May 2008 Archives

I managed to fubar my Movable Type templates - or maybe my widgets, or widget sets, or template widgets, or whatever - so badly that the sidebars completely disappeared. After a futile effort at repair, I deleted everything and started over.

Then I deleted everything again, and started over again, because telling Movable Type to delete a blog (ugh, hideous word, 'blog') doesn't actually delete anything.

It was a struggle, but I think I've finally got everything back to its original state. The default style is cartoony & hideous, but I think I'll leave it for a while.

Trying to add the Flickr and Twitter sidebar thingies to Movable Type. It's not going well.

I really don't like Movable Type's template system, which is intertwined with the widget system and then overlaid with the widget set system - adding up to one big mess. It seems that widgets are also templates, but templates aren't widgets. Widget sets can hold widgets, but not templates.

It is to gag.

I managed to get something working, but it's ugly. The widgets - templates, whatever - are wider than the columns they're in, so the spacing is messed up. Perhaps against this wall I will resume beating my head at a later date....

Still trying to export the old posts from TypePad, so I can import them here. Still having problems.

I've tried different web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari. I've tried different operating systems: Windows, OS X. I've tried disabling IE's popup blocker; I even added www.typepad.com to the Trusted Sites list. Through it all, TypePad steadfastly refused to export any post more than two months old.

As near as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world who wants to export a TypePad site. The TypePad knowledge base betrays no awareness of the current brokenness of the export function; Google can find no complaints from people who can't get export to work. (Most Google hits seem to be from 2005: perhaps that's the last time export worked?)

I suppose all I can do at this point is wait for TypePad tech support to come up with a workaround, or for the TypePad developers to fix whatever's broken. (Cf. pigs, flying; infernal regions, freezing over of.)

Grandparents came over from Normal this morning, to visit the grandchildren.

We had lunch at Courier Cafe, which wasn't nearly as crowded as it usually is. Sam would have had grilled cheese for lunch, if he'd eaten any of it. As it was, he ate a few bits of cheese, drank his vanilla shake, and that was it.

Jennifer was seen to ride a bicycle, briefly: first time in quite a while, she said. (Myself, I haven't ridden a bicycle since Jimmy Carter was running for re-election.)

The chimps at Six Apart spiffed up the TypePad site-export function recently, to the point that it doesn't work any more.

This is rather annoying, because I have approximately 4,300 posts over on TypePad that I'd like to move here - preferably before the $49.50 annual fee comes due in December.

I opened a help ticket with TypePad technical support; "We're working on it" is all they had to say for themselves. So I prodded them a little bit just now:

Is there any combination of operating system / web browser on which export has been tested and is known to work?

(At the moment it seems like you're holding my data hostage, and if I don't keep paying you $50/year you'll delete it. Surely you don't want your customers thinking of you this way....)

Perhaps this will encourage them to fix their [censored] code.

Henceforth, I:

...will not fill out any kind of customer-satisfaction survey, either printed or online. Any that I receive will be thrown away.

...will not talk to telemarketers, pollsters, etc. I will hang up on any that call.

When I moved back to Champaign in 1991, one of the first things I did was open a checking account at a local bank.

I exercised it pretty vigorously for the first few years, but then Jennifer & I opened a joint account and all the big transactions moved over there. For the last few years, it's been essentially dormant, with a balance of $10 (pathetic) and two or three transactions per year.

I kept it open on the theory that someday I might need it again, but as the months and years passed that seemed less and less likely; so yesterday I closed it.

Sam woke up at 6:25am, upset because his binky had fallen out of the crib.

I fetched a new one for him, but he wouldn't go back to sleep. Instead, he stood up in the crib and said, "Want get up?"

Silly boy.

If S is how many hours of sleep I got last night, and M is how many miles I put on the pedometer today, then you might expect that S > M.

You'd be wrong about that.

It turns out to be cheaper to let Pair install - and, more importantly, maintain - Movable Type here at dusty old http://patrick-rice.net/ than it is to pay for a TypePad account.

So that's what I've decided to do.

(I also downgraded my Pair account from Basic to FTP. The disk and bandwidth quotas are a bit more restrictive with FTP than with Basic, but it shaved $4/month off the bill: more than enough to cover the $2.95/month Movable Type fee. A year's blather will now cost $106.80, instead of $168.90. As Martha Stewart would say, that's a good thing....)

(And the editor doesn't mangle my HTML, either: a nice bonus.)

A fella came to the house this afternoon for an annual air-conditioner checkup. It did not go quite as we expected it would.

We had the idea that this visit would be covered under the annual service contract we signed up for last year; alas, it wasn't: it was the first visit of the 2008-2009 contract. We also had decided not to renew for 2008-2009, but the single-visit price turns out to be $30 more than the contract price: so I grumbled a bit and re-upped.

And, as a special bonus, the technician wanted to replace the mumble-mumble part, which he said was failing. "If this goes, it'll burn out the motor," he said. "Only $87."

So our free air-conditioner checkup turned out to cost about $250. I think the air-conditioner people have been comparing notes with the local Ford dealer (home of the $600 oil change).

I've been using Spanning Sync for a while now to synchronize iCal on mork with my Google Calendar(s); despite the dire warnings about synchronization bugs in Leopard, I never had any problems - until tonight, when I installed the OS X 10.5.3 update.

The update said it had to convert my iCal entries; apparently it meant that it was converting them from 'OK' to 'fubar': sync errors, duplicate entries, time zone snafus, etc., etc.

I believe I have cleaned up the mess, but whether the mess will stay cleaned up is anybody's guess.

Update: The mess didn't stay cleaned up, so stronger measures were required: I created a new set of calendars in iCal, recreated all my events in them, then wiped everything on the Google Calendar side & re-uploaded everything. It took a while, but I think everything is hunky-dory once more - at least, until the next time Apple decides to 'migrate' iCal to a new level of fubar-ness. (Thanks bunches, Apple.)

Went yesterday afternoon with friends to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the Savoy 16. (This required finding a sitter willing to wrangle four kids at once: Jake, Sam and the friends' kids.)

It was a pleasant confection, fun to watch but not rewarding of too close an examination. A bit of overlap near the end with the X-Files movie of some years ago, which made me cackle a bit.

I'm sure there will be another Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, possibly two; and then they'll restart the franchise with Shia LaBoeuf and crank out another three or four - the last of which will be so bad they won't be able to get funding for any more.

To import a new project into subversion, do this:

svn import -m "New project." . http://mork/svn/repository/project

Dunno why I couldn't remember that before....

I wrote a bunch of Python code this morning. I want to import it into the subversion server running on mork. I don't remember how to do that.

No problem, thought I. It's in the daybook, I'll look it up.

Alas, as part of their exciting! new! editor upgrade, the TypePad chimps appear to have disabled the search function. (Or maybe it's available only to the TypePad Plus users, who pay $40 more per year than TypePad Basic.)

No problem, thought I. I'll just export the daybook to a text file, save it to the laptop, and use notepad to find what I need.

Alas, the TypePad exporter doesn't seem to work very well. I can't get it to export more than the last 60 days of posts. The subversion post I'm looking for is definitely older than that.

The other day, I tried to set up automatic Google indexing of the daybook, but didn't get too far into the process before giving up. Looks like I need to try again.

In the meantime, my python code will remain uncommitted. Alas.

Jennifer's off sewing this afternoon. (She does that every now & then.) Sam is taking a nap. Jake is watching cartoons.

After a game of Age of Empires that lasted way too long (maybe I should have used a few cheat codes to speed things up), I am pecking away at the daybook & thinking I should find something more productive to do with my time.

The Sunday newspaper is still out in the box. I suppose I could go get it....

The local fishwrap is in financial distress, having lost a big reprint contract with the Chicago Tribune, and is trying increasingly desperate schemes to bring in a little cash. On the obituary page, next-of-kin can praise the departed for as many column-inches as they can afford. The Sunday comics now include a half-page of advertisements. There's even an advertisement pasted over the banner on the front page.

There used to be two local newspapers in town; the other one, the Courier, folded the year before I started school at the big U. Seems like pretty soon there won't be any.

Five months ago, I deleted my last.fm account, but I'm still getting mail from last.fm about it.

Today, it was an invitation to join some kind of John Lennon video group.

Well, all right, thought I. If they're not going to delete my account, I might as well reactivate it. So I did. I even linked it into my FriendFeed page, so in the unlikely event that I do something with last.fm, it will show up on FriendFeed (where no one will ever see it).

TypePad says:

The editing option selected when the post is last saved will be used for that post. Older posts that were last saved using the Rich Text/HTML editor will continue to use that editor. Newer posts will respect the setting in your blog configuration for new posts.

We will take your comments into consideration when updating the editor and look into setting a default editor all posts.

In other words, if I want to prevent their new! improved! post editor from scrozzling my posts, I'm expected to manually change the editor for each & every one of my 4,270 posts.

How annoying.

I forgot to de-authorize iTunes on nessus before shutting it down, which means I'm wasting one of the (only five!) authorizations I'm allowed.

Probably I should fix that while I still can. (There are rumors that Apple will reset all your authorizations, if you spin a sufficiently persuasive tale of woe; but why take chances?)

Update: It was mildly inconvenient, but I managed to resurrect nessus long enough to de-authorize iTunes on my account. (Poor nessus wasn't very happy with the old iMac USB keyboard & mouse. It trundled a long time before grudgingly accepting them.)

Yesterday, I pulled the DVD drive from nessus and installed it in mindy, then moved over the last few user files, favorites, and set up Jennifer's email (very important: mindy's chief duties will be Jennifer's email and playing DVDs for Jake & Sam).

This morning, I moved the fancy keyboard / mouse combo over from nessus (poor mindy had been using the iMac's original USB keyboard & mouse; it was a bit strange to see that plugged into a Windows box).

Poor nessus is now powered down, unplugged, sitting next to my desk in Sam's room. At some point I will most likely remove the disk (just in case there are files on it that we need) and CD-RW drive (again, just in case we develop a sudden need to burn CDs on mindy), then get rid of what's left.

Nessus lasted almost eight years - its first power-up was August, 2000. It was a good machine. Rather expensive, but less so when amortized over its eight-year lifespan. A cheaper machine wouldn't have remained usable nearly so long.

(I rather doubt that mindy will still be operational in 2016....)

Set up a few useful networking thingies on mindy this morning:

• ssh: Used ssh-keygen to generate keys for my account on mindy; copied the public key to WRI, and to mork; set up ~/.ssh/config so that I can do password-less ssh from mindy to WRI and mork.
• cvs: With ssh working, the next step was cvs. Now I can talk to the WRI cvs server (useful for working from home).
• vpn: Also set up the WRI VPN, very useful with XP's remote-desktop utility for wrangling build machines.

(Remember mindy? Jennifer's new computer?)

A carefully-phrased non-response from TypePad tech support regarding their (vile, useless) new post editor:

Thanks for your feedback about our new compose editor. We're sorry to hear you're unhappy with the change. We were mindful of frequent user requests for upgrades and we hope you'll take the time to use the new editor and discover all of the great new features it offers.

I did take some time to use the new editor. In half an hour, it managed to delete two of my posts (only one of which was I able to restore), and tried to delete a third (fortunately, I caught it in time). It mangled the HTML tags in several of my posts.

People have been trying to write WYSIWYG front ends to HTML at least since FrontPage 1.0, way back in 1996. Not one of them has succeeded. (Microsoft, in particular, keeps trying but just can't get it right. Anyone who depends on Microsoft's HTML edit control is guaranteed to ship a defective product.)

TypePad and I are at a standoff. I've disabled the new editor, but only for new posts. It's still used when editing an existing post, and there doesn't seem to be any way to stop it. So TypePad is running at 50% usefulness until this is resolved.

Buried in the TypePad preferences is a section of default settings for new posts. One of them is the default text-mangling mode, which I have set to 'None'.

The big question: will this setting behave any differently than the Markdown mode?

(And will it apply when I edit an existing post? As it stands, that uses the Rich Text editor, which is no [censored] good, and mangles any post it comes into contact with - except for the posts that it deletes entirely.)

Testing the TypePad post editor's Markdown mode. Will it let me enter my own HTML, without mangling it?

• How does it feel...
• ...about lists?

And...

...blockquotes?

The TypePad people haven't responded to my support ticket, so it looks like I'm on my own.

Update: The Markdown editor didn't mangle my HTML. Yay.

The folks at TypePad rolled out a new post editor the other day. I hate it.

First: I click the New Post link, the editor page comes up. I click on the title and start typing. (I always write the title first. Maybe that makes me weird. I dunno.) After a while, the fancy new editor control finishes initializing itself - it takes forever, it must be from Microsoft - and steals focus. Half my title ends up in the post body.

Stealing focus is about the most annoying thing software can do, short of causing the computer to burst into flame (which I'm told was actually possible with certain early-model PCs).

Second: the Rich Text editor mode generates HTML with capitalized tags: <P>...</P> instead of <p>...</p>, that sort of thing. That's so 1996, people. (And another sign that the new editor must be from Microsoft, which has never managed to ship a decent HTML editor despite years of effort across several different products.)

It's an XHTML world now, and all tags are lowercase. Get with the program.

(Curiously, the fancy formatting buttons on the editor page still work in HTML mode, and generate lowercase tags.)

Third: the new editor loses posts. At the post list, click on a post; the editor page comes up, in Rich Text mode. Start bashing the HTML tab, because the Rich Text editor stinks; after a while, the editor switches to HTML mode - and all your text is gone.

What moron wrote this code, anyway?

When I fired up Google Maps (for a little research related to the previous post), the Microsoft Office installer popped up one of its trademark message boxes, the ones that say:

I'm doing something to your computer!
No, I won't tell you what it is!
Oops, it didn't work! Sorree!

What possible reason could a web page have to trigger the Office installer?

Yet another demonstration that Microsoft's Windows Installer technology is a steaming lump of yak dung....

[The misbegotten TypePad editor has eaten this post. Thanks bunches, TypePad.]

Poor Jennifer, she seems to have caught Sam's bronchitis.

Stayed home from work today - though with a laptop and VPN, avoiding work is harder than it used to be - to keep an eye on Sam while Jennifer recuperates.

Poor Sam, he's been on the antibiotics since Friday evening, but he's still coughing. Aside from that - which seems to happen mostly when he's in the crib - he's not acting sick. But he's been taking longer to fall asleep at night, and getting up earlier in the morning, because of the coughing.

Poor little guy. Perhaps a few more days of amoxicillin will fix him up.

Mail this evening, claiming to be from the TypePad Beta Team & inviting me to join the beta program for the next version of TypePad. Just click on this link, fill out a short survey, and I'm in.

However. The survey seemed to be on SurveyMonkey, but it looked strangely under-styled & primitive. All it asked for was my name and the URL of my TypePad site - two pieces of information that the TypePad people presumably already possess.

So I found myself wondering: Who are you people, really? And what are you after? And quit the survey.

(It probably was a legitimate message, and I probably blew my chance at being a TypePad beta tester. Sorry, TypePad people.)

I've been reading the pickaxe book lately, trying to make up my mind whether I should use Ruby for anything. (Haven't decided yet.)

There are things about Ruby that strike me as slightly mis-designed:

• Name decorators: @foo and @@foo are two very different things, and the language offers no help in keeping them straight. You just have to remember that @foo is an instance variable and @@foo is a class variable.
• Implicit code: the return value of a function is the value of the last expression in the function; no return statement is required. That reduces readability just to save a little typing, which is never a good trade-off.
• Redundancy: Ruby has blocks, which are interesting, but also procedures. They're almost, but not quite, the same thing. They're both chunks of code that get called by other chunks of code, so why do we need both of them?

I suppose I'll keep reading. I've been using Python for a few years now; before that, Perl. It might be time to switch languages again, keep the brain stretchy, that sort of thing.

Over on Twitter, Hillary Clinton - or whichever underpaid, overworked campaign staffer is posting for her - says, "Voters in Florida and Michigan deserve to be heard."

Would she be saying that if she had more delegates than Obama, instead of being stuck - permanently, it seems - in second place?

Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights today, to watch Jake's last soccer game. (I think Jake's team won, but this particular soccer league isn't too serious on the keeping-score part of the game.)

They brought presents, too: Jennifer has a bicycle now. Jake & Sam have lots of new clothes. (I have not one but two certified birth certificates, with different names on them. They're both me - maybe I should apply for two passports?)

Nice day today: sunny, not so warm. I really should be outside, mowing the lawn. But I'm lazy.

Poor Mr. Sam, he's got some germs: fever (102° when he woke up from his nap today), a bit of a cough, a bit of drooling.

He & I are off to Convenient Care. I predict we will come home with a bottle of amoxicillin.

The West Virginia primary was last Tuesday. On the Democratic side of things, 331,045 people voted: two-thirds for Clinton, one-third for Obama.

In previous campaigns, nobody cared about the West Virginia primary, because one or another candidate had already sewn up the nomination months before. (Nobody ever cared about the Illinois primary, either, for the same reason.)

But because Clinton received 147,551 more votes (and 12 more delegates) than Obama, the West Virginia primary is being described as a crushing defeat for Obama - who nevertheless has more overall votes and delegates than Clinton, and seems likely to win the nomination.

Perhaps this says more about the newsdroids' need for a catchy headline than it does about anything happening in the real world.

Last week I ordered a 500GB disk from Amazon; the idea is to attach it to the AirPort, and use it for backups (from both machines).

It arrived yesterday; this evening I plugged it in. Alas, there are problems:

• The AirPort has only one USB port, so I had to unplug the printer. I'll have to buy a hub to get both online; fortunately, they're pretty cheap.
• The disk is formatted FAT32, which is dumb. But it seems that the AirPort can't format disks, so I'll have to plug it into the iMac to reformat it.

The tangle of wires, power strips, etc., etc., behind my desk is getting out of control. I'd really like to shut everything down, unplug everything, then set it up again neatly. (After dusting: it's filthy back there.)

Line three of the current shopping list - posted on the refrigerator here at Stately Rice Manor - reads as follows:

flushable wipes teddy grahams

Er...those aren't really interchangeable....

Wikipedia says:

An individual's Erdös–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdös number - which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös - and one's Bacon number - which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

My Erdös–Bacon number is, alas, infinite. How will my self-esteem recover from this terrible blow?

Installed a trial version of Spanning Sync on mork this evening, and synchronized the iCal calendar on mork with my calendar on Google Calendar.

I have two weeks to decide whether being able to do that is cool enough to pay $25 to keep doing it.

Now all I need is a phone that can synchronize with the iMac, and I'll have one calendar available everywhere....

I've had the Dell Axim X30 for about four years now - I bought it in August, 2004 - and I think it's finally reached the end of its usefulness.

The battery won't hold a charge any more. I only use the X30 for a few minutes each day - mainly to look up passwords, enter gas purchases, that sort of thing - but whenever I check the battery meter, it's down to 40% again. I can't use the wireless networking - even if I could get it to work (which I can't; thanks bunches, Dell & Microsoft), it drops the battery meter almost immediately into the danger zone.

The X30 has Bluetooth, but the one time I tried to use it for anything it didn't go so well.

The contacts list on the X30 is out of date. These days I keep my contacts on the iMac, with which the X30 will not synchronize. I'd rather keep my contacts online somewhere (the way I keep my bookmarks on del.icio.us), anyway.

The X30's calendar has some interesting items in it - a few years ago, I wasted an hour entering information about all Mercury, Gemini & Apollo missions - but it's as out of date as the contacts list. (At the moment, my calendar is divided between the iMac, to which I migrated my Outlook calendar two years ago, and Google Calendar, which I've been using for the last few months. I'm looking into ways to synchronize them. Spanning Sync seems popular, and it's relatively cheap.)

I have a few third-party applications on the X30: FlexWallet, Personal Vehical Manager and Personal Health. They're useful enough, but they're ancient & no longer supported. (And the publisher, Two Peaks Software, no longer exists, having been absorbed by some other company a few years ago.) They don't synchronize so well with the desktop versions on nessus, and it seems unlikely that I'll ever be able to migrate them and the data they contain from nessus to mindy.

So: the new policy is that no new data goes into the X30, since it's no longer certain that I'll be able to get it back out again.

I want to keep recording all the same day-to-day data that used to go into the X30 (my biggest hobby is creating databases, and generating charts & graphs therefrom), so yesterday I picked up a $3 spiral-bound notebook from the drugstore. It's cheap, it's portable, it never needs recharging, it can easily accommodate any data I feel like recording, and synchronizing with my various online databases is pretty simple: hold notebook in one hand, type numbers into the computer with the other.

At some point, the data in the X30 will be so far past its freshness date - and I'll have all the important stuff online, accessible from just about anywhere - that it won't be worth the trouble to cart it around any more. When that day comes, I'll hit the system-erase button and leave it in the breakroom at WRI.

Someone will want it, I'm sure.

Once upon a time, it was necessary to leave the house to buy presents for people.

Now, through the wonder of the Internet, you can send your sister a birthday present and send your mother a Mother's Day present while sitting on the living-room sofa.

(Alas, Lisa's birthday was today - happy birthday! - so her present will be a bit late. Oops....)

Moved some files into Jennifer's and Jacob's home directories this evening. (I seem to have forgotten to move Jennifer's bookmarks over from nessus. Must remember to bag those up one of these days & get them copied.)

The hard part of this migration will come at the end: when it becomes necessary to start pulling hardware (e.g., the DVD drive) out of nessus. There will be a certain interval during which neither machine is completely operational. The users (i.e., Jennifer and Jacob) will be most annoyed with their sysadmin (i.e., me) if the downtime lasts too long....

(The Microsoft Update site offered to install XP Service Pack 3 on mindy this evening. I declined: that's not a project I'm willing to undertake at 9:30pm....)

NOAA says 82° at 1:00pm.

Spring is well underway, finally: warm weather, lots of sunshine. (Lots of lawn-mowing, too.)

Online banking says there's been a rather sizable deposit made to our account by the U.S. Treasury.

Mr. Bush calls this an economic stimulus. I call it a bribe. Jennifer calls it blood money.

I have a half-dozen web sites that I visit just about every day: Flickr, Google Reader,Twitter, TypePad, etc., etc., etc. Each one has its own login & password, which is a problem.

I have too many passwords, and they're too difficult to remember. (Lately, I've started using long strings of hex digits interspersed with punctuation; those are really hard to remember.) It's especially annoying with web sites that expire their login cookies every few days. Using the same password everywhere would be easier to remember, but also a huge security risk.

What to do, what to do....

A while ago, the phone rang. I answered, and was preparing a stupid greeting - "So, yeah, yeah, hello already?" - when a synthesized voice interrupted me to announce a collect call from the county jail.

I don't know who it was - all I heard was an unrecognizable male voice, bellowing, "It's me!" - so I told the computer that I refused to accept the call.

Do wrong numbers count against the traditional one phone call allowed to recent arrestees? Have I, merely by pressing 2 on my phone, condemned some poor yutz to spend the weekend in jail?

I moved the weather station console from nessus to mindy this evening, and installed the WeatherLink Toolbox software to download data. (I have seven or eight years of local weather data, courtesy of the indefatigable sputnik. It's cool.)

Alas, there was a problem: the WeatherLink software insists on appending downloaded data to a text file in the application install directory. Limited user accounts - which is what we all have on mindy - aren't allowed to write to the Program Files directory (or subdirectories thereof).

Normally, I'd bring up the Properties dialog for the file, go to the Security tab, and adjust the permissions. But the Security tab is hidden so long as simple file sharing is enabled; and simple file sharing can't be disabled on XP Home (which is what I installed on mindy).

Argh.

The solution: use the administrator account to create the download file (which is empty), then use the (somewhat obscure) cacls.exe to manually adjust the security settings on:

cacls download.txt /E /G Users:C

In theory, non-admin accounts will now be able to write to the download file.

Finished - last night, somewhat later than was perhaps wise - reading The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West, by Richard Rhodes.

This was the revised edition, published on some anniversary (30th? 40th?) of the original. It was interesting, but only mildly. Perhaps I shouldn't have read the foreword, in which Rhodes says (more or less), I wrote this when I was young & annoyingly overopinionated.

There did seem to be an unpleasant whiff of Look at me! I am a keen-eyed observer of the human condition, and I have profoundly insightful opinions! throughout the book. And for some reason it bothered me to know that just about everything mentioned in the book is thirty (forty?) years old - i.e., long gone.

The Inland Ground is too old to qualify as current events, but somehow doesn't work as history, either. (And that whole chapter about Cupcakes was just plain dumb.)