Site Upgrade

This site went live in its present form (with Wiki, Forum and Blog) in January 2007 with Mediawiki 1.8.2, SMF 1.1.1, and Blogger, while in February 2007 I switched from Blogger to WordPress 2.1. I had made extensive (and in several cases uncommented) modifications to all programs, so all this time I had avoided upgrading the software because I expected I would have a hard time transfering my modifications to the upgrades (it would involve a three-way comparison among the old versions, the modified versions and the new versions). Now however I decided to tackle it and thanks to the help of WinMerge, a program that compares directories and files, I was able to do it without much trouble. It took some time (something like two days altogether), but I did not face any insurmountable problems, and now the site runs on the latest version of all software, MediaWiki 1.11.0, SMF 1.1.4 and WordPress 2.3.1. So now I will not be so worried about upgrading any more, and I will be able to do it when new versions become available 🙂 .
 
Update January 11, 2008

Today I upgraded WordPress to 2.3.2, which was an urgent security release over 2.3.1. It proved rather easy now that I have figured out the right way of going about it.

Guest Post at Tommaso Dorigo’s Blog: Extrinsic Relativity

Tommaso Dorigo is a research scientist at the National Institute of Nuclear Research of Italy, who works at the University of Padova and maintains a prominent blog in English. He is open minded enough to advocate that

doing science does not necessarily require a PhD and a desk in a University office, and that ideas and theories are not crackproof or crackpotty, but just right or wrong .

(In this connection, he had also published in his blog a great story titled Cracked Pots which is well worth reading.)

So Tommaso started a series of guest posts at his blog, some from mainstream scientists, some from “alternative theorists” with high academic credentials, and some from “alternative theorists” with no academic credentials, aka “crackpots” (I belong to the third group). He graciously accepted my submission, entitled Extrinsic Relativity, which he posted on November 16, and you can see it in the link above. I have also copied it to a page of the Wiki: Guest Post at Tommaso Dorigo’s Blog: Extrinsic Relativity.