navelfluff

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…

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.

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.

I’ve used a PDA for a few years now and i’m quite happy with a gadget which works like a calendar that actually reminds me to look at it. I use it as a shopping list, a small surf board, a to-do list and a platform to play solitaire and sudoku on. Granted, there are cheaper options available but a geek needs his toys

The most valuable feature of a PDA is actually in its ability to synchronize with your full size computer (which is why one of my computers still run Windows). The PDA the becomes a live extension to the desktop computer (which in reality is a laptop computer, which mostly resides on my desk — unless it travels in my backpack and on occasions emerges into a sofa laptop… now where was i?). For example, ListPro is an insanely great piece of software if you get the desk+pocket pc edition.

Not long ago, i got (to borrow) a phone from work. Again, a “smart phone” is only really useful if it synchronizes with a full size computer, so i installed Nokia PC Suite. Promptly, my MS Actice Synch stopped synching. I uninstalled the PC Suite (and probably un/re-installed MS Active Sync) and the PDA came back. I made a political decision to keep the PDA as my main computer extension and the phone as a manually edited thingamajing. Because i knew that there would soon be another phone replacing this one.

Flash forward to last week. My professor tells me it’s Christmas. He has a Nokia N70 for me! Whee! After much pondering i decide to have the phone as my primary PDA, so i uninstall the MS bit and install the new and shiny PC Suite. Much to my surprise, the installation and synchronization goes entirely without pain and works the first time executed. Nokia has improved a lot.

I still have the Communicator 9k5 which i decide to synch as well. After all, i’ve edited a lot of PIM stuff on it.

My computer does not like this. Windows figures out that i have a Nokia 9500 connected, but that’s where it stops. PC Suite doesn’t care for the Communicator even if it’s built to cope with many phones. Seems like Nokia doesn’t sport “universal drivers”.

But hey, now somebody else is jealous too, because PC Suite refuses to recognize the N70 and i now have exactly zero gadgets that talk with the computer. Way to go.

One trick i’ve learned from my previous life is never to connect a Nokia phone to the computer before installing the drivers. It frells your computer. It’s ridiculous it has to work this way (though i don’t think work is a suitable word here) but that’s how it is. I just didn’t expect you’d have to install more Nokia drivers after installing current ones.

What i am requesting for is this. A universal synchronization interface for Windows. And Linux. Actually i have it that they’re pretty far with it on Linux even if i haven’t managed to actually get any of my gadgets to speak with Linux. But Windows is where all the money is. Please, design a way for a phone and a PDA to both be able to talk with my computer. I’d really, really appreciate it.

In the meantime, please give back my Nokia connection. I will not connect a phone to my computer without installing the drivers again. I promise.

Ööög. Olen wanha. Muistan kun ensimmäinen PC-virus “Brain” tuli, ja nyt siitä on 20 vuotta. Oi floppeja ja bootsector-viruksia. Se oli aikaa ennen Word-viruksia ja verkkomatoja se.

Ooh! I’m a geek! I have created my first PHP-enabled web page . My script shows the next event on one of the courses i’m an assistant on.

My humble snippet reads from a flat, semicolon-delimited text file (i could snob away and say it’s a CSV file), parses the date from the first field, compares that to today’s date and if it’s for the next/current event, shows the event with the date prettified to local standards. The nifty features are that it finds the data file even if the web page is read through a symlink, and that no event information is shown if the course is already over.

Too bad i don’t have time for this: create a one-second
Musical Ode to the Leap Second and send it in to createdigitalmusic.com, where the kind folks there will compile the submissions into one great piece of musical mish-mash!

Mike and Glenda Carmichael have an Ultimate Goal. For 28½ years, they have painted a baseball over and over again, and they’re up to 19′100 coats of paint, rendering the poor baseball completely unplayable (though at 800 kg, you’d be unplayable too).

Abweird.