Yes, it has been colder in Minneapolis this summer… except when it wasn’t

There’s a bit of a brouhaha afoot with regard to our weather in Minnesota this summer, and whether it proves or disproves climate change.

A good summary of the “debate” appeared yesterday on Alas!

It started with a Minneapolis-based wingnut blogger relying on anecdotal evidence to prove… something.

Statistics guru Nate Silver responded with a bunch of boring old facts that dispel the argument of a colder-than-normal summer.

I just have a few comments to add to the fray:

1. If climate change is real (and it’s pretty much impossible for an honest, rational person to deny at this point), anecdotal evidence of a chilly month of July in one city doesn’t do anything to disprove it. And if you’re not looking at hard numbers, it’s easy to endure this cold July and forget just how hot it really was at the end of June.

2. Rising global temperatures associated with climate change emphatically do not mean that the resulting weather change in any particular location will manifest as a simple 2-3 degree temperature increase, and identical weather as before. In fact what it means is that global weather patterns will change significantly, and unpredictably, with some parts of the globe experiencing significantly hotter temperatures, some cooler, and more severe weather events occurring in more places than before.

Questlove tries to salvage something of musical value from a (the) Philip Michael Thomas album

I just started following Questlove (drummer of The Roots) on Twitter less than an hour ago, and it’s already paid off with this little gem, which I believe is how he’s spending his summer vacation (i.e. week off from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon). Nice. It’s cool to see him in action at home (a.k.a. the studio).

Since the video is so tantalizingly incomplete, he has also shared the finished product.

“Unnatural Disasters” remixed

In addition to my various and sundry ongoing personal projects, musical and otherwise, I am presently assembling a compilation of Room 34 “greatest hits” (so to speak) from the 3 EPs and 3 full-length albums I’ve produced (so far) in 2008-2009.

I’ve worked out the track list, and am currently playing around with the sequence. I’m also going to be remastering all of the tracks and remixing a few of them (mostly from Unnatural Disasters, my 2008 RPM Challenge album, because I’ve never been satisfied with the mastering on that album.

The full compilation is likely to be completed and released in October. (This delay is mostly to allow for the inclusion of tracks from Burnt Snow, which is being distributed exclusively by Sidedown Audio through the end of September.)

Stay tuned for more details about this project (and others) as it progresses. But for now, here’s a sample: the remixed version of “Unnatural Disasters.” Enjoy!

[audio:http://blog.room34.com/wp-content/uploads/underdog/room34_unnaturaldisasters_remix.mp3]

On upgrading WordPress (and WordPress plugins) automatically over SSH/SFTP

For the most part, I love managing my own server. Even though it requires digging into the muck of Linux configuration files with my bare hands (so to speak), and if it goes down, I have no one to blame (or call on for help) but myself, it’s great to have full control and flexibility.

One downside I discovered as a WordPress user, however, is that the super-slick automatic upgrade feature of WordPress was broken on my server. WordPress only supports FTP and the (as I see it) somewhat pointless FTPS. Insecure as it is, my old host supported regular ol’ FTP, and that made WordPress upgrades painless.

There’s no way I’m going to implement FTP on my own server. It’s easy enough to install the package at the command line (really, it is), but I just see no reason to open myself up to the security risks. Granted, there aren’t really that many security risks (beyond one very big one — intercepted passwords) with a well-configured FTP server. But I don’t care to investigate the steps necessary to ensure an FTP server is well-configured.

The obvious choice is to use SFTP/SSH, but at first it looked to me as if WordPress simply didn’t support it. But as I’ve learned (and since proven with my own server), WordPress does support it if your PHP installation has the proper extensions installed. And here’s a guide to get you started.

Once your PHP install is upgraded to support SSH connections, the option will automatically become available in the WordPress upgrade tools, and it works perfectly!