Lee.org

Credit where credit is due.
Here are all the Plugins I’m running as of 6-6-08 on this WordPress 2.5.1 install.

1. Admin Drop Down Menu (v. 2.1 ) by Ozh.
2. Brian’s Latest Comments (v. 1.5.10 ) by Brian Meidell.
3. DoFollow (v. 4.0 ) by Kimmo Suominen.
4. Exec-PHP (v. 4.7 ) by Sören Weber.
5. Flexible upload (v. 1.13 ) by Antoine Choppin.
6. FLV Embed (v. 1.1 ) by Yaosan Yeo.
7. Google XML Sitemaps (v. 3.1 ) by Arne Brachhold.
8. Permalink Redirect (v. 0.8.4 ) by Scott Yang.
9. Plugins list (v. 0.2 ) by Davide Benini.
10. Recent Posts (v. 1.05 ) by Nick Momrik.
11. Related Posts (v. 2.02 ) by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
12. RSS Footer (v. 0.7.5 ) by Joost de Valk.
13. Search Everything (v. 4.5 ) by Dan Cameron.
14. Smart Archives (v. 1.9.2 ) by Justin Blanton.
15. Spam Karma 2 (v. 2.3 rc3 ) by dr Dave.
16. Subscribe To Comments (v. 2.1.2 ) by Mark Jaquith.
17. WordPress.com Stats (v. 1.2.1 ) by Andy Skelton.
18. WordPress Database Backup (v. 2.1.5 ) by Austin Matzko.
19. WP-PageNavi (v. 2.30 ) by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
20. WP lightbox JS (v. 0.8 ) by Safirul Alredha.
21. WP Super Cache (v. 0.6.4 ) by Donncha O Caoimh.

Some fliers made it to the front step of the building. They remind me that I live in San Freaky Cisco.

From the website…

Rent control has been a road block for Landowners, but it does not stop them from taking advantage of renters. For example:

– 2 bedroom apartments being advertised as 4 bedrooms
(calling the living room and dining room bedrooms),
charging twice the value of the apartment to maximize profits.
So, this guy didn’t actually notice he was moving into a tiny city apartment?

– realtors bribing senior tenants to move out so they
can jack up the rent to “market value.”
Hmm, good idea

– renters fixing their apartments themselves instead of calling
the Landowners afraid inspections will force them out.
So this guy would rather continue to live in a place that -should- be condemned rather than use the existing laws and force the landlord to make repairs? Ok… umm…

I like that the website has a (insane) poison pill statement

The FBI in the Bay Area with help from the police have been known in the past to spread disinformation to prevent popular movements from interfering with business as usual, (COINTELPRO era and beyond). DO NOT TRUST any rent strike statement you see that is racist, authoritarian, anti immigrant, sexist, factional, or contradicts anything you read in this statement. With the economy in the state that it’s in today a rent strike could very well scare many wealthy Landowners and realty companies (look up COINTELPRO).

Removing Landowners’ control over properties they don’t live on would be real property reform. They definitely shouldn’t control or profit from land they don’t need (use your imagination). Striking rent could be the beginning of this process. Our ability to organize our community will determine how successful striking rent will be.

I went to his recommended website and found this list of how terrible CitiApartments/Skyline is. From that site:

* Showing up at tenant’s doors late at night with a couple of big guys, for “inspections”
The law says they have to be “announced” and appear at a “reasonable time”. Dude, just tell them to come back tommorrow!

* Snooping around tenants’ apartments on false pretenses like inspections, and then looking for things they can use against tenants
What illegal activities were you hiding?

* Telling tenants “we can do this the easy way, or the hard way”
So you did something that caused the building to be condemned, got caught and the landlord asked you to leave. It was time to quit yesterday. Why didn’t you just leave?

* setting up tables in the lobby with a photo copier and demanding ID from tenants
Huh?

* putting notices up saying tenants aren’t allowed in the building
Wha?

* refusing to repair elevators in buildings full of seniors
If the elevator is in the lease, make them fix it. If not…

* telling tenants they will call the FBI, homeland security, or immigration on them
Ok, what did you do? Really?

* (in at least one case) showing up at a tenants’ door wearing fatigues and a firearm
The landlord has a license to carry in your San Francisco neighborhood? Man, you live in a shitty neighborhood. You should really move!

* pretending they didn’t receive rent and then issuing evictions for lack of payment of rent
You didn’t pay by check and you didn’t get a receipt. Ok.

* issuing evictions for roommates “in violation of lease” when roommates are legal tenants
Are they? What -exactly- does your lease say? Your friends can’t crash on your couch forever, really.

* refusing to pay interest on security deposits
Dude, it’s like 1% interest. $20/year or something. Just let it go.

* telling immigrants or people of color that their “money isn’t good here”
There are serious laws about that. If you can prove those statements, you’re golden.

* videotaping tenants as they walk out of their doors
That sounds like a good thing, since even the landlord, who is packing, got mugged with your rent money.

* letting bedbug epidimics run unabated
Umm…. get a new bed? Bedbugs are hard to get rid of, really. Sorry.

* doing construction on buildings in such an irritating way that tenants are forced to leave
Yes, you’re right, they should use hammer muffs.

* demanding meetings with tenants at the church and market office
Those Bitches!

* trying to impose draconian house rules on tenants
Which one? “Turn off your faucet before you go out of town” or “It’s 11 o’clock, turn down that crazy rap music!”

* trying to require that tenants tell them when they’re leaving town
Huh?

* issuing evictions when tenants leave town for the weekend
Evictions take weeks. And why are you getting evicted? Oh yeah, you left the faucet on for 3 months while you were out of town.

* issuing evictions for messy apartments
Dude, if it smells that bad, you really should clean it up. And yes, you can get evicted for that.

* requiring tenants to hand deliver their checks
The lease has the landlord’s address at the top of it. On the 26th of every month, write and mail a check. Is it that hard? Apparently. That’s why I advocate building in late-fees to leases so when people like you write your rent check late every freaking month, the landlord says, “No problem. If received after the 5th of the month, you owe an extra $20. Pay or get out.”

* failing to fix the heat
San Francisco law is quite clear about how much heat an apartment should get. If it’s substandard, lodge a complaint. But if you want a sauna, move to Iceland. They have lots of those there.

* claiming tenants are “nuisances” and then offering them market rate rooms in other buildings
Well, with your crazy parties and running the faucet for months at a time and that smell, that smell! You should move further away. Or save some money buy your own place so you can do all those things in your own house.

Here’s the new chant for our picket line:

Free Housing! No Rent!

Free Rent! No Housing!

450: Number of people that voted at the 25th and Valencia polling place for the June 3rd election
1: Of those, how many that were registered Libertarians

Last night at about 7:45pm Charlotte and I walked in to the voting place at the Synergy School on Valencia. When I was signing in, I stated my political party confidently, “I’m the Libertarian”. The lady giving out paper ballots responded with surprise, “You’re the first one today!”

We ended up staying until the polls closed. I watched and was the last Libertarian as well.

I run several Mediawiki wikis and WordPress blogs on my Dreamhost shared hosting. I continue to work on improving performance on my wikis.

Here are some performance hints for the Mediawiki LocalSettings.php file I am running right now:

## Compress output if the browser supports it
# I commented this out in favor of wgUseGzip below. I -think- it offers better
# performance. LCS 5-6-08
# if( !ini_get( ‘zlib.output_compression’ ) ) @ob_start( ‘ob_gzhandler’ );

# Enable the basic file cache for static pages for non-logged-in visitors
$wgUseFileCache = true;
$wgFileCacheDirectory = “/home/.author/leedh/lee.org/[my temp folder]”;
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

# I set wgUseGzip to be true and commented out the bit about ob_gzhandler
# above. I -think- this makes for better performance. LCS 5-6-08
$wgUseGzip = true;

$wgEnableSidebarCache = true;

#default is 1, changing to a higher number will be a little bit
# nicer to the database
$wgHitcounterUpdateFreq = 10;

$wgUseETag = true;

I also run my own PHP executable on Dreamhost and PHP_Fast_CGI. I didn’t take the time to install my own PHP. This is a bit of a hack but it works fine. I control the php.ini file… read below. The part I like the most is that I don’t have to manually upgrade PHP every so-often. Dreamhost will do it automagically. Here is an excurpt from the .htaccess file of the root of my website that tells all the PHP programs on my site to use my PHP and PHP_Fast_CGI.

# This is to run my own PHP and PHP_Fast_CGI. Since this is in the root
# of my web site, the whole website will run this way.
# note that I modified php5-wrapper.fcgi to run my own copy of PHP
AddHandler fastcgi-script fcg fcgi fpl
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi

The contents of the php5-wrapper.fcgi file in the root of my account is:

#!/bin/sh

# Run PHP with 2 persistant processes
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=2

# Run PHP
#exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi

# Run my own PHP with increased limits
exec /home/.author/leedh/lee.org/cgi-bin/php.cgi

The php.cgi file in the cgi-bin directory is the PHP executable fetched from where it normally lives on the Dreamhost server at /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi. Once a month I run this script to make sure I have the latest PHP. This script also fetches the php.ini and modifies it so I can upload files using PHP up to 100 MB instead of the 7 MB limit.

#!/bin/sh

# This script copies over the latest php5 to my folder so I can run PHP locally.
# running locally lets me use my own php.ini (in the same directory as php.cgi)
# So then I can set the max post size and max filesize to larger than 7 megabyte
s!!
# Hurray!

CGIFILE=”$HOME/lee.org/cgi-bin/php.cgi”
INIFILE=”$HOME/lee.org/cgi-bin/php.ini”
rsync -a /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi “$CGIFILE”
# REMOVE THE FOLLOWING LINE TO CREATE THE UPDATE-ONLY SCRIPT:
cp /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini “$INIFILE”

perl -p -i -e ‘
s/.*post_max_size.*/post_max_size = 100M/;
s/.*upload_max_filesize.*/upload_max_filesize = 100M/;
‘ “$INIFILE”

Enjoy.

My friend Free points out:

…Unlike Massachusetts, California does not have a law prohibiting marriage in the state if your home state would not recognize the marriage. Thus, allowing same-sex marriage in California will open same-sex marriage up to a lot more people than the Massachusetts change did.

…In addition, any same-sex couple from outside of California that gets married in California may find themselves unable to get a divorce. The reason is that divorces are generally governed by the law of your state of domicile. Thus, even if a Maryland couple gets married in California, they could get a divorce only in Maryland. Since Maryland would not recognize the marriage, it would not issue a divorce. Thus, the couple would truly be married for life, unless one or the other of them moved to Massachusetts, California, or another state or foreign jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriages.

One comment on her blog mentions

… Strange that in legalizing same-sex marriage, they’re indirectly promoting the sanctity of marriage (married por vida). Wonder what that will do to the arguments that same-sex marriage diminishes the sanctity of marriage. :)

Ha!

When I switched my permalinks from http://lee.org/blog/archives/… to http://lee.org/blog/… I had several links in my blog with the old “archives” links. Thankfully, the Permalink Redirect plugin redirects hits to those pages with “303” errors. But I still needed to change the 30 or so posts with those old links. Search and Replace WordPress Plugin to the rescue. Of course I backed up my database first but it worked peachy keen, changing links en-mass. Here’s the search-replace strings I used. Doing it this way kept some direct links I had to the “archives” folder intact.

href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2008 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2008
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2007 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2007
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2006 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2006
href="http://lee.org/blog/archives/2005 --> href="http://lee.org/blog/2005

etc…

This show was quite a lot of fun. The piece I found most fun was a piece involving real dancers. A dancer was moving around, dancing this repeating pattern and I saw a placard around her neck that read something like “1, 1 2, 1 2 3”. On the wall there was a sign that read “Put signs on the dancers if you can” There were signs like “Take a break”, “Double time”, “Slow Motion”. I had trouble getting the sign on the moving dancer until Charlotte noticed the pattern. She pointed out when the piece was going to end and I got to put my sign around the dancer’s neck. Groovy.

It was at the Climate Theater.

Nice. (via)

Taylor Square is a new public artwork created by Paul Ramirez Jonas and installed in front of the renovated Engine 8, Ladder 4 fire station in northwest Cambridge, at the intersection of Huron Avenue, Sherman Street, and Garden Street. Taylor Square is the smallest public park in Cambridge, measuring only 57 square feet, and has locked gates. It is a communal space through the distribution of 5,000 artist-designed keys and the invitation to the public to duplicate them endlessly.

Each key, embossed with the phrases “Taylor Square” and “Copy Me”, were mailed to Cambridge households along with the artist’s words, “Here is your key. It is one of 5,000 keys that opens Taylor Square, Cambridge’s newest park. The park and the keys are a work of public art that I made for you. The park has barely enough room for a bench and a flagpole; please accept this key as its monument. Add it to your key chain along with the keys that open your home, vehicle or workplace. You now have a key to a space that has always been yours. Copy it and give it away to neighbors, friends and visitors. Your sharing will keep the park truly open.”

Further distribution of the keys and, thus, the sustained life of the park is the task of the public. In the artist’s words, “Taylor Square belongs to the public. It is closed, yet simultaneously open, re-emphasizing that the ownership of public space resides in the public itself.” The keys for Open are a tangible symbol of this relationship between public space and the public.

Paul Ramirez Jonas’s work has included museum and gallery exhibitions and public art projects throughout the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Studio Program in Sweden, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the International Studio Program in Sweden, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others. Ramirez Jonas lives and works in New York. For more information, visit: www.automat.com.

I was wondering today, “What exactly is the purpose of the International Space Station and all those Space Shuttle trips for upkeep? Aren’t those flights really really really expensive?”

A pretty convincing answer comes from Maciej Ceg?owski. In short: government space-cheese. They could be doing potentially useful things, but instead “…the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio.” I want my ten billion dollars back.

This is a really good article. Read A Rocket to Nowhere.

A Victorian trans-Atlantic viewing tunnel revitalized for the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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The ends of the telectroscope had been sealed off for more than a century, forgotten… almost.

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Find out more about the Telectroscope here and here. I found out about the Telectroscope when looking over my blog logs. A Metafilter article talked about both it and my Alameda-Weehawken article.