bweaver.net

SQL on Rails is a pure SQL development framework for robust, data-focused web applications.

As they say at the SQL On Rails website, Taking the VC out of MVC – SQL on Rails is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for language consolidation and breakneck collaboration. So SELECT SQL on Rails, and get your applications on the fast track.

Be sure to check out their screencast where they create a Google-smashing search engine in about eight minutes. It really is amazing.

Maciej Ceglowski at Idle Words has written an enjoyable and leisurely article on the history of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel, which supplies the East Coast with authentic burritos from San Francisco’s Mission district.

Who can imagine New York City without the Mission burrito? Like the Yankees, the Brooklyn Bridge or the bagel, the oversize burritos have become a New York institution. And yet it wasn’t long ago that it was impossible to find a good burrito of any kind in the city. As the 30th anniversary of the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel approaches, it’s worth taking a look at the remarkable sequence of events that takes place between the time we click “deliver” on the burrito.nyc.us.gov website and the moment that our hot El Farolito burrito arrives in the lunchroom with its satisfying pneumatic hiss.

The story begins in any of the three dozen taquerias supplying the Bay Area Feeder Network, an expansive spiderweb of tubes running through San Francisco’s Mission district as far south as the “Burrito Bordeaux” region of Palo Alto and Mountain View. Electronic displays in each taqueria light up in real time with orders placed on the East Coast, and within minutes a fresh burrito has been assembled, rolled in foil, marked and dropped down one of the small vertical tubes that rise like organ pipes in restaurant kitchens throughout the city. Continue reading at Idle Words.

In Will Ferrell’s hysterical Landlord video, his landlord Pearl comes to his apartment to demand the rent. Sorry for the language but go watch it. Funny stuff.

The landlord is played by Adam McKay’s talented daughter, Pearl. Funny or Die is a new video sharing site from McKay and Ferrell’s production company Sanchez Productions.

Will Ferrell

If you’ve been under a rock for ten years, you might not know that comedian Will Ferrell is a Saturday Night Live alum, has starred in several films, including Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Elf, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Bewitched, and Blades of Glory.

Adam McKay

A Second City member and writer for Saturday Night Live, Adam McKay wrote and directed both Talladega Nights and Anchorman. He also writes for the Huffington Post.

Okay, so I’m moving WordPress up from bweaver.net/wp to bweaver.net. Simpler.

The minor bits of content that was at bweaver.net will show up somewhere here soon.

Steps to Move WordPress Directory

There are a few simple steps to move the WP installation to another directory on the same server.

1. Update your WordPress install to the latest version if needed or desired.
2. Obligatory – Back up your database. Back up your files in both the original and, if something else is already there, the target directories.
3. Move all files, including .htaccess, from the original directory to the target directory. Use an FTP app like FileZilla.
4. In the WordPress database, browse the wp_options table. Find and edit the paths stored in siteurl and home option rows.
5. Edit .htaccess and change any paths containing the old directory and point them to the new location.
6. Under the Manage tab, search for the old path and edit any posts containing the old path to point to the new location.
7. Edit any themes that might contain the old paths. They shouldn’t, but if they do, they will need to be tweaked.

That’s it.

This is what I did, but you might also want to read the WordPress codex article on Moving WordPress. Its instructions are similar, but covers changing databases, moving to other servers, etc.

One-Click Install Issue

Whoa. Everything is all well and good, but since this WordPress installation was made via Dreamhost‘s One-Click Install panel, I’ve got an entry pointing to the wrong path and no apparent method to point it to the new location.

The only reason this matters to me is to pick up the handy one-click upgrade when new WordPress releases are done. I’ve submitted a support question to see if there’s a way to handle this.

Excellent. It’s John Kerry who needs halp. What a doofus.

Seen here.

Scrappleface hits a homerun with Because of Iraq II, a nice counterpoint to Wes Clark’s goofy video blaming everything on Iraq. (Yeah Wes, when did terrorists declare war on the US? When did terrorists hit the World Trade Center? The USS Cole? Before or after we went to war with Iraq?)

WordPress 2.05 has been released. Bug fixes and security enhancements.

A friend pointed me to an article by Vincent Ferrari about trying to cancel his AOL account, complete with audio. Wow.

after several minutes of getting nowhere… Vincent: Cancel the account. I don’t know how to make this any clearer for you. Cancel the account. When I say cancel the account, I don’t mean help me figure out how to keep it, I mean cancel the account.

More to the story, though. Turns out Vincent received a nice apology from AOL and the snotty customer rentention expert got fired. Ferrari’s website, Insignificant Thoughts, was hammered by Digg and the story turned out to be a good test of the revamped Netscape.com. CNBC interviewed him as well.

As an experiment, I’ve added a Deals page with the “latest deals.” Currently it is limited to deals from Buy.com and an Amazon Omakase banner, but I hope to be adding more time permits.

SparkStats is a little plugin to build sparkline-style usage graphs. And, use with sidebar widgets.

There are various options, including the number of days to display, the width of each bar, the height of the graph, colors, etc.

I’ve placed it on this site (for now).

More info on sparklines at Edward Tufte’s website, and the PHP Sparkline library by James Byers.

Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence is a wonderful book, as is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.