2020 Hindsight

DNS transfer activated

Well, it's been a quick trip here in MT@TP-land. I've exported the site and imported it to WordPress on a webhost elsewhere. Loved the time here. I saw good web application design behind these walls. Congrats to the folks at SixApart for creating such a good space. And thanks for the temporary stay here. I flipped the switch at 6:10pm July 4 (a good thing to do on a holiday weekend, methinks) Once the domain propogation goes into effect, 2020hindsight.org will continue in a new-old way.

I've got a couple more months here before it's time to pay up at TypePad. So I may end up blowing away most everything from this weblog but the blog migraton posts, and write up the import to MT more succinctly (with spiffy screen shots!) and also create a list of "things I would have liked to known about ahead of time" as a way of saying thanks to TypePad for the temporary free hosting and of letting someone benefit from the 32-day-long process that it took for me to get all my stuff outta Manila and into its new home.

The weekend weblog transition

Another in a series of thinking-out-loud posts about what is required to move from my old weblog host (using UserLand Manila) to a new one.

I'm no longer posting on the Manila site, I'm posting here, using Movable Type on TypePad. My Manila arrangement had a dynamic server that created static pages. There are two parts to this transition. One is simply transferring the static pages I've got a new hosting home and when I'm ready, I'll sign into my Domain Hosting place and point to the new domain. www.2020hindisight.org/somepage.html will be the same at the new place as it was at the old.

So what all do I need to do in order to make sure I'm ready?

Ring ring ring

So there I was, on the web, waxing eloquent about how those boys and girls at JPL do such good work. I'm several paragraphs into a kinda musing-piece, and the browser crashes, sending all my composed text to file heaven. oh well.

Got up this morning to see the ring images start showing up at 5am live. Rings. Ring images, Ring Scientists and Ring Lore... are phrases that come out of this morning's broadcast of the first images sent back.

Last night's news conference about the retro burn: Q: what would have happened if the retro burn hadn't gone off? A: We'd've had a fly-by instead of an orbit insertion and Cassini would've eventually left the solar system.

Had a conversation with Doc M in which I exclaim that "You guys at JPL make it look so easy!!!" to which he shakes his head, and exclaims over the years of work and effort that went into it beforehand... he speaks with that burdened conviction of one mired in planning and engineering. As if to say, 'this is the stage where we work all the problems that later result in the triumphal high-fives... and I'm in the thick of it.' I wonder if the sheer accuracy to retro-burn cutoff within one minute of predict lays a bit heavy on him. After all before it got sent to Saturn, someone built it, and before someone built it, it was a description in an engineering document, debated in meetings and raked over in design reviews. Doc M's particular instrument, bound for an earth-orbiting satellite, is much smaller than what's 1.6 billion km away from us, beaming back data and images that fill me with awe. But the work to get engines and sensors built so so well that it cuts off within one minute of predicted burn time, putting the satellite in an orbit period that's within a day of predicted length, all occured years and years ago; it's the kind of work he's doing right now. And no, no, it's not easy at all.

Hellllllllllllllllo, Saturn!!

New vocabulary: SOI: Saturn Orbit Insertion. Here's hoping that SOI is not equal to SOL.

I'm seeing familiar views in mission control. feel a little better knowing what, for instance "fault" is (the one that tracks when faults happen and what they are).

Not really blogging it. (No one's really at this site) Just watching it and enjoying it via IM (auntialias)

I keep hearing them talk about "saturnian" which sounds like the wine: sauterne. Maybe that's the appropriate wine to drink for this event!

More thoughts: Doc M is all on pins and needles today/tonight. He was on the lab and went home to his house where the local cable channel did NOT display NASA TV (heh. Inadvertantly typed in NADA TV...) Don't know why the cable company dropped it; it serves the neighborhood right near JPL... you'd think.... So he managed to get the NASA TV webcast. earlier he said that radar plays a much larger role in Cassini than it did with Mars (for Mars, radar played a very short but significant role in EDL: the radar locks onto the ground to tell the distance in order to determine when to fire the retro rockets). Radar is going to be used to find out more about the topography of some surface... below clouds/vapor.

There's a communication blockout till 5 or 6 minutes after the hour. I'm sure that the collective water pressure at JPL dropped a bit.... and it's a good time to fix a little smackerel of something.

CASSINI IS CAPTURED IN ORBIT!! Yeehaw!

Signal returning.... as expected. 9:05 (after this they have but 1.5 hours owrth of burn fuel in tank).

More Manila moving notes - images

So today I'm downloading via FTP all the static content of my 2020 site, i.e., that statically rendered pages generated from the dynamic Manila site. I know I'm going to have to change all the pointers to the images, so I checked to see how they work right now.

I checked an old static page, and the images contained on that page point to (wait for it) http://static.userland.com/images/SusansSperiment (Susan's Speriment was the name of my blog for oh, about 3 days before I thought of something better to call it). Anyway, static.userland.com?!? That dates back three years. I went to paid Manila hosting at weblogger.com in late June of 2001. (any relation to another weblog move--at the end of June, mind you--is purely coincidental)

So. I guess that, once you upload an image in Manila in a way that points to image serving from a static source, which UserLand began offering on 1 Mar '00). Whatever internal map-to-static-server that Manila uses for pre-first move images never got switched over when I first moved to weblogger.com three years ago.

Even when you transfer a root from one place to the next (and all the images *were* gathered in the site.root), the pointers didn't get changed. So, thanks UserLand, you've been hosting my substantial image collection unbeknownst to me! Once I get all this worked out, your bandwidth requirements should drop a little bit.

Cassini Orbit Insertion

June 30, 6pm pacific time, the live coverage begins. (Doc M said that when he rode his bike onto the lab today [tues] there was a tent and signs saying, "Media do not go past this point.") So it's gonna be SHOWTIME! for JPL once again. The nailbiter event includes a 96-minute retrorocket burn before orbit insertion.

Cassini's home page at JPL

webcast/broadcast schedule (beginning from 9am)

A Guide to Saturn Orbit Insertion: June 30 (All times are approximate and listed in Pacific Time)
NASA TV/webcast coverage begins at 6:30 pm. [click more for the full schedule]

Dang it! I'm too late!!!!

I saw Andrei Herasimchuk @ Design by Fire throw a FlameFest Software Giveaway contest. I was jonesing for some old Adobe Software. Threw this together. Here's a link to the full sized image. Then I go back to his site and see that the contest is already over. Well, enjoy it Andrei... Blogmoving and deadlines and projects.. what's another too-late thing to add to the mix?

Extra, on the right. This is something simple (for grins), a refreshing change after that collage with layers and layers of imagery: Analog. Direct

This week in space

Monday, 21 June: Privately-financed SpaceShipOne flies 100km high to the edge of space.

Thursday, 24 June: NASA announces re-org .

Coincidence? you decide.

How companies thrive by sharing what they know

Dr. Nancy Dixon's article appears on the leadership.gc.ca site; she wrote a book called Common Knowledge. [via Rebecca's Pocket]

Her 4 main points:

• start with the seekers of knowledge, not with the providers
• knowledge can only reside in the mind
• to acquire new knowledge, the seeker has to connect it to existing knowledge
• people are delighted to share what they know

Dixon's fourth proposition is that people are delighted to share what they know. She has a caveat though. People are delighted "if what they know is appreciated.

..."I've done a really interesting experiment," she adds. She has asked people to spend a couple of hours writing down an aspect of what they've learned on the job. The answer is very often, "I just don't have time."

"If I go to them and say, 'I want to interview you about what you've done; it will take a couple of hours,' they say, 'Sure,' because now they're going to be telling it to a human being and they're going to be able to see my understanding.

"Why would they take two hours to talk to me when they won't take two hours to write it up? It has to do with the human connection and with their knowledge being valued."

GE Company Manual, 1926

Ancient Geek Tech: The GE Schenectady Personnel Manual. Don't touch live wires. when and how payday. A look at life three-quarters of a century ago.

The regular pay day is Friday, at which time the piece rate employees are paid up to and including Thursday of the previous week, and day workers up to and including the previous Sunday. All women employees are paid off at 4:25 p.m., at the regular pay stations of the different departments, and form in line according to the numerical order of their check numbers. Men employees are paid in the same manner, with the exception that they form in line at 4:30 p.m.

2 years ago today

This is not the first Movable Type weblog I've had. I began one a little over 2 years ago. It went for not quite a month, and had about 16 entries total. I created it for a small but very interested audience. I've gone back and re-read it twice in the last week. Here is the entry from June 27, 2002 (slightly redacted). It concerns Doc M, my boyfriend (as I refer to him in blogville)

After Surgery--NOMINAL!!!!

Doc M is out of surgery--which went really well. The Ross Procedure valve replacement (the one he wanted to have and the one that Bruce Reitz, MD, wanted to do) is what did in fact what he got. And it went well. (YAY!)

He's in the ICU right now. All open heart surgery patients are listed as "critical" in the first 24 hours or so. But his numbers look good. Here's the timeline of the day --so far, a long one.

• 4:30 wake up (yawn--eek)
• 5:30 arrive at hospital for pre-surgery prep.
• 6:45 ish, they wheeled him off for anasthesia
• 10:30 or 10:40 or so we got a report of how it was going-- the aortic valve had been replaced by the pulmonary one (in the Ross Procedure, Doc M's his own heart valve donor, offering his healthy valve from the low-stress position of heart-to-lung to go in the high-stress aortic position), and the replacement of the pulmonary valve by a new one (homograft, from a human cadaver).
• 12:00 noonish, we spoke to Dr. Reitz, who told us that surgery had gone well; he was off the heart-lung machine and his heart was beating on its own, and that we'd be able to see him around 1:00 - 1:15.
• 1:30 we saw him in the ICU; he was still unconscious from the anasthetic
• 3:30 Thanks to K, a doctor friend of Doc M's, I got to pay an unscheduled visit to see him just as he was first coming to... very groggy.
• 4:00 I came back with P and D, Doc M's sister and brother-in-law for the regularly scheduled visit (every 2 hours at the top of the hour); Doc M recognized all and nodded in response to comments and questions.

He's still on the ventilator/respirator that's used during surgery, so he can't talk and the tube's damn uncomfortable. It should come out in the next few hours.

I saw the anesthesiologist just as I was headed down here to this computer (yay for Stanford; they've got a wee Cyber Cafe in the hospital cafeteria, so I've now got blog!!), and he said that everything went very well from the anesthesia end, and that Dr. Reitz was very pleased with how the surgery went.

The valve that came out was calcified (Reitz gestured to indicate the outer ring of the valve), and the opening was small and the valve wasn't really opening or closing... so though Doc M wasn't abundantly symptomatic (standard symptoms: shortness of breath, dizziness and pain-in-the-chest; Doc M experienced muscular fatigue whenever he tried to 'put on the gas' while riding his bike uphill), that valve was in bad shape.

So... for those who aren't familiar with "nominal," it's space industry speak for normal, expected conditions. In other words, optimal. Freaked me out when I first heard it. I have repeatedly told Doc M that things are "nominal" and he nods in response. :D

I am here, I am here!

I am here. With all posts. Functioning (I think). I was discombobulated, for a bit. I'm not less discombobulated now.

Here's how it worked:

1. Jason Levine created a script that runs inside of UserLand Frontier for exporting Manila sites to a format that Movable Type can import. He offered to run the script on my site. I needed to get him my site root (the database table in Frontier-format) for him to work on. He ran the script and sent me the results, a ~5.4MB text file with over 4000 posts for the last 4.5 years of weblogging.
2. I created a TypePad account, and created a weblog named (are you ready for it?) 2020 Hindsight. Next up: Importing the 5.4MB file. Turns out I'd end up doing 5 total imports to 4 different weblogs:
3. First site import, into the /2020/ directory. There were a couple of outstanding problems with the export script that Jason made, especially where Manila News Item-style posts were concerned: Departments (akin to Categories) and the Link associated with the News Item title weren't a part of his script. So he worked on it a bit; sent me a new export file.
4. In the meantime, I'd made a few posts to my new weblog. This introduced that problem that those in the software biz call "version control."
5. Second site import. I did it by creating a second weblog here in Typepadville. 'Twas faster than deleting all (or most) of the first /2020/ weblog. Results: Yes, the URLs associated with post titles did translate. The categories did not.
6. Jason tweaked his script and ran another export of my Manila site, and sent it to me.
7. Third site import. I created a third weblog, and imported the third text file. Results: Success! URLs in titles and categories both present and accounted for. (I'll eventually have to lose the "imported" category, though)

   So now I have a working site at Import3, and some new posts in Import1, (along with the barest rudimentary design tweaks at Import 1). Next up: Harmonizing them



8. I exported the entire contents of Import1 and Import3. Opened up both files in BBEdit. Made a new file that had the good stuff from exportedImport3, and combined that with only the 3 or 4 new posts from Import1. Saved that to a new file. This is IT.


9. So I wanted to replace the contents of /2020/ (Import1) with my Latest and Greatest site export. How to do that? Can I blow away ALL the posts of a weblog without deleting the weblog itself? MT@TP has this way to apply filters to view certain posts, but it does not select them all. I've got over 4000 of these; I'm not going to do ANYthing by hand.


10. Googling for terms such as movable type import backup restore overwrite didn't yield any results that work on Typepad. Hey, it's time for that ol' empirical try-it-and-then-see. In the words of Julie Powell of the Julie/Julia project, "What could happen? "


11. Try a direct import into already existing blog: will this overwrite or doublewrite the posts? In /2020/ (Import1), I went to the Import/Export section of the manage blog control panel, imported my Latest And Greatest. Results: 4000+ posts are now 8000+ posts. Razzum frazzum.


12. Looks like I'm going to have to blow away the blog and start over again. I went to the template design and (eventually) discovered that you can create a theme based on existing one. Cool. If I do that, then when I blow away /2020/ the theme won't go with it.


13. Go to manage weblogs, for this weblog /2020/ (Import1+Import4). Click the little trashcan icon/Delete Weblog link. I am asked, Are you sure? Yes I'm sure. Vaya con Dios and click the button. Little status windoid eventually changes to error windoid. But it took a while to get there. Maybe all is well.


14. Check my list of weblogs. There are only two (Import2, Import3). Cool! So I create a new weblog with the same name and directory as before: Name: 2020 Hindsight; Directory: /2020/.


15. Import the Latest and Greatest. Before publishing, I go to the design section of the control panel and select my saved theme.


16. Publish all. 15 minutes later, I'm here. Guess it's time to go delete the Import2 and Import3 blogs.

Not quite the latest thing

I see that Rogers linked to this site from buzzword.com. There've been two more export attempts besides this one, and I've got to collect the more recently made posts here with the latest export-and-import. However, I gotta get out the door soonish.The problems mentioned here (and colorfully sworn about) have been solved. The rest, as they say, is implementation. Haven't done that yet, though. URLs will change. So will everything. What you see is temporary. (But thanks for stopping by!)

2nd thoughts

Or is that second impressions? The MT@TP site design tools are cool.

Observation: With some 3000+ posts, it takes about 15 minutes per rebuild of site. Thank God style sheet changes don't require rebuilds. I can see where php/mysql will be a Thing Most Desireable going forward.

Did a new look. Must. Be. Different.

I viewed source; the email addy here is a fancy-dan javascript thing that's supposed to ward away those coitus-ing spammers.

<blather>Aaah, those coitus-ing swear words. After all the FCC stuff about profanity, and other things that have transpired while I felt constrained not to post because, well, My Site Was In Transition, it's time for a little pent-up commentary. The Perverters of Free Speech and Guardians of so-called obscenity or profanity think that certain words, i.e., the Bono-effing-brilliant term always connotes graphic depiction of sexual activities, well, they're intercoursing wrong! They have no penetrating idea! No coitusing idea at all!

So I want to start using some other swear words, ones that, well, pass muster, but which have a penetrating ability to enter their way into your mind and coitusing take over your train of thought! But no four-letter-words beginning with the sixth letter of the alphabet for me! That would be obscene in the worst he-enters-her way! Whether or not there is a first amendment right of free coitusing speech!</blather>

...uh oh... now wait just one minute. I just realized that many of the titles of my old Manila News Items contained links. Those didn't survive.

Oh, fuck.

Well, lookie who's here!

A post...

in which Susan displays beyond all doubt what kind of masochist she is. No, really.

Anil Dash, bless his heart, offered me a place to try out MT. And, after 20 days of attempting to export my site from Manila (I still have *issues*), and finally, finally getting a file that MT would import thanks to Jason Levine who rocks! the! house! I had to do it. Fast.

So here I am. Don't know how long. But I'll document my MT stay and what it takes to get here.

Categories. Wait a second. (um, about those issues...) I made lots of posts on Manila site with categories. Where do those live in the Manila root database? They didn't come along for the ride. I see that MT@TP offers suggestions for categories. But what about the ones I had before? Well, I guess it's time to dig some more.

The photos show up. I guess they're pulling from the old site. I have no idea what to do as far as images go. I have a mere 1700 of them in a directory that's a whopping 46.3 MB.

Next thing to do... take my email address off of the site. I get enough spam as it is.

I do marvel at the way that comment threads were imported just so. That's rather sweet.

Also gotta figure out if it's possible to change the directory that this blog lives in. I just took the default form. don't like it. I'll change it to /2020/

Corel sells Bryce to DAZ Productions

this link is to a MacNN story that basically describes this email sent out to all Corel Bryce Customers:

From: Corel <corel@corel.rsc01.com>
Reply-To: Corel <campaigns@corel.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 11:58:23 -0700
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Corel Update- Sale of Bryce to DAZ Productions

To Corel's Bryce Customers,

Today, Corel is announcing the sale of Bryce to DAZ Productions, global specialists in the creation of 3D digital content (www.daz3d.com). Bryce is an exceptional product and we feel confident that DAZ is the ideal company to carry it forward.

I'd like to take a moment to provide some background on Corel's decision to sell Bryce. Over the past year, Corel's attention has been squarely focused on promoting the launches of our main business lines, lead by CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, WordPerfect Office and the next release of Painter, coming later this year. During this time, we received questions from some of you about the future of Bryce. We recognize that Bryce inspires considerable passion and loyalty within the design community. That's why we carefully considered a number of factors before making the decision to sell Bryce to DAZ.

Our chief concern was to make sure we found a partner who would protect your investments by continuing to innovate, deliver new releases of the product and provide ongoing customer support. We feel confident that DAZ is that company, particularly given their commitment to release new versions of Bryce on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. They've also committed to hiring more staff to work on Bryce and to
taking an active role in Bryce's online communities and technical support forums. Given these factors, Corel feels strongly that DAZ offers Bryce a bright future that will benefit Bryce customers.

DAZ now assumes responsibility for all sales and customer support related to Bryce. If you have any questions regarding Bryce, please contact DAZ directly via telephone or email (toll-free in the US at 1-800-267-5170, internationally at +011-80-495-1777, or email sales@daz3d.com).

I want to personally thank you for your longstanding loyalty and continued support of Bryce.

Sincerely,

Amish Mehta
Corel CEO

The X-prize report from Mojave Spaceport

No, I didn't go. But I watched the landing on TV live (I console myself with that). Rand Simberg was there. See his several posts about it. And follow his links to other eyewitness discussion.

Grant Henninger was there, too. With pix.

And Donald Larson said he was gonna be there (w/ connections, ooh la la, he's a friend of Burt Rutan's son). So Don, spill! How was it? (not here, tho, I'm in the midst--heh, I originally typed 'mist' and it's fitting--of site conversion and any comment will prolly not survive. How about on your site?)

PapaScott needs help creating a script to convert a Manila site

Scott Hanson has had my exported site, in the XML format that Radio creates, and has been working on modifying his script to convert that to a more universal format (Movable Type, since everyone tends to deal with that.)

But it's more complicated than what he converted his site a coupla years ago. (I've got News Items. I've activated--but haven't really used for a while-- John VanDyk's MetaData plugin. And Manila itself has probably morphed over time since the time Scott did his original conversion.)

He's created a Converting Manila Wiki where he's documenting his problems. If you know XML, if you know scripts, if you know the guts of Manila/Frontier, please take a look.

(I knew, I just knew, this wasn't gonna be easy. My technical knowledge has great limitations. And frankly, even tho I started this on June 2--20 days ago--, aiming to be done by end of month, I'm kicking myself for not beginning earlier. All this happens to coincide --in timing, but not in causality--with that large hullaballoo about the Weblogs.com outage and the transition plan notwithstanding. I only hope that my doings here will be A Help To Others.)

Weblogs.com sites are now down (well, except for Doc's site)

Glenn F. puts it well: If You Don't Pay for It, Don't Expect Persistence.

Four years of free hosting on weblogs.com draws to a close. Phase 1 of closing: Can't access stuff. But if you request your site root, it'll be made available after July 1. Listen to the audio note that Dave puts up on his site. (or read Jeanene's transcription) It 'splains a few things. But man, the timing and notice--what notice?!--are a shock.

(I did have a site on weblogs.com, for brycecamp, and in fact, a couple of days ago I thought, Oh, I should just do an export of THAT, too. Didn't. Missed my chance. But it wasn't active, really, so the delay to July is no bigs. Different for Craig Jensen and Dean Landsman and others whose sites have been ongoing concerns. Gents, you've my best wishes. Doc Searls stays up and running. But then, I think that he gave Dave his Qube years back, the one with the control panel thing that lit an inspirational fire for what was to become Manila and Radio.)

I see that my posts here about exporting Manila sites using MySiteRoot.root and documentation of struggles therewith is very timely. Prolly when people get access to their site roots again, some'll be doing this very same process. Welcome to the pretzel. It's quirky, it's painful. It's documented. (by me. Here and here) But I (think) it's behind me. Of course, I keep posting here, so what I've exported is outta date. Next I'll try to "update" with this current copy and see what happens.

Thank you, Andre Radke

Thanks, Andre! My Manila export worked!