or check the other end of the spectrum with the most active discussions.

In under 3 weeks, we have built a community of 255 registered users with over 1,200 threads created. We have answered hundreds of questions and help a great many first time (non-registered) donors that have participated in G1G1

There just are not enough people pitching in.

-from OLPC Community Support Forum.

As may be expected, their are slight growing pains. The Support Forum is growing fast and we could really use interested forum members to “pay it forward” by helping answer questions from the 150,000+ new users of the XO laptop that are getting online for the first time with their new machine! Most questions are OLPC-specific (and we have great documentation), but a growing number are general linux questions with users discovering the Terminal activity and getting exposure to Bash for the first time. So, go register for an account help answer some questions and join this new, great community!

On Friday I head to New York City to begin an internship with Google.com. I will be working as a Linux Systems Administrator for three months. I will be trying to continue my volunteering for OLPC with the community support forum, and am looking to get other pet projects underway. Wish me luck, and let me know if you have a spare room available near a NYC subway stop!

Why doesn’t facebook run a (giant) forum? Network, regional and global forums on any range of topics… The scaling problems aren’t hard to solve. Spam is easy to punish and even easier to detect, making it a non-issue. It could be a great medium for conversation Even of some of it would be frat party-related drivel.

Why doesn’t facebook run an academic curriculum wiki? By encouraging its millions of high school and colllege student users to upload general class notes, proofs and terminology, it would build a broad body of knowledge. Structuring it into a comprehensive curriculum text. Google is doing it with their wikipedia-like Knol repository of factual knowledge. Facebook could enter the academic end of that market in a very big way.

I’ve been working with various OLPCers to build a support community around the users of the XO. There are some 50,000+ laptops being delivered to donors Canada and the US and they will have questions that need answering.

Our setup is hosted at no cost by the OSU Open Source Lab. We are using <a href="http://phpbb.comPHPBB, mxBB, mail2forum and pjirc. Our fourm (phpbb) is synced with various support, project and community mailing lists, linking our newest users with the existing development circles. Suggestions, volunteers, and contributions welcome. Cheers!

All languages are welcome, but it should be noted that there’s a
need for those languages used in the ‘green countries’, which
are: Amharic, Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Hausa, Hindi,
Igbo, Nepali, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda, Thai,
Urdu, & Yoruba.

-Xavier Alvarez
The people doing One Laptop Per Child need help translating their free software and content. They have made a webpage to help them streamline the process for contributors to translate phrases. So, have you ever wished you could contribute to an open source project but got to intimidated by the code? Well, now is your chance.

You can now use IMAP with gmail. Neat.

Most all geeks have seen the XKCD comic “Map of the Internet“. Last week, researchers released a comprehensive study of every reachable host on the Internet, using the same mapping technique from the earlier webcomic. The map technique puts all contiguous numbers into adjoining blobs, so companies and organizations are represented as a series of patches to a quilt. An interesting proof-of-concept would be a tile-based zooming map, that let you focus (and bring up more detail) about a given area of the map. Put it in a database and you could have rolling updates, too.

It looks like I will be trying to fill the shoes of LUG President after Alex Polvi graduated last year and Jirwin is going in other directions. I was (more or less) voted in on Tuesday at our weekly hacking social.

Our first event was the Beaver Community Fair. Fun times and a great way to start off the term. Girls just *love* inflatable penguins taped to the tops of remote control cars.

Would someone tell me how this (Winamp version 1) become this (Winamp version 5) without someone raising a hand and asking “WTF?” … This is a candidate for the Interface Hall of Shame.