This entry is for anyone who's tried to move their MovableType installation or had their Berkeley DB crash and discovered that once they resurrect their blog, all of the URLs for their entries have changed. MovableType 3.0 fixes this problem by changing how URLs for entries are created, but their are plenty of people out there who still feel the pain (MovableType 2.x users may wish to innoculate themselves).

meta's database crashed a couple weeks ago, which means that a lot of her older entries were no longer displaying properly nor were comments working properly on those older entries, so I wrote a quick script that is similar to the innoculation technique above. This script can be used to 'fix' broken links after a Berkeley DB crash, or it can be used to move your entries from one server/host to another. It requires that you have the old monthly archive pages pre-crash/move, and once it's done it creates a single file that you have to upload to your Web server. That's it.

I've included the source code of this program in the full entry, but I don't expect people who find this entry to know how to pull apart the code, because if they did, then they would probably be able to write it themselves, so feel free to leave me a comment if you find yourself in a situation similar to the one described here and I'll tailor it to your needs.

I mostly did this because it took less than 30 minutes, and I really need to practice my python.

I'm only posting this because meta and I were discussing the book quiz and what book I'd probably be (not knowing what all the answers were on the test), and my guess was Cat's Cradle, though my reasoning was because I was going to bring about the end of the world.

You're Cat's Cradle! by Kurt Vonnegut

You believe quite firmly that free will deserted you long ago and far away. As a result, it's hard to take responsibility for anything. Even though you show great potential as a leader of a small 3rd world country, the choices are all made ahead of time. You're rather fond of games involving string. Your fear of nuclear weaponry is trumped only by your fear of ice.

Take the Book Quiz

I started reading *Martian Chronicles* not realizing that I would be seeing Ray Bradbury speak at Comic-Con. If only the flight to San Diego were a bit longer so that I could have gotten a bit farther by the time I heard him speak -- I really enjoyed reading this book, and if I were braver I would have asked him for 'tips' in reading it.

In many ways it is not really a novel, as it is really a bunch of short stories loosely connected with one another (which made it perfect for finishing up on multiple Caltrain/BART trips). It certainly does not express hope for mankind, nor for technology/space travel, but it does open up the imagination in a variety of ways in how it plays with old (e.g. Poe) and new in both familiar and unfamiliar settings. Any number of the short, 10-page-or-shorter passages could have been published as a short story on its own merits, but published together they give a disjoint, yet complete narrative.

DirecTV delt a big blow to TiVo by announcing that they are going to use DVR boxes from NDS, starting in 2005 (both NDS and DirecTV are owned by News Corp.). This pretty much explains why DirecTV hasn't updated their TiVo boxes to use Series 2 features (despite having the proper hardware), and perhaps explains why their HD TiVo option is overpriced and un-enticing.

I'm disappointed in the move because it demonstrates how anti-competitive the TV market is. Cable broadcasters have kept TiVo out of the digital cable market, which requires proprietary decoders, and instead have released their own branded decoders, and now both the DirecTV and Dish offerings will be no better.

To me this is akin to having to purchase a VCR from your cable company. I would like to stay with analog cable forever, but it probably isn't long before Comcast eliminates this offering entirely.

TiVo dented by DirecTV move - News - ZDNet

The new citations feature that I have just recently noticed on Bloglines makes it even more useful than Technorati in finding entries linking to your blog. It's improvements over Technorati include: * speed (though this is probably due to the # of users on it) * the ability to customize your search to search inside or outside your bloglines subscriptions, which makes it much easier to find the random strangers who are linking to your blog. * includes LiveJournal entries. * seems to preserve entries much longer than Technorati, so you can find much older links.

Of course, it doesn't have the same level of API openness that Technorati has, and despite the inclusion of LiveJournal blogs, Technorati seems to carry some blogs that Bloglines does not, which makes their search results complementary, rather than competitive.

Citations search

del.icio.us just added a cool feature: you can now take the intersection of the tags you assign, which may simplify my tagging in the future. For example, I have a 'blogs' tag and a 'mozilla' tag, so if you select both you get my link to asa's blog (mozilla developer). The UI works fairly well too. You click on the first category, and then shows you a list of related tags that you can do a intersection with.

I feel in a puzzle-giving mood, so here's one that rcp will recognize this from her Oracle interview:

There are 25 horses, and you can race 5 of them at a time. Strangely, you have no stopwatch, but the horses always run exactly the same in every race. How many races does it take to figure out:
* the fastest horse?
* the top three fastest?

Woohoo, some good TiVo news: The FCC has approved the TiVoToGo feature, which allows users to share TV shows with friends and family (who own TiVos), as well as transfer programs to your home computer. The feature requires that you buy a bunch of dongles that you and your friends/family plugin to your TiVos. I'm not a fan of the dongle solution, but I am a fan of the actual feature, as the current requirements on the Home Media Option are overly constraining (TiVos have to be registered under the same name and have to be on the same subnet). The home computer feature will be launched first, followed by the friends and family feature at some indeterminate time.

An interesting consequence of this feature is that it would allow pooling of cable connections. For example, some of my friends don't get Comedy Central, but would like to be able to snarf my recordings of the Daily Show. This feature would allow them to get these recordings without having to pay the absurd $41/month that Comcast wants for analog cable with Comedy Central. I can see cable companies being angry about this, but I have no sympathy for them seeing how poorly they are treating analog cable.

It also allows storage pooling. We are experimenting with this right now with our three Series 2 TiVos (40/40/80). Each person participating could be responsible for maintaining a particular set of shows, which means that you could build a massive catalog of TV series to watch from. It also means that a person with a ton of storage could act as a storage service for everyone else.

Through davextreme I have found out that Virginia is officially a battleground state, which makes the coming months for me very interesting now. I had planned to go get a California driver's license finally, seeing as my Virginia license expires in prior to the elections, but now I'm tempted to fly to Virginia, renew my driver's license, AND make sure I'm still registered to vote there. The whole process will still probably be faster than waiting in line at the California DMV.

Am I right in feeling like this book is an episode of the Twilight Zone, only extremely literate and set in 19th century England? The similarity to modern-day sci-fi enticed me, though it also made it easy for me to guess exactly how it would end, which made some of the plot progression rather tedious.

If you read through the quotations that I have selected, it may become obvious that the sections of the book that I enjoyed most were Lord Henry's epigram-filled rants and his rapid-fire dialogue battles with the Duchess of Monmouth (Gladys).

Strangely, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is proving a useful introduction to this book, even though it is set a couple centuries prior, as I actually caught some of the references to courtly figures and places.

Interesting article on how we recognize written text: The Science of Word Recognition
(via kottke)

Congratulations to meta on her marriage (she promises me that I can be her man on the side). Ever since 9/11 she's felt so close to the Bush family (Dubya is a personal hero of hers) that she just had to be a part of it.
CNN.com - Bushes celebrate wedding, Jenna's catch - Aug 7, 2004

Update: you may wish to go to this Microsoft support article (thanks Frances) if the comments below don't help you with this issue. Back when I wrote this post the support article did not exist and this post is mostly here to detail my frustrations with how poorly Microsoft dealt with this issue.

I just installed Service Pack 2. Impressively there is no smoke emanating from my laptop, but we shall see. It appears that they have upgraded some useful services, such as Bluetooth and 802.11 management, though I have no Bluetooth device to take advantage of the former, and for the latter I get this wonderful message:

Windows cannot configure this wireless connection. If you have enabled another program to manage this wireless connection, use that software. If you want Windows to configure this connection, start the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) service. For information about starting the WZC service, see article 871122 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base on the microsoft.com Web site. (emphasis mine)

Am I the only one that finds this message completely broken?

I felt like testing exactly how broken this message is, so here's my attempt to look this article up: * There's no link to article in the error message, so I open up a browser to microsoft.com * I try typing 871122 into the search box at the top of microsoft.com -- no results. Seeing as Google is smart enough to be able to detect FedEx tracking numbers, numerical equations, street addresses, and so on, you would think Microsoft would be able to tell that I was typing in one of their knowledge base article numbers on their own search page. * I click on the "Search the Knowledge Base" link on the microsoft.com front page * I type 871122 into the search box that's labeled "Search the Knowledge Base." I get back "We Currently Have No Documents That Match Your Search." Apparently not even the Knowledge Base search engine can recognize its own article numbers. * I notice a link further down the page that says "Knowledge Base Article ID Number Search" * Again, I typed in 871122. This time it tells me "The Knowledge Base (KB) Article You Requested Is Currently Not Available"

Oh Microsoft, how I hate thee.

Although the conference floor was rather sparse with booths, there were two booths that caught my attention: NASA and a Maze of Carnage. The NASA booth had a small playpen with one of their personal rovers that I thought was pretty neat. Its head has a tilting camera that can be programmed to take panoramic photos. Granted, the resulting photo is stitched together horribly, but you forgive the robot for its cuteness.

I forgot who set this booth up. I assume it was an obstacle course for search and rescue robots, but as I gazed across the scene and witnessed the disembodied limbs sticking up in the air, waving back and forth, and the mannequins ripped in half in various trapped positions, I couldn't help but think that with a little more red paint they might have a good haunted house for Halloween.

Sixapart went all out with their mixer. Open bar with great drinks (Chimay, sake, wine), tasty (but a little strange) hor d'oevres, great schwag, and an art gallery to top it off (with a slightly disturbing painting of a topless Uhura). There was also a lot of the MovableType team and random industry and blogger representatives, and you could generally tell who was who, as the MT people and industry people mingled while the pure bloggers stood around :). I managed to pull away from my wallflowering long enough to have a couple of conversations, including one with a guy from rojo, a soon-to-be combined XML aggregation/social network service.

The 3.1 demo went well. I wasn't excited by the PHP integration when I first heard about it -- I was worried that it wouldn't be a seamless switch -- but when I saw it in action I was impressed. With a simple menu selection you can get rid of page rebuilding, allowing you to make quick changes to your templates and speeding up the commenting process. The URLs stay the same and all the MT tags have been reimplemented using PHP. Kudos to Brad Choate for handing over the keys to this. They also showed off a new Post Status option labeled "future", which allows you to delay a post. That might be useful, but I don't know yet.

I've been having some good schwag karma. At Comic-Con I got the Star Wars lego minis and Incredibles poster. Google gave me a nalgene bottle and t-shirt. Sixapart wins the prize though. They gave everyone 32MB flash drives (USB 2.0) with the MovableType 3.1 beta loaded on it. They were even nice enough to give me an extra one so that bp can have one.

I didn't take too many photos as I've figured that their were so many bloggers there that there should be no lack of media produced from this event. Mena was taking tons of photos with Barak's Canon digital SLR, so I was jealous, as I want to save up some money for that camera. I did have to crop the photo of me and Mena to remove my mug from it, as there was no reason to ruin a perfectly good photo.

Mixer Photo Gallery (18 photos)

It's been awhile since I've done a zeitgeist report for this site. In the past k-leo and gollum have ranked highly on this site's search results, though I moved the gollum image so as to lower that particular datapoint. The k-leo results remain because I find the comments on that thread so amusing that I can't bring myself to delete them.

I was inspired to do another report because I find the top result for this month so far to be really disturbing, which comes as a result of this comic-con post. As for the other results, let me state that: * the Redskins do not suck (at least, not yet) * It's sad that I've become tech support for Microsoft error messages. If I were to describe the one job in the world that you couldn't pay me enough to do, it would be Microsoft Tech Support, and yet my blog has doomed me to this terrible fate. Darn you MovableType! * which one is Andy Lau? * somehow I find Googling a Google e-mail address to be amusing.

I'm having a great Friday the 13th: * 8:30am: Dropped of my car to have the windows on the left side fixed (broken regulators) * 11:30am: Rode my bike to the dentist to have him look at my broken crown * 12:30pm: As I left the dentist I discovered that there was a staple through my back tire, so I had to have meta come pick me up * 1:30pm: Blew my only spare tube trying to fix the flat tire because I'm incompetent * 2:30pm: Picked up more spare tubes from bike shop, finally got back tire fixed on bike * 4:30pm: Picked up car from BMW, spent $700 on extending my warranty that expires in two weeks * 5:00pm: Discovered that my sunroof regulator may need to be replaced as well

Hmm, I'm hungry

(write your own tombstone)

MT-Blacklist v2.0e (emergency release) is out! It's installed on kwc.org now and I will be putting it through the ropes to see how well it does. It comes just in the nick of time as it seems that the spammers have caught up to my latest attempts to foil them and have been leaving loads of spam in the past 48 hours.

I have long said I would upgrade movabletypo to MovableType 3.0 when MT-Blacklist comes out, but I will have to amend that statement slightly. The features I saw in the soon-to-be-release 3.1 are significant (no more individual archive rebuilds!), and this emergency release of MT-Blacklist will not be compatible with 3.1. So, my current thinking is that I will bite the upgrade bullet with MT 3.1.

Update: MT-Blacklist has made me aware that the same spammer has now made 200 failed attempts (and rising) to spam my blog. Surely there has to be a better use of bandwidth than 200 hits against my site in only 2 hours.

So yes, MT-Blacklist is working quite well (with some minor non-feature-related bugs).

Went to the Small Brewer's Fest last weekend. It seemed smaller than in previous years; it appeared to me that although the tent was the same size, they spread the booths further apart, and there were a lot less small brewers, i.e. there were either not-so-small-brewers (Sierra Nevada, New Belgium), or restaurant breweries (Faultline, Tied House). If memory serves me right, even Anchor didn't show up this year.

A marching band performed, which was amusing, because it I got to see that band geeks do have a life after college.

Also went to a house-warming (jp) and a house-leaving (itinerant) party on Sunday. During the first we discussed orthodox religions and embroidered holes in sheets, and during the latter another person and I vociferously debated the existence of an army position that hasn't been held since WWII, which is of great importance, naturally.

I'll end with a small poll for gamers out of curiousity: which fighting game franchise is better, Tekken Tag or Dead or Alive?

Tim Wu (guestblogging on Lessig) had an interesting post on the Loser's Paradox (government always picks losers)

Not that he needed any given the 2003 Tour de France in which in raced with a broken collarbone, but Tyler Hamilton, after dropping out of this year's Tour with a back injury, now gets to stare at a shiny gold medal. He edged out US Postal's Ekimov (silver), and Bobby Julich (bronze).

Hamilton wins Olympic TT; Julich takes bronze

Awhile back I wrote a never-posted entry entitled, "Die Social Networks, Die!" In it I ranted about how bad the current social networking sites are, and how their craptastic offerings may be so spectacular so as to delay the adoption of social networking technologies in the mainstream (i.e. when a good social networking service finally did come along, it would get no traction due to the burnout suffered at the hands of Orkut and Friendster).

I'm glad I didn't post that, because I think I was wrong. The site that's been winning me over, ever so slowly, is Flickr. It's not a social networking site, per se. I think it wanted to be in the beginning, if my vague memories from many months ago serve correct.

To me, social networking is like wireless. Wireless attracts me to a coffee shop, but my main purpose is to buy coffee, and the coffee better be good, and the wireless better be free. When Flickr initially looked to me like an flashy social networking app with photo-sharing thrown in, it wasn't that interesting to me, because the social networking seemed more important than the photo management.

Now, however, they've worked really hard on making the photo management work really well with both cameraphones as well as my desktop. According to bp the cameraphone integration is one of the best out there, and my experiences with the Windows Explorer integration have been great as well. They've also just released a new Organizr, which rivals desktop photo organizers, and they are part of the new wave of organizers (del.icio.us, gmail) that uses tagging instead of folders. Another great feature is that they've made it possible to incorporate flickr photos directly into your blog.

There are disadvantages of course. I publish far too many photos for Flickr's free quota, and you can't publish high-quality versions of the photos, but neither or these is truly the aim. Flickr creates a new opportunity for building a shared visual narrative with friends or broader community, similar to how LiveJournal's friends list creates a shared, journaling community.

Speaking of LJ (which previously had been my only example of a good social networking site): LJ publishes your friends list as FOAF (http://livejournal.com/users/username/data/foaf). Combine that with Flickr's Web API and you could have a great combined, distributed service with both journaling and photo-sharing. In the near future these Web applications can start blurring the borders and create a great, distributed, social networking service.

My trusty stainless steel crown that I've had since I was eight or so finally gave out on me. I have a fancy new porcelain crown that was made using a $12K camera that captures a 3-D image of the tooth, and then some 3-D modelling software that generates an appropriate crown for the tooth, and finally a $100K dual-diamond bit cutter that mills the crown out of a block of porcelain (of the correct yellow hue for my teeth). I was rather impressed, in a dorky way, how computer technology is taking over the dentists office.

QED

This post on Kakutani's theorem broke my brain for a bit:

Take two pieces of 8*11 paper and lay them on top of one another so that every point on the top paper corresponds with a point on the bottom paper. Now crumple the top piece of paper in anyway that you wish and place it back on top. B's theorem tells us that there must be a point which has not moved, i.e. which lies exactly above the same point that it did initially.

Fry's had an 80GB Western Digital USB 2.0 hard drive for only $70 after rebate. They were selling an 80GB Western Digital internal hard drive (6MB more cache) for the same exact price. Apparently if I went a week earlier I could have gotten an off-brand 160GB external drive for $80, but this will do for now. Now I just have to figure out what to do with the darn thing.

Not the movie, but the phrase, which means "Life out of balance." Granted, there's no Philip Glass soundtrack or fear of industrial development, but the phrase remains descriptive enough for how I've felt for the past several months, perhaps starting when I first injured my back, and then worsened by the complacency that followed. The environment we live in has such a strong hold on how we feel and how we develop, and in my most recent move I didn't feel that the pieces came together just right.

Using the methods I learned growing up as a military brat, I'm attempting to right things in the way I best know how, which is a long way of saying that I will be moving, again, in the near future (60 days), as will the rest of the house of 99.

This perhaps is a good time to advertise a wonderful house for you or anybody you know to move into. Those of you who have visited know that it is quite a spectacular house, with three bedrooms, a gigantic living room and kitchen, small basement, 2-car garage, very large backyard, and cottage, all totaling 3/4 of an acre I believe. I was jealous of the previous tenants when they lived there, and I'll be jealous of whoever moves in next.

The new MT Blacklist is spectacular (in comparison, the first version was merely great). Since installing it on kwc.org, not a single spam has gotten through. Additionally, MT Blacklist requires almost no administration -- it updates its list automatically every night. This is everything a spam-fighting tool should be:

a) blocks all your spam
b) requires no effort on your part

I'm still in the habit of logging in constantly to clean out my spam, but I will soon learn that it no longer requires my assistance, and I can spend that extra time doing more productive work.

There are a couple of minor Windows-only bugs, but these really aren't an issue because no spam has gotten through, so I haven't had to use the features that have those bugs.

Two announcements:

1) I have officially forsaken my Virginia identity and have applied for a California driver's license.

I've given up on my previous plan to fly to Virginia, re-register my license there, and also register as an absentee voter, mainly because there may be tax implications of pretending to still be a Virginia resident.

2) My California DMV experience went really well. This is shocking. I've avoided (1) for three years because the bad stories about the DMV were endless. Cohen went there three times before he was successful; others went online to make appointments for dates 30 days in the future. I, on the other hand, went online, and was given an appointment for the next day. When I showed up for my appointment, I took a number, which was called promptly. I then discovered I did not have $24 in cash, as required, but the woman helping directed me to an ATM and let me cut back in line.

My only disappointment in the whole experience is that I got 100% of the questions right. Clearly, if there was any time wasted, it was studying for that test.

My post frequency is down, so I'm going to cheat and mine a post from an e-mail thread.

This New York Times has an article on people and their iPods, and more specifically, how people attribute a higher level of intelligence to their iPods than actually exists. For example,

The iPod "knows somehow when I am reaching the end of my reserves, when my motivation is flagging," Mr. Greist insisted. "It hits me up with 'In Da Club,' and then all of a sudden I am in da club."

People also seem to think that the iPod favors certain artists, and point to the fact that the songs by the same artist will frequently play in proximity to one another. Often this artist will be someone the person likes, so they think that the iPod has learned their music tastes.

Personally, I think this viewpoint may be a result of how humans have a hard time comprehending random.

There is a problem that math/CS majors study called the Birthday Paradox, which asks "given N people, what is the probability that 2 have the same birthday?" It only takes 23 people for the probability to reach 50%. When we did this in class it only took ~15 people before we had two of the same birthdays. (Rubin reminds me that birthdays are not actually distributed evenly throughout the year, so the probability of having two people with the same birthday is actually much higher "since people in certain weather areas always seem to get randy around the same time").

This problem has applications to the iPod shuffling problem. Assuming that you had an equal number of songs from 100 different artists, then you would need 12 songs for there to be a 50% probability of at least two songs by the same artist (100 different artists). This doesn't mean that the songs by the same artist are 12 songs apart; it just means within that span of 12 songs there are at least 2 songs by the same artist, which means on average they will be a lot closer than 12 songs apart. If there are only 50 artists, then it only takes 9 songs, and for 200 artists it takes 17 songs.

However, like the Birthday Paradox, these assumptions are unrealistic: there are definitely artists that we have a lot more songs of, and soundtracks also inflate the number of artists. We also, as the article points out, buy more music of the kind we like. Putting this all together, even if the iPod is being completely random, it should be the case that you frequently hear songs by the same artist close together, and that artist will likely be someone you like. Thus, through complete mindless randomness, the iPod has 'learned' all about your preferences.

(I didn't verify any of the math I used in this entry)

As meta noted, we went to the Saddlerack in Fremont Friday night. It was a rather interesting place, as I would have never expected a country-western Bar of that magnitude to exist in the Bay Area. If you had taken a photo of the parking lot, one would think you were in Texas, as nearly every American pickup truck in the South Bay must have been parked there. This is not to say that the entire crowd was authentic; rather, the bar had to cater to both the authentic and ironic crowds, the latter mostly made up of Stanford students and what-not. The music would switch between live country and Outkast and the like, though each would run for about half-an-hour to give each group its appropriate amount of time on the dance floor.

meta rode the mechanical bull, as did several others. Sadly, jay wussed out, or perhaps he didn't want to deprive watching female riders. I, of course, can blame my invertebrate spine for my weakness.

I saw zealot for the first time in quite awhile on Saturday. She was a proper CD/DVD-shopping companion: while being responsible for instigating our trip to Rasputin Music, she also made sure that I didn't waste all my disposable income there by going through my selections with me and tossing anything I showed the slightest hesitation purchasing. None of this, though, stopped her from impulse-buying Knight Rider Season One at the cash register.

Quick tangent: sarah, Season One and Three of the TNG. Rasputin Music. $50 each. You know you want it.

Also got to see Jeff and Dave, yet again on Castro Street in MV. We hung out a bit before I rushed Jay over the airport, and then dropped in on Al's b-day bash. I will note that Al's team won the mini-golf tourney with Al wearing the yellow bracelet, a fact which will become important in a future post I am preparing.

Not for myself, as AT&T can't seem to drop the price on the Nokia 6820 that I want to upgrade to (I have the 6800). Honeyfields was looking for a new Cingular phone, so I had to entertain myself as she browsed through the demo models.

My entertainment, repeated at two different booths, went as follows: * begin playing with my cellphone, tossing/twisting/bouncing it around * let the cellphone drop and hit the floor * watch horrified looks of mall-goers walking buy (usually someone will say something like, "looks like he needs a new phone") * turn towards Cingular salesperson, make some point about the phone being really tough, showing him how its still working. * intentionally drop cellphone directly in front of salesmen, letting it break into about four different pieces (phone, battery, battery cover, sim card) * observe the truly horrified look of the salesperson

I scared one salesman enough that he started comforting his anthropomorphic cellphone (kinda how you might pet/comfort a bunny), going as far to get out his cellphone case and put his cellphone back in it, as if to protect it from my doberman cellphone.

I'm thinking of deleting my Friendster account. My main reason is that it's served zero purpose for me thus far, they also just fired an employee for blogging/commenting about something that was already public. I wish I could say that I would be canceling to defend her right, but really, the event is just a reminder how irrelevant Friendster is (see their desperate pleas for attention). Also, in response, people have been posting account cancellation links, which overcomes my laziness to do something I should have done awhile ago.

I placed a question mark on the post title as I offer this as a last chance for anyone to convince me why I should remain on Friendster. Will you lose some valuable Friendster-rank? Will it sadden you to have one less testimonial? BTW - I'm keeping my Orkut account for now, as it would no longer be redundant.

Update: "Friendster account is dead, okay?" No one rose to the defense of Friendster (not really surprising), so the account is now dead. Don't be too surprised if you start see some of your old testimonials showing up on orkut, as I'm not creative enough to write new ones.