about having kids

seen at another blog, somewhat my view:

"I will most likely never have kids. I think out of all the other factors edumundo mentioned, kids by far are the largest limiter of options. You can't divorce a kid (at least not without being a terrible person), you can't pay off a kid, and finally, unlike in previous points in history, kids are a depreciating asset.

There is a reason that as a society develops the birthrate drops. When you are a poor farmer in India, having multiple kids is liking getting cheap labor. As they get older they work in the fields and eventually they will feed you in retirement. Compare that to developed societies where kids consume more and more resources as they grow up. And there is no longer any society enforced family commitment (individuality and freedom are encouraged) so the kid(s) could move across the world and no longer be there to help you survive retirement. Basically all the economic incentives are gone and only costs remain."

Joomla Tutorial: creating a copy of a Joomla site

A web development company developed a site for me using Joomla and set it up at the hosting service. I wanted to make a copy of that site on my local machine. I had to go through some troubleshooting, I am recording it here for my and others' benefit.

You need to have administrator access to the Joomla site.

Remote machine
archive site using akeeba
download the zip file
backs at my SQL database and download

Local machine
MySQL
creative user name and password exactly as you have on remote site for Joomla
create database and assign access rights to the newly created user to the database with the correct hostname

Local Apache
enable mod_rewrite (used for seo URLs): ap2enmod rewrite
restart Apache
set " allowoverride all " in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default (at all the places in the file, if you are smart enough and you know what you are doing, do it only where required)
create virtual host for a new site, this is required so that the rewrite rules for URLs will work properly. Initially I put the Joomla site under a folder but that doesn't work properly that the rewrite rules.

Local - machine from where you will access the site on browser
make the correct entry in /etc/hosts to match the virtual host setting an Apache so that your browser goes to your local Joomla installation.

Argument against the average

On a podcast a gentleman talked about the relation between money and happiness. It seems the relationship is logarithmic, people's happiness doubles when their wealth increases by 10 times.

What should I make of this for myself? Is this what I should expect to happen to me?

How many children on average do US families have? I believe it is something like 1.3. Do you know any family that has 1.3 children? Your parents had exactly as many children as they had. It is a fact and it is before you. You don't have to rely on National statistics to find out how things are around you.

I am not the average person from that study. I am what I am. I believe I will be happy when I reach my financial goal and have no need for any more, happiness or money.

We should be careful about how much attention we give to the aggregated metrics. Sometimes we may have hard numbers close by and no need to rely on aggregate numbers.

Google has abandoned desktop search

Went looking for desktop search for Ubuntu, top result is Google Desktop Search for Linux. Pleasant surprise that Google supports Linux. I click on search result and just out of curiosity go to the product blog. And what do I see there? Their blog has not been updated for more than one year! Looks like they have abandoned desktop search. I guess there is no competition.

Link to most recent blog post as of today below:
http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-desktop-now-supports-64-bit.html