Monthly Archive for May, 2007Page 2 of 12

Up/Down Server Maintenance Page

Published
by
michael lee
on 29 May 2007
in geek and technology
. 3 Comments

This last week was a nightmare ye olde’ Addison Road server. Hardware failures, network problems, torn ligaments, data loss. Several times this week, I found myself having to shut the site down and put up a maintenance holding page.

I’m a lazy person. If I find myself doing something more than once, I’ll spend 5 or 6 hours finding a way to automate it, so that I never have to do it by hand ever again. Maybe not a good use of time, but certainly a good use of … I dunno, beer? Anyway. This is for the hobby geekers and tweakers out there, who run their own sites on servers that allow them SSH access. Suppose your site gets really slow, and you want to keep users off while you tweak. Or, maybe you’re upgrading your wordpress install, changing themes, whatever, and you don’t want your undies exposed while you do it.

Here’s how I do it.

I keep two files in the root folder of my site, index.php (it’s a wordpress site, built with php, so that’s the extension, not html), which is my normal, everyday functioning index page. The second page is named index.down.php, and it contains a simple error message to let people know that I know that the site is all hinky. In fact, you can check it out if you go there now. When my site is down for maintenance, I want to rename that page index.php, so that it shows up instead of my normal index page. I also want to rename my normal index page to index.bak.php, so that I don’t lose it. I want it all to happen with no downtime.

Pop open the .bash_profile file located in the home directory of my server. I’ve added the following two lines (ignore all of the line breaks here - enter everything on one line, anywhere in the file).

First line:
alias ard.down="mv ~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.php
~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.bak.php;
mv ~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.down.php
~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.php"

Here’s the second line:
alias ard.up="mv ~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.php
~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.down.php;
mv ~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.bak.php
~/addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.php"

So what are you commanding the automagic computer machine to do? ‘Alias’ means that you only have to type the short word, and the shell will execute the long command. There’s really only one command here - mv means move, but since locations are names, it also works to rename your files. The secret sauce is the semi-colon. It tells the computrix to execute the first command, then immediately execute the second command. Since this happens almost simultaneously, that makes it pretty much an instant name swap.

You’ll have to exit out, then log back in before the aliases in your .bash_profile file will work.

Once these two commands are in place, putting up a maintenance page is a simple as logging into your server via SSH, and typing ‘ard.down’. It renames the files, in an order that won’t overwrite either one, and with no downtime at all.

The advantage of this while I’m tweaking on my site is that I can still see the site, just by entering the direct URL to ‘addisonrd.com/WordPress/index.bak.php’.

Once I’ve finished whatever I’m working on, I enter ‘ard.up’, and the files are flipped back to their original names, just like that.

Candy, baby. Nothing but pie.

bbq pics

Published
by
michael lee
on 29 May 2007
in asides
. 5 Comments

pics from memorial day BBQ: click here.

Fightin’ Fundies, Part 3: The Creation Museum

Published
by
Paul
on 28 May 2007
in art and culture, church, current events, faith and theology and politics
. 20 Comments

Fightin’ Fundies, Part 3: The Creation Museum

Sorry, I know this post arrived late in the day, but it’s still May 28…

Our last action-packed episode ended with mention of a major event today (May 28, 2007) that, in my humble opinion, will not help promote nuanced discourse about the origins of life. That event would be the grand opening of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Sporting a $27 million budget, this multi-media walk-through extravaganza, designed by a former exhibit director at Universal Studies Florida (as in “King Kong” and “Jurassic Park” rides), will function as a showcase (I use the word advisedly) for the organization Answers in Genesis and will also serve as the group’s administrative and ministry headquarters. Both Answers in Genesis and The Creation Museum are dedicated to advancing an unapologetic and uncompromising “young earth” interpretation of the contents of the Bible overall and Genesis in particular. Specifically, they insist that the earth and apparently the entire universe were created about 6,000 years ago, over the course of six literal 24-hour days – and much more.

The Creation Museum website speaks for itself, but I would direct your attention to a couple of representative entries. A description for the Bible Authority Room on the virtual walk-through tour announces, “The Bible is true. No doubt about it! Paul explains God’s authoritative Word, and everyone who rejects His history — including six-day creation and Noah’s Flood — is ‘willfully’ ignorant.” The descriptive text for the Creation area declares, “…the Bible’s clear—heaven and earth in six 24-hour days, earth before sun, birds before lizards. Adam and apes share the same birthday. The first man walked with dinosaurs and named them all! God’s Word is true, or evolution is true. No millions of years. There’s no room for compromise.”

Now I have no doubt as to the sincerity and commitment of those involved in this project, but I still cannot rejoice in the debut of this particular enterprise. For one thing, it would appear to be one of the biggest, most irresistible targets for media ridicule of Christians in many months. Watch for unflattering attention on SNL or MAD TV or the Daily Show, for starters. (I’m surprised no one picked it up for Phreaky Friday this week, but I suspect the 3-day weekend was a distraction.) No doubt the staff of Answers in Genesis is prepared for this, and will probably consider comedic persecution to be part of the cost of taking their particular stand.

But more bothersome is the fact that those who won’t give an inch in their opposition to the idea that life might have a designer will have another glorious opportunity to lump everyone who questions naturalistic evolution into the six-day, young earth camp. This of course is not at all the case, but it’s certainly a convenient rhetorical device, somewhat like tarring all followers of Islam as terrorists or pro-lifers as clinic bombers. For example, a May 24 LA Times editorial dealing with the Creation Museum (mischievously titled “Yabba-Dabba Science”), notes with some alarm that “…three of the Republican candidates for president do not believe in evolution. Three men seeking to lead the last superpower on Earth reject the scientific consensus on cosmology, thermonuclear dynamics, geology and biology, believing instead that Bamm-Bamm and Dino played together.” In fact, the question “Do you believe in evolution?” was asked of John McCain at the 10-candidate Republican debate on May 3. He said, “Yes” and then a moment later noted that he “sees the hand of God” in a sunset or at the Grand Canyon. The moderator then asked for a show of hands of anyone on the platform who doesn’t believe in evolution. Three hands went up, prompting considerable ridicule in the press during the ensuing weeks. I don’t know if the three dissenting candidates are young-earth Creationists or people who (like me) are comfortable with a 4.5 billion year old earth and a 15 billion year old universe, but question the “we are the product of random, meaningless biochemical reactions” party line. There’s a big difference, but I doubt that we’ll hear much about it in the media.

I have one other concern about the thinking represented in the Creation Museum, and, believe it or not, it is actually well-stated in the aforementioned LA Times piece.

Religion and science can coexist. That the Earth is billions of years old is a fact. How the universe came into being and whether it operates by design are matters of faith. The problem is that people who deny science in one realm are unlikely to embrace it in another. Those who cannot accept that climate change may have caused the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago probably don’t put much stock in the fact that today it poses grave peril to the Earth as we know it.

Okay, the last sentence is a little stretchy, but the point is worth pondering. In my own field I have repeatedly seen a disturbing tendency among some evangelicals to distrust scientific inquiry, and in particular to blow off a well-established body of knowledge about how the human body works in order to embrace eccentric or even bizarre therapies. I suppose I could be accused of doing the same with respect to evolutionary biology, but I see a major difference between understanding how cells work (and, for example, that they’re not influenced by “invisible energies” supposedly manipulated by someone waving their hands over the body) and claiming to understand how all of these intricate mechanisms assembled themselves randomly out of primordial soup.

I have to confess that I haven’t probed in depth to see how people who believe the planet must be 6,000 years old explain all of the evidence that suggests otherwise, but in this regard I find them in a similar position as the evolutionary fundamentalists, with a hard-core bottom line and a lot of ‘splainin’ to do about information that doesn’t readily conform to their doctrine. Put another way, I’m equally impatient with Christians who insist that a six 24-hour-day creation is the only way to understand Genesis 1 and with evolutionists who insist that they know that life has no designer.

To both I would say, “Really??…”

basic vocab

Published
by
michael lee
on 28 May 2007
in asides
. 1 Comment

Yikes! I thought I had finally gotten my vocabulary up to a High School level, but according to the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary, I’m a complete moron. 100 words every high school graduate should know.

Fightin’ Fundies, Part 2: Evolutionary Fundamentalists

Published
by
Paul
on 27 May 2007
in church, faith and theology, philosophy and politics
. 13 Comments

Posts in the Fightin' Fundies series

  1. Fightin’ Fundies, Part 1: Narrow My God to Thee
  2. Fightin’ Fundies, Part 2: Evolutionary Fundamentalists

At the conclusion of our last exciting episode, I noted that not all fundamentalism relates to deities and the dogmas surrounding them, and that I wanted to propose for membership in the Fightin’ Fundie Club a vocal group (not the Four Seasons) that claims no religious affiliation whatsoever. My nominees are (drum roll) the implacable proponents of naturalistic evolution, true believers in the fullest sense of the word. I’m not going to offer a systematic footnoted literature review here, but rather a personal meditation on the way the (non)discussion of the origin of life has been playing out recently in the mainstream media.

By way of introduction: I am a family physician focused on the daily care of people with various health issues and not an bioscience academician, but as such I have some degree of understanding of animal (though far less of plant) biology. I would submit that even the most casual study of any type of biological system – animal, plant, microbe – at any level – macro, micro, biochemical – and from any angle – structural, functional, dissected or integrated – reveals a level of complexity that is, in a word, staggering. Pick a topic – how the eye works, how blood clots, how nutrients are absorbed, how glucose enters cells, how white cells destroy microbial invaders, how viruses hijack cell nuclei to replicate themselves, how sound is converted into electrical impulses, how nerves communicate with each other, how cells divide – whatever the subject, study it in any detail: if you don’t experience awe and wonder, administer a good enema and try again. And we’re not even addressing the intricate play of astronomy, geophysics and climate that are finely tuned to allow these events to proceed.

Call me naive, but it has repeatedly struck me that the most intuitive and rational response to this information is that it seems incredibly unlikely that these systems would assemble themselves at random, no matter how much time one might give them to do so. If you make the random-assembly-over-billions-of-years assumption, there’s a whole lot of faith involved in the process, and a lot of ‘splainin’ to do in order to address how so many features of the above-noted complexity came to be. In recent years books such as Darwin’s Black Box have raised some reasonable questions about what the naturalistic evolutionists (NEs) are willing to accept on faith as they move from point A to point ZZZ despite the gaping uncertainties in between – a process that we used to call “hand waving” in math class.

Instead of responding reasonably and thoughtfully to these questions, however, I continue to hear (in the general public media, anyway) the NEs planting their flags and defending their position with startling, numbing ferocity, including routine rants about separation of church and state, political innuendo of all sorts and lots of ad hominem attacks (i.e., characterizing people who question the NE position are all Bible-wielding, IQ-impaired sub-hominids who want to take over the government and stamp out free speech). More than once in the past few weeks I have heard, with a clear rhetorical snort, references to the fact that X number of Republican presidential nominees don’t believe the naturalistic evolution gospel, as if that meant they also believe in Santa Claus and child sacrifice.

Yet what continues to leak through all of the rhetorical smoke, in my humble opinion, is that NE remains a philosophical assumption, a bottom line that was made the starting point and now has become iron-clad dogma, with no questions to be entertained, not even for a second. If the Scopes trial were held today, it would be the NEs who would be singing “Gimme that old time religion” and prosecuting the science teacher who had the temerity to ask students to think critically about NE’s assumptions. In other words, they’re acting like good old-fashioned Fightin’ Fundies.

Over the past decade some of the more nuanced and thoughtful questioning of NE has come from what is called the “Intelligent Design” camp, including authors such as Michael Behe (author of the above noted Darwin’s Black Box) and William Dembski. NE zealots routinely vilify these guys, and have seemed bent on avoiding at all cost an intelligent public dialogue about intelligent design. When I read op-ed pieces on this subject in the LA Times or even commentaries in medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, I repeatedly sense the following subtext:

Naturalistic evolutionist (NE): Life assembled itself over billions of years from primordial elements.

Inquirer (I): How do you know?

NE: It just did!!

I: But how do you explai—

NE: DON’T INJECT YOUR RELIGIOUS DOGMA INTO A SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION!

I: But I was just wondering—

NE: “Religious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of ‘intelligent design,’ by elbowing its way into the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long.” [Robert Lee Hotz, “Laws of Nature,” LA Times Book Review, July 30, 2006.]

I: But could we just talk a little about the idea of “irreducible complexity”—

NE: Shut up! This has all been settled! Go back to your pews!

Okay, I’m exaggerating a little, but see if you don’t notice a little of this venom in the op-ed pages of the Times and other media outlets in the coming weeks. There will be, I’m sorry to report, a spectacular opportunity for NE pundits to vent their spleens – beginning tomorrow (May 28).

And what will be the occasion that will cause a major setback for intelligent conversation about the origin of life? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exciting installment!

Previous in series: Fightin’ Fundies, Part 1: Narrow My God to Thee