UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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!

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.