Bloatware? Erm… yeah

Office 2007 Professional retail box

Upgrading some PCs at the moment as part of the closedown procedures, and I spotted one patch coming down the wire from Microsoft Update – 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1. A whopping 194Mb. Ouch.

Now, given that one of the “selling points” of Office 2007 is its smaller OXML (.docx etc) files which are a significant space-saver over the old format Office files, isn’t it a little poor to issue a patch which is larger than some office suits? How big is Office 2007 if a patch is just shy of 200Mb?

I’m glad I stuck with OpenOffice. Version 2.4 is a whopping (not) 127Mb download. That’s the actual suite, not an update or a patch.

The benefits of being famous

I just read on the BBC News site that Wesley Snipes has been sentenced to three years in jail for being famous. OK, so not quite true but close enough. His actual charges were tax evasion but the judge stated that an example had to be made of him as he was famous, despite being of good character.

Isn’t this just a little bit unfair? Surely a person should be judged and sentenced based purely on the circumstances, severity and so forth of the crime involved and on their past behaviour, risk of re-offending and so forth?

The other thing that niggles me is the large sentence for what’s effectively a white collar crime – a financial one. A financial one in which the government were the victim. How come stars who drink-drive or get caught in some drugs scandal don’t get similar harsh treatment? Is it just the fact that the taxman’s involved which gets the stakes raised as they want to frighten people into giving them money?

I just find it rather… well, amusing isn’t the right word, but – bonkers that a corrupt government can kick up a stink about not getting their cash so much when there are far more serious crimes being committed. Face it, the US government wouldn’t miss Snipes’ back-taxes if they weren’t haemorrhaging cash in the Middle East courtesy of the  Midget Oil Baron Of Doom who’s currently ensconced in the White House.

Or maybe Snipes just had a **** lawyer and should have got the one who got Kiefer Sutherland down to 48 days for drink-driving. A sentence he was going to serve in fits and starts around filming until the writer’s strike screwed him over.

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Gah! Computers! But sometimes they help out…

First off, let me repeat that GAH! only amplified somewhat:

GGGGGAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Thank you. Apologies to anyone who couldn’t post comments earlier. I’d put the wrong API into my upgraded reCAPTCHA so it didn’t work. That’ll teach me not to check these things when I’ve tinkered with them.

I’ve just tonight noticed that using the drop-down archive box to the side there, that you can’t go back further than February 2007. No idea why not. If you go to Feb and step back through the individual posts, or go to the archive on a single day anytime before then it works just fine. It’s simply month-long archive pages pre-Feb’07 that struggle.

[UPDATE: Fixed. Turns out I had some “real” folders with the same name in my directory tree. That seems to confuse WordPress’s “pretty permalinks”. Deleted the old folders, all works now. Phew.]

I’m looking into it, but it’s driving me nuts. The WordPress support forum’s gone crazy as well. First of all not letting me log in (cleared cookies, not it’s fine), then letting me in, letting me post… but not allowing me to edit the posts. And then not letting me reply to my own posts, telling me that the topic has been closed – when it hasn’t been.

*locates nearest brick wall, loves it in the way only Glaswegians really know how*

BUT.

Better stuff. Here’s a way you can help a charity and take money out of Microsoft’s pocket. No, it’s not that stupid email forwarding thing. It’s a scheme they’ve started on MSN. Put a little code next to your login name and MS will donate a sum to the charity of your choice (from a short, US-biased list) each time you start a conversation.

It’s called I’M Making a Difference – I’M… Instant Messenger. Clever.

Sounds like a wind-up, but I promise it’s true. Details are on CybernetNews, and also at Microsoft’s own I’M page to save me keying in all the “how to”‘s.

As I’ve commented on there, it’s a shame all the charities are US ones given the international usage of IM. However, better one good cause than none wherever it may be. I can’t believe this has been going on since March last year! They’ve raised almost $1.5million so far. Each charity is guaranteed a minimum $100,000 with no upper limit.

I’m not 100% sure if non-US residents logging in makes a difference, but let your Yank friends know about it all the same. And there’s no harm in putting the icon on your own name – just in case it does work!

So when is World Book Day?

I check out a few of the official Google blogs and today they had an interesting post. It’s regarding some work being done by various organisations and part-sponsored by Google to help improve literacy numbers. All well and good. But the article is “In celebration of World Book Day” – which according to the World Book Day website was back in March.

Then I did a little digging. The link above is the top link should you search for “World Book Day” in Google itself. Despite the use of the word “World” and the “.com” domain, it seems it’s more of a UK thing. In fact, it was kicked off by Tony Blair back in 1998 – five years before UNESCO’s version which is actually somewhat more international in flavour.

In fact, UNESCO’s version is actually more English than our own version – given that it’s celebrated on St George’s Day. This is actually one of the reasons for them picking the date. In Catalonia (a province / part / territory / autonomous community / whatever) of Spain, it’s traditional on this date for men to give a rose to their lover, who in return gives a book.

Regardless, can someone explain how we can have a World Book Day, and a World Book Day (UK and Ireland) which are on two different dates? We obviously didn’t make ours “world” enough, despite nabbing the better domain name, and we only seem to concentrate on initiatives within the UK anyway. So another chance to lead the world wasted by a pathetic Labour government. Kudos for the fantastic idea and great initiative – they just didn’t take it far enough.

However, check out the title of UNESCO’s effort – it’s formally called World Book and Copyright Day. Which, to me, sounds a bit of a gobful and slightly legalese. There’s no denying, though, that it’s more widely accepted worldwide than the UK version.

As an aside, doesn’t it gall many of the English readers that our national saint is celebrated more in other countries around the world (I’d somehow expect Georgia to have a holiday) than in our own?

(Blogger and) Haloscan to WordPress

Blogger (service)

That’s what I typed into Google to find the plugins and instructions to get my old Haloscan comments over into this blog. And seeing as Babs asked, I thought I’d rattle off my version of the transfer – including the hiccups I had and how to get around them.

I started with around 900 posts on Blogger and 4500 comments on Haloscan (ah, for the old days when I was popular)! Haloscan is a free service, and works pretty well after some wobbly periods bad in the day, but I just liked the new functions I can get on WordPress with easier control over the comments and so on. As an aside, I highly recommend the Subscribe To Comments plugin. Works a treat and, despite what it says on the WordPress archive it is fine on v2.5.

OK, so we’re moving from Blogger and Haloscan to WordPress. There are things that you must have – settings, versions and so on. I’ll assume you’re moving to WordPress 2.5 as it’s the current release. Anyone using a wordpress.com blog will be using this by default as they upgraded recently. However… you won’t be able to transfer your Haloscan comments onto a wordpress.com-hosted blog as far as I know. I’ll explain why later.

Step 1 – Prepping Blogger

First of all, ensure you’re using “new” Blogger. Virtually every Blogger blog is now on this. It used to be called Blogger Beta. If for some reason (or somehow) you’re not running this version then check the Blogger online help for details of upgrading. It’s quick and easy.

I was publishing my Blogger blog to my own webspace. This is not the default setting for Blogger, which is to publish to a Blog*Spot address. This Blog*Spot setting is required for transfer due to the method WordPress uses to syphon your posts out of Blogger. Just go to Settings and Publishing on your Blogger blog and ensure you’re publishing to a Blog*Spot address. If you’re not, then change it. Any name will do for the address – it’s temporary after all. Don’t worry, this won’t affect your posts stored on your FTP space if you’re doing that – you still have all that in place as a backup.

The instructions I read also told me to change the Timestamp Format in the Formatting section to be “mm/dd/yyyy” – apparently the default. I think this is only relevant for older versions of the import as I left mine on “hh:mm” and had no problems.

Two other settings which must be configured are as follows:

  • Archiving / Archive Frequency must be “Monthly”
  • Archiving / Enable Post Pages? must be “Yes”

The latter one got me for ages as I tried to figure out why I was only importing one post from each month…

Step 2 – Importing Blogger

Next, you go into your brand new empty WordPress database and use the Import facility. Follow the instructions in there and it should be nice and simple. All your posts magically drag over. Do check them once they arrive, though. Some things may be broken – such as internal links. It’s highly unlikely that the links direct to pages that worked in Blogger will also work in WordPress. Also, some formatting may be off, although WP2.5 does seem to handle embedded YouTube videos (for example) where earlier versions didn’t.

Step 3 – Prepping Haloscan

First off – as mentioned above, if you’re using a wordpress.com-hosted blog, then you cannot do this. Stop now. You can continue to use Haloscan, but starting from scratch comment-wise. Your old comments will be there, but you won’t be able to access them via the blog interface. I will now explain why.

To import the comments, you need to use a plugin. You cannot install your own plugins at wordpress.com, or in most other ISP-hosted solutions which use WordPress as their blogging platform. It involved admin access to certain folders which they simply won’t give you.

To configure WordPress’s imported posts to link to the existing Haloscan comments on Haloscan, you need to run queries on the internal database structure – and also run a plugin. Again, you simply won’t be able to do this.

The only way to manage these two options (I’m covering the former) is to host WordPress in your own webspace on your own server, or at least to one where you can get administrative access in some way. Sorry, but I think this rules Babs out!

I mention this now as you have to spend real cash money to get your comments out of Haloscan. They charge $12 per year for an upgraded account, one benefit of which is being able to download your comments as XML files. I thought this was decent value. After using them for maybe 4 years or so, that’s barely $3 per year as a goodbye present. Of course, if you already use the upgraded service then this isn’t a problem and you can go ahead and download.

Each 1000 comments comes down as a single file. Download as many as you need and number them so that it’s obvious they are different files. The order doesn’t matter so long as you make sure not to overwrite any!

Step 4 – importing Haloscan to WordPress

Your next step is to visit Justinsomnia’s page and download his excellent utilities for dragging your comments over. There are two steps: getting the post IDs from Blogger and then importing the comments from the files downloaded above.

As an aside, this is the reason you can’t just plug Haloscan into WordPress and have it viewing all your old comments connected to the same posts. When you import from Blogger, the “new” WordPress posts each get a unique ID numbering from 1 upwards. Similarly, on Blogger, each new post gets an ID. The thing is, these numbers will be wildly different and based on them being unique amongst all Blogger posts. As a result, your Blogger post 1075543567465125 (for instance) could well be number 23 in WordPress.

Haloscan used the PostID to reference “conversations” of comments, so by moving that post from one site to the other, that link is broken. One way to fix it would be to drag the numbers down from Blogger and update the equivalent ones in WordPress with their “old/original” values. I don’t have a plugin for this, but it’s a moderately simple piece of SQL code once you’ve run the first part of Justinsomnia’s routine. Then continue using HaloScan as if you’d never stopped.

But this post’s about bringing everything into WordPress, so we continue.

Following the instructions on Justinsomnia’s page, first install the get-blogger-post-ids plugin and run it. This scans your Blogger blog and takes those PostIDs I mentioned, clagging them onto a table within WordPress where they’re associated to the dragged-over posts.

The last stage is to import the actual comments. The important thing to mention here that’s not included in the original instructions is this: if you have more than one XML file of comments to import, then do them one at a time or you will get errors.

import-haloscan.php is not a plugin, instead running as a standalone file. Upload it into the wp-admin folder as instructed and also upload your first XML file (not all of them!). Run the PHP script and you should find your first 1000 comments dragged in quite quickly. Delete that XML file from the server and replace it with the next. Repeat as necessary.

And that should be it. Once you’re done, you can disable and delete the get-blogger-post-ids plugin, and erase the import-haloscan one.

Job’s a good ‘un. And it works. As you can see.