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Well, so far my family has managed to annihilate any chances of enjoying TV, or getting work done tonight, so I took some time to study blogger themes.

Managed to get most of my Live Journal entries from 2007 transferred here, and I’ve some what an idea of how I want this blogger page to look. Tomorrow, I’ll likely strip out the templates code and design something more to my taste. Two things that I do like about Blogger, is that most trivial things can be changed without touching the code, and you don’t have to pay up to modify the code! Live Journals S2 system, has always interested me, but I’ve never dug into it, due to the feature splits they employ.

Now if I could actually get some sleep before dawn, it might help… *sigh*

Old razor, still sharp.

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Decided to join the action on Proving Grounds EU tonight, for a little Raven Shield ;). It’s been about two months or more, since I really bothered playing RvS, but went pretty slick. I breezed through the first few maps with the skill you would expect a WO1 to display, and survived until the clock ran out on staying up late 8=).

Even more comforting, is that I’m not rusty, even though I play without an aiming reticle lol. Then again, if I expect to be shooting beyond ~10 metres fairly often, I generally will equip my weapon with a scope: as opposed to using the CQ style employed throughout RvS.

I just find it more natural and instinctive without the aiming reticle, and usually my reaction times are elevated, since I’m engaging the target in a fluid motion; there’s no point of reference from the centre pip.

The Blogger Experiment

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I spent much of the afternoon manually importing my posts from Live Journal to Blogger. I have all the posts in LJs XML export format, but efforts to convert that into something workable have proven, shall we say to great a lossage to put forward.

LiveJournal2Blogger was only able to download a portion of my posts, importing about ~63 od them to Blogger :-(. Thus, I deleted all of those and started doing it the Old Fashioned Way. At first I figured I would just do something like this:

$ cat *.xml | vim -

but that quickly proved in efficient, due to the nature of LiveJournals XML export format: it rather wreaks havoc on any HTML entities used in posts. Simply put, I have used a heck of a lot of pre and blockquote tags, between code/command snippits, song lyrics, and quotations. Fairly regular use of strong/em and more anchors then you can shake twenty sticks at, this is not a good thing. I also tend to use angle brackets as part of my asciibody language >_>, so it is rather important to avoid the pain & anguish, if you get my meaning.

All across the web, I’ve seen shotty looking snippits in blogs, and well, for as much as I hate those, I am not interested in having them in anything I call *mine* so no content mutilation will be tolerated.

LiveJournal has an excellent system for browsing archived posts, at least until you want to actually /search/ for something. So I merely started at my first journal entry and began working forwards through the archive. Whenever you edit a post on LJ, at least when you composed it in raw HTML mode, as I always do 😉 you get back just what you put into the editor way back when.

So copy/pasting that into Blogger’s snazzy editor, in “Edit HTML” mode, works like a charm :-D.

Most of 2006 is transferred, and the word verification limit wasn’t even reached until entries from late November or early December were processed. Later tonight I’ll finish up on that. The operation has however been lossy by nature: things encoded into LJ posts have been omitted for speed. So they no longer carry information such as my location, mood, or music. I have tried to keep the date/time accurate with respect to the numbers on LiveJournal, which is the slowest part. One good thing though, it lets me walk through my journal, “Label” entries accordingly for recollection, and it really does help put things in perspective. I’m good with faces and objects, bad with names and times, lol.

In some cases, such as my Vi User How To, I have elected to copy the comments along with the entries, by adding them in a singular comment of my own. But for the most part, I’ve left the comments behind as part of the lossy translation from LJ to Blogger. To be honest, I rarely get comments on my entries, so it is not to big an issue with me. I think between 2006-09-09 and 2009-11-13, I’ve only received about 150 comments or so.

Later tonight I’ll experiment with the look/feel and informational aspects of this blog. When the experiment is complete, I’ll set up a self referential link between the relevant Blogger and LiveJournal entries: it should appear seemless. Well, the comments and misc meta info aside.

Right now, I am off to SWAT 4 for a few good games :-).

Screws, miracles, and Turkies.

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It’s been quite a day, lol. When I was at work, I was looking at the bottoms of my shoes for a moment, and I’m sitting here like, “Since when did they start making sandles with screws in the bottom?”. I had to look at my other shoe to be sure, lol. Sure enough, there was a screw stuck into the bottom of my shoe, less then a centimetre away from the bottom of my foot.

On top of that, when I was loading the car, who should greet me in the front yard, but the bosses dog that had just gone out in the back yard—the bloody gate was open! I said thank you LORD, and whoever’s watching, and thank YOU for small miracles!

The misserable part of the day however, ma decided to buy a 22 lbs Turkey (that’s nearly 10kg). I hate turkey, when you’re eating it until the cows come home from their seventh voyage 🙁

XSLT, where have you been all my blankin’ life!

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I spent a couple hours to play around with a few style sheets, after inhaling all the XSL/XSLT and XPath related data I could get my mits on.

I wrote one for converting DocBook XML into a portable subset of Bulletin Board Code, and one for HTML-aware blogs. The textproc/docbook-xsl port offers html/xhtml outputs, but it is better suited to generating stand alone web pages; mine targets it for posting to my Live Journal ;-).

For quite a while, I’ve generally skipped dealing with eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and her friends, but now I’m happy as a clam! XPath expressions provide a relatively simple form of addressing XML elements and attributes, kind of like basic regular expressions and CSS selectors rolled into a hierarchal package. XSLT processing has it’s ups and downs but for generating output for creatures like web browsers, where formatting is different from matter, is quite trivial.

Most non-trivial HOWTO’s, guides, and reviews that I post, are actually taken from files kept in my ~/Documents/ folder. I’ll likely be adjusting them to DocBook and integrating them into their own private git repositories, mauhauha!

Before I was interrupted…

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Hmm, as I was saying before I was interrupted, I’ve been learning more about DocBook, and as should be obvious to anyone following this blog or my microbloging outlet, I have also been learning XSLT.

DocBook is a good format, it seems to have all the attributes from LaTeX and troff that I desire, it’s as easy as HTML (in which I am generally fluent), and just like it, is available in XML-based variants ;). Personally, I consider RST the easiest method of preparing documents. The principal problem with RST, being the available formatters: it works good for generating HTML output for the web, but not quite ready for manual pages just yet.

Some people might have issues with writing in XML/SGML like markup languages, but I do not; in fact, I feel more comfortable with DocBook, because there is *no* real presentational crap bloated into it, not to the level that HTML has been mutilated beyond permanent scaring… so yeah, I like it. Even better is being able to use DocBook with XSL/CSS related data to control the outputs. I’m a freak, I like to have central sources for documents, that I can keep under version control, unlike Word docs; and preferably a document that I can read, either in my text editor, a document viewer (ala PDF & PostScript), or copy/paste into a web page. DocBook is a very highly structured way of describing the contents of a document, which further mates well with my insane mind.

Likely I’ll be writing new HOWTO, guides, manuals, reviews, and so on in DocBook; any pertinent documents in existence now, will likely be converted over to DocBook. I will probably write suitable stylesheets for creating posts on my Live Journal here, and forum posts in BB Code.

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Today has been a fairly nice day, managed to get some stuff sorted on the net; helped a friend with her blog; finished reading an article on DocBook. Along the way, I also found a cool page on creating rounded corners in CSS, and remembered to add A List Apart to my feed reader, after stumbled across it again.

Ahh, foooooood time!!!!

Just how safe is SHA-1?

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Q: How hard would it be to find collisions in SHA-1?
A: The reported attacks require an estimated work factor of 2^69 (approximately 590 billion billion) hash computations. While this is well beyond what is currently feasible using a normal computer, this is potentially feasible for attackers who have specialized hardware. For example, with 10,000 custom ASICs that can each perform 2 billion hash operations per second, the attack would take about one year. Computing improvements predicted by Moore ‘s Law will make the attack more practical over time, e.g. making it possible for a wide-spread Internet virus to use compromised computers to mount such attacks as well. Once a collision has been found, additional collisions can be found trivially by concatenating data to the matching messages.

— source

I dunno about everyone else on planet earth, but I feel safe enough with that probability, at least until Independence Day arrives.

Writer’s Block: My Favorite Apps

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What are your favorite web or mobile apps? Which ones do you use everyday?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Web applications are things that can either be awesome or truly disappointing, most fall some where in between for one reason or another. In particular, there support for sane web browsing ;).

From the apps I use every day, I would have to say that my favourite is Google Web Search, if that actually counts :-P. The reason being, Google uses a nice AJAX system for suggesting search terms—which can be helpful when you’re not sure exactly what you’re gonna type next. On top of that, the search results are often excellent (in proportion to your query terms). unlike some sites hosting web search engines, Google doesn’t try to be an all in one portal — it’s just a search engine! With lovely tabs to other resources ;). Microsoft/Bing has even gone this wrote as well. For those that want a more portal like page, you can build your own with iGoogle personalised pages instead of relying on a generalised one (Ala MSN classic).

In terms of web apps, in the more modern rich user experience sense, I’m not sure if I really do have a favourite. Every day, I use Googles Mail, Groups, and Talk (XMMP) systems; several flavour of phpBB and vBulletin forum; not to mention extensive utilisation of Wikimedia and Reference.com (from ask.com) services. Perhaps, Google Mail, Docs, and Reader are the modern web apps that I favour the most. I like them, because Google takes a more minimalist yet distinctive approach to developing their apps, yet they are often fully featured. Google Reader for example, the only areas for improvement I can see, is support for themes and even more optimization for speed; nether of which are required to enjoy the experience.

Lately, I’ve been using rtm, which is arguably the best designed web app created to date! It combines all the attractiveness of a good web app, into an easy to use — self documenting package. Complete with keyboard shortcuts! The ability to integrate both GTalk and RTM into GMail with ease, is a massive perk.

To few web apps these days realise that the old school design rules still ring on home. Revised, I would say these are what most people forget:

  1. Users have more to do in their lives, then just run your stupid app
  2. It’s shouldn’t (strictly) be necessary to visit the website to use it
  3. If it looks like an app, it should act like an app not something alien
  4. It shouldn’t matter what browser is, as long as it follows the standard

Point 1 is something the folks at RealPlayer and PlayXpert should really take to heart, seriously now!

While point 2, is best exemplified by software such as RTM and GMail—both integrate quite well into other websites, and in Googles case, to most desktop software.

The third point being, if it looks like a program, it should act like one: the fact that it’s running inside a web browser that is using a desktop widget toolkit, instead of running stand alone in a desktop widget toolkit, shouldn’t matter very much—learn about the principle of least astonishment, and take it to heart!

Fourth, brings to mind a time that I stopped by a Yahoo! video page when responding through a thread in forums.pcbsd.org. The result was humorous: Yahoo told me that my Operating System (FreeBSD) and Web browser (Firefox) were upsupported, suggested that I download a supported browser like IE or Firefox, then went on to proclaim that I was missing Windows Media Player and Adobe Flash plugins, never mind the fact that my web browser is configured to use the MPlayer plugin to handle Windows Media 8=). I assume their website has changed for the better in the years following: but it shows an important lesson. Don’t blacklist usability, smartlist accessibility. If it’s unsupported, downgrade intelligently and warn the user unobtrusively that their setup is missing XYZ functionality, don’t just send them to /dev/null because they don’t meet your expectations of Joe & Jane user.

If people did that in a desktop program, like Microsoft Office, a company might go out of business or lose market share to wiser competitors ^_^. Sheesh, I wonder how many ignorant webmonkies have used user agent detection or faulty CSS files when wiser work arounds were (and are) available.

One reason that I often favour Googles web applications, they tend to work well and stay the hell out of my way. I’ve yet to see any of them do anything truly stupid or grandiosely insulting.