If you need to run multiple-separate domains and one base master Wordpress template theme with multiple children themes (like what I needed was a product site, 2 blogs, a community and a corporate site) without the need for wildcard subdomains or subfolders per blog/site then running a single instance of code and database on Rackspace Cloud Sites is possible using their domain alias feature.

I recommend you follow these steps to setup Wordpress MU:

1. Download and install WPMU Multi-Site Plugin
2. Setup your different domains, sites blogs locally with the help of this plugin on your dev installation and get everything working the way you want like content, themes, plugins etc.
3. Deploy to the core or ‘first’ site as you would normally do to the Rackspace Cloud Site
4. Test to see if this core site is working

Then follow these steps to setup the other Rackspace Cloud Sites & DNS:

1. Setup the actual core domain in DNS to point to the matching Cloud Site IP that should have an appropriate database for the instance
2. Deploy the local developer instance files and database to this core domain
3. Setup domain aliases with the help of this Help guide at Rackspace Cloud support
4. Test that wordpress mu is serving the core and new alias domains that you have set up in the multi-site configuration

It’s that easy and I was pleasantly surprised when it was working so easily in addition to not having to get a server or other dedicated vm/box for running WPMU in this way!

I noticed that it would take hours, sometime never finishing if I just try to delete the folder through Finder on the Time Machine drive.

Instead, I found a command line solution.. but be warned don’t do this unless you know what you are doing!

Steps:

1. Open Terminal
2. Run

   sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/ -d

   - this simply disables ACL on this volume

3. Run

   sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -ctime +1 -exec rm -rfv {} ;

Make History with the National September 11th Memorial & Museum

I had some trouble getting things working but found an excellent article that should help you .NET developers looking to use Rackspace Cloud Sites as solution to host your ASP.NET web sites, web apps or WCF services.

Since cloud hosting has different conditions for security and reliability, there are some other considerations that you should check out at the Help support area of the Rackspace Cloud:

• Overview of modified Medium Trust
• How do I add impersonation to my ASP.NET site?

Cheers to the folks at Rackspace Cloud! PS When can I expect Cloud Servers to run Windows in a vm ?

Must have Live Packs (Free or cheap!)

• Ableton Live Packs Downloads
• The Covert Operators
• Free Ableton Live Pack by Composer Dennis DeSantis
• Five Dollar Bass, Atmosphere Expansion Packs for Ableton Live
  If you’re finding massive soundware libraries to be a little overwhelming — on your hard drive, your brain, and your wallet — you’ll like the idea of the new expansion packs from Tone Research. The first two are 13MB downloads priced at US$4.99 each. They work with Live 5 and get bonus features from Live 6. I’m still waiting on my copies, so I can’t yet comment on sound quality yet, but I’ll report back once I’ve thrown these into some songs.
• Ableton » Synthtopia
• PureMagnetik
  Great Deal.. pay a $5/monthly subscription and get a great Live Pack every month

Learning Resources

• AskVideo.com
• Ableton Live 6 101
• Ableton Live 6 102

VST / Plugins

• Native Instruments Komplete 5
  KOMPLETE 5 is the high-end collection of 11 ground-breaking synthesizers, samplers, emulations, and a virtual guitar studio. Perfect for both studio and stage - this is the industry-standard bundle for serious musicians, producers and sound designers. KOMPLETE 5’s instruments can be heard on platinum-selling records and in underground clubs alike, all over the world.
• Major Malfunction
  A sweet plugin for mangling, glitch, distortion and and much more in a easy to use interface.
• Sounds Online
  A top site for massive collection of samples from many sample studios with most of the tools available via VST or other host plugin technologies and sometimes also raw samples .
• KVR Audio
  I check this site to stay up to date on the latest trends in Audio Plugin technology.
• Dblue Glitch Freeware Plug-in: Free .wav Deconstruction

Cool Hardware

• Sonica Labs
  I recently purchased the high end HUSH-QR Quadcore after doing research on all the top tiered custom DAW vendors around the world. Sonica Labs’s price point for a QuadCore Xeon loaded with memory, disk and expansion abilities has been a great replacement for my old DAWs. Talk with ‘Guy’ at the company to find out more, I was sold even before I asked them a thousand questions which they gladly answered to satisfy my curiousities about investing in their products.
• MonoTouchLive
  A brilliant tool to allow you to control your DAW with your TabletPC’s remote touch MIDI interface application!

To be honest with you, I don’t think I have time to list every tool that I use on this post since there are so many but I’ll try to do a follow up post or possibly create a dedicated page so you can come back to it for updates. Enjoy.

For those of us wishing the iPhone included GPS receiver built in, this is a short term solution that’s a hack at best but even if it is ‘off’ by 100 yards, I can at least avoid the time wastage that occurs with putting a starting address into the driving directions feature of the iPhone Google Maps application!

Find out more from Gizmodo.

Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

If you find yourself repeatedly running the same user flow tests on a website or web application, try out this extension today!

In the recent past I’ve posted about Google Maps mashups with heat map technology but there are many powerful tools out there (some web based, others not) that intrinsically yield powerful trends that may not even have been discoverable with simple charts, graphs and basic visualization tools of the past era.

An article in SmashingMagazine.com has catalogued and captured screenshots of the most amazing and beautiful data visualization models out there including everything from 3d heatmapping/contouring, content clouding, to mind mapping.

One of my favorites is a 3d visual population hill/spike density map from Time Magazine:

If you are in the business of analysis of any kind, you should definitely read this article and check out the screen shots. You might find the technologies that these companies are creating useful to your endeavor.

Personally I find that a certain amount of ego is complementary to your professional reputation. One of the first answers in the interview suggests that if your ego has been boosted by success in the past, if one is not careful, that success creates the illusion that it was them alone that achieved that success. And the more publicly visible they are, the more they believe the headlines that attribute their success to just them.

I firmly believe that if you work hard on something and achieved success, your reputation will be increased naturally because word will get around eventually. So keeping modest and being humble of one’s success is not a bad thing at all. The author suggests that a potential combination of ambition, ideas, and healthy ego drives one’s success. So as with many things in life, finding the right balance is something one may just have to learn by making mistakes.

Several obvious tell tale signs of breaking the barrier to becoming an egomaniac that I found interesting in the article:

• Seeing someone you work with as a rival and think about how to “beat” them.
• Taking disagreement with your ideas personally.
• Compulsively following a competitors “lead” so they’re not doing anything you’re not.
• Criticizing competitor’s strategies and prematurely discard them as irrelevant.
• Disagreeing with someone’s point just because they’re the one who said it.
• Feeling worse about where you are when you see what others achieve.
• Seeking acceptance: desiring respect and recognition interferes with success.

So now you’re probably wondering what might be considered a “healthy ego”? The following interview excerpt might enlighten you:

Genuine confidence; confidence that doesn’t have to exert itself to “prove” it’s confidence. Healthy ego keeps us from thinking too highly or too little of ourselves and reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be. But to understand what healthy ego is, you have to understand the relationship between ego and humility. For most people, tradition holds that the opposite of excessive ego is humility, when in fact having too little ego is just as dangerous and unproductive as having too much.

There are also those people who say that extremely confident and ambitious people can also show signs of being an egomaniac. I can’t argue with this idea either, but if you can balance the image of the ego with your humility and remembering how you achieved success in your life (if you started with humble beginnings), then you might just live a more harmonious life.

In addition to the recent price drop from Apple for the 8GB iPhone model, an open letter from Steve Jobs gives any first-to-buy iPhone owners a $100 offer towards other Apple gear.

Are you loving apple yet?