Wordpress automatic updates

Submitted by devin on Thu, 03/01/2018 - 11:23

I maintain a couple of wordpress sites, and I rarely want to spend time keeping them up to date. I use this permissions script https://www.devinhoward.ca/technology/2014/mar/wordpress-permissions-script though, which disallows Wordpress's normal auto-update mechanism. This vastly increases the security, which is worth it, but I need another way to auto-update.

So I use this script, along with the excellent command line tool wp-cli: https://wp-cli.org

To be good, do what is good for your heart

Submitted by devin on Wed, 01/17/2018 - 23:43

I have a theory about how to be a good Christian. As with all my ideas, I worry that I've missed something, so please think critically about what I'm writing. But so far I've had success and haven't found this theory to be contradictory to my other knowledge of God and the Bible.

A long time ago, Moses et al summarized right living by publishing the Ten Commandments. Then Israel went on and built a lot more law, most of which is also attributed to Moses - hence the "Law of Moses".

Then a long time later, Jesus came and summarized the law in two commandments:

How to have productive meetings, part 1

Submitted by devin on Wed, 01/17/2018 - 23:25

At some point in my life, I started going to meetings, and slowly started gathering good and bad experiences. Also, for some reason, during university I actually studied how to have productive meetings, and I’ve kept a few tidbits of wisdom from that course.

I hold this truth to be self evident: most meetings are a waste of time.

But there’s a corollary: it’s also hard to identify which of your meetings are a waste of time, and why. It’s hard to predict in advance whether a meeting will be productive.

Arguing past each other

Submitted by devin on Fri, 11/24/2017 - 23:16

Consider the "strawman" logical fallacy (wonderfully illustrated in video here):

  1. Person A presents her argument (call it A).
  2. Person B voices his disagreement with argument S (an exaggerated or incorrect version of A).

The similarity between Christianity and Feminism

Submitted by devin on Sun, 01/22/2017 - 20:40

I'm a Christian and a feminist. Membership in both groups is a key part of my identity. If you talk to someone with a simplistic understanding of these groups, though, they might be surprised that it's possible to be a member of both groups!

The problem is that we aren't very good at differentiating subgroups that happen to share the same label. We lump Catholics, Pentecostals, and Unitarians into one group called "Christians". We even lump Canadian Christians and American Christians into one group!

Decompartmentalizing your faith

Submitted by devin on Sun, 01/08/2017 - 18:25

I think the single greatest challenge so far in my life as a Christian has been compartmemtalization. And I imagine others may have the same challenge, so I'm going to blog about it. To really do the topic justice, though, I need to first talk about Fruedian, behavioural, and cognitive psychology.

Originally the field of psychology was dominated by Freudian theories, which were vast and attempted to explain why high society women might become hysterical. Each of his theories had a few important traits:

Tmux is great

Submitted by devin on Wed, 07/27/2016 - 00:09

Tmux is a great application with a few super-cool uses. You can get really deep into configuring it, but I tend to use the default options so that I can install it and start using it on any machine and get a similar experience. Here are a few of my favourite uses:

Persistent ssh sessions

This is far and away the best use of tmux. I typically use mosh to make sure my ssh sessions don't crash.

Metamaps.cc now has import and export!

Submitted by devin on Wed, 03/30/2016 - 22:35

It's taken a long time to get from planning to reality, but https://metamaps.cc now has a working import/export feature!

If you aren't familiar with Metamaps, and/or would like an invite code, feel free to reach me on Twitter.

Now, how can you get your grubby paws on some mind map data?

The most important link on Wikipedia

Submitted by devin on Thu, 02/11/2016 - 01:12

People should cite Wikipedia when they use it for information.

People are afraid of citing Wikipedia because their professors in university or high school said it "wasn't academic". Then they went on to talk about academic dishonesty and plagiarism, probably in the same breath.

The problems with capitalism

Submitted by devin on Sun, 01/17/2016 - 21:53

I have a surprising number of friends who want to do away with capitalism entirely. The hope is to create a new economic order, with the aim of achieving some or all of these goals (among others):

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