
Reference
Legacy MySQL VMs
Installing old versions of MySQL is a giant pain. An AskUbuntu contributor gave a workable procedure. Need to run MySQL 5.5? Download this VM. Running MySQL 5.7 is easier. Install Ubuntu 18.04, then do sudo apt install mysql-server-5.7 .
WordPress multisite programming tricks
This pulls together some notes on handling plugin programming for WordPress multisite (network) installations. Basic information Lots of this information comes from the globally instantiated $wpdb object. Tables To get a list of WordPress tables you can use the wpdb::tables() method. Here’s a quick way to get a useful list of tables. This list include … Read more
From around the ‘toobz: articles marking the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s article
Milton Friedman wrote an article called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits” fifty years ago. It is here. Here are some articles marking that anniversary, for reference. Some of them challenge the status quo Friedman established back then. Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times Tom Poldre, B Lab UK Article about … Read more
Half a century of this is enough: Friedman’s piece saying business must be irresponsible
Fifty years ago come this Sunday, on September 13, 1970, Milton Friedman (a professor of economics at The University of Chicago) published a piece in the New York Times called “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” Invoking the socialist bogeyman, he argues that businesses should focus only on increasing their profits. … Read more
Bar codes (QR Codes) for web sites
I was really getting tired of the Wookiee look. So, I called the barber who usually takes care of that for me. She said they don’t allow walk-in customers because of the pandemic, and proceeded to read me a long URL over the phone to make an appointment. Generally I’m a geek and a Mr. … Read more
New Microsoft Edge rolls out to everybody this month
About time! the new Chromium-based Edge browser will show up on Windows 10 machines in this month’s update. For the cancelled Internet Explorer and Legacy Edge project people, I would have more sympathy if their work products hadn’t baffled software developers for a quarter-century. IE and old Edge were in the uncanny valley of compatibility. … Read more
Rig Windows 10 to make work easier
There are some quick and easy things you can do to make Windows 10 easier to use. X Window System display server Download and install the free and open-source vcsxrv package from SourceForge. Then, configure your ssh to forward X11 packets. Then, when you ssh to a Linux or FreeBSD box, you’ll be able to … Read more
Massachusetts town-by-town COVID-19 cases
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health started publishing, on April 14, 2020, epidemiological data for each of the Commonwealth’s 351 cities and towns. The results come out once a week each Wednesday. They publish them in .pdf and .docx format. And, they don’t keep previous weeks’ data on their web site. Here is a .csv … Read more
Web Service APIs in dotnet C# made easy with ApiController: Part 1
Setting up your web service Dotnet’s stuff for developing web applications includes an inheritable class called ApiController. This makes it easy to develop REST-style web services, either for standalone API servers or in the context of larger servers. To start using ApiController, however, requires navigating lots of Microsoft documentation; as of early 2020 that documentation … Read more