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I’m in the process of moving my blog to another server. Why this, when i’m on a perfectly swell, and free host right now?

It’s this: i like to tinker. I like to hack. I like to be able to destroy every single tool i’m using and be responsible for it. I like to be in control.

Blogsome is an excellent host if you like a free Wordpress blog with minimal hassle and really unobtrusive ads. Sure, you can tinker quite a bit with the settings and stuff, but you don’t get to really rip your Wordpress apart, and you certainly don’t get a shell account.

So that’s why i’m moving to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

The moving itself is what is going to be tricky. Blogsome does not provide a service to back up your own blog. Supposedly, they’re afraid of leavers — like me. But this is an unhealthy approach, good Blogsome politicans. I now cannot wholeheartedly recommend Blogsome for anyone who might eventually grow out of hosted blogging. I can certainly recommend it to a person who only wants to blog, and maybe do some small tweaking here and there. But for the hacker-tinkerer-type, the best solution is probably to go somewhere where you can break things yourself. Like NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Also, i cannot find a proper blog migration tool, though i’m sure sombody must have written one by now. Heck, it’s possible to post flickr-images to blogs automagically, from flickr, so why not a tool to migrate? I tried some Windows software (w.bloggar, Qumana) for offline blog authoring, but i couldn’t find an easy way to bulk-migrate everything from one place to another. There is a Perl module to support this, but for that, i would have to write a whole Perl script to get the thing done. And i don’t know enough Perl to fluently do that.

My new Wordpress certainly has a functionality to import material, i just wished the Wordpress at Blogsome would care to export…

Solution: install Kubuntu Linux. Aaaah. The laptop works again

(ok, tomorrow i get to see how well it works at work, but that’s another story)

Aaargh. Again a Linux installation bites the dust.

Yesterday i did an apt-get update and upgrade on my laptop. Apt-get complained that there was some problem with lib-mesa-something, which has something to do with OpenGL.

In my desperation, i did an apt-get distribution reinstallation which, in retrospect, was a bad idea. At least my X-Windows did work before, but now i just get the error message /etc/X11/X is not executable.

Not good.

I thought of re-installing the whole damn Debian with kubuntu, but there’s a MS-Windows installation on the same hard disk that i don’t want to risk. It’s one of those Thinkpad-Windowsen, and apart from hosting some rather persistent spyware (nail.exe anyone?) it works.

Don’t know exactly what i’ll do just yet. It’s my work laptop so i could give it to the IT support guys, but i’d rather fsck things up so irrevocably that i simply cannot fix things before i do. Or in other words, i’ll want to try to fix it myself first.

Let’s see where that takes me. I already have another laptop with a broken Gentoo Linux that i’d like to let the IT support guys replace…

I just don’t understand some muslims. I mean, i do understand that most muslims are not of the militant, fundamentalist, flag-burning kind, but still i don’t understand the scale of Evilness that some of the lesser tolerant muslims follow. It’s bad when muslims are physically tortured. It’s really bad when they are ridiculed. And it’s really, really bad when The Holy Koran (Qur’an) is ridiculed, but it’s only when the holy word is ridiculed when people hit the streets.

Or the more current example. It’s really, really evil when a Danish newspaper does a culturally insensitive thing (half a year ago, mind you) publishes caricatures of which some depict prophet Muhammad, but as retribution, it’s alright to kill people in protests.

Now the Danes has closed their embassy in Pakistan due to the lack of security. Still it was okay when Denmark was involved in the rescue operation after the earthquake in Pakistan.

Go figure.

The Government of Finland has signed an agreement to support the development of Timor-Leste, the nation formerly known as East Timor, with a further 500′000 euros, bringing Finland’s support to over 1 M€ for the last three years (including, heh, my salary at the time ).

The press release says the money will be channelled to send more advisors to Timor-Leste. I’d love to go. I would if i didn’t have this family… Timor still isn’t the easiest place on a family.

In the picture to the right, we have Ambassador Markku Niinioja of the Finnish embassy in Jakarta (Finland does not have representation in Timor) shaking hands with UNDP Resident Representative (which is a UN understatement for “UNDP country manager”) Dr Sukehiro Hasegawa after the signing. The painting on the wall btw is rather typical of modern Timorese paiting, and i’m a bit sad that i didn’t have space to bring any art with me home from Timor.

Two things regarding web user interfaces happened to me within the last 24 hours. First, i stumble upon the blog Jabbering Giraffe (possibly through CSS Mania). On the surface, there’s nothing special about the Jabbering Giraffe user interface (UI) but look closer at the top row. From there, you can “personalize” the display: toggle rendered headline fonts (using sIFR, very nifty), body text size and width (fixed/maximum/flexible-within-sane-limits) and whether the side bar should be placed on the left or on the right. And there is a rather nifty use of symbols –with CSS generated content, i suspect– in conjunction with visited links. What i don’t know (yet) is whether the personalization is persistent, i.e. sticks between sessions. But it’s a purposeful implementation of dynamic HTML nonetheless. Actually, i don’t know if the DHTML magic originates from Jabbering Giraffe, but i’ll allow him the honour for now.

The second thing i caught from Slashdot: Yahoo! has released a HTML user interface library (“Oh, so i’d want Yahoo!-branded UI components on my site?”, i thinks) as Open source (“Whoa, they’re smarter than i thought!”). That, and a set of HTML UI Patterns.

I haven’t had a look at the UI library yet, but if some of the patterns Yahoo! describes can be realized with the UI lib, i’m happy. At least it contains the backline needed for AJAX connections, drag-and-drop, event handling and page animation. The library also contains more tangible artifacts: a calendar, slider and Tree View component (”widget”). Very welcome!

Yahoo! seem to be hinting that they are eating their own dog food, using the same stuff for their own web apps. I wonder if the UI library is the same one used at Flickr, which employs a bunch of subtle but useful DHTML techniques, like in-place editing (”direct manipulation” in usability-speak) of titles and texts.

I hope these components are useful and flexible. If they are, they will provice Yahoo! a lot of good and well-needed web karma that Google has stolen a lot of lately.

One of the poppier tracks that i keep on digging even if it’s been on heavy rotation on The Dividing Line for quite some time is Pressure by the band Threshold. InsideOut, their label, has a near-zero-budget (and near-zero-ingenuity) video of the track. Yes, i still think it’s catchy, even after viewing the clip

Inside out has a whole bunch of freely downloadable full length tracks , including stuff from Spock’s Beard, Enchant, RPWL and Tiles (but, alas, no Ritual)

Bruce Togazzini wrote of how bad usability made Scott Adams delete 500 moderated comments from his blog. This is basic usability stuff tought at “Usability 101″ which you old pharts should know already. And for you who’re not, see how a lack of planning can create a lot of havoc in what we usability pharts like to label Conceptual Models.

Do this:

pdftops -level2 book.pdf book.0.ps && pstops "4:0@1.2(-0.5cm,-3.5cm),1@1.2(-3cm,-3.5cm),2@1.2(-1cm,-3.5cm),3@1.2(-3cm,-3.5cm)" book.0.ps | psbook | psnup -2 | pstops "2:0@1.0(-0.00cm,0.0cm),1U@1.0(21cm,29.7cm)" > book.ps


Last friday, i wanted to use less paper to print out a 256 page book on mobile programming. I wanted to print a booklet. I wanted this so bad that i spent most of the friday trying to figure out how to do it. So as not to be the only one benefiting from my mammoth waste of time, i’ll share my findings. I’m sure you could do more McDinking with the settings but at the stage i came up with the one liner above, i’d completely had it (and i still needed to print, cut and bind the damn thing). I should also note that on Windows, with proper HP drivers, i have been able to accomplish the same magic by just ticking a checkbox, but no such checkbox exists on this do-it-yourself system of a Linux. Whee.

Here’s an explanation of my behemoth one-liner, broken into steps.

First, you take a PDF file created from a TeX source. The operation will be a lot simpler if you start with something formatted for a full A4 page; TeX does this very nice formatting commended by the Church of Knuth that makes text easier to read. If you’re just going to output A4 (or Letter) printouts, i strongly suggest you stick to the original settings. Also, if you have the original TeX source, you can do a lot of the tweakings elsewhere than here and save yourself from a lot of work. Here i started with a PDF file with no access to the source.

pdftops -level2 book.pdf book.0.ps

Pdftops translates the PDF file into a PostScript file. Since our printer (and oldish Laserjet) coughs on overly complex PostScript Level 3, i asked the file to be translated into older PostScript.

T_EX (there, i wrote it correctly once — now can you leave me alone?) formats the page to work beautifully on an unadultered size, but in this case, i’m going to zoom it down to fit the page on half a sheet. In its original size, TeX leaves rather giant margins around the text, which, i stress, is fine if used as is, but on an A5, the text gets rather small for my eyes. So i zoom.

pstops "4:0@1.2(-0.5cm,-3.5cm),1@1.2(-3cm,-3.5cm),2@1.2(-1cm,-3.5cm),3@1.2(-3cm,-3.5cm)" book.0.ps book.1.ps

This magnifies the page by 20%, then (yes, after scaling) moves the resulting page a various amount of centimetres to the left, and 3½ cm down (which means it actually moves 1.2 * 3.5 cm down). The four-phase translations (Xcm,-3.5cm) are a result from much tweaking, McDinking and frustration.

Then comes my favourite command.

psbook book.1.ps book.2.ps

Psbook re-orders the pages of the original PDF stream to be book(let)-printable. It felt like a miracle to find it. After that, pages can be re-shuffled so that two pages are fit on one sheet:

psnup -2 book2.ps book.3.ps

But we’re not done just yet. Since many duplex printers (which is a fancy name for a printer that can print on both sides of a paper) print the reverse side of the paper upside down, we have to accommodate for this. Again we use the pstops command:

pstops "2:0@1.0(-0.00cm,0.0cm),1U@1.0(21cm,29.7cm)" book.3.ps book.ps

The second argument (1U…) rotates the page upside-down, then offsets it so that the resulting output actually hits the page. It’s quite intuitive if you’re a transformation matrix.

The whole exercise leaves you with a book.ps, which you can send to the printer using lpr -Pprinter book.ps or translate back into PDF if you want to confuse somebody else.