A software tool created by the NSA to hack into Microsoft Windows systems has been turned into a ransomware worm that has infected and disabled hundreds of thousands of unpatched Windows’ systems. Read more at bbc.com if you’re interested.
Here’s a link to Jeff Bezos’ letter to Amazon shareholders, circa April, 2017. Possibly one of the most important phrases to me personally is his concept of, “Disagree and commit.”
I was surprised to find out yesterday that you can change your Amazon email address without having to verify the change from your old email account. You only have to verify the new email address. That seems like a flaw.
UPDATE: These days you should put your server configurations in files in the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled directory.
As a short note, if you need to configure Nginx to serve multiple static websites out of one nginx.conf file, I have been using this approach, and it seems to work well:
server {
server_name www.howisoldmybusiness.com;
rewrite ^(.*) http://howisoldmybusiness.com$1 permanent;
}
server {
server_name howisoldmybusiness.com;
listen 80;
location / {
root /var/www/howisoldmybusiness.com/html;
}
access_log /var/log/nginx/hismb_access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/hismb_error.log error;
}
The first server configuration says that I want all requests to www.howisoldmybusiness.com to go to howisoldmybusiness.com. I don’t see the need for the “www” part, so this is my way of forward all requests to howisoldmybusiness.com.
The second server configuration block does the real work. It tells Nginx to listen on Port 80 for requests to howisoldmybusiness.com, and when it gets a request it should look in the /var/www/howisoldmybusiness.com/html directory for the files it should server. It also states that all access requests should be logged to the file /var/log/nginx/hismb_access.log using the “main” format, and all errors should be logged to the file /var/log/nginx/hismb_error.log.
I think the main format came with the default Nginx configuration file. You should find it defined in the main http block like this:
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
If you have Nginx serving up multiple websites on the same server, all you have to do is copy that configuration for the other websites. For instance, I have a website named alaskasquirrel.com on the same server as the howisoldmybusiness.com website, and its configuration is almost identical:
server {
server_name www.alaskasquirrel.com;
rewrite ^(.*) http://alaskasquirrel.com$1 permanent;
}
server {
server_name alaskasquirrel.com;
listen 80;
location / {
root /var/www/alaskasquirrel.com/html;
}
access_log /var/log/nginx/aksquirrel_access.log main;
error_log /var/log/nginx/aksquirrel_error.log error;
}
This is a short blog post, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Here are a few links on configuring Nginx, particularly the Nginx log files:
I just saw this video for LiquidText. It made me think that this is the sort of functionality I always wanted from Amazon Kindle. More accurately, I knew I didn’t like how Kindle worked, and LiquidText makes you think, “See, there it is, that’s what I want.” (I’ll know it when I see it.)
About a month ago I shared some code for my Wikipedia Reader application, which reads Wikipedia pages out loud to you. As I thought about what I want from that application, I thought, “Why limit it to reading Wikipedia pages? What if it could read a book?”
“If you think you know what the state of the payments system 10 years out you're in a state of delusion.”
~ Charlie Munger talking about AMEX
From a Phys.org article titled The thermodynamics of learning:
“The greatest significance of our work is that we bring the second law of thermodynamics to the analysis of neural networks,” Sebastian Goldt at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, told Phys.org. “The second law is a very powerful statement about which transformations are possible — and learning is just a transformation of a neural network at the expense of energy. This makes our results quite general and takes us one step towards understanding the ultimate limits of the efficiency of neural networks.”
Last week I was wondering how mechanical watches work, and this morning Erik Bruchez shared this ‘animated infographic’ article on how they work.
HP offers 157 “business” laptops. (I have no idea how many “personal” laptops they offer, I didn’t look.)
When I searched Dell for 15” laptops, their search results showed 167 models.
Apple has one. Maybe as many as four, depending on how you count.
"AdWords campaign disapproved! Disapproval reasons - trademark terms"
Yikes. I just saw this "AdWords trademark violation" message when I logged into my Google AdWords account. I've been trying to get a small AdWords campaign going for my "Hide Desktop Icons" software application, but it's been a battle getting through the AdWords approval process. My biggest problem is that Google AdWords won't approve my ads, and the only information they give me is this trademark message that states, "Disapproval reasons - trademark terms".
The New York Times has this article on how Silicon Valley’s attitude towards Donald Trump changed in less than 36 hours. The photo shows Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and refugee, joining a protest at the airport in San Francisco.
Forbes has a good article on the causes of the Samsung Note 7 battery explosions, including everything Samsung did to understand the problem, and a little bit about where they’re going from here.
Dan Bricklin, inventor/creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, has created this page of historical notes and images about his work. His work came long before my interest in computers and programming, so I enjoy reading about it from a historical perspective. He shows a TI calculator and very large state diagram on this page. I remember seeing calculators like that in stores, and the work he put into the state diagram looks like a modern mind map.
If you’re into history, it’s all very cool.
This bloomberg.com article shows a little bit about how and why solar energy may become cheaper than coal in the next ten years.
The Wall Street Journal has an article titled, Microsoft, rebooted, emerges as a tech leader. Personally I’ve ignored Microsoft since around 2005, but some of their recent decisions seem better than they have been in years (IMHO).
I haven’t done any HTML5-specific web programming in a while, so although I know many of the HTML5 tags, I don’t know them all. Here’s a link to the HTML Element Reference page on w3schools.com.
Fortune has a good article on the Google Brain research team, their products, and technology.
I don’t know about you, but the only thing I’m interested in getting for Cyber Monday is a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit:
Here’s a link to ThinkGeek’s “Black Friday” deals: