vsftpd is a simple and secure FTP server, I hear. I've used it to set up an FTP server quickly. Rather than fighting with TLS and FTP, I just use SFTP now - it's much simpler.

You'll need to download and install vsftpd and openssh-server at least. Also, I usually use AllowUsers in my /etc/ssh/sshd_config to whitelist  which users are allowed to ssh in like so:

Beer is a vice, so I shouldn't feel particularly proud of drinking it. But I feel a certain kinship to those with vices. Drinking beer isn't pleasant, on first glance. It can be bitter and literally tastes like poison.

Last night I watched some videos from the "Kids React" series, which is a great way to see what people are thinking. Kids are getting their ideas from others and recombining them in their brains just like I am, they're just more up front about it and say it in simpler words.

I just saw a documentary about a sushi maker. You might think I was focussed on the sushi, but what really struck me was some of the ways Japanese culture works, and the universality of dominance with humans. We defer to leaders, time and again. I'm going to reflect on that, but the focus in my mind is not this particular sushi chef. The focus is dominant leaders and their followers.

(I have lots more to say on this topic - even more so than other topics. But I'm going to sleep now and can't finish this :( )

1) There are a lot of crappy startups right now.

2) People are bad at choosing which businesses will take off, but think they are good. Accelerators could easily turn into a big circle jerk, but more insidiously, a place where startups that make the bosses happy get resources. Often innovative startups are frowned upon because new ideas are hard to understand; 

I'm going to save this to read it later. You can read it now if you like :)

http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21590098-being-charge-hard…

This is an amazing paper by EW Dijkstra. Please go and read it ASAP.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

Here's a quotation:

I'm watching Ender's Game right now. Spoiler alert!

The book/movie plays with an interesting moral situation. The Formics come and kill a whole bunch of humans; morally reprehensible. But then from their perspective, killing little mindless ants is like cutting off fingers from the one actual mind at the centre of the Formic fleet. From ours, it's awful.

Then Mazer Rackham killed the one live Formic in the fleet - murder! Reprehensible! At least, reprehensible to the Formics. Of course, in reality the humans killed one mind, and the Formics killed thousands.

I go to the United Church and it's a funny place. It's all about inclusiveness and political correctness in some bizarre combination. I go because it's progressive, not because of its sometimes-strange theology.

So the question is: what would it take to be excommunicated from the (a) United Church?

Of course, if you go to prison or something, you won't need to be excommunicated. So you'd need some way to be such an awful congregant without breaking any laws to prompt the elders or board of the church into actually excommunicating someone?

Here are some useful Drupal scripts! The first is a script that will put your Drupal directory's UNIX file permissions back to a secure and useful state. The second is great if you have a production and a staging website. You often need to clone your production website back to production then change some configuration to make the staging website "development". This is pretty basic; for instance, I sometimes need to disable google analytics as well in this script. The third is basically a listing of the crucial Drupal 7 modules I install in every site I have.