the online home for mitch pirtle
I’ve avoided sodas for years now, mainly because I think they taste too sweet – and then as I learned more about high fructose corn syrup and artificial ingredients, I was happy I came to that conclusion in the first place.
Watched Food Inc. last weekend with the wife, and am pretty amazed at how soda is now cheaper than clean water. “Clean” is relative sure, but modern standards leave us with clean water costing way, way more than soda.
This was just asked on the NYPHP Joomla mailing list, so I thought I’d add it here for folks as a quick cheatsheet. Basically the problem is when you find yourself with a Joomla site and have no idea what the logins are. You need to find the admin user (or whatever the admin user’s username is) and reset the password to something you know, so you can login and start taking control of the site. This is how it can be done.
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This site has been up in the current incarnation – that would be Wordpress – for several months now. That means time to tear it up and do something different.
Since I’ve been bemoaning the sorry state of Joomla as a blogging platform, I’ve been politely told that I can in fact use Joomla as a blogging platform, and it’ll actually work like, you know, a blog. Read More >>
Wow, reading up on the arguments between the pro-vaccination folks and the anti-vaccination folks, interspersed with the folks that just want to bring some common sense into the matter, has become a time consuming task. Here’s a great article titled “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us” at Wired.com that actually is a pretty weak article; but provides a great source of information (and some amazingly incoherent rants) in the comments. I completely disagree with the article and think it looks like a pretty naive puff-piece for pro-vaccine folks (FUD), but what do I know?
Pretty good reading, if you are into the topic of vaccination.
My favorite comment is this one (Posted by: LizP | 10/23/09 | 10:59 am), which pretty much sums up my opinion on the matter:
Ignorance abounds…There is NO way to know from whence your illness arises – people are contageous LONG before they exhibit symptoms of disease! People all around you, who appear entirely healthy (including individuals who have been fully vaccinated), are shedding bacteria and virus’ with every cough, sneeze, and spittle-drenched “p.” WAKE UP! There are not enough vaccines in the world to prevent you from getting sick. What prevents you from getting sick from your exposure to all of the “bugs” is your intact immune system, good health derived from unpolluted whole foods, pure water, ample rest, and regular exercise, practicing hand-washing excellence, avoiding close contact with obviously ill people, and keeping your hands off of your face and out of your ears! Just because you choose to down Big Gulps full of corn syrup, devour food-like processed and “enriched” products, and couch-camp, rather than avail yourself of good health practices, don’t expect me pollute my body to possibly lessen YOUR risk; your lousy health outcomes, regarding virus’ and bacteria will be a direct result of your own conscious decisions. Further, for those of you who feel opting-out of some or all vaccines should disqualify families from receiving medical care and health insurance — think very carefully, it is our healthy families, paying into the insurance pool and NOT USING regular medical care, who are carrying the burden of your pharmaceutical lifestyle on our backs. Without us, the risk-pool is far deeper and your costs will sky-rocket! If we were not paying outrageous premiums, for insurance which we don’t use, we would have plenty of cash to pay out-of-pocket for emergency care, in the event of an accident.
Note to site owner: Please turn on some sort of formatting capabilities in your comments – these huge jumbles of copy are tough to read and make all the responses look a bit hastily written.
So what’s your take? Is there a logical, reasoned angle that everyone will hopefully find, one way or the other? Or are there too many competing interests that don’t have our well-being as their top priority to allow that to happen?
This is the stock slideshare widget that they provide, which pulls my presentations and presents a sort of playlist where you can select which of my decks you want to view.
Nice idea, going to plop it here just for giggles.
In an earlier conversation today, a friend and confidant said (somewhat in exasperation), “You are too smart to really be this naive. You’re deliberately being naive, aren’t you?” At the time I presumed it was a sort of chiding, backhanded compliment. After some thought, I’d like to challenge everyone else to give it a try. Go ahead. Be a total homer. Read More >>
So there’s all this hubbub about PHP frameworks, and heated debate over which one is the one true framework to rule them all. And you wondered, “So what is all the fuss about, is there really one framework that solves all of my problems?” I’m not an author of any particular framework, nor do I portray one on television. Let me take an unbiased swing at what I see as the lay of the land regarding frameworks and our favorite little programming language, PHP.
Really just testing the iPhone app for wordpress. Can I add a picture? Let’s find out:
You are going to see a lot more writing about non-relational databases from me in the near future, and I thought I’d start making the transition with a little ditty about auto increment columns in MySQL.
In short, they are bad. Not bad like mixing parachute pants with knitted sweaters, but bad like trying to eat a Volvo because you are hungry.
Auto increment, how much do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:
Put more bluntly, right now the only databases that use auto increment are MySQL and Microsoft Access. Yes, there is a reason, and it ain’t a good one. Read More >>
Been working like a maniac recently integrating a Joomla 1.5 powered website with a remote user source via RESTful interface. REST is a great thing, and makes it dead simple to scale and shard your applications at the network level. However Joomla has an attitude about primary keys, or more specifically JTable. So when it came time for me to stuff user ids from this remote REST source, JTable said “no way, amigo.”
JTable, in this specific instance, won’t let you change the values in the jos_users.id column. Unfortunately that was exactly what I needed to do. In the end, I had to hotrod my authentication plugin to check to see if the jos_users.id was the same as the id coming over from the REST calls – and if not, manually update jos_users and jos_acl_aro_map. Read More >>
I'm Mitch, and this is my blog. I tend to blow the whole thing up and relaunch using a completely different platform every 90 days or so. You can learn more about me on my social site stuff (see links below) and by reading about me on this here site.
