I am in the middle of preparing to launch a site on my company's hosting platform. This site in particular consumes a service, provided by a server running on NodeJS. We typically secure dev sites behind some basic authentication by the web server, which is mainly done to prevent dev sites from being indexed by search crawlers. So to get past this basic authentication, I set the dev URL to follow the username:password@domain convention. I have not used this often, only for simple cases over the years.

Pictured above: I bought this children's book about planets for my son in the book store bargain bin. The page about the earth, is pictured as a mirrored image. An obvious mistake from the book's publisher.

Discussing complex scientific concepts in a medium limited to 240 character messages is probably the worst idea anyone has come up with. Yet here I am, allowing myself to get dragged into drawn out discussions with armchair “skeptics” who don’t really deserve that label. A few weeks ago, Scott Adams, famous as being the creator of the Dilbert comic strip (to his credit, I love these comics), issued a “Climate Challenge” on twitter. Here is his tweet:

I just had to make a post about this strange issue. A client sent me a database for a Drupal 7 site so I could resolve an issue for them. I clone the site, set up a virtual machine, import the DB. But trying to interact with the site resolved in some unusual errors:

After attempting any drush command:

Apache Nutch is an open source, highly extensible web crawler I sometimes use for various purposes. These include:

Since the presidential election in November 2016, the state of Wisconsin has de-registered over 482,000 voters from its rolls. This is according to the numbers that The Wisconsin Elections Commission post to their website. Looking at the history of voter registration levels in that state, there was an unprecedented rate of voter purging starting in August 2017, that continued through the beginning of 2018.

I was recently inspired by Jeff Geerling's blog post on the subject of taking a Drupal 8 project, not using composer to managed dependencies, and moving it to doing so. His blog post is a good read.

This post originally appeared on forumone.com

An occassionaly pastime of mine is to put together timelines using the timeline.js framework. This is what I used to build a timeline based on the events of the Star Trek universe. In the past few monts, I had been working on a timeline that depicts real human efforts to explore space. So here is my Timeline of Space Exploration (Can you tell I like space?). Of course it's a work in progress.