Month: February 2003

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Grandma McLean’s fall

Grandma McLean and AlexMy grandmother was taken in to hospital earlier today. She slipped and fell while she was out shopping, and has fractured her cheekbone, and a bone in her upper arm. My parents are up in Aberdeen with her now, and they’ve reported that despite the injuries, she’s in good spirits and bearing up well. Still, it was a shock for all of us. And for grandma, too, of course 😉

This means we’ll be postponing our weekend away at Rufflets, and going up to see Grandma instead. (We don’t know if she’ll still be in hospital by then. If she’s out, she may be going to stay with my parents for a while.) Family comes first.

Get well soon, Grandma. We love you.

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Mondrian Machine

The Mondrian Machine (via forty.something) is more than just a cool web toy that allows you to create your own neoplasticist art. It is also an interesting illustration of the capabilities of Opera 7‘s new DHTML engine. The toy works by using JavaScript to alter the structure of the web page after it has been rendered to your screen. Opera 6 can’t handle this, but Opera 7 just breezes through it without a problem. Sweet.

On a completely different note, “Mondrian” is the English spelling of the artist’s surname (“Mondriaan”). When an English speaker pronounces “Mondrian” the “a” is long. If a Dutch speaker pronounces that spelling, the “a” is short, and it would sound something like “Mondree-uhn”. The long “a” sound in Dutch is represented by the digraph “aa”. To illustrate this, check Google. When you search for “Mondriaan”, most of the top search results (18,800 pages in total) are in Dutch. If you search on “Mondrian”, you get predominantly English pages (103,000 of them).

What baffles me, though, is why his first name doesn’t seem to have undergone a similar anglicization. A typical English speaker hearing a Dutch speaker pronounce “Piet” would spell it “Pete”. So why hasn’t he become “Pete Mondrian”?

Linguistic drift. Gotta love it.

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Playing around with Trackback

I’ve been playing around with Trackbacks this evening, trying to get them set up here in my blog. Trackbacks are an alternative way of commenting on blog entries. Instead of posting an actual comment on the entry, you write an entry on your own blog. Then you tell your blog software to send a “trackback ping” to my server. My server then automatically adds a reference to your entry on my pages. Nifty, eh?

Well, I’ve got it mostly working. Movable Type normally considers comments and trackbacks to be completely different things, but Adam Kalsey has written a new plugin called “SimpleComments“, which allows you to merge them into a single display.

There is only one slight problem. When someone posts a comment on a blog entry, Movable Type automatically rebuilds that entry. If you’re displaying comments in-line with the entry, this ensures that the comments actually show up immediately. But trackbacks don’t trigger a rebuild. (This is intentional behaviour, not a bug in MT. It does make sense: if your rebuild process takes a long time, then a person trying to send you a trackback ping may get a time-out before the rebuild is complete.)

If you’re using the standard MT popup dialog for showing comments and trackbacks, the rebuild issue is not a problem, because the popup dialog dynamically extracts comments and trackbacks from the MT database when it shows up. But I don’t like popups. I much prefer to see comments and trackbacks on the same single page as the original entry.

I’m reluctant to change all of my archive pages from static .html to dynamic script pages (e.g. PHP). I use slashforward URLs for all my permalinks internally, but unfortunately Movable Type doesn’t realize that, and whenever I’ve been leaving trackbacks behind on other people’s sites, the trackback URLs point to the actual page.

Other alternatives include installing a script that will automatically rebuild my MT archive pages every so often, or doing a manual rebuild whenever I get a notification email that someone has sent me a trackback ping.

I’m going to have to think about this one for a while. I suspect I’ll end up going to an automatic rebuild solution, but I’d like to find one that only rebuilds selected entries (i.e. only the ones with new trackbacks since the last rebuild) rather than the whole archive. We’ll see how it goes.

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Export from Mozilla to Oulook (part 2)

After a few suggestions from a friend I eventually found the solution to importing mail from Mozilla into Outlook. It’s a grotesque and hacky travesty of application compatibility, but there you go.

The full instructions are on Google NewsGroups here. In summary, you have to install Eudora 5.x. Eudora can import from Mozilla. Then you use Outlook Express (6) to import from Eudora. (OE says it can only import from versions up to 3, but it lies. 5 works fine, too.) Finally, you use Outlook to import from Outlook Express. (Outlook says that it can import directly from Eudora up to version 4, but it seems to make an incorrect assumption about the location of your Eudora mail store, and won’t allow you to change the import directory.)

You also have to watch the import from Mozilla to Eudora closely, because it seems to occasionally merge huge bundles of messages into a single one. (Open up each folder in Eudora, and look for messages with unusually large file sizes.) At least the bug seems to be consistent: running the import twice in a row will consistently merge the same messages. To get around this, I spent some time shuffling the affected messages around in Mozilla (putting them into different folders), and then re-importing.

Note that you also have to tell Mozilla to Compress its folders (from the File menu). It seems that when you move messages between folders in Mozilla, it just updates the mailbox indexes, not the mailbox files themselves. And it’s the mailbox files that Eudora imports. Compressing the folders forces Mozilla to physically move the messages, and re-index everything.

End-to-end time: about two hours this evening, plus an hour or so scouring the net to find out how to do it in the first place. Thanks, Mozilla. Don’t expect to see me back again.

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Export from Mozilla to Oulook

Okay, so having decided that I would like to change my mail program from Mozilla to Outlook, I now find that it’s not possible to migrate my mail messages. It works fine the other way round, but apparently Mozilla developers/advocates seem offended at the very thought that anyone would want to switch away from their program, while at the same time Microsoft must think it’s beneath them to import from the lizard.

Duh.

In my last post I pointed to Joel Spolsky’s article about this very matter:

“The mature approach to strategy is not to try to force things on potential customers. If somebody isn’t even your customer yet, trying to lock them in just isn’t a good idea. When you have 100% market share, come talk to me about lock-in. Until then, if you try to lock them in now, it’s too early, and if any customer catches you in the act, you’ll just wind up locking them out. Nobody wants to switch to a product that is going to eliminate their freedom in the future.”

Email has been around for decades. Email is the only application that everyone on the internet uses. How stupid is it for two of the biggest email software developers not to be able to read each other’s files?

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NewsGator

With all of the weird stuff happening last week, I almost missed a good thing I found in the sunpig server logs: NewsGator. NewsGator is an RSS aggregator that integrates with Outlook.

If you’re not familiar with RSS aggregators, they are basically programs that allow you to check web sites for updates without having to visit the sites themselves in your browser. RSS is especially popular with people who read and write weblogs, because it’s very easy to get interested in a lot of weblogs, and they often change several times a day. Checking dozens of weblogs just to find out if they have changed gets old really fast. But an aggregator program takes all of the hassle out of it.

There are a bundle of RSS aggregators out there: Radio Userland (which is also a blogging tool), AmphetaDesk, NetNewsWire, Aggie, and Syndirella are just a tiny selection of the most popular ones. Radio Userland and AmphetaDesk have a program that runs in the background on your machine, while the actual RSS newsreader interface appears in your browser. NetNewsWire, Aggie, and Syndirella are programs you have to fire up separately. With all of them, you say how often you want to check on your news sources, and then they scan them for you automatically.

I’ve been mostly using AmphetaDesk for my RSS newsreading purposes, but now that I’ve come across NewsGator, I may well switch. NewsGator acts as a plug-in for Outlook. When it scans your RSS news sources, it converts new articles into Outlook items, and sorts them into a set of folder for you–just like mail items. After that, you can treat the article/headlines just like anything else in Outlook. You can delete them, move them around, or drag and drop the most interesting ones into a public folder so others can see them.

I love it. It’s like saying to all your favourite sites, “send me an email when a new article appears”, only without the twin disadvantages of ending up on dozens of email lists (which you then have to manage, or remember about) and having your inbox flooded with dozens of non-critical emails each day. It’s a perfect match for the way I think about RSS news.

The only possible problem is that it runs on Outlook. I’ve been reluctant to run Outlook as my mail client at home, because of vulnerabilities like these. I don’t think that Outlook is necessarily much less secure than other mail programs, but because of its ubiquity (and Microsoftness) vulnerabilities are much more likely to actually be exploited.

After trying the new M2 mail client in Opera 7 for a while, I’ve temporarily settled on Mozilla mail reader, but it’s horribly slow. Diego Doval’s Spaces email client also includes an RSS newsreader, but the software is still alpha quality. I tried it yesterday, and while it showed promise, it didn’t quite click with me. (Also, with switching between mail programs, there’s always the question of how easy it is to switch back if you don’t like it.) Spaces is certainly promising, but I’m not ready for it right now.

So Outlook it is. By taking proper care (make sure you have the security settings right, don’t open dodgy attachments, view messages as text-only, etc.), it can be made pretty safe. I have a virus checker on our home firewall, and one running on my PC as well, all of which help. (Still, security is a process rather than a product, though, so no complacency will be allowed here chez Sutherland 😉

I have to say that I’m actually quite excited about starting to use NewsGator. There are dozens of sites that I want to track, but which haven’t made it into my AmphetaDesk subscriptions file. NewsGator is going to bring me up-to-date with all of them–and much faster than I could have tracked them before.