Roger Cuddy

Now available in a single video is Lawrence Reed’s Lessons from the Great Depression. Thanks to Nelsio.

So the December 09 unemployment rate held steady at 10% … yeah right. This goes to the issue of how to read and use economic indicators. The rate stayed were it was because a million people were dropped from the count of unemployed due to going passed the magic 27 week number.

It’s very important when reading the BLS Employment Situation report that you understand how it’s laid out and all the values that need analyzed. The report is available at BLS Employment Situation report and I refer you first to table A. Look for the Civilian labor force data at the top of the table and the not in labor force values just below. You will see that 847000 workers were removed from the labor force numbers and added to the not in labor force. Those workers now do not count in the version of the unemployment number that is most used by the media and politicians. I also advise examining table C and all the information it gives on the decline of the percentage of the available population that participates in the workforce.

There are actually 6 different measures of employment that BLS provides. These are know as U-1 through U-6 which each providing a relatively greater inclusion of who is counted as unemployed. To get the more complete number that includes workers who have been unemployed for a longer period of time and those that BLS considers as marginally attached.

using the December 09 numbers the U-3 values are the ones presented by the media and were  10%, the U-6 value however shows 17.3%. Which is approriate for your use is of course dependent on your task but I imagine we can guess why the lower value gets the press time.

On closing, The Bureau of Labor Statistics is one of your most important sites for economic indicators. Learn to use it and explore what is available.

Gross is one of the top money managers in the world and his views are always worth reading but his latest investment outlook is extremely important and timely. Do yourself a favor and read the January 2010 Investment Outlook .

There are two items I always ensure are in my briefcase before I go out the door. My much abused and scarred HP-12C and a Knoppix DVD. Klaus has now released version 6.2 of the best live CD around. Some notable changes and upgrades include:

• LXDE desktop for those low resource situations that still occur surprisingly frequently.
• KDE is now version 4.3.3
• Gnome version 2.28
• Kernel 2.6.31.6
• Xorg 7.4

The CD version has been shrunk a bit to make it easier to remaster your own custom version. The DVD weighs in at 8GB of applications compressed onto a normal dicsc. The only caveat I’ve found so far is make sure you get the 18 November version as there was a keymap imperfection on the first release set. upgrade your Knoppix now http://www.knoppix.com/

This is a follow up to previous post This should be interesting … where I stated the intention of getting WordPress up and running in my SourceForge user web space . Depending on where you are reading this you can see that it worked out pretty nice. I’ll go over what steps were needed. I do assume here that the reader has familiarity with installing WordPress and at least some practice at using SourceForge’s project and user tools. If you don’t have that experience then I strongly recommend that you first practice setting up WordPress locally and also experiment with SourceForge to gain an understanding of what it provides. Both exercises will do you good anyway.

1. You must own at least one project on SourceForge so that you have a database to use.
   1. Strictly speaking WordPress doesn’t need it’s own database and you could just tell it to place it’s tables in an existing db but I like to keep it separate so I created a specific database just for the blog.
2. Download WordPress locally and unzip into a temp work area.
   1. For each SourceForge project there are 3 database user ids: read only, read write and admin. WordPress needs the admin user so it can create it’s tables. Edit wp-config.php and put in your database and user specific information.
   2. Upload all the WordPress files and directories to your htdocs directory ( example: /home/userweb/r/ro/rogercuddy/htdocs is mine).
   3. Create a directory on your persistent userweb space that will be used by the blog to store uploads. Your persistent space will be under  /home/userweb-persistent and a full path example would be /home/userweb-persistent/r/ro/rogercuddy .
   4. You will now need to replace the WordPress uploads ( location <your WP install folder>/wp-content/uploads ) directory with a link to the persistent directory created in previous step. Many GUI SFTP programs do not have the command ‘ln’ but any command line interface should have it. If you are using a GUI based SFTP then also you can check if it allows you to type in a custom command to send to the server.
      1. Remember to remove the uploads folder before trying to create the link
      2. Syntax should be similar to ln /home/usweb-persistent/r/ro/rogercuddy/uploads /home/userweb/r/ro/rogercuddy/htdocs/wp-content/uploads
   5. You should now be ready to browse to your blog /wp-admin/wp-install.php
      1. If anything goes wrong don’t get excited. Just analyze the error and fix the issue. The most likely problem you will run into is making a mistake on your database setup in wp-config.php .
3. Limitations inherent to running on SourceForge because it doesn’t allow outgoing connections.
   1. You will have to install themes and plugins manually by uploading them instead of being able to browse for them in the blog site admin section.
   2. Most plugins will work just fine but plugins that rely on outgoing connections won’t work. This one is a shame since it means Akismet doesn’t work to scan comments for spam.

Even with those limitations it has far fewer limitations than trying to use SF’s hosted apps. With the hosted apps you can’t do much but post (at this time anyway).

That’s it. Happy blogging!

We’re still a bit undecided on whether to use the library website to post items intended only to the dev team. For now dev items will be posted on my SourceForge site and at Poor’s site both.

Poor and I have tried to structure the build process to minimize special requirements on any developer’s machine . So far at least we’ve been able to keep it pretty mild, especially if you only have the developer role. Most developers will already have everything they need installed.

To develop and build

• Text Editor of your choice. Use whichever tool you normally do but DO NOT check IDE specific files into the source repository.
• Subversion (and a GUI if you wish)
• JDK 1.6 SE
• Ant 1.7.1
• Optional – PMD installed for use by Ant, ant task doc

If you will be working on the website then you need to add a little more

• Pushing to the website via the build script requires that your ssh key be registered with sourceforge. We very much do not want any user ids and passwords embedded in the script at any time. It’s just too easy  to forget and check in build.xml with your id / pw now publicly available.
• Pushing from Ant requires you have optional library JSch installed.

That’s it for now anyway. Changes will be posted as new articles so they are easy to catch.

Can you really run a functioning WordPress blog on Source Forge’s user space? We’re going to find out. My first thought about installing was admittedly ‘this is going to hurt!’. Once setup it will be accessible at Rog’s SF Notes

<edit>The install went well. You can read about it at the follow up post <end edit>

Goals:

1. Be able to install themes and plugins.
2. Responsive enough that it drives readers mad waiting on pages to render.
3. Support sitemaps
4. Easy to backup/restore both the database and the file system.
5. Allow multiple contributors

Quite modest but if I can get that much working I’ll be pretty happy. #1 itself rules out using SF’s Hosted Apps as it won’t be possible to use any themes or plugins.

Will post soon on how it all went.

It’s not exactly a secret that I think Gentoo is the perfect balance of customization and still being able to use good package management tools. Gentoo turned 10 this October and I’d just like to wish the team many more to come.

A new page Free Books has been added to the site. It’s accessible through the menu at the top. It is simply a collection of short descriptions of books I think are worth reading and links to obtain the text free from various sites. The first two items added are:

Carl Menger was the founder of what is called the Austrian School of Economics and his Principles of Economics is simply an incredible book. Available in PDF from Mises.org Principles of Economics Plus there is a Study Guide Menger Quote: Money is not an invention of the state. It is not the product of a legislative act. The sanction of political authority is not necessary for its existence.

Frederic Bastiat will show on this list several times but for a first exposure to his biting wit and intellectual edge I recommend Economic Sophisms. Available online at Econlib Economic Sophisms First published in 1845, you will be amazed at how few words would need changed to apply to our current time. Bastiat Quote: The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.