My favorite Palm app these days is ChatterEmail. It’s a top-notch email client for PalmOS. What I love most about it is that it plays incredibly well with IMAP. It works well with my IMAP store, which has a couple of dozen folders and probably takes up well over a GB of disk space. And it keeps getting better: the developer of ChatterEmail, Marc Blank, has just started a blog to let his users keep up with development.
Derrick has a great post that sums up my feelings about whether it’s time to buy a new Mac notebook: buy what you need when it’s available. I’ve been growing unhappy with my 12″ PowerBook, which is still pretty new, actually (99 days left on its 1-year warranty). Unlike Derrick, it’s not disk space, memory, or graphics speed that are troubling me. I’m mostly bothered by the limited resolution on my Mac. I keep my PowerBook plugged into a 20″ LCD panel most of the time.
So, a 15″ Mac is pretty tempting. After I read Derrick’s post, I wondered whether it might be a great time to buy a 15″ G4. After all, the latest model will pretty much be, by definition, the best 15″ G4 PowerBook ever made. And refurbs of those models are starting to appear on the Apple Store: 1.67GHz, 1440×960 resolution, $1,699.
I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that a refurb might be less likely to suffer from the latest PowerBook defect. After all, a refurb has left the factory twice (sort of).
The AS220 Broad Street Studio has made the 36-page Muzine #21 available as a 5.5 MB PDF. The Muzine is “The Uncensored Voice of Rhode Island Youth”. Inside, you’ll find poetry, photographs, drawings, and writing, including a reaction to the Mosquito, an anti-teen sonic weapon.
As C.K. found out, PSP Hacks is in print, and it won’t be long before it’s in a bookstore near you. Check out the, uh, Sample hacks to read all about the cool ways you can mess with your PSP. This is the third gaming book I’ve had the pleasure to edit recently: Halo 2 Hacks and Retro Gaming Hacks are also a lot of fun.
One thing I love about my Mac is the ability to set the color of a folder. I’m in the habit of naming folders for various stages of my workflow: CE (copyedit), QC1 (first set of galleys), and QC2 (second set of galleys), and by coloring the current stage green, I’m less likely to accidentally open ch01.pdf from the wrong stage. Additionally, whenever I have something I know I need to remember at a given stage, I can go into the folder, mkdir or touch “Do not forget to blah blah blah” and color the new item red so I see it when I finally reach that stage.
Now that I’m using Windows a bit more, I miss that feature. I tried to use a custom folder icon, but all hell broke loose when I tried to sync to my Mac using unison. First of all, Windows marks the folder as read-only when you use a custom icon. Then, unison dutifully propagates the property change over to my Mac, which changes the folder permisions to r-xr-xr-x, so I start getting errors from unison along the lines of “Failed: Error in processing a transfer instruction: Permission denied”.
So, I can mark the directory as read/write, but according that KB entry, “Windows sets the read-only attribute on the folder to instruct Windows to look for the Desktop.ini file.” How strange. Isn’t there some metadata attribute that Windows could use rather than overloading the read-only flag?
The next problem was the categorization of my posts. I had hundreds of posts, and they picked up the blosxom categories like /Development/XML. But I wanted tags, instead. I also wanted to cut down on the number of tags I had. At first I used the WordPress user interface, but that would have taken days. So I poked around the Yahoo site management tools, and found that it was easy to install phpMyAdmin, which lets me do ad-hoc SQL queries against the mysql database.
By going to the WordPress admin interface, clicking Manage, and then Categories, I was able to find the unique IDs that WordPress assigns to each category. So, if I wanted to change all my posts tagged “/Development/XML” so that they were tagged “programming”, I had some digging to do.
Assuming “programming” was 30, and “/Development/XML” was 16, then all I had to do was find the table where the categories are stored, and issue an SQL command like:
update whatever-the-table-is-called set whatever-the-id-is-called = 30 where whatever-the-id-is-called = 16
In phpMyAdmin, it was a matter of selecting the database named “blog” (if you’re not on Yahoo!, it might be a different name), and issuing the query against the wp_post2cat table, using the category_id column. So a command like this would do the trick (you’d need to replace 30 and 16 with the correct values for your system, and please back up your database first!!!):
update `wp_post2cat` set category_id = 30 WHERE category_id = 16
So, I did this a lot, and eventually got my categories down to something manageable. Then I used the WordPress admin UI to delete the categories I was no longer using.
If you don’t know SQL, you should read up on it before you try anything like this. One wrong move, and you could accidentally do something like change the category of every post in your archive (or worse, delete everything).
The next thing I had to tackle was to import all my blosxom entries into WordPress. I used the RSS Import feature with the entries that were in my feed, but I had a couple problems:
For the first batch I imported, I fixed the dates by hand, but that got old. So, I grabbed an RSS 2.0 flavour for blosxom, and gave it a whirl. The only problem was that it didn’t add the full text of the post by default, but that was easily fixed by adding <description>$body</description> to story.rss20.
This was OK, except for a couple of new problems:
Also, I was only seeing partial entries in my WordPress blog after importing the blosxom RSS feed. At first, I thought I was getting a truncated feed, but it turned out that my WordPress theme was using the_excerpt() instead of the_content() in archive.php, search.php, and probably some other places I haven’t discovered yet.
Way back when, I registered jepstone.net with Network Solutions. It used to be kind of tricky to deal with them: I remember having to fax a lot of stuff at one point to make some changes. It’s a bit easier right now, since they have a web interface that’s pretty decent for maintaining your domain name.
It’s basically a matter of changing your Designated DNS servers from your old hosting provider’s DNS servers to those of your new one (in my case, it was a matter of changing all the he.net entries to yahoo entries, for example ns1.he.net to yns1.yahoo.com). Then, the waiting begins.
It can take up to 48 hours for the new settings to propagate far and wide. The name servers for Cox, my home ISP, were slow at picking it up. So I tried connecting to T-Mobile’s EDGE network using my Treo as a bridge, and I found that T-Mobile’s DNS was up-to-date. So, I used that to test out my links (Yahoo! also gave me a domain name that I could use during the transition, but it was more fun to see everything working with the real domain name).
So, I was able to start playing pretty much right away. But, I got tired of the slow EDGE speed and finally called it a night. When I got up in the morning, I restarted my AirPort base station (it proxies DNS, and was caching the old, incorrect entries), and everything was working fine.
Yesterday, I got it in my head that I’ve be happy moving my blogging over to the free hosting at wordpress.com, and it didn’t work out so well, since I tripped over a bug that confused me. It was fixed pretty quickly by most measures, but I got impatient, and started thinking about what I was doing. It made the most sense to move the whole site over to a WordPress-friendly host. So here I am, after moving my blosxom blog over to Yahoo! Web Hosting. I did not have to pull a total all-nighter (and when you are changing DNS entries, it’s best to put some space between the update and when you start tinkering a lot).
In a few subsequent posts, I’ll describe some tips and tricks that I learned along the way in case it helps anyone else:
If you’re seeing this, then you’ve found my new WordPress blog. In theory, the old links should still work. I’ve switched over to Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting, and while it’s unusual, I’m finding a way to do what I need to do, even when it’s in a where-the-hell-is-my-shell roundabout way. You’ll probably want to update your subscription at some point, but it’s probably not necessary.