More posts coming soon!

Gray vs. grey – Grammarist.

And you thought cats were mean!

PS: I’m trying to post at least something minor more often.  I’m using a WordPress feature called “PressThis” which allows me to post anything I see on random sites.

John Saint-Denis, a designer, released the video above for Valentine’s Day this year.  It’s a beautiful video with a great ending.  Enjoy!

Molly has been with me and my family since she was a tiny kitten.  She was abandoned by her Mom in order garage at the first house I ever lived at in April of 1995.  In 1996 we moved to a new house about 1/2 a mile down the road and she seemed more attached to me than anyone else.  In 2008 when I moved to West Lafayette, Molly came with me to live with us at Purdue Village.  In 2010 we moved to Lindberg Village.  While she never really liked Sparky, there were moments when she would tolerate him enough for them to be near each other.

Molly always would sleep with us, either by our heads or on our stomachs.  She was always there for comfort and warmth.  It’s hard sometimes because we will see something that will remind her of us and, at least for me, I’ll think she’s there for a second until I realize she’s gone.  Pretty soon we will be moving on to a new house we have purchased.  It will be difficult because this is the first place I’ve lived where Molly hasn’t lived with me as well.  It will be hard to leave behind the last place she was, but we will always have memories with her and many pictures to remind ourselves of the impact she made on our lives.

Farewell Molly, we will miss you greatly.

I dragged myself out of bed this morning to go for a run and boy am I glad I did! I ran a bit further than my goal, I am quite awake right now and I have now ran over 1300 total miles with Nike+!

That’s enough miles to run from Purdue to Boston and 1/3 the way back!!

How can anyone reasonably claim that to not be discrimination?

Click the photo to view all 614 items.

Recently I started noticing problems with our Comcast service that although speed tests were very speedy, as were certain downloads – primarily torrents of Linux distributions, other content downloads were pathetically slow.  These would include items such as iTunes downloads, streaming content and the like.  It wasn’t until I switched my router from using Google DNS (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) back to using Comcast DNS and seeing a drastic speed increase did I realize why this slowdown was occurring.  The issue here is with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and alternative DNS services.

CDNs are great services that replicate data across a number of data centers to offer faster access to the content by allowing you to reach a center closer to your physical location.  This allows for lower latency as your connection has to go through fewer hops so you can get a better experience.  The problem comes with using alternative DNS services such as Google DNS.  These services tend to mess with the geo-location features of the CDNs and as such, they may route you to a center that is further away which would create a slower experience for the users.

This is the problem that we were seeing.  As mentioned, once I changed us back to using Comcast’s default DNS servers, everything from iTunes downloads and general page loading times increased dramatically.  Despite my disdain for Comcast DNS, I guess I’ll be leaving that alone for a while.

As it took me days to fully recover from the half marathons that I have run, I have decided that they definitely aren’t for me.  I congratulate those that did run it, but I’m perfectly happy to run the 5k alone.

I’m also happy with my overall time although it definitely is lower than the first 5k I’ve ever ran back in 2010.

OVERALL RESULTS:            (Number finished = 763)

Place    Age
Overall  Grp  Name                     Pace     FINISH
-------------------------------------------------------
     74   11  KEITH MCDERMOTT          07:57    24:42.5

The hardest part of the entire race was definitely the climb back up the back of the stadium. That is quite a steep incline!  (You can tell where this was on the track by looking at the darkest part of the heat-map for my run of the 5k to the right.  I actually just walked part of the way up!)

Despite the one slow-part I encountered, I did enjoy the race and would definitely run it again and recommend it to others.  It was the inaugural race so of course there will be kinks to work out, but it can only get better over time!

Enjoy a small gallery below of pics of runners from the half marathon and others in the 5k portion as well.

In the past, I’ve used Dropbox to sync the code between my workstations and to a Linux virtual machine which ran a web server.  The problem with this setup is that when it failed, it failed miserably.  The issue here was with Dropbox.  The Linux client is quite crappy and is prone to failure very easily – at least the command line version.  The version which integrates into Nautilus seemed a lot more stable.

So, I decided to go back to my old buddy, Mac OS X and use the server capabilities built-in.  I’d check-in code and test using a local server.  However, in Mountain Lion, Apple removed “Web Sharing” from the Sharing pane of Preferences.  After a bit of searching though, it was obvious that although the GUI was removed, the services weren’t.  Follow the directions below to enable an Apache + MySQL + PHP Stack on Mountain Lion that allows .htaccess file directives and has a few tweaks to php.ini.

1.  Configure Apache

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Find the php5_module and uncomment the line.

#LoadModule perl_module libexec/apache2/mod_perl.so
LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
#LoadModule hfs_apple_module libexec/apache2/mod_hfs_apple.so

Next, I changed the default virtual domain to point to my local document root and set the User/Group as myself.  I also enabled directives to allow .htaccess to work.

#User _www
#Group _www
User keith
Group staff

#DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
DocumentRoot "/Users/keith/code"

#<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">
<Directory "/Users/keith/code">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
   #AllowOverride None
   AllowOverride All
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
</Directory>

2.  Configure PHP

Next up, we need to configure PHP to have a proper date timezone set.  This reduces errors/warnings which could show up. We will also enable short_open_tags. Not necessary for most setups, but can be useful.

sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini
sudo vi /etc/php.ini

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
; date.timezone
date.timezone = "America/New_York"

;short_open_tag = Off
short_open_tag = On

3.  Install & Configure MySQL

The MySQL libraries are actually built-in to the PHP that ships with Mountain Lion.  If you do not need any of the command line tools and will only connect to a remote server, you can skip to the next step.

• Download MySQL x86 64 Bit DMG Archive
• Install all three items in the DMG

4.  Set Apache to run on boot

Run the following command to have Apache start at boot

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd Disabled -bool false

Congratulations! You’ve now configured Apache2, MySQL and PHP to play nicely together on OS X Mountain Lion in a more standardized way than the default Apple configs would normally allow.
Leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions!

You’ve registered your domain name, and paid for hosting with a hosting provider, and uploaded your website to the web server. If this is all done, why can’t you see the results of your hard work right away? What is this DNS propagation people keep telling you about?
In order to understand DNS propagation, you must first understand a little about how DNS works. When you set up your website with your hosting provider, they create a Master DNS record in their Domain Name Servers. Your domain registrar (the company you paid for the honor of owning your domain name) points to your web host’s DNS server as being the master authority of your domain.

When any outside source wants to know how to find your website, they first go to the registration database to find out who the DNS authority is for your website. Then they visit your hosting provider’s DNS servers to find out what the IP Address is for your domain name, and from there your audience can now view your website.

The problem with this whole scheme is that in order to speed up the rate at which their customers can view the internet, each Internet Server Provider caches their DNS records. This means that they make their own copy of the master records, and read from them locally instead of looking them up on the Internet each time someone wants view a website. This actually speeds up web surfing quite a bit, by (1) speeding up the return time it takes for a web browser to request a domain lookup and get an answer, and (2) actually reducing the amount of traffic on the web therefore giving it the ability to work faster.

The downside to this caching scenario and what makes it take so long for your website to be visible to everyone, is that each company or ISP that caches DNS records only updates them every few days. This is not any kind of standard, and they can set this time anywhere from a few hours to several days. The slow updating of the servers cache is called propagation, since your websites DNS information is now being propagated across all DNS servers on the web. When this is finally complete, everyone can now visit your new website. Being that the cache time is different for all servers, as mentioned above, it can take anywhere from 36 to 72 hours for DNS changes to be totally in effect.

Source: DevShed’s Rich Smith

The video above may not be suitable for young viewers due to some cursing and violence.

As stated in the video, what if it were illegal to be tall or have a certain type of eye color?  That is the kind of prejudice that I go through at times.  I am glad to work at Purdue University where that is not an issue at all, however I face discrimination whenever I think about how I cannot marry the man I love because of immigration issues and how many rights and responsibilities we are denied because of that.

Today, Justin and I took the TCF (Test de connaissance de Française) at the Alliance Française de Chicago.  I have taken a French class at the Alliance as well as private tutoring to help me to prepare for the test while we both took advantage of many resources to study practice tests for the TCF (All resources we used are listed below.  Links are provided if available.)

While we will not know the results of the test for 2-3 weeks from now, we are hopeful that at least I was able to obtain an A2 level of French in both oral express and comprehension.  The language structure and reading comprehension portions of the test were not important for us however we tried to do the best possible that we could regardless.  I felt like I stuttered a lot during the verbal expression, however looking back I think it wasn’t as bad as I thought.  I was able to expand on several topics while staying in-line with the theme.  Justin didn’t do bad as well and hopes to possibly reach a basic A2 level.

Resources used:

• French Faster private tutoring (Thanks Zarrina!!)
• French classes from Alliance Française de Chicago
• TV5 TCF Website
• Réussir TCF book
• Belin TCF book
• TCF 250 Activities book

A great little video about why marriage equality just makes sense.

Source: vimeo

Mon deuxième meilleur amie est s’appelle Jaime.  Elle a trente-deux ans and elle a un mari et deux enfants.  Elle est un peu ronde et grande.  Mon amie est ma confidante parce-que on peut parler de tous les gens ensemble.  Nous travaillons à l’universite de Purdue ensemble depuis deux-mille huit.  Elle est très gentille, independante et charismatique.

Mon troisième meilleur ami est mon chien!  Il s’appelle Sparky est il a deux ans.  Il est fidele et intelligent.  Pour un chien, il est grande et un peu mince.  Il est blanc et noir aussi.  Nous jouons à plein air ensemble.