Geek stuff – Page 147 – a sibilant intake of breath

WordPress has taken over

As you can see, going directly to www.sindark.com will not take you directly to the new WordPress blog. I encourage people to register for a user account that will let you comment without leaving you information, and perhaps let me do fancier things later.

If you want the RSS feed, it is: http://www.sindark.com/feed/ Please update your BlogLines accounts and such. There is even a feed for comments, at: http://www.sindark.com/comments/feed/

Should you want to look at it, the old blog is still available at www.sindark.com/blogger/. It probably will not be updated any longer. I will not be moving the post pages or archive pages for the moment, so Google searches leading to entries on the old blog should still work.

WordPress migration timeline

Beta period:

Finish fixing photos
Change colour of links and the search box
Generally finish tweaking template
Add Google Analytics tracking to WP blog
Find a photo upload plugin akin to the Upload Photo tool in Blogger

Release:

Shift Blogger blog to www.sindark.com/blogger
Redirect from www.sindark.com to www.sindark.com/wp/
Update any technorati style services as needed
Discontinue updates to Blogger blog
Fix internal links within WP blog

Optional:

Fix internal links within Blogger blog

If done properly, this will only really cause turmoil for the search engines, which should be able to sort it out in a few months, regardless. Relatively non-technical people who have seen the new WP site detect little difference, as it is. Is there anything else I am missing here?

WordPress migration, photo trouble

As part of the process of Blogger to WordPress migration, I really need a plugin that acts like the ‘Image Upload’ function in Blogger. It needs to be able to take a 1024×768 JPG file, upload it to my web server, create a thumbnail in one of a few sizes, and insert the thumbnail into my post as a link to the large version.

Does anyone know of such a plugin, or another easy way to do this?

Also, how can I configure WordPress to automatically mail new posts to an email account? I like having all my blog entries in my GMail account so that I can search them from within it.

Another strange and very annoying bug: on all posts that begin with photos immediately followed by a heading in bold, the WordPress version leaves an open [strong] tag that makes everything below it formatted in bold. I can fix them manually, but there are dozens and dozens.

Pondering content-management options

Increasingly, I feel the desire to be able to do more sophisticated things with this blog. For instance, I would appreciate being able to organize posts by category, as well as being able to send and receive trackbacks. I would also like to be able to host my own content management system, so I won’t be out in the cold whenever Blogger (frequently) goes down. Having the ability to establish user profiles with differing access levels also has some appeal, given the wide variety of people who read this blog, and the varied purposes for which they do. At this stage, I should probably have a blogroll, as well.

The most comprehensive (and expensive) option is to switch to MovableType, which would cost about $200 – the amount I pay for four years of hosting at sindark.com. TypePad – also from six apart – is about $50 a year. WordPress is an appealing free option, seemingly used by many of the better blogs I read. I like that it is licensed under the GPL.

The most important consideration is ease of continuity. I need to shift more than 1200 posts (not all of them obviously part of a sibilant intake of breath), along with hundreds of images. Also, any viable transfer will need to include the automatic alteration of internal links to reflect the new structure. Clearly, it’s not a project to be taken on during the middle of a term.

Has anyone made the transition from Blogger to WordPress or TypePad? If so, how difficult did you find it? Were you able to broadly transfer things automatically, or did it take a lot of manual tweaking? Also, what made you decide to switch and for what reasons are you either glad or regretful about doing so.

In the interests of fair and comprehensive reporting, I should disclose that special forces teams are already operating inside WordPress – reconnoitering and marking targets to be followed up upon later. The important thing to to have a really sound post-migration plan in place, reducing the possibility of some kind of data insurgency from posts or other components that prove resistant to being integrated into the new order.

Science fiction and positivist social science

While thumbing through a copy of Frank Herbert‘s Dune that I bought for a Pound at a used book shop, I realized the extent to which the highest ideals of strongly positivist social science can be found in science fiction. Because of the complexity of his notion of politics – and the interconnections between politics and other phenomenon, like religion – Herbert’s perspective extends somewhat beyond social science as often envisioned. Much closer to the ideal is some of the work of Isaac Asimov, which I will come to in a moment.

Dune itself can be read if an interesting (if fictional) study of politics. The Bene Gesserit notion of politics as fundamentally bound up in the structural relationships between different entities would not be hugely out of place in an American international relations faculty. The connections drawn up in Dune between transport, resources, and power are also relevant to contemporary politics. Of course, at times Dune is quite a self-aware allegory for the situation in the Middle East. I was entertained to find a discussion of coercion and consent as dual means for maintaining power in the novel. With a bit of terminology changed, it could be in a textbook on Machiavelli and Gramsci.

A better example of positivism embraced in science fiction is the concept of psychohistory: as described in Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation novels. Basically, psychohistory is envisioned as a science that can accurately predict the development of human society in the long term, and for large numbers of people. While it can’t make specific predictions about precise moments in time, it can predict massive systemic reorganizations over the course of anywhere between decades and millennia. It’s a strong endorsement of the idea that history is guided by comprehensible forces.

One interesting twist is that even with the benefit of psychohistory, the arch-positivists in the Foundation novels must still be actively involved in shaping the development of the system they examine. Also, for the predictive power to be maintained, people must not be aware of the fact that psychohistory is being applied. To say much more would spoil a number of key surprises in an iconic science fiction series, but the connections between science fiction and social science – within the historical context that spawned both – might reveal some important things about the kind of project some people understand themselves as being engaged in, as regards the world around them.

An alternative explanation is that, after spending so much time trying to force as much IR as possible into my head, I can’t see things any other way. When an eight year old boy is given a hammer, he suddenly discovers that everything needs pounding.

Maddening little bits

Whoever designed the expensive electronic devices that ship with these tiny plastic doo-dads must have been aware, on some level, that there were people out there who would actually try to keep track of them. As such, it can only be understood as an act of cruelty that they were made so small and, in many cases, actually transparent.

Without exaggeration, I can affirm that I have spent at least one hour of my life looking for each of these, and many more in a state of paralytic anxiousness about them. That’s particularly true of the tiny, soft, black things. If I lose one of those, my expensive headphones become worthless. Once, after being up all night, I spent almost an hour searching the main road beside the Nanaimo Skytrain Station, looking for one of these that had fallen off while I was crossing. I did find it, but nearly got killed by passing cars a half dozen times, while crossing the road looking straight downwards over and over again.

£1 coin included for scale.

Appeal to fellow geeks

Despite much tinkering, Blogger is still being awkward with regard to image uploads. The way it normally works is that you select an image to add and it generates two resized versions in JPG format: one at 1024×768 and the other at 320×240. It then uses the smaller image as an item in your post that links to the larger image. It does all this with a really odd looking block of code:

[a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” xhref=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” mce_href=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_BIG.JPG” ][img style=”float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;” xsrc=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” mce_src=”http://www.sindark.com/uploaded_images/IMG_SMALL.JPG” border=”0″ alt=”DESCRIPTION” /][/a]

I’ve tried uploading small and large images of the right sizes and plugging the filenames into that template, but that doesn’t seem to work either, as well as being quite a pain.

I am trying to use the image tool to have it automatically resize and upload pictures to my FTP server. It can upload posts fine and non-image files fine, but it hangs every time I try to upload an image. In Firefox, it does so with “Waiting for photos.blogger.com…” listed at the bottom of the photo upload window. In Opera, it just hangs at the upload screen, without even the animation that usually accompanies the upload process. Safari shows the animation, but it never ends. The same tool is capable of uploading images to my BlogSpot hosted blog without problems.

I can put files in my uploaded images folder via an FTP client and I’ve checked the privileges on that folder. Obviously, the login information is correct. I’ve tried clearing my cache and cookies. I’ve also tried this process in Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.2, and the latest version of Safari. What else could be wrong? Is this a Blogger bug, or am I doing something wrong? Exactly the same setup worked fine three days ago.

Magic and Mathematics

A book of magic tricks that I owned in elementary school included a number of ‘tricks’ that worked because of the properties of the Mobius Strip. I realize now what an insult they were to geometry. Yes, it may seem amazing that you can draw a line all the way around or cut a Mobius strip along its centre and have it turn into a larger loop, but to attribute these things to ‘magic’ is absurdly anti-educational. You might as talk about how the angles in a triangle ‘magically’ add up to 180 degrees.

Electronic botherations

I obviously haven’t been making frequent enough offerings to whichever god watches over electronic devices. First, my digital camera got some kind of dust or mold permanently inside. Since it’s not a camera with lenses that can be switched, there is really no way to open it up to clean the senror. The dust is sitting directly on the sensor and the dark blotches it produces need to be manually removed from every photo that I want to look presentable, especially those with large areas of a single colour. That camera was itself a replacement for the first one I got, which had a defective flash that always fired at full power.

Today, my iPod simply stopped playing any sound in one ear. The iPod is also a replacement for the one I originally got, which would pause randomly and for no reason if it was not kept perfectly still. Hopefully, cleaning the jack for the headphones will fix this newer problem, because my experience of sending the first iPod back to Apple was hellish and the one they sent back (more than a month later) had a click wheel that was off kilter.

I wonder whether I have particularly bad luck with electronics or whether I am just pickier about them working properly and more willing to go through the hassle of getting them fixed. Both my Sony and Panasonic portable CD players got sent back to the manufacturer for defects. My GPS receiver is actually the replacement for a replacement. It’s grandfather had abysmal reception, even compared to other identical models, and its father died for no apparent reason during the second Bowron Lakes trip.

I should not, in any case, let these things distract me from the task of finishing my core seminar paper for tomorrow. It’s on whether order and justice are compatible in international relations. Obviously, it’s the kind of topic that anyone with normative concerns will feel fairly strongly about after five years of studying IR at the university level. That makes it both easier and harder to write upon. In the interests of not being up all night, I shall get back to it.

PS. This week’s readings on normative theory have been the first time I read a lot of Dr. Andrew Hurrell’s work. It has been really interesting, well written, and suited to my research interests. I think I will probably take normative theory as one of my two optional subjects next year. Overall, I think it meshes well with a research project focused on environmental politics.

PPS. It seems like it might actually be my headphones which are defunct. While they seemed to work in my iBook before, they do so now only when you hold them in a certain way. I will need to try out the iPod with another pair.

PPPS. Upon further experimentation, the problem lies with the headphones, not the jack on my iPod. While they work if you twist them in a certain way in the iBook socket, they don’t work at all in one ear with the iPod. I will need to buy new ones. In some sense, this is worse. At least the iPod is under warrenty, and all electronics are absurdly expensive here. I honestly can’t understand why people tolerate it. England desperately needs Walmart.

Music and frustration: copy protection schemes

Having spent the last few minutes explaining to a friend why a brand-new, legitimately purchased CD will not play in her computer due to the copy protection EMI has included, I am reminded of my considerable indignation about how the music industry is treating their customers. Yes, in this case, it was possible to disable the copy protection program just by holding shift as the CD was inserted into a Windows computer, but there is no guarantee at all that music you buy today is either usable or safe.

In the worst case, such as the notorious Sony BMG rootkit, inserting a legitimate music CD into your computer intentionally breaks it. It also causes it to report what you listen to to Sony, even if you choose ‘no’ when a screen comes up asking for permission to install software. It also creates really sneaky back doors into your system that can be exploited for any number of purposes, by Sony or random others. While Sony is currently facing lawsuits for this particular, infamous piece of malware, it isn’t nearly enough to put my mind at ease. If some 16 year old had written something comparably dangerous, they would probably be in jail.

Legitimately downloaded music is little better. Songs you buy from the iTunes music store may work with your iPod today, but they won’t work with another portable player. They won’t even play in software other than iTunes, and there is no guarantee that they will still work at some point in the future. Spending a great deal of money on songs from there (and they’ve just had their billionth download), is therefore probably not very wise. You don’t actually own the music you are buying – you’re just buying the right to use it on someone else’s terms: terms that they have considerable freedom to change.

Personally, I will not buy any CD that contains copy protection software. I will not buy a Sony BMG CD, regardless of whether it does or not, nor will I be buying any of Sony’s electronics in the near future. This is a business model that needs to change.