bifröst

My girlfriend used haloscan as a commenting system for her blog at blogger for several years. As far as I know that was because the default commenting system provided was really bad. This changed some time ago (after an upgrade made by google which owns blogger now) and now she wants to transfer the old comments. She found a howto and so I had to try it.
I’ve never coded anything in Python until today, but at least I already used Perl and Ruby, so it was not that hard to modify the script. At the end it just was a bit of regex’ing. Now we have an xml file with all the comments, but importing it into blogger will be much harder: the blogger api provides a commenting function, but you can’t specify the date…
No surprise, right?

Nokia’s PC Suite is really a nice software - if you use Windows and Outlook. But you have to find alternatives if you change one of these parameters. Maybe you run thunderbird as mailing client, so you can use tools like MobileMaster. And maybe you run linux as OS, so you can use tools like… wait… that’s the question!
Theres an XML-based format called SyncML which can be used to sync clients with a server application. The default sync client on Nokia mobiles is such a client, so why not use it? A connector for thunderbird’s addressbook and sunbird/lightning calendar is also available. So what kind of server should be used? I tried the OS version of funambol but swichted to their free online service at my.funambol.com quickly. There you can setup a push mail service for your symbian mobile phone. I didn’t try it because I have an IMAP client on my phone. You can sent a config message to your mobile which includes all the data for the sync profile. With my Nokia E51 syncing the addressbook worked fine via WiFi. One problem isn’t solved yet: some numbers aren’t replaced with the person’s name in the message inbox, although the are linked with the person in the addressbook (and I don’t have duplicates!). Let’s see if I can fix it via PC Suite when I start Windows next time.
I don’t sync the lightning calendar via funambol because you have to select which calendar you want to sync in the addon. One point is: it’s not handy to switch to the extensions config for 4 different calendars. And secondly all appointments send to the online service will be resend to the “other” calendar, which means I have duplicate entries in every calendar. I am using a google calendar connector within lightning and have some private calendars, share some calendars and use calendars shared by other persons (with writing access), so this sucks hard… I’ve found some tools for my mobile, but the don’t have all the features I need yet. One of it is open source - I want to talk about it next time.

I can’t believe it, but this is a “helpful solution” for problems with the google bot:

Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html).

To be honest: if somebody does this, I will get aggressiv ;P Let’s think about it: Maybe your website ist located at mytest.mydomain.net so the link to your main page should point to http://mytest.mydomain.net/index.html instead of ./index.html. So you’ll have a lot of fun when moving to www.mydomain.net and changing your links…
Yes, I know the function “search & replace”, but I don’t like regular expressions and you just have to change the href=”xyz” stuff

I dont know why google’s new mobile device OS is called android, but I switched the platform for my accounting software… And this software got a working title (bifröst ist the name for the whole project): Glitnir.
And, before writing this posting, I upgraded Wordpress which was an annoying “journey”. First, my upload rate was really slow (0,5kB/s) and afterwards I noticed, that something is bugged. The preview screen under this textarea does endless refreshs (wants to, it is prevented by firefox).