Getting AWStats to show Plone-authenticated users
I’m using AWStats to track usage on a Plone site that’s essentially a portal for collaborative document translation. That means that most users of the site need to login to do anything useful, and I want to see who’s logging in along with the rest of the stats on my site.
For hosting the site, [...]
Automating AWStats configuration for multiple domains
Like most Web sites, this site shares server space with a number of other domains. When I recently undertook to set up AWStats after years of not knowing anything about what kind of traffic my personal sites were getting, I figured it would probably be relatively easy to make it so that anybody else [...]
Understanding economics: International finance, liberalization, etc.
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Ever since Adam Smith in the 18th century extolled the prospects for mutual gain inherent in free trade between nations, economics textbooks have tended to classify economic policies as either "welfare-enhancing" or "welfare-reducing." One implication of this tradition is that a macroeconomic policy ought to be judged on the basis of whether it provides [...]
Gnapsack 0.1.0 released
I have just released Gnapsack, a desktop client for Linux that uses the Backpack API. Check out the site for info, screenshots, etc. This is an open source (GPL) project.
While it only runs on Linux currently, I’m hoping to get someone to help me out with a Windows port. It uses the [...]
Getting started with Darcs
The following is a rudimentary set of instructions for setting up, on a Linux server, a Darcs repository which uses the most basic possible method for collaboration, in which a single administrator manually applies patches1 sent him/her via email (automatically, via the darcs send command issued by the contributor).2 Some notes on producing those [...]
Offline Living
Over the past year or two I’ve become increasingly convinced that one of the keys to personal productivity is to spend as little time as possible connected to the Internet. For some–for example, those who need to be constantly available via an instant messenging client for collaboration with remotely located coworkers–that may not be [...]
Understanding economics: A few basics
About five months ago, I posed myself a few questions, relating to such matters as currency exchange rates, trade deficits, and public debts, in an effort to enhance my understanding of economics. I currently live in Argentina, a country where periodic financial crises have repeatedly thrown the country into disarray and economic depression. [...]
Notes on Graham Greene’s “Getting to Know the General”
Some four or five years after starting to read Graham Greene’s Getting To Know the General, I found the leisure to finish it on a trip to Brazil. Previously, I had brought a copy with me on a trip to Panama (the General of the book’s title is General Omar Torrijos, Panama’s military ruler [...]
Legal threats to the Internet and Open Source
The field of information technology–particularly the rise of the Internet and a related phenomenon, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)–provides an interesting prism through which to view contemporary ideological conflicts in the political and economic realms. Both the Internet and FOSS are powerful testimonies to the fertility of the public domain, at a moment [...]
Reflections on contemporary International Relations
On "The End of History"
In his article "The End of History," written on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama declares an "unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism" and that the "total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism" spell the "end of history." That is, we have arrived [...]