UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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!

I’ll take Jeffrey Zeldman over Jakob Nielsen any day. (Case in point.) And Zeldman’s criticism today of Microsoft’s inexplicable use of the Word HTML rendering engine in Outlook 2010 despite IE8’s genuine efforts to become standards compliant is true to form. A quote worth repeating in its entirety, re-tweeting (if it weren’t over 140 characters), and having tattooed on your favorite body part:

Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

Here we have another exhibit in the battle of Arial and Helvetica: two signs posted side by side, and obviously designed with some intention of consistency. Sort of. Their sizes are different, their shapes are different, and, of course, one is in Helvetica (the left) and one is in Arial (the right). But someone was clearly trying to make them match, to the best of their limited abilities.

This photo was taken this evening in the west parking garage of the Mall of America, near the Best Buy entrance.

Any guesses on which sign came first? I don’t know myself, but I have a hunch it’s the one on the left. The rounded corners and use of Helvetica suggest the work of a trained designer; the shortcut copycat approach of the sign on the right — sharp corners and Arial, seems characteristic.

I’m pretty sure the No Smoking sign would precede the Authorized Parking Only sign chronologically for logical reasons as well: the concern about misplaced smoking existed long before the concern about misplaced parking at MOA, the latter only becoming a serious issue within the last five years as both IKEA and light rail transit have considerably increased non-mall traffic to the area.

As titillating as apocalypse stories may be, I’ve never really believed that the world is going to end on the winter solstice in 2012, as “predicted” by the Mayan calendar. I don’t think they really predicted the end of the world; that’s just as far in the future as they bothered to calculate. Any culture that couldn’t anticipate needing to account for four-digit years a mere 30-odd years in advance should surely understand that kind of shortsightedness.

And so we have this grand new CGI-fest of an apocalyptic vision, 2012. Frankly the biggest surprise to me is that John Cusack would have anything to do with such a piece of overblown shite as this, but I suppose he’s an “A-lister” now, so it’s part of his pact with the devil.

Anyway… this movie looks like a grand spectacle, with a dreadful story. As usual with movies that are grand spectacles. Never mind that it’s set off on the wrong foot from the very beginning of the trailer — the Mayans were not the world’s first civilization. It’s not about making sense; it’s about setting up whatever minimal pretense is necessary to justify the image of an aircraft carrier smashing into the White House on the world’s biggest tsunami. But I think the best moment of the trailer is the highly symbolic shot of the crack spreading across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, right between the fingers of God and Adam. How come no Hollywood blockbuster writer ever thought of that before?!

I snapped these photos yesterday in the parking lot of the Lyndale Rose Garden in Minneapolis. Why, at a garden with huge displays of flowers, fountains, sculptures and more, would I bother taking not just one but multiple photos of the pay machine in a parking lot?

Fonts.

In particular, ever since I saw the documentary Helvetica, I’ve been observing instances of the use of Arial — that abomination of a Helvetica knockoff Microsoft foisted upon the world by being too cheap to license Helvetica for Windows — on public signage. In days gone by, the default, almost ubiquitous, font on all sorts of public signs was Helvetica. But in the modern PC era, these signs often use Arial, the readily available not-quite-lookalike, instead.

But this pay machine is something else entirely. It displays a schizophrenic mix of Arial and Helvetica.

The most readily distinguishable difference between Arial and Helvetica, as I’ve noted before, is the capital R. So this pay machine immediately caught my attention with the giant “PAY HERE” sign at its top, immediately recognizable as Arial. I also noticed that the taped-on “ATTENTION” sign (which frustratingly informed me that the credit card function was not working) was in Arial as well.

Next I noticed the pasted-on Dymo labels below the change slot, which were printed in Helvetica.

The instructions printed on the machine, presumably by the manufacturer, are in Helvetica, albeit an ugly, artificially compressed version. So it would appear that the “PAY HERE” sign was a Minneapolis add-on and not part of the original unit.