Father’s Day

In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a re-post of a quote from How Green Was My Valley, that I originally posted a few years back:

There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.

LaunchBar 6

I’ve been using LaunchBar on my Mac for quite some time. It hasn’t changed much over the last several years, and, for a while, I don’t think it was very popular, as Mac apps go. But LaunchBar 6 was just released, with a bit of an interface refresh, and it’s getting some attention, including a good review on Cult of Mac, and a lengthy and useful writeup by Shawn Blanc. I just installed it, and paid the $19 upgrade fee for it. That seems pretty reasonable, given that they haven’t done a paid upgrade since 2010. I’d recommend it to any Mac user who likes the idea of being able to quickly launch programs without having to use their mouse or trackpad.

In memoriam: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA

From a good article about the impending end of The Colbert Report:

…the real heart of The Colbert Report had little to do with actual politics — it was far more a critique of modern discourse, where people refuse to agree on the facts. And, more importantly, it shed light on the complete absurdity of the world with enough levity to keep us from going insane.

via In memoriam: Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA | Stanford Daily.

Monet’s Water Lilies at MoMA

I don’t watch NYC-ARTS on channel 13 regularly, but I catch a bit of it here and there. There was a short segment on tonight’s episode about the Monet Water Lilies triptych that is on display at MoMA. I’ve been to MoMA a few times this year, but I don’t remember seeing this, and I really love Monet. (I’ve mostly been heading straight for whatever special exhibits pique my interest, and maybe stopping to look at Starry Night or some Jackson Pollock.)

I have actually been seeking out the Monet stuff at the Met, the last couple of times I’ve been there, so I don’t know why it hasn’t occured to me to seek him out at MoMA. I need to make a point of looking for Monet the next time I go! (Which might be this weekend or next.)

1&1 back to normal?

It appears that 1&1 is back to normal. Everything seems reasonably responsive, both on the front-end and in the admin. There’s been no explanation posted to the Twitter feed or on their status page, so I don’t really know what went wrong, or if it’s really fixed. That’s a little frustrating.

I started looking into the possibility of switching hosts today. Depending on how well 1&1 holds up, I may consider that. I’m paid up through November, so maybe I’ll revisit things in the fall.

1&1 woes

Well, it appears that the reason my site has been really slow for a couple of days is due to a problem at 1&1. They acknowledged the issue on Twitter yesterday:

Hopefully, they can get it resolved soon. Meanwhile, I guess I should take a break from messing with this site, and maybe go outside and get some exercise! (Too bad it’s been raining all week.)

UpdraftPlus Backup and other WordPress stuff

I finally got around to installing a backup plugin. After looking at a few possibilities, I settled on UpdraftPlus for now. The free version does scheduled backups, with e-mail notification, of both the database and the file system. For now, I’m just backing up to the local file system on my web host, but at some point I’ll try sending them to Google Drive or DropBox, both of which are possible with this plugin.

It looks like the free version will do everything I need it to, but if I want to switch over to the premium version, it’s $60, with one year of support and updates. Subsequent years are discounted a bit. Oh, and I should really try doing a restore, from my production site to my test site, just to make sure those backup files really work. (I have enough IT experience to know that I can’t assume that those files aren’t just filled with zeroes…)

One another front, I recently turned on the site monitoring feature in Jetpack. Based on the reports I’ve gotten over the last couple of days, my site apparently goes down more than I realized. I’ll have to keep an eye on it for a while, and see if this is an anomaly, or if 1&1 is just not as reliable as I thought. Or it may just be that my home page sometimes takes more than ten seconds to load, which is a separate problem. (Though I’d think the Jetpack monitor should be getting the static cached version of the page, which should load pretty quickly.)

And speaking of slow load times, the WordPress admin on my site is still working pretty slowly most of the time. I know I can’t fix that with caching, and I’m not sure what I can really do about it. I guess I can deactivate some plugins and see if there’s a particular plugin causing the slowdown. Using SSL might be contributing to the problem, but I don’t want to turn that off. So I guess I’ll do some research and some experimenting over the next few days. Fun!

AX 2012 list pages: missing the obvious

I spent an embarrassingly long time today trying to solve a problem in AX that was pretty simple, once someone pointed out the obvious answer to me. Just in case anyone else is looking for the same thing (and for the amusement value), I thought I’d write it up.

A list page in AX 2012 always has a drop-down in the upper right, allowing you to filter the grid by one of a number of fields. I was asked to add a new field to the list of available fields. This didn’t seem like it should be a big deal. Now, I haven’t done much work specifically with list pages. But they’re still basically AX forms, and I’ve done plenty with “regular” AX forms. Going into the list page form definition, I couldn’t find anything that looked like a control for that drop-down. It just seemed to appear magically. I found a blog post explaining how an individual user can add a new field to the drop-down, but nothing on how a programmer could add a field to it for all users.

Until someone pointed out to me that the list of fields in the drop-down corresponded exactly to the list of fields in the grid below it. So the drop-down is basically just a way to filter on any individual field in the grid. So the answer, of course, was just to add the field to the grid.

Oh, and there’s one other oddball thing about list pages that I figured out a few weeks ago, after a similarly long amount of time banging my head against the wall. List pages can be used by both EP (Enterprise Portal) and via the regular AX client. So if you need to, for instance, override the “clicked()” method on a button on a list page, you need to change the display target from “auto” to “client” before AX will let you do that. (See this blog post for details.) I guess this isn’t a good idea if you’re using EP, but we’re not, so, in my case, it’s OK.

WP Super Cache

So after seeing 10-20 second load times on my home page (via http://tools.pingdom.com), I decided that I really needed to install a caching plugin. So I went with WP Super Cache, as that seems to be well-supported and stable. So far, it’s working fine, and page load times are down to 2-3 seconds, which is much better.

Somehow, the idea of using a plugin to generate and serve static pages seems like a step backwards to me, but I guess if it’s well-written and intelligent about regenerating the static pages when needed, then it’s fine. I know I can’t expect WordPress to run at top-speed in a shared hosting environment, but I was surprised to see how slowly stuff was running.

Oh, and I have seen a slowdown in the speed of the admin pages since I switched them to SSL. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing I can do about that, short of moving to a faster environment or turning off SSL.

a long walk

walk-20140608

I managed to go out for an hour-long walk today, which is probably the longest walk I’ve done this year. I did a couple of walks yesterday too, but not one long one.

I’ve managed to get into the habit of going for a 15 or 20-minute walk almost every day, after lunch, in the parking lot at work. (It’s a big lot.)

Between that, and some longer walks on the weekends, I think I’m doing OK on maintaining a reasonable level of physical activity. Still quite a way from my doctor’s recommendation that I walk for a full hour every day, but not bad, right?