Month: May 2004

Mapping The Past

Though I’ve converted the site over to WordPress, the old Movable Type archives are still there and accessible. This presents a bit of a problem, because how do I get rid of them? Search engines are going to continue referring to them for a while, so it would make sense to leave them in place so the searcher doesn’t get a 404, but leaving them there will just keep them in the search engines even longer. Redirecting all requests that point at the old archives to the new main page would be unfriendly, since it wouldn’t be what they were looking for.

What would be preferable is to have requests to the old pages automatically redirect to the same article under the new site. The major problem there though, is that the article numbers under the two systems are not the same; what was article #77 under MT is now #74 under WordPress, for example. It’s not a simple single offset for all the articles either, since MT exported them in the order they were posted, not by numerical order.

So, clearly what’s needed is some kind of script that will map the old numbers to the new numbers. Figuring that PHP might be worth a look, since WordPress itself is implemented in it, I brought up the PHP Manual, opened some of the WordPress code in an editor as a sample, and hacked out the following: redirect-mt.php

Instead of mapping each and every article number, it takes advantage of the fact that large ranges of numbers have the same offsets, so all it has to keep track of is the boundaries of those ranges. It took longer than I thought it would to extract those ranges from the MT articles, but the generation of that list could be automated, too. I was just lazy.

This script will remap the article numbers, but I still have to capture the requests and feed them to this script. Fortunately that’s a fairly simple addition to the .htaccess:

# Redirect Movable Type archive requests to the WordPress articles,
# through a remapper script
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{6}).html$ /heide/redirect-mt.php?index=$1 [QSA]

It seems to work well enough, though I’m sure there’s probably some better way. I don’t think I’ll put PHP down on the resume quite yet… :-)

Meta-Spoilers

I was thinking about movies recently, and in particular this idea popped up: simply knowing that there are spoilers is itself a spoiler. Well duh, every movie with a plot more complicated than “See Spot run” is going to be spoilable, of course. Where this really matters though, is with movies that have some sort of surprise or twist to them.

Normally when I watch a movie I’m not really thinking about how it’ll end ahead of time. I don’t go into it thinking “Ooh, I wonder what all of the potential endings could be,” I just enjoy it moment-by-moment and let it unfold at its own pace. Whenever I read that a movie has some BIG SURPRISE or ironic twist to it though, natural curiousity sets in and I start to wonder. Sometimes the mind will get lucky and stumble across the right answer before I stop wondering about it and presto, the movie is now spoiled for me, even though nobody really told me anything about it.

For example, The Sixth Sense was obvious. As soon as I heard that there was a surprise twist to it, and knowing a famous line from it, I had an immediate guess as to what it was. Checking online verified it, and I haven’t even bothered to actually watch the movie since. If I hadn’t known, I wouldn’t have even made that guess and might very well have enjoyed the movie, but what’s the point now? In the case of The Usual Suspects it *should* have been obvious in hindsight, but I went into it not knowing anything other than that it was highly recommended, and was pleasantly surprised. If I had been warned ahead of time, would I have enjoyed it as much?

I’m not really much of a movie-goer so I don’t really care *too* much, but it’s an interesting phenomenon, at least.

Welcome, Again

Yes, the paint is new, but the place is still the same. I spent a chunk of the afternoon converting the site over from MovableType to WordPress and things *seem* to work, though I’m sure there are a few broken links here and there.

Why switch? JUST ‘CAUSE.

Oh okay, there are a couple reasons. MT used statically generated pages, which are nice for keeping the server load low but not so nice for incorporating dynamic data. WordPress has a few additional nifty features like password-protected entries and comment moderation. MT does have some similar features on the way, but the new version is also in a bit of a licensing kerfuffle. And finally, I just like tinkering with things.

Breaking News

(Update: The error 87 is solved over here.)

Attention everyone. I would just like to take this opportunity to announce that InstallShield still sucks. That’s all, thank you.

Ever since I started on the InstallShield portion of this project I’ve been fighting to get it to cooperate with our source control system, Perforce, which is supposed to integrate nicely with it. No go. Anytime I’d try to add the project to source control it would appear to work, but then after loading the .isv file tables would be missing and the project would be corrupted.

It wasn’t just a problem with Perforce, though. If I directly tried to export the project to text, it would fail partway through with an ‘Error 87: Error in Exporting Table(s)’. Merely going into the Direct Editor and just selecting the ISProductConfigurationInstanceProperty table would also produce an ‘Error 87: Error retrieving primary keys for table…’ Tech support was no help at all; apparently a couple other people have seen the same problem, but there was no solution posted.

Yesterday though, I finally got fed up and moved the whole development environment over to my other system, running XP. I don’t like to use it for development since it’s already bogged down by a bunch of other apps, but I had to try something. And now it apparently works fine on this system.

Curse you InstallShield! *shakes fist*

(Maybe it’s a problem with Windows Server 2003; I’ve also had difficulty with cygwin on there.)

Parcel Problems

You’d think getting something shipped to you would be easy, but noooo, I just have to be super-picky…

I don’t really like using the commercial shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, etc., especially for packages coming from the States. Their airmail rates are fairly high, and I don’t usually care too much about it arriving quickly. The ground rates are better, but then there’s extra paperwork involved; customs charges wind up being handled through a separate broker for some reason. In any case, the customs charges themselves are annoying, and there’s often an additional customs brokerage charge on top of the actual duty itself. UPS is particularly bad — the last time I received something from them, there was a flat $25 brokerage fee in addition to the duty percentage *and* the initial shipping charge paid to the company that sent it.

Delivering it to the right place can also be tricky. If I get it sent to my home, they’ll almost certainly never actually catch me at home, so they wind up holding it and making vehicle-less me go down to their way-out-of-the-way holding centres to pick it up. Maybe if I’m lucky that day they’ll let it be redirected to the office, or I could have it delivered there in the first place, but then there’s office paperwork added in. And sometimes they won’t allow it, insisting that it can only be sent to the credit card’s billing address.

I would actually prefer that they just send it through regular post office mail, since then I can pick it up at the nearby neighbourhood branch, the customs brokerage fee is only $5 (and often waived completely), and the speed isn’t *that* bad. Unfortunately a lot of places don’t give you that option. The major one that does is Amazon, but now there are whole categories of things that they won’t even ship to Canada (e.g., electronics).

Ah well, time to just deal with the paperwork, I guess…

Trapped

Gotta love it when you’re trapped in line behind someone making horribly complex lottery purchases. You can see the next line over moving rapidly, but you stay where you are because hey, this guy’s got to be finished any moment now, right?

And then I get stuck in the elevator for a few minutes on the way up to the office after it refuses to move after reaching the 8th floor.

Oh yeah, this is going to be a really nice day…

$ALE!!!!

It’s well known that companies play tricks with their numbers to make it seem like you’re getting a better deal than you really are, but the Net can reveal just how blatant it is…

Amazon.com’s price for the iGP-100: $211.95
Amazon’s original list price: $249.99
Your alleged BIG SAVINGS: $38.04
iRiver’s own MSRP for the device: $199.99
What you’re actually paying: $11.96 more

Sadly enough, I’d probably still wind up going with Amazon for the better reliability and free shipping…

Oooo, Round…

Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to abandon the MP3 player change. I’m not sure how I overlooked this one the last time around, but statwise it looks extremely nice: the iRiver iGP-100

It supports Ogg Vorbis, the 1.5G capacity is almost exactly what all of my favourite tracks total to in Ogg format, it acts as a USB Mass Storage device, has an FM tuner, and is even cheaper than most of the other players iRiver has. About the only major downsides are that it can’t record (not too important), and may have potential battery replacement problems down the road.

The reviews don’t seem too bad either. It’s tempting, at least…

Oh Yay, Another Expansion

Sony has taken a bit of a different direction with its most recent expansions, and Omens of War, the next one, looks to continue the trend. Specifically, instead of releasing big expansions with a ton of new content for everyone, they are now focusing on smaller expansions focused on specific types of players, released more often. It makes sense from certain points of view (sustains interest, adapts to player demands more quickly), but it’s hard to shake the feeling that they’re just trying to milk as much money as they can out of the players…

So what does this one offer and do I even care? Well..
Continue reading “Oh Yay, Another Expansion”

But Watch Out For Light Breezes

Now this would definitely turn some heads:
Commuter Cars

It’s an interesting enough idea and design, but not really a full replacement yet. It suffers from the same thing as the rest of the pure electric cars: a lack of range, and that’s especially a killer up here in Canada, where the major population centers are farther apart. It wouldn’t be good enough for city-to-city travel, and really who wants to buy two separate cars or always have to rely on buses, trains, or planes?

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I need, but I’m sure there are some markets it could do well in. I certainly hear enough complaints about commuting from people I know in places like California…

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Screw this, I’m sticking with the PocketPC for my music needs for now. As much trouble as it is, it’s just too much of a hassle to switch at the moment.

The iHP-120 looks really nice, but is expensive and even bulkier than the PocketPC. The iPod has the capacity, but not much else. The other iRiver players are nice and small, but damn hard to get hold of and also rather pricey for the larger-memory models. And miscellaneous other faults in the other products.

Of course every product has its downsides, but considering that I already have a more-or-less working solution at the moment, whatever replaces it had better be damn-near perfect if I’m going to be shelling out hundreds of dollars…