Not happy with blogspot "help" :-(
In a previous post I wrote of my frustrating experience wasting many hours
of my time following (precisely) the instructions on blogspot "help"....
Last night I wasted another 4-5 hours and got something working.
It's really simple - blogspot just can't do it.
And there's a post on the Blogger forums that says this...
The help instructions are confusing - they run together instructions for two different types of templates (old and 'layout'), without letting you know how to tell which you've got, nor that you have to 'expand widgets' and with an error in the so called working code... And when you finally get to the end of their example so it parses - it can't be made to work. There is a bug that's been reported to them and they're not fixing...
The really annonying part of the help page - that you cannot send them a message! I'd like to wring their necks... They ask "was this helpful" ? Doesn't matter how ofter you hit 'No', you've got no way to tell 'em what's going on.
Finally found a Blogger forum post that pointed to 'hackoshpere' - in amongst a whole slew of people having exactly the same problems as myself over 6-9 months.
What I don't like about the solution:
It relies on a javascript file pulled of someone elses site. It's a big security hole...
And Google with all their resources, could easily fix this.
I wonder what their business objectives are with 'blogspot'??
NOTE: These URL's are not links.
You have to copy and paste them to use them. That's so you know where they go :-)
Javascript:
http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js
Hackosphere notes:
http://hackosphere.blogspot.com/2006/09/expandable-posts-with-peekaboo-view.html
http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/peekabooposts.html
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
RTFM!! or Read Blogger Help :-(
There's a compatibility matrix in Blogger Help for browsers...
Unfortunately, 'Safari', doesn't do a bunch of useful stuff. Like support the wysiwyg editor.
Firefox does. Fired up the version I had (1.5.6?), loaded the update (2.0.1).
Installed and running... With the wysiwyg editor :-)
Have to check whether the auto-install replaces the '.app' in Applications.
Unfortunately, 'Safari', doesn't do a bunch of useful stuff. Like support the wysiwyg editor.
Firefox does. Fired up the version I had (1.5.6?), loaded the update (2.0.1).
Installed and running... With the wysiwyg editor :-)
Have to check whether the auto-install replaces the '.app' in Applications.
Adding summary/full article to a blogspot
Saw this on a blogspot blog and thought I should do it as well :-)
Looked up Blogger Help - and there seemed to be two mechanisims.
Then there is the 'Classic' vs. 'widget' (? - anyway the _new_ format).
Banged on the format, couldn't find the 'style' tags they talk about.
Couldn't see where to modify the 'post template' they refer to.
Couldn't see where to add the 'span type=fulldisplay' tags either.
Didn't break the CSS :-)
Now, where do I go??
Looked up Blogger Help - and there seemed to be two mechanisims.
Then there is the 'Classic' vs. 'widget' (? - anyway the _new_ format).
Banged on the format, couldn't find the 'style' tags they talk about.
Couldn't see where to modify the 'post template' they refer to.
Couldn't see where to add the 'span type=fulldisplay' tags either.
Didn't break the CSS :-)
Now, where do I go??
Monday, January 08, 2007
So I bought a Palm...
I've had a PSION for maybe a decade. Started with a Series 3 and upgraded to a Series 5 (B/W).
The '5' uses batteries faster than I'd like. It's got lots of great things standard - including external buttons to use as a voice 'note taker', standard "CF" (Compact Flash) cards, sound (play & record), infrared and a touch screen. For most people the price (~A$1,000) was *not* right.
As a 'consultant' for a company, I ran my life from the Psion. It allowed me to separate my work and personal lives, capture critical information (like billing times, tasks, notes) and was pretty much small enough to go with me everywhere. I never did it working with my Nokia 7110. Shoulda, but the replacement handset had old firmware and I baulked at shelling out ~A$100 for the upgrade. I'd rigged up a battery pack for an old land-line modem (Maestro 28.8kbps) and with a few adaptors, actually *did* check my e-mail once or twice when travelling...
My data was well organised and I knew where things were. But I'd stopped using the '5' - it churns 'AA' batteries compared to the '3'
Psion provides an actual operating system - so you have multiple programs (and different instances of them) open at the one time - and you can just put the thing to sleep. I have a standard set of programs open - it's quick to zip around and do regular things. On the '3' I pretty much wore the writing off the 'command' key used for most keyboard shortcuts.
And you need MS-Windows to run the Nokia phone suite *or* the Psion.
Having a serial interface, it's possible to backup & upload/download 'stuff' to the Psion - *iff* you have a serial or IR interface on your box.
This year I moved my working desktop to Mac OS/X (a mac-mini, so I can share KBD/Screen with other computers). I bought an IR-USB interface. Works like a charm on Windows :-) Mac doesn't seem to understand serial over USB. Google-ing didn't show an answer :-(
Early 2006 I started some projects at home, including formal study at the ANU (university). After realising that I don't have the personality/character structure to be an accountant, I found I missed *two* important deadlines. My organisation/processes failed me...
Never happened with the Psion - time to get a new PDA. Rechargable, small & light, 802.11.
Couldn't get another Psion, no longer produced. But the code lives on in Symbian.
Looked at PDA-phones - permium pricing, compromise user interface and poor keyboard.
Wasn't interested in a Windows-CE device. Just don't trust MSFT code to absolutely not let me down.
So it was a Palm...
Generally happy with it - but.
Doesn't provide a real O/S, but 'fast start' applications - and just *one* is running at a time.
The 802.11 is sorta integrated into the applicaitons, but not uniformly.
Bluetook 'works' with the Mac - but is so much slower (10 or more times) than USB, it's painful.
Bought a fold-out keyboard - bit bulky & uses batteries. Billed as 'universal wireless keyboard' - sorta. It's infrared, and you need to download the driver to the Palm, and if your mobile phone has no driver, tough... Have used it to sit and write notes/document. Not entirely a dud :-) Not nearly as effective as the Psion, but close enough.
All the address lists and calendar docs from the Psion - tried to download them...
Mixed success. The Psion program exports in CSV format. It's seen by the Palm Desktop on Mac as Excel files - and the Palm itself says they are Excel, but barfs when opening one. From memory, it requires a hard-reset to recover.
Too many times for my liking, I've found myself being forced to do hard resets...
'palmsource' (?) have announced a Linux for Palms - and it seems to be opensource. No idea on how to convert my T|X :-(
My major concern is giving up the 'graffiti' touch screen input. And 'bricking' it.
The '5' uses batteries faster than I'd like. It's got lots of great things standard - including external buttons to use as a voice 'note taker', standard "CF" (Compact Flash) cards, sound (play & record), infrared and a touch screen. For most people the price (~A$1,000) was *not* right.
As a 'consultant' for a company, I ran my life from the Psion. It allowed me to separate my work and personal lives, capture critical information (like billing times, tasks, notes) and was pretty much small enough to go with me everywhere. I never did it working with my Nokia 7110. Shoulda, but the replacement handset had old firmware and I baulked at shelling out ~A$100 for the upgrade. I'd rigged up a battery pack for an old land-line modem (Maestro 28.8kbps) and with a few adaptors, actually *did* check my e-mail once or twice when travelling...
My data was well organised and I knew where things were. But I'd stopped using the '5' - it churns 'AA' batteries compared to the '3'
Psion provides an actual operating system - so you have multiple programs (and different instances of them) open at the one time - and you can just put the thing to sleep. I have a standard set of programs open - it's quick to zip around and do regular things. On the '3' I pretty much wore the writing off the 'command' key used for most keyboard shortcuts.
And you need MS-Windows to run the Nokia phone suite *or* the Psion.
Having a serial interface, it's possible to backup & upload/download 'stuff' to the Psion - *iff* you have a serial or IR interface on your box.
This year I moved my working desktop to Mac OS/X (a mac-mini, so I can share KBD/Screen with other computers). I bought an IR-USB interface. Works like a charm on Windows :-) Mac doesn't seem to understand serial over USB. Google-ing didn't show an answer :-(
Early 2006 I started some projects at home, including formal study at the ANU (university). After realising that I don't have the personality/character structure to be an accountant, I found I missed *two* important deadlines. My organisation/processes failed me...
Never happened with the Psion - time to get a new PDA. Rechargable, small & light, 802.11.
Couldn't get another Psion, no longer produced. But the code lives on in Symbian.
Looked at PDA-phones - permium pricing, compromise user interface and poor keyboard.
Wasn't interested in a Windows-CE device. Just don't trust MSFT code to absolutely not let me down.
So it was a Palm...
Generally happy with it - but.
Doesn't provide a real O/S, but 'fast start' applications - and just *one* is running at a time.
The 802.11 is sorta integrated into the applicaitons, but not uniformly.
Bluetook 'works' with the Mac - but is so much slower (10 or more times) than USB, it's painful.
Bought a fold-out keyboard - bit bulky & uses batteries. Billed as 'universal wireless keyboard' - sorta. It's infrared, and you need to download the driver to the Palm, and if your mobile phone has no driver, tough... Have used it to sit and write notes/document. Not entirely a dud :-) Not nearly as effective as the Psion, but close enough.
All the address lists and calendar docs from the Psion - tried to download them...
Mixed success. The Psion program exports in CSV format. It's seen by the Palm Desktop on Mac as Excel files - and the Palm itself says they are Excel, but barfs when opening one. From memory, it requires a hard-reset to recover.
Too many times for my liking, I've found myself being forced to do hard resets...
'palmsource' (?) have announced a Linux for Palms - and it seems to be opensource. No idea on how to convert my T|X :-(
My major concern is giving up the 'graffiti' touch screen input. And 'bricking' it.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Blogging interfaces
Google/Blogger have good doco on-line:
http://code.blogger.com/archives/atom-docs.html
And there are PERL modules on CPAN.
O'Reilly has a discourse: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/15/dive.html
[and many others]
I'd like to find some free application to edit the XML or post the blog locally.
O'Reilly have a thing that publishes to "iDisk" on .MAC - not blogger and atom.
Here's some command line posting stuff. Uses "curl".
What BLOGS do I have?
Auth='stevej_098:password'
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.1 https://www.blogger.com/atom
Which will give for each blog:
<link href="https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699" rel="service.post" title="stevej-in-oz" type="application/atom+xml"/>
<link href="https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699" rel="service.feed" title="stevej-in-oz" type="application/atom+xml"/>
<link href="http://stevej-in-oz.blogspot.com" rel="alternate" title="stevej-in-oz" type="text/html"/>
Download a blog
Get the "service.post" tag.
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.2 https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699
Post an entry
The hard bit here is the formating of the XML..
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.4 -H "Content-type: application/xml" -d @blog-post.1 https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699
some useful searches
grep service.feed blog.1
grep service.edit blog.1
grep service.post blog.[12]
grep service.delete blog.[12]
http://code.blogger.com/archives/atom-docs.html
And there are PERL modules on CPAN.
O'Reilly has a discourse: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/10/15/dive.html
[and many others]
I'd like to find some free application to edit the XML or post the blog locally.
O'Reilly have a thing that publishes to "iDisk" on .MAC - not blogger and atom.
Here's some command line posting stuff. Uses "curl".
What BLOGS do I have?
Auth='stevej_098:password'
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.1 https://www.blogger.com/atom
Which will give for each blog:
<link href="https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699" rel="service.post" title="stevej-in-oz" type="application/atom+xml"/>
<link href="https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699" rel="service.feed" title="stevej-in-oz" type="application/atom+xml"/>
<link href="http://stevej-in-oz.blogspot.com" rel="alternate" title="stevej-in-oz" type="text/html"/>
Download a blog
Get the "service.post" tag.
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.2 https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699
Post an entry
The hard bit here is the formating of the XML..
curl -u "$Auth" -o blog.4 -H "Content-type: application/xml" -d @blog-post.1 https://www.blogger.com/atom/29583699
some useful searches
grep service.feed blog.1
grep service.edit blog.1
grep service.post blog.[12]
grep service.delete blog.[12]
Saturday, June 17, 2006
The Data Dungeon
This idea came from reading "I, Cringely" of 17 Nov 2005. Cringely says Google is creating a "datacenter in a box" - shipping container, really - "5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk". That's pretty impressive.
People have been buying servers and building datacenters for years - why should this be exciting? Because it has the potential to lower the cost of the whole datacenter radically - without doing any calculations, 5 or 10 times.
I thought how I'd do it - no fans (they break) means liquid cooling, no UPS - direct DC, single A/C unit, no walk spaces, no cases needed for equipment unless it's for cooling, RFI or containment. OH&S doesn't occur when it's working - it's sealed.
And you throw away the key. It's the next logical move from "lights out" or "dark datacenters"...
[You may even weld the doors shut.]
A reasonable technology and physical life, without maintenance, would be 3-4 years.
And people like SUN, Dell, IBM and HP could make these things - either sell or lease. And being the owners, could
Google have a very special workload - it scales linearly and generally is short transactions that can be rerun.
Normal commercial workloads are things like:
- webserver (Transaction based, restartable, load-balancer friendly)
- database (long-connection time, persistent, need clustering for high-reliability/availability)
- filer/file server (more like a database)
- email - client or server. Both need reliable data storage, but can take restarts.
- and probably way more...
The whole point of a "Data Dungeon" is replicating at the systems level, not the component level...
You don't need hot-swap power supplies, dual-NICs yadda-yadda-yadda if you have two complete systems that hot-swao.
Commodity hardware is *cheap*. You have to be inventive with your software/systems to design around break-able parts.
And all parts don't have to be the same - you'd want some really low-power fanless CPU's for some types of service, and enough top-end high-power CPU's in the mix for those times when too much grunt is not enough...
It's not going to be a box full of just the one thing...
So a "Data Dungeon" - would you ever just have ONE? Nope - the breakable design dictates at least two... Which you can stack in a car-space out the back [shipping containers, rememer?]. And when it's time to upgrade, wheel in another one or two, mirror the data, migrate the persistent processes and take away the old ones - all done live in prime-time...
Part of the scheme is running everything in Virtual Machines: Only one service to a virtual machine (ebserver, email, DB, ...)
It's easy to migragte a service onto a different physical processor - if you have load or servicability problems.
[VMware have some neat new Enterprise tools to do this now.]
And with Mac on Intel, running VM's means you get to run all the major commercial apps:
- all flavours of Windows deskop - via VNC or Citrix remote client to host legacy Apps.
- Windows server
- Mac OS/X
- z/OS [IBM mainframe]
- Solaris, BSD, and Linux [for those who need a Unix]
People have been buying servers and building datacenters for years - why should this be exciting? Because it has the potential to lower the cost of the whole datacenter radically - without doing any calculations, 5 or 10 times.
I thought how I'd do it - no fans (they break) means liquid cooling, no UPS - direct DC, single A/C unit, no walk spaces, no cases needed for equipment unless it's for cooling, RFI or containment. OH&S doesn't occur when it's working - it's sealed.
And you throw away the key. It's the next logical move from "lights out" or "dark datacenters"...
[You may even weld the doors shut.]
A reasonable technology and physical life, without maintenance, would be 3-4 years.
And people like SUN, Dell, IBM and HP could make these things - either sell or lease. And being the owners, could
Google have a very special workload - it scales linearly and generally is short transactions that can be rerun.
Normal commercial workloads are things like:
- webserver (Transaction based, restartable, load-balancer friendly)
- database (long-connection time, persistent, need clustering for high-reliability/availability)
- filer/file server (more like a database)
- email - client or server. Both need reliable data storage, but can take restarts.
- and probably way more...
The whole point of a "Data Dungeon" is replicating at the systems level, not the component level...
You don't need hot-swap power supplies, dual-NICs yadda-yadda-yadda if you have two complete systems that hot-swao.
Commodity hardware is *cheap*. You have to be inventive with your software/systems to design around break-able parts.
And all parts don't have to be the same - you'd want some really low-power fanless CPU's for some types of service, and enough top-end high-power CPU's in the mix for those times when too much grunt is not enough...
It's not going to be a box full of just the one thing...
So a "Data Dungeon" - would you ever just have ONE? Nope - the breakable design dictates at least two... Which you can stack in a car-space out the back [shipping containers, rememer?]. And when it's time to upgrade, wheel in another one or two, mirror the data, migrate the persistent processes and take away the old ones - all done live in prime-time...
Part of the scheme is running everything in Virtual Machines: Only one service to a virtual machine (ebserver, email, DB, ...)
It's easy to migragte a service onto a different physical processor - if you have load or servicability problems.
[VMware have some neat new Enterprise tools to do this now.]
And with Mac on Intel, running VM's means you get to run all the major commercial apps:
- all flavours of Windows deskop - via VNC or Citrix remote client to host legacy Apps.
- Windows server
- Mac OS/X
- z/OS [IBM mainframe]
- Solaris, BSD, and Linux [for those who need a Unix]
The Challenge
From: NeilG
Subject: The Data Dungeon - Notes from the Lab
As a side-effect of our conversation last night, I mentioned you should start blogging this idea ("throw away the key data center") as a way of promoting it. This is my reminder.
I'm pretty sure you said it wasn't a patent item, but you weren't sure how to convince people it was a good idea. Blog it! :)
In that same vein, I was trying to think how to differentiate your blog. Most blogs are just text, and very unappealing visually (to me). I think a paradigm that would work well for you is, a "lab notes" format. We were talking about keeping a notebook as part of the chem and eng and comp sci disciplines. Take that same format (you already have the base text) and blog it with visuals.
E.g., This link
Personally, I think it's cool if you can look inside someone's mind as ideas are being wrought and I think a lot of geeks would agree. That's also the antithesis of the western philosophical tradition, and a good match for your style.
Subject: The Data Dungeon - Notes from the Lab
As a side-effect of our conversation last night, I mentioned you should start blogging this idea ("throw away the key data center") as a way of promoting it. This is my reminder.
I'm pretty sure you said it wasn't a patent item, but you weren't sure how to convince people it was a good idea. Blog it! :)
In that same vein, I was trying to think how to differentiate your blog. Most blogs are just text, and very unappealing visually (to me). I think a paradigm that would work well for you is, a "lab notes" format. We were talking about keeping a notebook as part of the chem and eng and comp sci disciplines. Take that same format (you already have the base text) and blog it with visuals.
E.g., This link
Personally, I think it's cool if you can look inside someone's mind as ideas are being wrought and I think a lot of geeks would agree. That's also the antithesis of the western philosophical tradition, and a good match for your style.
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