DIY: maintaining a local webserver (technical difficulties)

Computer woes, image found at Negative99

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My machine is a dual boot system with Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu to test web development before being released to a public server for further testing.  All has gone well for several years, except for disagreements between the clocks on each operating system (OS).

The best arrangement for a local web server is to mimic the setup on the hosting service or machine. Servers facing the internet that are Linux-based often use CentOS, a derivative of Red Hat which requires a paid subscription. Since Ubuntu has been developed to be user-friendly, I opted to use that. But my versions of Apache and MySQL agree with my host Bluehost. My version of PHP is in keeping with Drupal 7.

It's worth noting here that hosting companies often operate on older, known reliable, versions of software. Introducing new versions requires a lot of testing and there may be some users who can't upgrade for one reason or another.

All was going well until I clicked on the button to update Ubuntu to 14.04. Now I have a Linux OS that runs the next version of Apache, which is 2.4, a very different animal. (Far as I can tell, this new version of Ubuntu will only run Apache 2.4.) PHP is not currently working (still have to check to see if it's not turned on or not installed). Needless to say, my test sites no longer work.

So the questions at hand are--do I learn Apache 2.4, role back to Ubuntu 12.04, or migrate to CentOS? If I choose a rollback or migration, as with any major change in an OS, the current file system must be combed through to see what needs to be set aside and saved and to produce a list of what applications to re-install or substitute.

Still thinking it over.

-- Marge

Heads up, folks: the Glass Brain

It appears our brains are about to be hacked, which is not necessarily a bad thing...

"Second Life founder creates Glass Brain, a system that lets you explore your brain in real-time" is a headline from Neurogadget.  According to the article,

[Philip] Rosedale made his wife a cap studded with electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes that measure differences in electric potential in order to record brain activity, while he wore a virtual reality headset to explore her brain in 3D, as flashes of light displayed her brain activity from the EEG.

For an idea of what he saw, here's a Glass Brain flythrough:

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This visualization was done in Unity3D; it allows the user to fly around and through the brain with a game pad while seeing real-time live brain activity from someone wearing an EEG cap. Rosedale collaborated with the Neuroscape Lab in San Francisco to produce the Glass Brain.  However, his main project at present is High Fidelity, which is:

...building a new virtual world enabling rich avatar interactions driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users.

Surf on over to the page to see what he means by "contributed by end-users." You're invited by Rosedale and his team to sign up for alpha and will be notified when it's available.

A related article found at Neurogadget is Brain-Machine-Brain Interface (BMBI).

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Miguel Nicolelis, monkey brain-machine brain (BMBI)

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Credit goes to Wagner James Au at New World Notes for his introductory post on the Glass Brain topic (Note: the site is currently offline, as of 11:50 AM AKDT).

More on the topic of brain-computer interfacing Wednesday.

 -- Marge