Blog

The blog hasn't had a facelift in a long time.

setup

Moved wp is so broken. What is the overall theory of directories, permalinks, rewrite rules and front page displays?

when I changed servers I decided to put my old wp in its own directory. I followed http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory, read about http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks as well as http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page. Some how I have gotten things in a terrible convoluted state. I am in an infinite loop of change in .htaccess, index.php, permalinks and static pages with something always left broken. I need to know the concept instead of following 'copy don't move this' , 'update your permalinks that'.

It might be a problem that I named the subdirectory 'blog'.

The state right now is: I can get to wp-admin (whew). The site loads but not with the static page but with the blogposts. It shows the blogposts but if I click on a particular blog post it 404's. Tags and categories 404 too. The state of the settings is:
in root:

index.php is

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('.blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

.htaccess is

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?sitebuilt.net$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ blog [L]
# END WordPress
</IfModule>

in /blog:

index.php is:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

.htaccess is

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

settings->permalinks is /%postname%/

pages->static_homepage is called 'home', the permalink is http://www/sitebuilt.net and it won't let me change it.

pages->place-holder_for_posts is called 'blogposts' and its permalink is http://www/sitebuilt.net/blogposts

With this setup permalinks are right off the hostname and it can't find them. I've changes stuff so permalinks say http://www.sitebuilt.net/blog/mypost and it still can't find them. Where are they? What's the theory of operation?

topics

cool companies

cool ideas

cool technology

occupy

drafts

front page

more like an about me page

Sitebuilt.net is a portal to Tim McKenna's <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/wiki">w</a>eb sites and other stuff. Sitebuilt (Systems Inc.) was the name of the <a title="house building" href="http://sitebuilt.net/sitebuilt-houses-2" target="_self">house building</a> company I ran for thirty years.

What is cool about being in business

I always liked working with people who had some money in the deal. Having an economic stake in the outcome of a project engendered a cooperative spirit and a productive atmosphere. On a construction site there may be six or eight separate companies working at the same time. The developer, architect, owner, the contractor and subcontractor all have an interest in a successful project. The non-profit and government world is a messier place. Motivations can become muddied and efficiency is no longer driven by the potential for a bigger payout. People can sometimes create little fiefdoms or tend to protect their territory or power. Production isn't as important.

Competition does seem to be part of the human character. Competition can motivate, increase efficiency and create innovation. To effectively compete you must have skills in cooperation and teamwork.

We have to re-claim our democracy and recreate a healthy middle class

Since Reagan, the chasm between the top 1% and everyone else has been ever widening. My first experience of how it worked was back in 1986 and the Savings and Loan crisis. I was building a dozen houses a year back then and worked with a good group of subcontractors. Here's how it went: 1) There was a bailout. 2) Investors and banks got bailed out. 3) Subcontractors owed money got nothing. <a title="the economy" href="http://sitebuilt.net/the_econmy" target="_self"> more</a> 

There are better ways to educate our kids

For six years starting in 2005 I taught in Boston Public Schools at a district high school. It pretty much fit the profile of a "failing" urban school: a very large percentage of students who a) qualified for free lunch, b)would be the first in the family to attend college, c)did poorly on standardized tests, d)were ESL students e)were special needs students. What I discovered surprised me. These kids were as bright as the Boston Latin kids. So why did they do so terribly on tests? Why did they have such trouble reading and writing? How come they couldn't solve a problem they hadn't already seen? <a title="education" href="http://sitebuilt.net/education" target="_self"> more</a> 

<a href="http://sitebuilt.net/noah">Noah</a> is taking a picture of the rest of the <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/family" target="_self">family</a> as we climb to meet him on a hill near Bamenda in <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/cameroon">Cameroon</a>. Peri is in the center, I'm on the right, Toby is behind Ari. I was on a Christmas break from my <a href="http://www.sitebuilt.net/wiki/Resume">job</a> as a <a href="http://www.pathboston.com/hum4/On_teaching">teacher</a> at <a href="http://www.pathboston.com/hum4">PATH</a>.

What is cool about being in business

I always liked working with people who had some money in the deal. Having an economic stake in the outcome of a project engendered a cooperative spirit and a productive atmosphere. On a construction site there may be six or eight separate companies working at the same time. The developer, architect, owner, the contractor and subcontractor all have an interest in a successful project. The non-profit and government world is a [slidingnote title="messier place" type="closeable"]. Motivations can become muddied and efficiency is no longer driven by the potential for a bigger payout. People can sometimes create little fiefdoms or tend to protect their territory or power. Productivity isn't as important.[/slidingnote]

Competition does seem to be part of the human character. Competition can motivate, increase efficiency and create innovation. To effectively compete you must have skills in cooperation and teamwork.

We have to re-claim our democracy and recreate a healthy middle class

Since Reagan, the chasm between the top 1% and everyone else has been ever widening. My first experience of how it worked was back in 1986 and the Savings and Loan crisis. I was building a dozen houses a year back then and worked with a good group of subcontractors. Here's how it went: 1) There was a bailout. 2) Investors and banks got bailed out. 3) Subcontractors owed money got nothing.  

My 401K gets drained every 8-10 years as the playing field is tilted and bubbles are created and then burst. It's happened to most of the middle class.

There are better ways to educate our kids

For six years starting in 2005 I taught in Boston Public Schools at a district high school. It pretty much fit the profile of a "failing" urban school: a very large percentage of students who a) qualified for free lunch, b)would be the first in the family to attend college, c)did poorly on standardized tests, d)were ESL students e)were special needs students. What I discovered surprised me. These kids were as bright as the Boston Latin kids. So why did they do so terribly on tests? Why did they have such trouble reading and writing? How come they couldn't solve a problem they hadn't already seen?

The process of discovering the answers was intriguing and illuminating. The job held endless fascination and challenge.

They did terribly on tests because the people running the schools had this deep down sense that the tests were somehow unfair to urban minority kids but that we could raise the scores by a series of techniques or by using some product.

Students had trouble reading since to the people running the schools did not believe that reading was amazing and interesting or really important. The job of the teacher was defined as telling the students what the reading was about and what the themes were so then the class knew how to have discussions about how it connected to their lives.

Writing is problematic if you never read. Writing in an urban school system is of two types. One is the repeated honing of your personal narrative: how you came to the country, survived violent neighborhoods, overcame adversity, supported you families and would succeed as a doctor or a lawyer or a millionaire. The second type was the formulaic method on how to answer the open-response section of standardized tests: introduction, main-idea, evidence, analysis conclusion. Any other approach to teaching writing is frowned upon by the people who run the schools.

The people who run the schools are uncomfortable with student being asked to solve problems they haven't seen before. It is considered bad teaching to ask them.

Class discussions are cool, personal narratives are valuable. Aside from that there is not much going on in the Boston Public district (non-exam) high schools that is valuable for its students.

What is valued is compliance. If you do what we tell you to do we will give you good grades and declare you a successful student. The same goes for teachers. What is most valued is compliance. Talk the talk, follow the script and you are a team player, a success, a good teacher.

Students are confused. If they do everything you say and get good grades they declare themselves smart, moving from grade to grade elaborately concealing their inability to read, write or think clearly. Nobody rocks the boat.

For 2 years we didn't have any students who scored above 500 on the SAT's. The long running district high school SAT average for reading and math is 370. You get 370 if you get ~ 1 out of 4 correct.

The system is broken and the predominant cause lies in an administrative philosophy that shortchanges urban students. The headmaster's charade of being their friend masks the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' that the admin has for the students. You know the headmaster's kids would never be allowed to go to a school like theirs.

Students who are with compliant the administration's game-plan end up poorly educated nonetheless.

So you work around that. You build classroom environments where kids are comfortable admitting what they don't know. You teach them to read every day and find meaning and beauty in the words. You encourage them to collect material, imitate, practice daily at using words to explore ideas and develop their voice. You ask students questions whose choices illuminate for them what precise understanding actually entails. They get better at it. It is hard work but they can make up a lot of ground quickly.

You can do it with an incompetent or lazy administration. You can do it with an administration of benign neglect. It is more difficult with an activist administration on the prowl for mediocrity compliance. It becomes impossible when an administration decides to undermine your work with the kids.

Building stuff

There is enormous satisfaction in building things. I turned drawings on paper into 3 dimensional spaces. As you gain experience your drawings become more creative because your ability to visualize improves. Your design can become more adventurous. Ted Howry built spiral staircases. A long time ago he showed me AutoCAD running on DOS. I used AutoCAD to create 3D models and then wrote Lisp code to create all the pieces and draw them and send them to a database. As long as I stayed +/- 1/4" as we framed, you could cut the all the roof parts before the second floor was even framed. It would work out. Computer code let you create things out of thin air.

When you build second house you actually have to physically build it. Once you write a program to do something when you want to do it again you just press a button. Fascinating. You write a program to save you a half an hour of bookkeeping a day and end up freeing up almost 200 hours a year. You can spend that time body-surfing or fishing in Boston Harbor.

In the technology lab where I worked at BU as a PhD student we built models of vision and tried them out on images, mostly satellite images. We shared a code repository and kept project notes on a wiki. Later when started teaching I used wikis as my core technology. I worked in newly minted innovative school where every student had a laptop. Mostly they looked at shoe ads and surfed BestBuy and chatted. I had to do something. I put my classes online, used a wiki, gave each student an account, left it wide open, everybody could see or even edit over everybody else. I wrote my lesson plans on the wiki and students wrote their papers there. They took notes and collected stuff in their wiki pages as well. What happened was transformative. Sixteen year old kids are actively forming their identity and working at creating and finding their own unique style. For these kids their writing became part of their style. Since their peers could see what they wrote, they started writing for their peers. You could say 'You gotta check out what Norbert wrote on Rousseau' and by the end of the day everybody had.

I became a hacker. Friday's a few of us would write code to extend what Mediawiki or Moodle could do. Recently I have tried to round out my skills, to move from PHP creating pages to more of a model/view/controller framework, exploring HTML5, javascipt and JQuery and web application that can work on mobile devices. I'd like to continue to work with transformative technology, create new models of learning, take advantage of things like the Common Core Standards to empower students and teachers with new tools.

When you write you search for words to express your ideas but then the words you are playing with extend those ideas and you search for new words which beget new ideas .

todo

Need a cool splash and connect to more static content.