digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gadgets/OU_prof_puts_laptop_in_liquid_nitrogen_smashes_it_VIDEO'; Hey, students -- pay attention. Not to us, mind you, but to the syllabus provided by your professor. Kieran Mullen, a physics professor at the University of Oklahoma, has a fairly strict rule about gadgets in class: there won't be any, ever, under any circumstances. Balk all you want (understandable given his own clipped-on cellie), but if you sign up for this guy's class, you'll be flipping your phone to "off" and leaving your laptop in the dormitory. And if you try to blaze your own path and slip that netbook into the back row, you might leave bitterly disappointed. As you'll see clearly in the video past the break, Mr. Mullen sought to make a visual point that laptops weren't allowed in class (he calls them "a distraction"), and while it seems that the whole stunt was premeditated, most students acknowledged that his point was driven home. In short, he took a defunct machine, submerged it in liquid nitrogen, and proceeded to make the following statement: "This is just liquid nitrogen, so it alone won't hurt the computer. But this will." Find out exactly what "this" was by hitting that 'Read More' button there on the lower left. Continue reading OU professor submerses laptop in liquid nitrogen, smashes it to prove a point (video)OU professor submerses laptop in liquid nitrogen, smashes it to prove a point (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink   |  The Oklahoma Daily  | Email this | Comments Continue Reading »

So I recently switched linux distros on my web server that hosts this wordpress blog. I tar’d up my wordpress files and dumped a database backup as well. I copied those files to my local machine and then performed the re-install. After the install, I imported the wordpress database, transferred back the wordpress files and all seemed to work well.

I noticed a day later that my wordpress permalinks were broken. All of the pages were displaying a 404 error. I confirmed that I had the apache mod_rewrite enabled and that the .htacess file was being re-written. I switched back to the default permalinks (?p=145) and the site worked as expected. For search engine optimization, however, I needed to figure out the custom wordpress permalinks issue. I tried a few wordpress plugins to resolve the missing permalinks with no solution to be found.

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