Monthly Archives: May 2011
A tour of my apartment in Mountain View, CA
Thursday was my last final at Cornell for my junior year, and my brothers picked me up to go home. Today, Saturday, I flew into San Fransisco, California and shuttled my way over to Mountain View, where I’ll be living this summer.
My visit home was unfortunately ephemeral, but I still got to see a few of my friends, and I still got to hang out with my bros and family. I’m rather anxious – in both senses of the word – to start working and meeting new people. I imagine it’ll be like the first few weeks of freshmen year, in which everyone is abnormally extroverted but all conversation is limited to the collegiate version of “a/s/l.”
I am the first of my three, fellow Cornellian roommates to arrive. In two words, my apartment is super baller. Below is a quick tour:
Modify WordPress Permalinks with Apache on Ubuntu 10.04
My site runs WordPress on a Linode instance with Ubuntu 10.04 with nginx as a front-end proxy to Apache. (That is, all requests to my machine first hit nginx, which usually serves static files on my Django projects, and then they get re-routed to Apache.)
Today, I wanted to change the link structure on my site so that page resources are more permanent. I wanted to change the permalinks from:
http://sohanjain.com/?p=N
to
http://sohanjain.com/2011/05/modify-wordpress-permalinks-with-apache-on-ubuntu-10-04/
In wp-admin, go to Settings > Permalinks, and choose from the radio buttons. I chose “month and name”. However, when I applied settings and tried to go to a static page like http://sohanjain.com/blog/, I got an HTTP 500 internal server error.
To get permalinks working properly with Apache, you must enable mod_rewrite:
sudo a2enmod mod_rewrite
The command a2enmod just creates symlinks (symbolic links, i.e., ln -s ) between /etc/apache2/mods-available and /etc/apache2/mods-enabled directories.
Finally, add the following to your .htaccess file:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
If you don’t have a .htaccess file, then WordPress can create one for you, given that your root directory has sufficient privileges for WordPress to create files. WordPress will ask to create the file once you update permalinks and it realizes you do not already have a .htaccess file.
Restart apache with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and you should be good to go.
A night of reflection and nostalgia
After chatting with one of my good friends and graduating senior, Emily, I began to reflect on what I’ve actually accomplished so far in life. I made this site primarily to document my progress through life, so that I can look back 50 years from now and say, “Hey, I existed”.
One of my proudest moments to date, trumping assorted academic accolades and myriads of resume-worthy material, was when my band placed 3rd in our high school’s Battle of the Bands my senior year. I’ve been crowd surfing since I was 15, and performing on stage for an audience of cheering friends was such a thrill. Footage below:
