devioustree

As one does, I decided that Isaac Asimov’s classic science-fiction series “Foundation” would benefit from added zombies. What do you think?

Zombiedation by Isaac Drummondov

Zombiedation

The first volume in Issac Drummondov’s world-famous saga, winner of the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Novel Series.

Long after Earth was forgotten, a peaceful and unified galaxy took shape, an Empire governed from the majestic city-planet of Trantor. The system worked, and grew, for countless generations. Everyone believed it would work forever. Everyone except Hari Seldon.

As the great scientific thinker of his age, Seldon could not be ignored. Reluctantly, the Commission of Public Safety agreed to finance the Seldon Plan. The coming disaster was predicted by Seldon’s advances in biological warfare, the study of using pathogens as weapons, and it could not be averted. The Empire was doomed to zombiefication. Soon Trantor would lie in ruins. Zombies would overtake humanity. But the Seldon Plan was a long-term strategy to minimize the worst of what was to come.

Two Foundations were set up at opposite ends of the galaxy. Of the Second nothing can be told. It guards the secrets of pathology. ZOMBIEDATION is the story of the First Foundation, on the remote planet of Terminus, from which those secrets were withheld.

Zombiedation And Empire

The Seldon Plan guided the First Foundation safely through two centuries of chaos as the Galactic Empire disintegrated. Seldon’s recorded holographic image appeared in the Council Chamber on Terminus at moments of crisis predicted by pathology, and his voice was heard. Even war between the Foundation and the zombiefied remains of the Empire was foreseen – and planned for – by the great scientist.

But Seldon had no way of predicting the birth of the Tank, a mutant of uncanny power and unlimited ambition. The Tank’s conquests are effortless and his subjects slaves.

The Foundation is powerless against the supernormal might the Tank exerts. The Seldon Plan is in tatters. Two men and a woman from Terminus flee to the ruins of the mighty Trantor in an effort to discover where the mysterious Second Foundation was established. Its help is needed desperately against the physical force of the Tank. But the Tank, using those same astonishing powers, is also looking for the Second Foundation.

ZOMBIEDATION AND EMPIRE is the story of the first contact between the two Foundations of Hari Seldon.

Second Zombiedation

One man understood the shifting patterns of the inhabited cosmos. This was Hari Seldon, the last great scientist of the First Empire. The study of pathology enabled Seldon to predict the Empire would all turn into zombies. To restore civilization in the shortest possible time, Seldon set up two Foundations.

The First was established on Terminus in the full daylight of publicity. But the Second, ‘at the other end of the galaxy’, took shape behind a veil of total silence. Because the Second Foundation guards the laws of pathology, which are valid only so long as there aren’t zombies.

When the First Foundation was conquered by a force Seldon had not foreseen – the overwhelming power of a single individual, a mutant called the Tank – the Second Foundation was forced to reveal its existence and, infinitely worse, a portion of its power. But so far its location, its most closely guarded secret of all, has been kept hidden. So far. The Tank and the remnants of the First Foundation will do anything to discover it.

This is the story of the Second Foundation.

The end

To spoil the ending, it turns out that the Second Foundation has succumbed to the zombie virus. Thus when they meet with the First Foundation, they have a feast and everyone dies.

Apologies to the memory of Isaac Asimov for really pissing all over his work. This is really awful stuff!

Installing a Wordpress plugin with SFTP

Like myself, you may use SFTP instead of FTP to upload files to your server. Like myself, you may also use Wordpress to blog about things. Like myself, you may have been a bit disappointed to see that you couldn’t auto-update Wordpress or install plugins through the dashboard as it appeared to only support FTP and FTPS. If none of this made any sense then you might want to check out What is SFTP and why use it? below.

Yet don’t be disheartened O reader for it is a little known fact that Wordpress does allow one to use SFTP! To do this you need to have the appropriate SSH extension for PHP. Luckily Kevin van Zonneveld has written a lovely guide on how one does this. He does note that a new version of libssh2 has been released and I can confirm that it works so when you reach that section you might want to use the following steps instead:

wget http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libssh2/libssh2-1.0.tar.gz
tar -zxvf libssh2-1.0.tar.gz
cd libssh2-1.0/

UPDATE

After you install libssh, remember to install the PECL module:

pecl install -f ssh2

and modify your php.ini (usually in /etc/php5/apache2/) to include the following beneath Dynamic Extensions

extension=ssh2.so

/END UPDATE

You’ll probably need to restart Apache afterwards:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now when you visit the auto-update page you will have a third option to use SSH, as shown in the image above and your Wordpress SFTP days have begun!

What is SFTP and why use it?

SFTP is a replacement for FTP which is much more secure. It is based on SSH and is not to be confused with FTPS (despite similar names, the two are incompatible). SFTP encrypts all the data and commands that are sent to and from the server and provides protection against a number of network security risks. FTP, on the other hand, leaves everything – username, password, data, etc. etc. – in plaintext and so is susceptible to man in the middle attacks.

Needless to say, I’d highly recommend everyone use SFTP and disable their FTP logins.

What is FTPS?

FTPS is FTP running over SSL-enabled FTP servers. This is similar to the difference between HTTP and HTTPS. With FTPS, all the control data (e.g. authentication) is encrypted but the data may not be. This is because if you have already encrypted the data then there is no point having FTPS encrypt it again. Of course, if the data is in plaintext then you can ask FTPS to encrypt it.

The main problem with FTPS is that you need an SSL certificate plus it requires a secondary channel for the data which may cause problems with some firewalls. Of course, SFTP isn’t perfect as well but it’s the one I prefer.

Happy secure data transferring!

If you are a techy person then it is likely that you have used Google (or another search engine) to search for techy solutions to techy problems you are having. It is therefore likely that you have come across the website Experts Exchange as it seems to rate quite highly in search engines for a wide array of topics. You may then be frustrated to find that the answer to your question appears to not be on the page you were directed to and that you are required to not only sign up but actually pay for said solution!

Jings crivens! Paying for something on the interwebs! Heaven forbid such a thing!

Yet here’s Tom’s Top Tip for the day: just keep scrolling down. Scroll past the hidden answers. Scroll past the adverts. Scroll past the topic list. Scroll as if your life depended on it. If you scroll enough then you shall be rewarded with the answers to your question.

I highly doubt that I am the first to expouse this knowledge but I do know that a number of my friends did not know this nugget of wisdom and so would constantly bypass any Experts Exchange results returned by their search engine of choice.

I’m totally perplexed as to why people choose to use that website though. There are any number of websites dedicated to answering your questions and the vast majority are free and don’t require you to scroll past craploads of junk. Can anyone shed a light?

Recently I uncovered a load of old school stuff in my parents house. Most of it has never been seen by anyone who knows me as it was all before I moved to Scotland. Over the coming weeks I shall be indulging in some of my past material and I hope you guys find it as funny as I do!

So without further ado, I shall introduce you to my 7 year old brain with the novelette The Mysterious Shadows.

The Mysterious Shadows: Front Cover

(Mick Allen was a pseudonym. No idea why!)

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I’m guessing, dear visitor, that you have heard of Twitter. If you haven’t, it’s a website that allows you to publish miniature blog entries of 140 characters of less; it’s better than it sounds trust me.

Anyway.

A couple of days ago I decided to read about Watergate. Why? No reason apart from being curious. It’s such a well known scandal and I felt my understanding was very incomplete.

Nixon on Twitter

So with that in mind I headed to the fountain of knowledge and started reading. It’s fascinating stuff and so I became very engrossed. But while reading about people such as Ellsberg and Ehrlichman an idea popped into my head.

“Twittergate”.

And lo, Twittergate – a recreation of the events of Watergate twittered through the eyes of the participants – was born!

All of the accounts are in correct – as far as I could tell – chronological order but are, of course, not in real-time as that would have taken several years rather than a few hours.

I have no idea how this will appear to the naïve reader as I myself find the whole thing rather strange but listed below are the twitter accounts of all involved in the order they first join our…story, for lack of a better word. A journey perhaps?

• Daniel Ellsberg
• Richard Nixon
• Anthony Russo
• Neil Sheehan
• New York Times
• Henry Kissinger
• Egil Krogh
• John Ehrlichman
• The Plumbers
• Frank Wills

So there’s the cast, feel free to do what you will. I leave it up to you as to how you interpret it (as I can’t make head nor tales of it). Is it art? Is it saying something about the state of current affairs? Is it commenting about the usage of technology intruding into our privacy?

Please, feel free to make up your own wild guesses as to what goes on in my mind and let me know!

UPDATE
The NYT twitter account I created for this got renamed. Spoilsports!

Following on from my previous list of The Honourably Mentioned Albums Of 2008, I hereby grant you access to the albums I enjoyed most last year. As before, the list is ordered alphabetically.

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10 hours without a toilet break

This was sent to me by Jonathan during Sky 2’s epic two day long 24 marathon.

Is this how America treats its heroes? By forcing them to withgo from basic bodily functions? If that’s their attitude then I’m afraid I shall have to resign from The American Heroes League. I expect Horatio Caine and Peter Griffin to also tender their resignations.

And yes, I should be writing a report at the moment; don’t judge me.

So it’s that time of year again – The End. And what is there to do at the end of the year other than make lists? I didn’t know either so lists were made and here I present them to you. I have decided that I shant put them in a numerical order as it would be, at best, arbitrary. But they must be ordered somehow otherwise they would overlap and you wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of what was written; so I chose my favourite means of sorting: alphabetically.

So what will happen is that in this here blog post I shall press upon you the albums that are highly recommended but fell just short of being in the best albums of the year. Some time in the future I shall write up the list of my favourite albums of 2008 but, as this one took me so long to write, it shall have to wait a while.

I must add that, of course, I did not listen to every album that was recorded this year so this list should not be considered a holy writ. It is merely the albums that I enjoyed and thought you might too (especially you, Alan).

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Merriweather Post Pavilion album cover

So I have just returned from the delightful Monorail where the new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was being played ahead of its release on 12th Jan. I am a late passenger on the Animal Collective train as I only really started to listen to them this year after much prompting from Richard. And lo it was Richard again who convinced me to go tonight. He really loves his Animal Collective! But anyway, you’re not here to read about Richard (or are you?).

The new album is quite a departure from Strawberry Jam (of which I am most familiar with) but Richard asures me that this is par for the course with AC; they are consistently inconsistent. Opening track In The Flowers lets you know this straight away as it’s a completely different kettle of fish from Peacebone, which opened their previous album. While their rampant usage of weird-and-wonderful-sounds-which-somehow-meld-together is still here, there’s a more natural feel to these sounds; as if Mother Earth had given the band a collection of samples from her mixing decks. But it’s the vocals that really differentiate Merriweather from their past work. Put simply, they’re sublime. Put slightly more complicatedly, it’s as if they are channeling The Beatles to produce some lush, multi-layered harmonies that tingle the ears.

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Monorail Music

Summertime Clothes contains probably the best examples of this new vocal work but since I don’t have that on mp3 you shall have to make do with My Girls. And by “make do”, I mean “enjoy lots”. Another notable track would be the album closer, Brothersport. A bit dancier than the rest of the album, you could tell that every person in the room was itching to cast their chairs to the side and strut their funky stuff.

Or that could have been just me.

All in all, it seems to me that Animal Collective has a winner on their hands. The album has a nice flow and I’m rather looking forward to it. It is probably worth noting that if you don’t like their other output then I don’t think this will change your mind.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a music journalist so please excuse my rather crappy descriptions and, as I have only heard the album once, I make no claims of this being accurate. It is just based on my admittedly flawed memory.