One of the things I didn’t realize when I switched from Autica to Media Temple Dedicated Virtual (dv) is that Plesk, unlike CPanel, doesn’t support creating multiple FTP accounts. Of course, this is by far would not sway my switching to Media Temple in the least bit as I hardly have the need for multiple FTP accounts. In any case, this is what I had to do. Read the rest of this entry »
I recently had to pull the latest three posts on a WordPress page and came across this great blog, Clearskys.net, that had the answer I was looking for. Figuring there as probably other great WordPress tips and tricks, I decided to browse around the site to see if there was other information that might be useful in the future and I definitely wasn’t disappointed at all.
Barry has a number of great posts on his blog that might be helpful for the WordPress developer such as:
So if you get a chance, check out Barry’s blog at http://blog.clearskys.net and be sure to bookmark it for future reference, I did.
So while making some changes to my office’s public website, I ran into an issue in which i needed to display the latest three posts from the site. Because we are using a static home page, I can’t just go into Settings > Reading and set the “Blog pages show at most” to 3. I also could have edited my functions.php file to include a specific sidebar widget for the theme and add in a hook to call that sidebar widget on the home page’s custom page template, but why add more clutter to the back end when users might mistake the home page sidebar widget for the actual site sidebar widget when they’re making changes? And no one is ever really going to need to remove this functionality from the home page anyways, so it would be silly to add that as an option. Read the rest of this entry »
After waiting forever for the cool features such as copy-and-paste, Spotlight Search, and so much more, it’s finally here. Apple has released software version 3.0 for the iPhones which open up some cool new features. You can read “How To Use The Best 40 Features of iPhone 3.0” by ismashphone.com to get an idea of all the new features and how to use them. Definitely worth upgrading. Unfortunately not everything is supported by AT&T here in the US such as teethering where you can connect you iPhone to your laptop and access the web, but there are still a lot of features we can take advantage of in the meantime. I’m updating my iPhone 3G as we speak.
Fed up with the constant crashing of my virtual private server (VPS) with Autica (which is or was owned by MidPhase), I’ve made the leap and switched web hosts to none other than Media Temple. I’ve been quite happy over the few years I’ve been with Autica, but as of late, their tech support has been lacking. Whereas before there was a lot of patient, one-on-one, quick tech support when I needed it, it has slowly diminished from “here, let me help you with that” to “this is how you do it” or “sorry, can’t help you there”. The final nail in the coffin was when my VPS slowly diminished from being a fast system to Apache crashing 5-7 times a day. I submitted a trouble ticket asking for help in troubleshooting why Apache kept crashing. One of the senior techs was kind enough to up some resources and that seemed to work for a few hours. The next step, according to the techs, was maybe to upgrade to dedicated server hosting. Thanks, but no thanks. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve had the Bui4Ever.com domain name since February 1, 2003, a mere 7 some odd years ago. I selected that domain name because I couldn’t think of anything else cool and obviously wasn’t smart enough to register richardbui.com at that time when it was available. To my dismay, richardbui.com was registered a year later by a family clothing store in Texas and as far as I can tell, no one there is named Richard Bui.
Why the change now? I’ve never cared that much for Bui4Ever and plus it sounds pompous, as if your name as a website URL is much better, I think RichBui.com is more descriptive. AndreaandRichard.com is our personal website for me and Andrea about our life and our cats in general and BuiPhotography.com is our business website, and RichBui.com will continue to be what Bui4Ever.com was, a site for me to ramble about everything else in between. Also be on the lookout for a new site design coming real soon.
I’m going to continue to keep Bui4Ever.com and for those who continue to type in the old URL, it will all redirect to richbui.com. Enjoy.
Andrea and I watched the new Star Trek movie directed by J.J. Abrams and it was great. I have to say that the last three Trek movies (Star Trek: Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, and Star Trek: Nemesis) were quite a disappointment despite Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) was the longest running Trek series and me actually liking the series and cast. So how does the new movie compare? Read the rest of this entry »
Susan Boyle [YouTube link]. Wow.
Hey look, I’m in SFGate.com in an article by Asian Pop columnist Jeff Yang.
Disclosure: I work for the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. The views presented below are of my own and not of the office or anyone else for that matter.
Furloughs have now hit me also. The City and County of San Francisco has been facing a $575.6 million deficit in its budget which is now down to ~$400 million. The situation is so bad now that San Francisco can’t even afford to pay all their employee’s salaries to the end of this fiscal year. Given the dire situation, if things continue the way they are, twelve people in our office alone will face immediate lay-offs so that we will have enough money to continue to function and pay our bills. No one is even sure of what will happen next fiscal year and if the lay-offs will continue.
Public Defender, Jeff Adachi, along with Chief Attorney Teresa Caffese are tirelessly (Jeff is even staffing the new Community Justice Center himself) in discussion with the Mayor’s Office and The Board of Supervisors on why our department should be exempted from the mandatory 25% budget reduction ordered by Mayor Gavin Newsom. The argument is that issuing lay-offs in the Public Defender’s office is not a cost savings issue because the cases that our office would have taken on would be farmed out to private attorneys who would bill the City & County at a much higher rate than what it cost to have a Public Defender on the case. Here is another side of the argument: hiring private attorneys would mean cases could potentially be solved quicker and private attorneys would be more willing to take plea deals resulting in the reduced cost of not having to go to trial. The problem with this argument is that according to a 2007 study by Harvard economists (read the NY Times article) is that “lawyers paid by the hour are less qualified and let cases drag on and achieve worst results for their clients, including sentences that average eight months longer.” To me, after reading that article, I don’t understand how the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors believe that this would result in any significant cost savings. Longer sentences means increased costs to pay for more guards, food, medical expenses, and so forth for that additional prisoner. I’m not saying that we should release or reduce prison terms, if a person has committed a crime, they should serve a prison term that is deemed fair and not excessive. But that’s a whole different discussion for a different time.
So how does this budget crisis affect me personally and our office? We were offered a choice and chance to save twelve of our colleagues: take a voluntary 5-day furlough for the months of April, May, and June which amounts to a 10% pay reduction. This will help twelve of our friends/colleagues survive at least until the next fiscal year. The only catch, to save all twelve, the entire office has to opt-in. If only half the office opts-in, then six people will be spared. I gladly do my part. A reduction in pay is better than no pay any day of the week and any little thing we can do to help each other out goes a long way. I liked how our senior Senior Felony Attorney, Stephen Rosen, put it (I don’t remember the word-for-word quote), “I may not know all of you personally, but you all chose to be Public Defenders giving up more lucrative careers to be here and to help out our clients. That is enough for me.”
