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.

• jfleck at inkstain » On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events – My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time and energy thinking through ways of reducing the probability of the high-consequence event.

  But if the chance of the truly horrific event is somewhere betwen 57 and 95 percent over the next four decades? Holy crap. If you’ve seen that coming and haven’t already started doing an awful lot to try to drive that number down, your system for solving societal problems is seriously fucked up.

• ABQJOURNAL NEWS/METRO: Actor’s $50,000 Keeps Boys/Girls Club Running – Arthur Garcia, its executive director, said his club — which has been in Roswell since 1965 — was on the verge of closing for the summer, its busiest time. The economy, he said, had taken its toll on donations the club needs to survive.
  "We were drowning," he said. "Even our grants have been cut."
  So, last week after KRQE Channel 13 did a story on the club's financial pain, Denzel Washington called to say he'd love to help.
  Washington, who is in Albuquerque filming the "Book of Eli" at Albuquerque Studios, donated $50,000 to the club, enough to keep it open through the summer.
• Where Gadgets Go to Die: Facility Strips, Rips and Recycles – With 15 locations in the United States, Sims Recycling Solutions is one of the world’s largest electronics scrap recyclers. Pictured here is the "demanufacturing" center of the company's Roseville, California facility, where workers disassemble everything from printers, cameras and computers to Jumbotrons for their reusable materials. The facility receives roughly 150,000 pounds of used electronics a day.
• Report Details Alleged Fraud Scheme Against AT – CBS 11 News has uncovered new information about FBI raids against Dallas companies that provide web servers for dozens of businesses in North Texas and across the country.

  Court documents show it's all part of an alleged massive fraud scheme against AT&T and Verizon.

  Court records show Verizon first went to the FBI this past January, alleging some North Texas web server providers were cheating them and AT&T out of millions of dollars.

• Chris Paling on time spent on a ward with alcoholics | Society | The Guardian – Barrel Man is immediately put on a drain. Several clear bags of fluid are emptied from his stomach every couple of hours. During the night, at around 2am, we are awoken by the sound of a cry and a splash of liquid. The room fills with the aroma of faeces. A nurse dashes in, switches on the light and pulls Barrel Man's curtain round, but not before we have glimpsed the pool of blood and faeces on the floor. Two doctors arrive. Barrel Man is wheeled down to the theatre. We don't expect to see him on the ward again. With typical understatement, the following day the nurse reports his condition as "very poorly".
• “Dow 36,000″ and your pension – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com – So in 2007 the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation — which stands behind corporate pensions — switched from bonds only to lots of stocks, buying in at, natch, the peak of the market. Oops. And this is big stuff: the Bush administration may have left us all a gratuitous loss of hundreds of billions.
• What Fourth-Graders “Know” About Money – Recently I used some of the latitude I have in teaching social studies when completing a unit on economics with two 4th-grade classes (41 students total). One group of students was from my classroom; the other group of students was from a neighboring teacher’s class. During the unit, I had an opportunity to gauge the students’ knowledge of a few concepts of money and the financial world around them.
• Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: Weblog: What We Can Learn From MacHeist – Mac software impressario Phill Ryu brought his controversial MacHeist bundle back for another round recently, this time with one of its former critics in the fold, which means that the old debates about its legitimacy and value have been raging once again. I’ll admit I’ve been a critic of MacHeist in the past, and one way to think about it is definitely as either a sign of or cause of a troubling devaluation of indie software. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why software products and services succeed or fail, though, and I’ve started to feel that, whatever you think of them, we indie developers can learn a lot from MacHeist.
• The G-20 can do better next time | csmonitor.com – The Group of 20 meeting took place largely because of a demand by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to set up a global regulatory cop to rein in excessive risk-taking by financial institutions – mainly American and British.

  For two reasons, he rightly didn't succeed.

  As long as the world remains organized around sovereign states, capitalism will largely be regulated within each state. Even the European Union can't agree on tougher rules for hedge funds, etc.

  A second reason is the difficulty of regulating complex financial instruments. Even the people who design them failed to see their flaws as this crisis unfolded. Would a global cop do any better at assessing such intricate risk? Exhibit A: The SEC's inability to uncover Bernie Madoff's scam.

• Al Jazeera English – Americas – FBI rejects Taliban US attack claim – The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dismissed claims made by the Pakistan Taliban that it was responsible for an attack in the state of New York in which a gunman killed 13 people.

  Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, had claimed in a phone call to Al Jazeera that he had ordered the shooting in which a man, believed to be a Vietnamese immigrant, opened fire at an immigration centre.

Update 12/18/09: I have moved the video hosting to YouTube. YouTube didn’t force me to change the music but does put ads (just as I have) for links to the music at iTunes and Amazon.

This is a movie I made with photos that I got from my Mom. I believe they were all taken around the 1950’s. They show my Grandfather, Grandmother, Mom and uncles. There’s some other people in there but I’m not quite sure who they all are. Though once my Mom sees this I’m sure she will tell me.

This was really just an experiment to get a hang of using Still Life. But I was pretty impressed with the results. I did very little editing of the pictures except cropping them and adjusting the levels. Even when converted to a movie some of them need more cleaning up, that’s still a bit over my head

The Music is Memories by Elvis (available on iTunes or Amazon).