Why Try Harder?

Fatboy Slim last week released a greatest hits album “Why Try Harder?” If you just want the audio CD version, the UK or US versions are pretty much the same. However, there’s also a limited edition version out which is packaged with a DVD of Fatboy Slim videos as well. This version is available in a European and Japanese version. For those of you in the US, I’d recommend getting the Japanese version. It’s already in NTSC format as opposed to PAL for the European version. The US also uses NTSC, so you wouldn’t need to worry about if your player can convert the video. It also includes one extra audio track and one extra video not on the European release. Amazon.com lists a DVD only package that will be released in the US, but no firm release date yet.

FATBOY SLIM: The Greatest Hits – Why Try Harder [w/ DVD, Limited Edition] (Japanese version from CD Japan.)

What I’m listening to

I’ve been playing around with WordPress today, customizing the Ocadia theme I use a bit (mostly just small tweaks). The big change is I added a plugin to show the music I’m listening to.

My first attempt was to use my last.fm account to generate charts. Unfortunately after a lot of searching I couldn’t find a theme that I both liked and also would fit in my sidebar. The only one I was happy with didn’t use transparency, so it looked stupid on Ocadia’s sidebar background.

I then settled on using the WP iTunes plugin along with iTunesBlogger. WP-iTunes actually does a bit more than I wanted, so I hacked it up a bit to take out the Amazon features (which didn’t work too well with my diverse music library anyways) and changed the presentation routine.

It’s surprisingly easy to hack on WordPress. I’ve only done a little bit of PHP programming before but it’s like a cross between C and Perl, so it’s pretty easy to make it up as I go along.

What I’m having problems with now is the CSS features on how the song information is displayed. I know so little about CSS now that I was only able to make a fairly crudely formatted list. I kinda know what I want it to look like, I just don’t know enough CSS to do it.

I also need to look into adding a spell-check plugin.

Ooh… Scary!

From the US Embassy American Institute in Taiwan:

A number of political demonstrations are scheduled to take place in
Taipei and Kaohsiung in the coming week. The American Institute in
Taiwan urges all U.S. citizens in Taiwan to exercise caution and to
avoid large political gatherings. Even protests intended to be
peaceful can quickly turn into confrontational situations. While
there is no indication that demonstrations will turn violent or that
American citizens or foreigners would be the target of any political
violence, U.S. citizens traveling or residing abroad should exercise
good personal security awareness including maintaining a low profile
and avoiding areas where large gatherings/demonstrations may occur.

Business update

I haven’t updated on how the Subway store is going in a while. Some of you assume that this is because I’m busy. The actual reason is that really, there’s not a whole lot of interest to say.

Things have been going pretty well. We’re at the one month anniversary today. Yesterday finished our fifth business week (Subway business week is Wednesday through Tuesday). Our first (partial week) we lost money, the second week we broke even, and the following two weeks had a decent profit.

I just finished the paperwork for last week and it was the first one where we ended with a very good profit. It’s also the first week that I made more than my manager.

There’s two main factors that made it a good week. First, productivity has increased through a combination of workers performing better and the work schedule being more efficient. The second is that sales have been steadily increasing.

It also doesn’t hurt that the weather has been pretty good, except for some afternoon rain.

I’m Gonna SCREAM+

(This post isn’t about the new Tommy Heavenly6 single, it’s about Migrating from LiveJournal to WordPress.)

I’ve decided to migrate my blog from being hosted on LiveJournal to hosting it on my own server using the open-source WordPress software. I primarily blame Suresh for asking me to set up a blog for APCAUCE, which lead me to decide to try it on for myself first. It probably would have been better to have set it up on the APCAUCE web site first, but anyways…

One of the things I liked about WordPress was that it had a feature to import blog entries from LiveJournal, which would make transitioning a fairly smooth process. It was only after I got into it that I realized how limited the import process was. Turns out that migration isn’t so easy, unless you have very low standards.

The first problem is with LiveJournal’s export tool. It has two major limitations: 1) You can only export one month at a time and 2) comments are not saved.

There are various LiveJournal clients out that that are not limited like that, and I eventually settled on using jbackup.pl, a tool maintained by LiveJournal. This is a nifty tool that will backup your LiveJournal complete with comments to a GDBM database on a Unix server.

But there’s problems with it as well. The first problem is that it doesn’t output in the same XML format as the WordPress import tool expects. For this you need to use a hacked version of jbackup.pl which I found at this wiki entry on migrating from LiveJournal to WordPress. This version has been modified to output XML in a format that the import program can understand.

That turns out not to be the end of the problems. The next problem is that the import program can’t handle comments, because the export tool it works with doesn’t support them. So back to that wiki entry for a modified livejournal import tool.

There’s a couple of plugins that the wiki also recommends, but I encountered some bugs with the threaded comments plugin they wanted. It turns out you can edit the modified import tool to turn off threading, so I did that. Basically follow their procedure except skip the install of the plugins and edit the import tool to turn off threaded comments.

The next problem I encountered is that a bunch of entries were scrambled because entity encoded characters weren’t copied over correctly. I had to use a filter to translate those back to straight ASCII:

sed -e "s/&lt;/</g" -e 's/&quot;/"/g' -e "s/&gt;/>/g" -e "s/&apos;/\'/g"

Then it turned out that lj-user tags weren’t getting translated, so I had to filter those:

sed -e 's/<lj user="*\([^">]*\)"*>*/<a href="http:\/\/www.livejournal.com\/users\/\1\/"><img width="17" height="17" alt="" src="http:\/\/www.livejournal.com\/stc\/fck\/editor\/plugins\/livejournal\/userinfo.gif" style="vertical-align: bottom;" \/>\1<\/a>/g'

Actually that only applies to the plain-text editor tags. If you use the rich text editor on LiveJournal, you’ll have to translate those separately. I only had one, so I did it by hand.

The final problem is with bare URLs. In LiveJournal if you type or paste a bare URL such as: http://jameslick.com/ it’ll automatically turn it into a link. However, the exporter leaves it just as a raw URL. I probably should have built a filter to convert these as well, but it was so close at this point that I just did these by hand as well.

So after a few hours of work, 361 LiveJournal entries imported into WordPress with comments and various other corrections.

Wish List:

WordPress import tool that can handle comments, can handle the default jbackup.pl format, can handle entity encoded characters, and bare URLs. It should have been MUCH easier than this.

Business Bug Bites Again

A friend of mine has gotten bit with the business bug too and today has launched the Asian Parent online store, selling Chinese language childrens books and videos. If you are an overseas Chinese parent or just want to introduce your children to the Chinese language, this is a good site to check out.

Birthday

Sunday was my birthday, so Maggie took me to Wulai to stay one night at the Pause Landis Resort. We went to Wulai village first to have some wild boar and meatball soup at the usual places I like there. Then a short walk down to the next village where Pause Landis is to check in. In the afternoon we went (separately) to the group hot springs. Our room included dinner and breakfast. The dinner was good but a bit sparse, so we went over to 7-11 to get some snacks after. It was a nice quiet and relaxing weekend.