Category Archives: technology

WordPress to Movable Type?

Written on July 25, 2007 by in technology

Nope, I’m not moving my blog to Movable Type, but I have been interested in trying out MT 4.0 beta since it is going open source. FYI, MT 4.0 was supposed to go final yesterday, but the power outages in the San Francisco area has delayed the release, so I tried out MT 4 Beta 7.

WordPress is known for its ridiculously simple 5-step installation. MT was pretty much the same. After unzipping it and pulling it up on the browser, the only real information I had to put in was for the database.

Movable Type 4 Beta 7 Database Setup

The next step creates an user and then you are presented with the dashboard:

Movable Type 4 Beta 7 Dashboard

I’m not sure I really like the interface, but it has the relevant options, just scattered around a bit. I wanted to try out MT with some real content, so I used a script from codemonkyramblings.com to export this blog into something MT could import. Instructions for using the script can be found in the comments here.

Movable Type 4 Beta 7 Importing from WordPress

The import itself wasn’t perfect, but it moved over all the published and drafts ok. Unfortunately, that doesn’t automatically display the posts on the blog yet. Instead, the site needed to be “published.”

Movable Type 4 Beta 7 Publishing Content

Changing some of the styles also required the site to be republished, but posting a new entry did not, so I’m a bit unclear on when republishing is required.

There are a couple things I noticed. First, the MT site definitely seems to load faster than my WP blog (yes, I do have WP-Cache installed and both blogs are in the same DreamHost account). Maybe the publishing creates static pages, but there is a performance difference. Second, OpenID is an option without any needed plugins. Christer Edwards and Aaron Toponce have discussed enabling OpenID on WordPress blogs here and here.

Finally, the end product is located at http://boredandblogging.com/mt-4-beta-7-test-blog/. All my text formating seems to have disappeared, oh well. Feel free to muck around on it.

Movable Type 4 Beta 7 Test Blog

Would I consider moving to it? Not at the moment, but I’m really interested in seeing if the open source MT community will be as vibrant as WordPress’s has been over the years.

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technology

RoboCup 2007 Atlanta

Written on July 3, 2007 by in atlanta, georgia tech, technology

The RoboCup 2007 competition is being held this week at the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta.

What is RoboCup? From the main site:

RoboCup is an international joint project to promote AI, robotics, and related field. It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. RoboCup chose to use soccer game as a central topic of research, aiming at innovations to be applied for socially significant problems and industries. The ultimate goal of the RoboCup project is ‘By 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in soccer.’

Nearly 1700 students and faculty from 300 teams and 117 countries will be competing in events ranging from four-legged and humanoid robotic soccer games to search-and-rescue competitions. Here are some images from RoboCup 2006:

 

Robocup 01_14_06Humanoid2.735

Humanoid5Robocup 0004

More pictures from RoboCup 2006 can be found here. There is a Flickr pool for pictures from RoboCup 2007 here.

Finals for the various competitions will be July 7th and 8th. Stop by if you are in the area.

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atlanta, georgia tech, technology

Evil EULAs

Written on June 8, 2007 by in linux, planetubuntu, technology, ubuntu

Not to regurgitate anything from Slashdot, but there is an interesting post there about a guy suing Gateway in small claims court over a defective computer. Gateway responded by saying that the guy gave up his right to sue when the user agreed to the EULA on the computer. The user says he never agreed to the EULA since his monitor was the problem.

So I starting googling and came across Scott Dunn’s story about InfoWorld Ed Foster’s thoughts on EULAs, at WindowsSecrets.com (don’t laugh), about why they are harmful:

  1. EULAs are anticompetitive – Blizzard won a lawsuit against BnetD who made an open source product that allowed gamers to play the game on their own servers, instead of using Blizzard’s Battle.net service. Even though BnetD didn’t violate any copyright laws, the EULA stated that the reverse engineering the protocol was prohibited.
  2. EULAs restrict consumer reviews – McAfee VirusScan had a clause where benchmarks could not disclosed to third-parties without the consent of Network Associates. Thankfully, the state of New York fought McAfee in court and won.
  3. Bad EULAs are anticonsumer – Back in 1995, Gateway (ahem), was sued for selling a computer with parts that were not advertised. An arbitration clause in the EULA required parties to pay a $2000 non-refundable fee just to go to arbitration!
  4. EULAs legitimize spyware – This is precious: “One egregious example is the case of FriendGreetings.com, which required users to download and install a reader to see its electronic greeting cards. Customers had to consent to two seemingly harmless license agreements, the second of which stated that the company would be using the customer’s Outlook contact list to send encouragements to download the software.”

So what you can you do? One way, Foster advocates, is to use OSS! There are also tools like EULAlyzer, which look for certain keywords and try to alert you of strange requirements. There are sites like fairterms which are trying to educate folks on why proposed legislation like Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is bad news and will hurt consumers. Of course, try to get in touch with your respective local governments and let them know how you feel.

Why We Must Fight UCITA by Richard Stallman

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linux, planetubuntu, technology, ubuntu

Links for May 3rd, 2007 through June 4th, 2007

Written on June 4, 2007 by in Random, technology
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Random, technology

How Scoble Reads 622 Feeds a Day

Written on May 30, 2007 by in technology, ubuntu

Tim Ferriss has video interview of how the famous Robert Scoble reads such a large number of feeds on a daily basis using Google Reader. The keyboard shortcuts and “river of news” (which most news readers provide) make it easy to scan through so many feeds.

To catch Robert’s attention, he does a quick mental check: good headlines are a necessity and the content should be link heavy. Link density shows that research has been done and hopefully there is some analysis and an unique point of view. Images are helpful because the readers slow down to look at them. Sites like TechCrunch have gotten popular for including graphics in every post.It’s an interesting conversation of balance between reading lots of different bloggers and other blogs who aggregate and filter for their readers. In a way this is related to the new planet.ubuntu-us.org that has gone live recently. Right now it’s set up to read feeds from sites of approved LoCos, but should it take in blogs of community members of those LoCos who are not CC approved members yet? Does that open up a can of worms? What would happen if a post is made violating the Code of Conduct? Does opening up the planet create an administration nightmare? Or should non-members use other planets like ubuntuweblogs.org?

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technology, ubuntu

Google Apps: This Is Why Big Companies Won’t Use It?

Written on February 22, 2007 by in technology

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock today, everyone knows that Google has rolled out a Premier Edition of their Google Apps service.

So this is going to be a bit of a rant. Bear with me.

Looking at some of the responses around the web, some folks think companies won’t use it because of privacy issues.

What?!? Is it 1998 again? Privacy?!?

Companies try to outsource everything. Everything. Call centers. Product development. Payroll. HR benefits. CRM. Hosting. Everything.

And companies won’t outsource email? Yeah, right.

Do people realize that companies do a background check when a person is being offered a job? Private information is being handed over to a third party on purpose. Take a look at your paychecks. If you work in the private sector, employee paychecks are usually not being handled by your employer. A third party has your social security number and knows your salary information. Got insurance? More and more companies are handing over management of all that to human resource BPOs. So these BPOs have access to your SSN, probably your spouse’s SSN, and your kids’ SSN. Awesome.

Product development. Do it in India, its cheaper. Its halfway around the world. We’ve never met any of them, but I’m sure they’ll keep everything nice and secure. Uh huh. Right.

Some people think Outlook is better than Gmail. Seriously, I understand personal preferences. But there is no way on earth Outlook is better than Gmail. The fact that the Google Desktop Outlook search works better than Outlook’s own search should tell you something.

People really mean to say that Exchange is better than the POP/IMAP standards. I don’t agree, but Exchange’s ability to schedule meetings is very nice. Also, once an account is added to Exchange, everyone who has access to the Exchange server can easily communicate with the new user. It doesn’t seem like Gmail Apps has really dealt with either of these issues.

Some users think Google Apps guarantee of 99.9% uptime isn’t good enough. That means it will be down 8.76 hours per year. Sure, it would be bad if all that 8.76 hours came in the same day and the whole company email system was down for the day. But its not likely to happen that way. 8.76 hours per year can also mean that it will be down 1 hour every 5.9 weeks. Hello! I can pretty much guarantee no matter how impressive your Microsoft Exchange Engineers are, your system is bound to be unavailable for an hour every six weeks so they can wipe out all the spam that users get.

Am I missing something? Where do these illusions of privacy come from? Companies have absolutely no problem with sharing information with third parties if it saves them money. Why is email any different? What is this allegiance to Microsoft products? This is from a company that believes the user should pay for plugging holes that the company mistakenly made in the first place.

Update: A reader pointed out that Google lists “shared calendar resources” as a feature of the Premier Edition. Not sure what that means exactly. There is also a reference to an user directory API which may be accessible through a Google partner.

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technology

Firefox: Force All Links to Open in Tabs

Written on February 10, 2007 by in technology

I come across this annoyance every time I upgrade from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0, but keep forgetting about it.

In FF 2.0, there is no option to force every new link, which would open a new window, to open in a tab. I would think that the option under Preferences >> Tabs for New pages should be opened in: a) a new window or b) a new tab would do this, but it doesn’t. Oh well.

Today, I had to upgrade someone else’s Firefox and this issue came up again. Doing a quick Google search gave me the answer.

Go to about:config. Look at the image below and set the preferences to the following values:

Firefox 2.0 Tabs Preferences

Its that simple.

[Via satukubik.net]

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technology

Atlanta gets Wifi

Written on January 31, 2007 by in atlanta, technology

Web Worker Daily has a post about the city of Atlanta hooking up with Earthlink to provide a city-wide wifi service. Check out the Earthlink press release here. It probably won’t be cheap, but its better than nothing.

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atlanta, technology

Mixed luck with Ubuntu Edgy

Written on November 10, 2006 by in linux, technology

As of now, my laptop and desktop are running Ubuntu Edgy. They were both running ok before. They both had Windows XP SP2 and always seemed slow. The Dell laptop was 1.7ghz and had 512MB of RAM. Nothing special, but it always felt a bit sluggish with firefox and 15 tabs open. The desktop was used as a fileserver, but I would do some work on it now and then. It has 1 gig of RAM, so pretty much everything runs fast on it.

So one afternoon, partly because my inner geekiness wanted to come out, and partly because I was bored, I decided to install Ubuntu Dapper on the desktop I downloaded the live CD from the Ubuntu site and installed it. Went just fine. It found everything the first time properly. Quite amazing.

Now I wanted to put Dapper on my laptop. Googled to see if anyone had installed Dapper on a Dell Inspiron 6000. Found some postings about people having issues with RedHat and Mepis. Decided to try Dapper on the laptop anyway.

Wow. Worked the first time again.

I’ve been itching to try Firefox 2.0 and it wasn’t coming up in the Dapper updates, but it is the installed browser in Edgy. Of course I could have just downloaded FF 2 separately and tried it out, but it was time to try something slightly different. Dapper always seemed a bit slow on the laptop for some reason. Granted it was faster than XP Media that Dell had installed with a bunch of other random crap, but still a little sluggish with Dapper.

So I went to the Ubuntu forums site and looked up instructions on upgrading. It was pretty easy. Just type the following in a terminal:

gksu "update-manager -c"

Wow again. Everything installed ok the first time around. Not only that, but everything seems to run faster. Maybe its all in my head, but Firefox and Flock definitely seem to be running very nicely.

Then I decided to upgrade the desktop. Ran the above command. All the files downloaded ok and then the installation started. At some point, it came back with an error saying the openoffice something package was corrupt. Oh no. I open up Synaptic and get an error saying Software Index is broken, run sudo apt-get install -f to fix it. I run the command and notice that it still fails when trying to do something with the openoffice package. But I could see that it didn’t try to download the openoffice package, but was trying to install it from the /var/cache/apt directory.

Maybe the package got messed up when downloading? Looking in Synaptic -> Preferences -> Files, there is an option to delete cached package files. I do that and rerun the apt-get install -f. Everything runs ok.

Reboot.

When I log in, I get an error saying something in Gnome setting barfed and themes and icons may not work. Oh great. I close the dialog box to move on. The Bug Buddy app shows up and tells me that nautilus has crashed and to send a bug report. Umm, maybe later. I cancel. But everytime I move the mouse, the Bug Buddy shows up. Irritating.

I go back into Synaptic and click on Mark All Upgrades. It tells me I have over 200 packages that need updating. WTF?!? I look through the list and nautilus is on it. So I do upgrades for all the packages. Reboot.

Finally, everything works ok and there seem to be no errors. Everything seems to be running a lot faster like the laptop.

So while the laptop upgrade went smoothly, the desktop was slightly painful. Nothing that difficult, but its easy to see why some folks are frustrated with Edgy. I wouldn’t want to revert back to Dapper since everything is working now, but people are justified in being PO’ed at the upgrade process. Not sure if Edgy didn’t go through some decent QA cycle, but the Ubuntu folks definitely need to fix the upgrade process for their future releases.

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linux, technology

Wow, WP.com rules!

Written on October 27, 2006 by in technology

Ok, I’ve been eyeing wp.com for some time now. Frankly, I was getting tired of downloading and installing new releases every few weeks. Of course if I kept up with backups diligently, it wouldn’t be a big mess if a security issue compromised my blog. Lets be serious though, everyone knows how important backups are, but does everyone have a backup plan? Yeah, right. So, I was looking for a hosted service.

WordPress’s best feature by far is its community. Folks turn out awesome themes and plugins constantly. And every now and then, I tried out some themes and random plugins. I’d always change themes depending on my mood. Finally I decided I needed to find a simple theme that I could be ok with and not want to change a whole lot. Ok, so I needed a hosted service with some simple themes.

I wanted my own domain as well. Wasn’t thrilled at the idea of having boredandblogging.whateverhostedservice.com. That is so 1990′s.

Obviously wp.com does most of these things very well. I use my domain for email and wp.com doesn’t allow for email and the blog to be on the same domain. Of course I could just ditch my email and give WP control of my domain. Umm, no. Using blog.boredandblogging.com isn’t so bad.

The auto-saving of drafts is an awesome feature and the dashboard overall is a nice upgrade to the standard wp installation.

This is my first post using wp.com and I’m thrilled!

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