Greg In The Desert

I started this blog in the summer of 2003 using iBlog for Mac and hosting using .mac. Eventually iBlog used Haloscan for comments and eventually iBlog died (technically it’s still available but it’s been at version 2.0 release candidate 3 for years). I have since moved this blog to Blosxom, RapidWeaver and finally Wordpress and changed the name three times.

I was able to transfer all of the posts generated from the other blogging systems into Wordpress through (mostly) automated methods. Using Applescript I was able to parse the contents of the rendered HTML files and exported to a text file that Wordpress could import.

I evaluated the various formats that Wordpress supports, including the wordpress WXR format but found the Movable Type Import Format the easiest to work with.

Getting the 1,100 plus comments from Haloscan proved to be more difficult. Haloscan does offer a XML export of comments, which required an inexpensive paid membership to access. Wordpress does not offer a Haloscan XML importer so I converted the XML file to the Movable Type Import Format using applescript.

Applescript has a XML parser built in but I found the XML parser to have difficulties working with the Haloscan XML file. Adding to the problem is that I started working on this about three operating systems ago in which Applescript has seen several changes. I stuck with a sort of brute force method of looping and parsing through each line of the content.

The script loops through each entry and outputs a dummy thread with no contents expect the title and includes the comment thread at the end. The Movable Type Import Format includes a NO ENTRY: 1 switch to signifiy this, but I’m not sure if Wordpress really needs it.

TITLE: AMREP Has Record Quarter
NO ENTRY: 1
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Johnny
EMAIL: XXXXXXX
URL: xxxxxxx
IP: xxxxxx
DATE: 09/14/2006 6:56:06 PM
It will slow eventually.  Everything in CA and AZ is plummeting and the west side is already over built and under occupied.
-----
--------

When Wordpress imports the Movable Type Import Format it looks for a matching post title that already exists. If Wordpress finds a matching post it adds the comments to the entry. If it doesn’t exist then Wordpress creates a new entry as a draft with the comments attached.

To make matters worse iBlog identified comment threads using a serial number like E554707186, Blossom identified comments using the title of the post with underscores and punctuation removed and rapid weaver used identified comment threads using a unique identifier like rw_unique_entry_id_403_page0. Most of my comments had post titles like these, except for a few that were generated by Bloxsom. I also had the added difficulty of my Haloscan XML file containing comments for two blogs.

I had considered writing a Applescript that could deterimne the real post title by reading through my website archives. That was going to take even more time so I decided to just import into Wordpress the way it was and manually move comments around from the newly created “dummy posts”.

Wordpress doesn’t have a built in capability to move comments to another post. For that I used the Restore Post Id plug in so I could identify post ids, WP Move Comments plugin to move individual comments and Simple Move Comments plugin to move all comments under a single post at once. I disabled the Subscribe To Comments plugin to avoid spamming the comments every time I moved a comment, but I’m not sure if that would have happened.

It was a good process for me as I got to delete comments that didn’t have any relevance and it allowed me to clean up and delete some posts. For one or two comments it was easier to move them one at a time, for posts with more comments I used the Simple Move Comments plugin which moved them all at once.

It’s a good time for users of Haloscan to consider doing something with their comments. Haloscan is discontinuing their free service and replacing it with a paid Echo service. For those that don’t upgrade, their comments will be deleted. The good news is Haloscan comments can be exported for free. On 14 December I received the following email from Haloscan

Exciting news, as we’ve mentioned on our blog, Haloscan, the legacy comment system that JS-Kit acquired last year, is getting upgraded to the new Echo platform.

You are receiving this email because, according to our records, you are (or have been) a Haloscan user.

This transition will happen in batches of users over the course of a couple of months. You are in the current batch!

We encourage you to log into your Haloscan admin dashboard right away. You will be presented with 2 options.

Upgrade to Echo for $9.95/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically.
Export your Haloscan comment data for free and turn off their service
Please make sure you make a selection within the next two weeks to ensure uninterrupted service.

• Crazy Croc’s, Rio Rancho, New Mexico – It's a long haul from the east side where I live, but tonight I made the journey to Crazy Croc's on Unser in Rio Rancho. From what I heard tonight, Crazy Croc's has come a long way from their historical reputation as a very dark biker bar. New owners have gutted the place and redone everything inside and out. With a dance floor, Techno programmable music, 3 pool tables, and a large outdoor patio, Croc's is set up for success.
• Deseret News | ‘Love advocates’ plan ‘kiss-in’ at Main Street Plaza – Former Salt Lake City Councilwoman Deeda Seed is organizing a "kiss-in" at Main Street Plaza on Sunday following an incident in which two gay men were cited for trespassing on the LDS Church-owned property.
• The Official Site of Rio Rancho, NM – Rio Rancho Isotopes Night – Special $6 tickets for the Tuesday, August 11, 2009, Albuquerque Isotopes game are on sale now for Rio Rancho residents and businesses. The first pitch is scheduled for 7:05 p.m. as the Isotopes face the Tacoma Rainiers.
• Dispute over flag protest erupts in Wisc. village – Yahoo! News – An American flag flown upside down as a protest in a northern Wisconsin village was seized by police before a Fourth of July parade and the businessman who flew it — an Iraq war veteran — claims the officers trespassed and stole his property.
• Southwest tops, US Airways near worst in passenger complaints in May – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Southwest Airlines Co. ranked best and US Airways Group Inc. ranked next to last for consumer complaints among the 19 top U.S. airlines, according to May data released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
• May semiconductor sales show slight increase from April – New Mexico Business Weekly: – Sales of semiconductors in May showed a slight increase from April, but year-over-year sales fell as the industry remains in the grips of the recession. The Semiconductor Industry Association reported sales of $16.5 billion in May, up from $15.6 billion in April. Still, those numbers were down from $21.5 billion in what the SIA uses as a three-month rolling average.
• TomTom for iPhone en route | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld – Macworld recently had a chance to talk with with Tom Murray, Vice President of Market Development for TomTom, and while the company hasn’t yet announced a release date or final pricing information, Murray was able to expand on some of the information presented at WWDC.
• Why Intel’s Processors Aren’t Big on Cellphones | Gadget Lab | Wired.com – Intel is being held back in the mobile sphere by its inability to offer power consumption on par with ARM’s chips, say analysts. Add to that the notion that Atom is untested for mobile phones and the fact that many proprietary mobile-phone operating systems are not compatible with Intel’s x86 architecture, and it makes breaking into the cellphone market an uphill climb.
• Canon “G”MOS [CR2] – I received an email that Canon does indeed have an APS-C sized sensor “G” camera being tested/developed.
• www.KOB.com – Lightning strike kills one, hospitalizes several – Lightning in Rio Rancho turned deadly on Saturday after one man was killed and the rest of his family was injured after being hit by lightning while waiting to watch fireworks.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a few changes and other screwey things happening on this site. On 9 March 2009 I received a email from my then hosting provider MacHighway.

Unfortunately, we’ve needed to suspend your blog, greginthedesert.net. Your site is regularly using between 30 – 99% of the CPU on that server. It appears that your site is getting around 161k hits per month. The good news is that Technorati estimates that a blog getting 100k his a month is worth $75k/year. The bad news is that it’s far exceeds the fair use policy of our shared hosting environment. Your sites’ needs have outgrown what a shared hosting provider can offer.

Additionally, your site calls on a tremendous amount of resources with all of the dynamic information that the site needs to load in order just to display the front page. This is exacerbating the problem and should definitely be trimmed down.

I totally understand how this was a problem and I can see how I made it worse with some of the stuff I was using to generate my blog since I have been experimenting with plug-in’s and templates. I replied to the support ticket and said I had a number of ideas on how to reduce the CPU usage of my blog and that I wasn’t coming close to my bandwidth or disk usage quotas. They were having none of it and said move my blog elsewhere.

It also would have been nice if they could have given me some heads up about the excessive CPU usage. I guess they didn’t want me as their customer. It’s too bad since the few other issues I had with MacHighway were well taken care of.

I started to look for a non-shared hosting provider. Dedicated hosting is expensive, the cheapest I found was nearly $100 a month. Even though the MacHighway support guy suggested my blog should be worth $75,000, I make tens of dollars a year on advertising, not hundreds. There is no way I can afford dedicated hosting. Also, the 161,000 hits a month I get are only translating to about 9,000 real people a month. I also can only see where 58K hits a month are coming from including robots, image leachers, etc.

After a searching around for a few days including local services providers I ended up going with another shared hosting provider: Dream Host. In fact, there’s a number of things I like about them but that’s a blog post for another day.

MacHighway temporarily enabled my blog so I could export my data. I copied all the Wordpress directories to my hard drive, exported the database and exported a WXR file. Just in case the database dump failed to import.

After getting my domain redirected to the new servers at DreamHost and Wordpress installed, I attempted to import the database. The raw sql file is 230MB and compressed it’s 22MB, far more than the 7MB limit that the phpmyadmin allows. I had to become familiar with the command line to do the import. After contacting DreamHost support because a few things weren’t properly configured on my account I attempted to try the command line import sequence. The import failed on line two, where the sql file’s phpmyadmin version was 2.11.9.4 and DreamHost’s version is 2.11.9.3. I commented that line out and tried the import again, next fail was at line 7.

I contacted DreamHost support to see what they would say about the situation. They tried importing and found several lines which failed. The support person suggested that I continue to comment out lines which fail. I thought that was a bad idea since many of those line look like important parts of the database creation process and I didn’t know how long this editing-upload-fail-repeat process would continue.

Database import wasn’t going to work. I started working on importing the WXR file. My import file was 10.6 MB, bigger than than the 7MB limit imposed by wordpress for import files. I compressed it, which I read elsewhere could overcome the import size limitation. Even though it brought the file under 7MB, it could not get it to sucessfully import. I had two results with the importing of the WXR file, sometime the site would just hang sometime it would give me a 408 page.

I went through and removed the 14,000 plus but that didn’t change the results. I broke the WXR file into several small files and was able to have successful imports. I went through a process of having one half of the cut up file succeeded importing and the other half fail. It has become clear that there is some part at the beginning of the WXR that is corrupt or some other problem that is confusing the import process.

There are still abut 400 posts left to import, but the majority of the important ones are there and I will continue to go through the process of breaking up the remainder of the WXR file until I find the problem entry. Although I learned a lot about Wordpress and phpmyadmin and SQL databases, I’m looking forward to getting this whole ordeal behind me and return to blogging.

Apparently Albuquerque has a super hero and his name might be Ghost Shadow. Might be because he (and I’m assuming he is a he) didn’t want to tell the Alibi what his real superhero name is.

According the email interview, Ghost Shadow is 42 years old, wears a kevlar suit and sometimes a mask and has been doing it since 911.

I don’t keep up with the superhero scene here in town or elsewhere, but I haven’t seen any reports that attribute crime fighting to any of these guys. You would think that if a mysterious hero saved someone from crime that it would be on KOB.

I often get email to my Gmail account meant for another Greg Smith. I don’t understand how someone can mess that up. One time I got a email for an Air Force officer with official Air Force business in it. This one was for the Ford Mustang I don’t have in Baltimore, MD.

The links I post daily are surprisingly popular, and have become even more popular since I started adding small summaries to them.

I use the social bookmarking site del.icio.us (del.icio.us/gregjsmith) to gather all my links. I post them throughout the day then had Delicious post them to my blog. I didn’t really like letting Delicious have control of the posting and recently found the Wordpress plugin postalicious. Postalicious pulls the links from Delicious (it also works with ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, Yahoo Pipes and Jumptags) allowing me control over how the post looks and when they are posted. I could post every hour if I wanted, thought I think that would be too much.

I didn’t like the way the link posts looked on the front page, so I disabled the Delicious category from appearing on the front page (using the Simply Exclude plugin) but they will still post on the RSS feed. If you get updates to Greg In The Desert by visiting the site, I suggest you subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe by email or visit the category.

In 2004 I recived a Scottevest 4.0 jacket. Since then it’s been my jacket of choice for every day use, hikes, skiing and yurt trips. Their have been many times I’ve rubbed against something and swore I put giant hole in it.

For four years I managed not to harm the jacket at all, until last fall when I pulled several teeth out of the main zipper. I used it for a few months like that but it became impossible to zip up and the zipper pull finally fell off and became lost.

I couldn’t afford a new jacket and there’s really nothing wrong with the current one except for the few missing teeth. I contacted Scottevest to see what they would charge to fix it.

I sent a email to Scott Jordan the CEO of Scottevest with a picture of the broken zipper. I then recived a reply from Laura at Scottevest who verified when I order it. She then sent me a pre paid UPS shipping label to ship it back to them for repair. She didn’t ask if I damaged it or ask for payment. She just offered to fix a 4 year old jacket on their dime without question.

I was a big fan of Scottevest before, now I am customer for life.

Momento Live is a service that goes along with the wifi enabled Momento digital picture frames. It allows you to stream photos from your Momento Live account to other picture frames.

I purchased two of these frame partly for this feature. I wanted to buy frames for my family then be able to stream my pictures to them as without anyone having to do any configuring.

Today I get a email that the service is being terminated. Not only is their site not updated to reflect what the email says, they seem to provide no work around to provide the same kind of service that they currently offer or to remove it from the frame’s software.

I think someone needs to hack the frame to run linux.

Dear Member,

The Momento Live service will be terminated on February 25, 2009. After that date you will not have access to the Momento Live website or services. However, your Momento frame will be unaffected so you can continue to enjoy viewing your photos on your frame.

The closure of Momento Live web site means you can no longer store your photos on the Momento Live server and/or and share your photos with other Momento Live members.

Important note! Any pictures that you have stored on Momento Live server will be permanently lost after February 25, 2009. If you have any images stored on the Momento Live server, please ensure you have a copy of them stored on your PC. Any images that are hosted on Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, or similar services will not be affected.

When currently visiting the Momento Live web site you may receive a website security warning as the SSL certificate has expired and will not be renewed. Please ignore this message. You are welcome to continue onto the website to retrieve your images.

To visit Momento Live please click here.

Any questions you have may be directed to momentosupport@imate.com

Thank you,

The Momento Support Team

There’s two high profile rejections of applications to the App store for the iPhone. In both cases they were rejected because Apple says they duplicated functionality already provided by Apple.

Podcaster is an application that lets you download podcasts directly on your iphone. According to Apple it duplicates functionality of the iPod application. Although it can play podcasts like the iPod application, the iPod application requires you to download them to your computer and sync them to the iPod app.

MailWrangler is an application lets you view Gmail email. According to Apple it duplicated the function of the built in Mail application. They can both can download Gmail but MailWrangler was for only Gmail accounts and was designed to switch between Gmail accounts easily.

Apple doesn’t publish the criteria about what will be accepted. That’s a problem when you spend considerable time developing your app then find out after you put in the effort that it’s rejected. Now that you have seen two application and you start to get an idea of what Apple considers not acceptable, I introduce an application that seems to fit in the same category but was accepted to the Application store.

Introducing iExchange. It duplicates the function of the built-in Calendar application and connects to Exchange servers, which the Calendar app can also do. Exchange compatibility was one of the big features Apple touted for OS 2.0. Yet here we have an application which does the same basic thing.

Soon enough you won’t want to live without it anymore. With iExchange Remote Calendar you can access your colleagues Microsoft Exchange based calendars from wherever you are! Use your iPhone to check if your colleague’s at the office or if he or she is available for a meeting. iExchange Remote Calendar features: Read access to all public Exchange calendars of your colleagues OVER THE AIR!! Connection to Microsoft Exchange Server 2000/2003 or 2007 with WebDAV and OWA HTTP and HTTPS are supported Select any public calendar on the Exchange Server Shows a time period of +/- 7/21 and 60 days from current date Only the first two lines of an entry are displayed. As calendar entries cannot be opened, the details of a calendar entry cannot be accessed. Recurrences, entries for one or several days (all day events) are supported Please note: To be able to use this software your company network must meet certain requirements. Therefore, before you order the software, you’ll want to contact your system administrator and check whether or not you can use iExchange. Requirements (Server): Microsoft Exchange Server 2000/2003 or 2007 (standard installation, no custom modifications in the login process) WebDAV and OWA (Outlook Web Access) enabled HTTP or HTTPS connection Requirements for accessing the calendar of a colleague: The user has to grant you read access to his or her calendar. The user or the system administrator can do so in Microsoft Outlook (Windows or Microsoft Entourage for Mac). A tip for Windows-users: If you are working with “Outlook Web Access” and can access Outlook by using the built-it login page, you should be able to use iExchange. A tip for OS-X-users: If you are using Entourage to access your company calendar, you should be able to use iExchange.

Apple sent this email today

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2826

The MobileMe Team