Note this is an archived version of this page. The current blog is now here
As if surfing the web didn't already consume enough of my time, I've now discovered the online Google tech talks (on Google video). So far I've seen Doug Lenat talking about Cyc (now there's a long-term AI project). I should have skimmed more of it, but you never knew when he was going to say something very interesting - the stuff about using Cyc to generate fragments of English then feed those to Google to generate more knowledge for the Cyc ontology; the large number of special purpose reasoners within Cyc (Lenat: if we have to fall back on the general theorem prover then we're doing something wrong); and the presumably funding-related quest to make Cyc think about terrorist plots and attack and defence plans.
The other one I saw was Seth Godin's All Marketers are Liars. Godin says something like "great technology gives you a chance at marketing", which I thought was quite insightful. There's quite a bit of good stuff in this one too - particularly where he talks about the "new" model of attracting an audience to your core product, then getting permission from them to tell them about something new, and then letting them spread the word because your product is so remarkable (a purple cow, as Seth would put it). Of course, first you have to catch your purple cow.
I've been using a Palm 3c for about 5 years now, and it's been a really useful little machine. Lately though I've found that I'm using pretty much only as an address book so I find myself with the Palm in one hand and the phone in the other, typing in the number from the Palm to dial on the phone. This is clearly insane behaviour: the phone has a perfectly good address book, but I've been holding onto the Palm for some reason.
Anyway, once I looked into what it would take to move the data across, it wasn't too hard. Fiddly, yes, but not difficult. With the thought that there might be someone else out there who needs to move from Palm to Sony Ericsson mobile, here's what I did:
When you import, for some reason WAB makes you press enter for each new card. Very annoying, but unless you have thousands of entries, not a huge problem. I also found that I couldn't import multiple cards with the same person's name. If that's a problem for you I suggest you disambiguate the names either in the Palm desktop, or by just editing the vCard file - it's plain text.
Now sync the phone with WAB and you're done.
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I recently wanted to move LiveJournals, for various reasons. So naturally I thought it would be good to take my old LJ posts with me to the new LJ. This turns out not to be as easy as I thought.
You can export entries, a month at a time, from the Export Journal page. However, there's no easy way to re-import them into another LJ. I admit I haven't looked into downloadable clients, so that might be another way to do it. In my case though, all I wanted was just to re-import the exported monthly archives as single entries.
The problem here is that you can export either as CSV, or as XML. You could write a program (or quite possibly an Excel spreadsheet) to turn the former into formatted text, but I thought I'd have a go at a simple stylesheet to turn the XML back into simple HTML I could paste into the LJ rich text editor.
Turns out to be quite easy, with even my limited XSL skillz:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>insert this:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="lj.xsl"?>
Hopefully that will work for you. If not, drop me an email or leave a comment and I'll try to help you if I can.
I've finally entered the 21st century: I signed up with NTL broadband, and bought a Linksys wireless router and cards for both PCs. For once, NTL seem to have been pretty competent: the engineer came the same day I ordered the service and installed the cable modem. The WiFi kit came the next day, and then the fun began.
It's working now, on the desktop PC at least - Mrs F's laptop is proving more reluctant, but I think that may be a problem with the machine itself (or possibly the wireless card).
I can see wireless networking taking off in a big way (I can reach two other networks just from my house) but the setup has to be simplified. It took me the better part of a day to make it work correctly, and I work with computers and networks all the time. I don't know what you'd do if you weren't technical - I think you'd be stuck at step one as soon as the NTL CD failed to connect you to the network.
Oh well. It's working now so hooray for me.
Sorry the site is currently looking very ugly (if it still is). I'm just in the process of upgrading to a 3 column stylesheet, and I'm kind of doing it by trial and error. I've looked at Erik Heels Movable Type braindump and basically copied the stylesheet from bluerobot.com.
So far the basic design is working, but I need to put back all the Furthermore specific styles, or think of updates that I like better. I have been meaning to get a proper banner for instance.
Update: It's now looking pretty good, once I understood which stylesheet elements affected which bits of the main template. You should be seeing delicious links and blogroll on the right now.
Probably there's some neat built in way to do this, but I don't know it if there is. Suppose you have a list, which may contain multiple copies of each item in it. You want to know how many of each there are.
ie, suppose I have a, b, a, c, b, a, d, c, b - how many of each thing do I have?
Okay, put all the items in a column, then sort it, so that all the a's are together, all the b's etc. Call that column A. Now in column B, put a 1 in row 1, then starting at row 2, use this formula: IF(A2=A1, B1+1, 1) - fill down to the end. The successive cells in the column will count up from 1 to however many of each thing you have.
Ah, but how can you extract the highest numbered item of group of identical items easily? Simple: column C - use this formula: IF(B2<=B1, 1, 0) and fill down - now the highest numbers will be marked with a 1 in column C, and all others will have a 0. Auto-filter on column C and you're done.
I'm not really much of an Excel head, but it's very useful for some things, and I've used this trick no end of times. Saves writing a script to do the same job.
I know I'm slightly repeating myself, but I thought this was worth pulling out into a separate post as I'm sure I won't be the only person with this problem.
If you've activated Typekey for comments, and then when you try to login, you get a message saying "The validation failed", then the following fix may be for you:
There's a long thread about this at the Movable Type forums, but the short version is this:
lib/mt/Util.pm, replacing this line: if ($has_crypt_dsa && 0) { with this:if ($has_crypt_dsa) {At this point I should just put in a plug for my hosting provider 34sp - I reported that the module wasn't there at about 3pm, and by about 4.30pm it was sorted. I am extremely impressed.
Having played with it for a few days, these are the things that are still not working in MT3.0.
If I get any further with these problems, I'll let you know.
Just saw Aaron Margosis' blog, which is all about running Windows without being logged in as admin all the time. This is something that should be really useful - at home I run Mandrake Linux, and I almost never need to use root.
The other thing that annoyed me just lately was that I got onto the list of some pretty industrious porn comment spammers. I had the odd comment before, but these guys clocked up over 360 comments in a very short space of time. I've turned off comments globally for now, but I'm very disappointed to have to do so. It's not like I was overwhelmed with responses, but a few people have commented on a few threads, and I like that.
I may upgrade and install typekey or something, but I don't really have time at the moment for that kind of fiddling.
Just saw the Webdav site which looks like a really interesting extension to http to support distributed authoring and versioning.
Some old links on technology and privacy issues. This is a subject close to my heart as I think it's an area in which new technology potentially has the ability to damage rights that we currently take for granted. I'm not a privacy fundamentalist by any means, but I do think the UK government (and others) are in the process of a land grab of these rights before most people even realise they had them to lose. I'll definitely be writing more about this.