Google for pirates!

Apparently today is international talk like a pirate day. Google are always keen on adding languages and today added Pirate to their list of interface languages. Good.

How to migrate away from WordPress

Well it wasn't as straightforward as I first imagined. Google-searching found a lot of stuff, but it was almost all to move in the opposite direction. My reasons for moving back to Blogger are outlined in my previous post, maybe I was a bit naive to expect all the good stuff in the free version, plus I am becoming a huge Google fan and just feel good about being back at Blogspot. Ok not quite so many features in some places, but more in others, and much more reliable in my experience.

To try and import my previous posts from WorPres to Blogspot I chose to use the wxr2blogger python script found here. It worked quite well after two fairly obvious (in retrospect) modifications. First remember to prefix the command with "./" (this may be specific to Mac?). Secondly I needed to use the workaround detailed in the README file. After that, and repeating from the beginning, the conversion to something that blogspot could import was complete.

There were sill quite a lot of things to do however and I started to wonder if it was worth all the effort. On balance I still feel it was.

Images migrated, but as links back to the original post images. I didn't like that, they didn't look quite right, text didn't wrap, so I exported them all to my desktop and reimported them to the new blog.

Comments migrated perfectly! I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately some spam comments also carried over and needed to be deleted. Strange really since they weren't visible as comments on the WordPres site.

The script unfortunately exports posts in small batches, since apparently blogspot refuses to import large batches of posts. It took a while to import, check and post everything. Many "posts" were created that were blank, and I had to delete. I had about 4x as many posts after using the script as I actually had on Wordpress.

Anyway, all done now. Thought someone might find my experiences useful.

WordPress no more

This is my first genuine post on compumunkey.blogspot.com. All the previous posts were imported from the WordPress version of the blog. I wanted to try WordPress because of all the really nice looking blogs I had seen. It never really worked for me though.

None of those nice templates are available on the free version, nor can you import templates.

There was always weird stuff going on. The font would change on different days. Why? At least one link just evaporated.

Most annoyingly of all WordPress intercept me trying to log on and redirect me to a screen persuading me to set up a second blog. Entering the same url a second time however does get me on. Anyway that bit of marketing was the last straw.

iPod fix

I recently had a problem with my iPod touch where some (but not all) applications would refuse to launch or immediately crash back to the main screen. Downloading them a second time did not change anything. I'm running version 2.0.1 software. I didn't find anything useful when searching the web yesterday. One of the reasons to post on this blog was to add to the Google searchable pool of stuff that is out there. I followed a link to the iPod touch troubleshooting page, and decided to restart the iPod by holding the top sleep/wake button until the red "Restart" slider appeared. After restarting everything worked just fine, some applications for the first time. Yet another triumph for the turn it off and on again strategy! It hadn't actually occurred to me that I had NEVER retarted my iPod, only toggled it between wake and sleep.

Amazing things the iPod touch (and iPhone). I almost never put the headphones in, just use it as a mobile internet device. Typing is very quick and very intuitive. The screen quality is sensational for photos. I use Google notebook, Evernote and Zenbe lists as productivity devices. Gmail, Google reader, and Safari web browser are excellent too. Email yourself a PDF and you can browse it at leisure, even if offline. Yes the screen is big enogh for this. Lots of new (often free) applications appearing daily, it reminds me of how Palm was years ago before they fell asleep.

Summer typin'; switch to the dark side

I've just learned how to swap my display to a negative image (OSX 10.5.4). This provides a really great way to use your laptop in the garden on a sunny day rather than going to work.

System preferences -> Universal Access, then check the radio button marked White on Black (in the Display section). The keyboard shortcut is ctrl-alt-cmd-8 (the 3 buttons to the left of your space bar and the number 8). It looks freaky, and is really useful in bright light. Unfortunately I haven't yet worked out how to take a screenshot for this blog (this picture was borrowed from the Apple site). Screenshots look great until you turn the screen back to normal (press the same 4 buttons) then you realize that the screenshot didn't reflect the negative image, it just looked like it did.

Anyway if you have an issue with screen brightness or contrast or just getting tired eyes from working in front of a big white page this might be useful.

Fink and ftp proxies

I have being trying to use the fink program to install other applications. Fink describes itself like this

"The Fink project wants to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. We modify Unix software so that it compiles and runs on Mac OS X ("port" it) and make it available for download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like dpkg and apt-get to provide powerful binary package management. You can choose whether you want to download precompiled binary packages or build everything from source."

Although I had fink working well on my previous iMac, it has been refusing to work for a while now on a range of new computers. It just fails to make a connection.I had 2 hypotheses- (1) the Univesity have introduced some unseen security that prevents it from connecting (they don't like ftp) or (2) I had messed up some setting.

Something I saw in fink FAQ this week rang some alarm bells and made me go back to check my settings.

Issuing a fink configure command allows you to change lots of settings including proxies. I knew that I would have to go through proxies for both http and ftp. It turns out that my ftp proxy was not prefixed by ftp:// -instead only the address was given. I suppose I had assumed it would fill this in since an ftp address MUST begin ftp:// but no. Actually the fink instructions at this point give an example address beginning http:// which should also be ignored.

Stupid really in retrospect, I should have spotted this earlier. Anyway this solved the problem.

Web of Science and Zotero

I don't want to turn this into ZoteroBlog, but since reference managers are major productivity software for me and Zotero is changing and improving very rapidly here is another installment. Some of my previous worries about Zotero not coping well with Web of Science have been fixed. The handy little import this reference or this collection of references buttons are back in the Firefox URL bar.


Also I now understand how to get references out of WoS and into Zotero by export/import. To do this mark the references you want. Then go to the marked reference list and tick the info to export (ie check the abstract button). Select BibTex from the menu at the bottom and Save. BibTex is imported very well by Zotero.

Turn it off and on again

I said below that Papers (the PDF management tool) may or may not be playing nicely with dropbox synchronisation. I investigated some more and discovered 2 things. Firstly dropbox had stopped syncing, I don't know why, so I restarted it. It lept into action and updated my Papers folder and others from changes I had made last night at home (and had clearly made it onto the server). Secondly I noticed that it had partially mangled my open Papers database, but only for the records that had changed. So for 3 or 4 records I had the info in my local Papers copy (work) but had updated the records at home. It now said that these PDFs were missing. I restarted Papers and now everything was perfect, all PDFs were found, all modifications for records (whichever machine I had made them on) were sensibly amalgamated. Obviously this isn't an ideal situation but at least the tried and tested "turn it off and on again" is a very simple solution to occasional problems.

Using Endnote bibliography styles in Zotero

I just downloaded and tried installing an Endnote style. It worked beautifully. Although how to do it seems obvious to me now, it didn't 15 minutes ago, so here is what I did.

1. Go to Endnote styles page and download the styles you want.
2. Open Zotero and open the preferences pane, choose Styles from the icons at the top
3. Click the + button at the bottom right corner
4. A window appears allowing you to select and import the style from wherever you just saved it

It should then appear in your style list. I just did this for BMC Evolutionary Biology which you can see in the window screenshot given here. I haven't yet investigated whether you can batch import files.

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview

Zotero 1.5 Sync preview is an update to the mostly excellent Zotero reference collection and management software. The big change here is that your references can now be synchronised across machines via the Zotero server. I haven't experimented very much with it since the launch yesterday but after a quick look it seems excellent, a very helpful addition. Another big change that was mentioned is the ability to use more than 3000 Endnote bibliographic styles to format your citations. I couldn't quite see how to implement this, but I only really played with Zotero1.5 for about 10 minutes last night so it might be in there. It requires Firefox3. Now if they could only get Microsoft to fix MS Word 2008 to accomodate bibliography tool bars again we would be there. I saw a blog recently (forgotten where) with someone saying that an institutional licence for RefWorks is around $10k. Zotero is free, and does all the same things, often much better, than RefWorks. It is also a community driven open-source project and needs supporting for that reason alone.