I finally got Galley2 working well enough for me, for now. I’m slowly adding my magazine scans to the online display. All are for sale. Some have been sold. View the gallery.
11th Feb, 2013
Another Computing History Gallery
5th Feb, 2013
Photos of Old Computer Gunk
Bear with me, be patient. I need to install and populate the Gallery2 app (and link up the wp plugin). I find the wp-plugin nextgen to be too painful to use and I’ve got a shi buttload of images to manage. Not that Gallery2 is my best-est buddy either, but that’s how it rolls.
It’s all to be found at http://www.mvmanila.com/gallery/main.php and it will slowly build up.
27th Jan, 2013
Repurpose
Hi all
I’m going to use this account to move some stuff around and maybe make it easier for you and the Great Google Machine to find things.
If you got here from iblamebush.com, rest assured anything of value from that silly site will be here. Eventually.
We’ve all moved on from running Manila websites although those postings are still here. My main blog is We’re Hosed . Fron ranting to tech solutions, observations to speculation and personal stuff.
I’ve also got a old Cooking Cheap blog. It doesn’t get a lot of updates but I like have some of the Cookin’ Cheap vidoes available to the world and I occationally check some of recipes and experiments. Still, there’s not much new there and quite frankly you can find better cooking blogs.
So what will appear here? Pictures of computer memorabilia. My memoriabilia. I’ve got a closet or two full of old computer magazine, books, tools and odd schtuff and I’m going to sell them (ebay willing) or I’ll trash them. But first, I’ll scan the covers and the table of contents page along with various half baked photos of items.
Obviously, I hope to build excitement (oooh!) for anything that goes onto the auction block. And some of it is just documenting what the smart folks said and did, and what didn’t. Causual nostalgia buff’s can read RCA 1802 or KIM-1 and move on to the next picture down memory lane. Some afficiandos may want to own these artifacts. Please send an email or comment on the posting if you would like one or more items to appear at auction,
The picture gallery will be built up over days and weeks and months and future blog posts will follow a time line.
30th Sep, 2008
New version of SplitWXR is available
Please read all the updates to this post.
I’ve fixed a bug that some kind folks reported. There’s a new versions (0.2) in the /public directory.
The bug didn’t put the output files in the proper directory. Where they went depends on your platform. A search for ‘wxr’ would find them (search hidden folders on Windows). It’s fixed now and for good measure it’ll show you where it does write them.
[UPDATE Nov, 19, 2009]
SplitWXR may not work anymore with out some hand holding. SplitWXR depends on Shoes which will download the Ruby interpreter. The Shoes site has gone “walk about” and might not be available so the whole chain of things fails. There is a solution. Download Shoes from an alternate site and install it. Then double click on the SplitWXR icon and it will find the Shoes (and Ruby) on your system and has been reported to work.
[Update: July 24, 2010]
I may not be able to make SplitWXR work with future versions of Ruby and Shoes and Older wordpress export files. It’s a messy stew of incompatibility that I’ll not bore you with here. Fortunately, if you upgrade your source WordPress to 3.0+, then there are export options that allow you to make smaller exports (by date or category or author or all of them) Granted, it’s clunkly but you can can make export files that are small enough to be imported to your new server. It would be infinitely easier to ask your new webserver host admin to up their download file size limit.
Upgrading your old WordPress blog to 3.0 would be a pain for some folks with highly customized and non conforming themes. It’s not in my power to solve that problem.
In other words, don’t expect SplitWXR to work for much longer. It’s not really needed anymore and your collective pain to use the WP 3.0 tools is less than mine. Yes, really! I might get around to fixing SplitWXR for the next version of Shoes (and Ruby 1.9.1) when I get bored. Don’t depend on me.
21st Sep, 2008
Split WXR (with GUI and installers)
A reader running Windows wanted to run my splitWXR script. It took a few hours of email but we got it working as a Shoe’s gui script. Sweet! I then decided to finish some GUI debugging and use some newer Shoes functions so it’s easy to install and run. It’s available in three easily installable versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you don’t have the Shoes framework, the downloaded app will do the download and install of Shoes. Then it starts my little script. That’s about as easy as it gets. Let me know if it doesn’t for you.
5th Sep, 2008
Next time, It’ll be faster.
I’ve discovered a problem with the 2.7 MvManila scripts when dealing with some Manila servers and the use of international (accented) characters in the title. There a hack I can email you if you want it. Of course I fixed it in 3.0 along with other internatational bugs and of course it wouldn’t Manla without some suprises . A patient client needed some 3.0 features and after I coded away, 3.0 is really nice for me. Maybe the next conversion will go so easily that I’ll make a profit. Who am I kidding? Profit is a pipe dream. It’s always going to be labor intensive.
Here’s a couple of things that I had to deal with:
International characters in the title. Both CP-1252 and ISO-8859-1. We agreed not to bother trying to fix CP-1252. We spent a lot of time getting this correct because as it turns out, he had some relative urls and 2.7 will not handle those but 3.0 will. And he liked the idea that 3.0 will rewrite permalinks in the style he wanted. We had some more internationalization problems, again with the title/subject getting to work like wordpress expects.
His Manila gave me a siteStructure that broke my parser and I horsed around a lot trying to get all the posts into the correct category. There were some Manila XML bugs to work around but eventually we got it looking correct and the stuff that didn’t categorize cleanly, gets WordPress tags so they can be found. A nice feature, actually.
That’s what happens in a conversion from Manila to WordPress. It’s why I charge, I know where the demons lurk.
11th Apr, 2008
Errors! Gasp! Feedback!
It turns out that the 2.7 documentation has some “oversights”. Other people would call them errors but this a marketing pitch so I don’t say ‘dumb ass errors’. A courageous Manila site owner has been attempting to run the 2.7 MvManila scripts in OS X and he asked for some help. Of course, I’ll help. That’s almost as much fun as getting paid. Seriously.
Issue #1. It might not be clear in the documentation that RubyGems has to be installed. It’s not the easiest thing to install because you have to google the correct set of instructions for your particular OS & version. I’m not picking on OS X. It was a minor challenge for me to get Gems installed in Ubuntu Linux. Too many ways to do it, some of them wrong. It’s a challenge.
Issue #2. Fixurl.tcl will probably croak with an error message like (but not identical)
.....
can't read "msgmap(13)": no such element in array
while executing
"set newnum $msgmap($msgnum)"
("while" body line 6)
invoked from within
"while {[gets $sf line]>0} {
set msgnum [lindex $line 0]
set path [lindex $line 2]
#puts stderr "$msgnum $path"
if {$path != "stories"} {
..."
(file "./fixurl.tcl" line 245)
I’ve seen this problem. The cure is to edit the ‘structure’ file and remove the line with “nnn {About} about” where nnn is a different number for everyone. Then rerun fixurl.tcl.
—
You might ask ‘why don’t you fix the code and documentation’ instead of posting a blog entry? Do you want the long version or the short version?
Short Version:
It’s easier to delete that ‘about’ line in the structures file than to fix the scripts and documentation.
Long Version:
I don’t run the 2.7 scripts because I have 3.0 versions and you don’t. Actually, it’s real a bitch to test modifications to the 2.7 scripts without a live working Manila site to test against. There are fewer and fewer Manila sites wanting conversion. Only a fewer of the few will grant me access to test. That’s just how it is, the pool is drying up. It’s not worth the effort to make a 2.7.1. A business decision.
29th Jan, 2008
PhotoMv Dream
I had a brain cramp followed by some proof of concept coding accompanied by great gulps of learning. The goal is to be able to move or convert your photo’s meta data around from website to website, one app to another, desktop to server and vice versa. There’s a tie in to MvManila. Quite a few linkages if you have a blog on one server and a picture server somewhere else. Or multiples of either and you want to move from one to another. Keep the blog at a.b.c.com but move the photos from Flickr to Picassa or your own web server (or all of the above) and you want your blog posts fixed up to where the picture moved to. You’d also like to take you tags/keywords, categories, and comments with you. Perhaps merge them.
I have a design or scheme or architecture in mind. It’s early and it will change as needed by user feedback and actual practice. This single page PDF will give you the basic idea if you don’t get all picky about the detail, or the presentation.
21st May, 2007
Announcing MvManila Version 2.7
Version 2.7 of MvManila has been released. It features improved handling of newsItems, fewer bugs, support to find and get Gems. It even handles some reluctant Manila hosts better.
MvManila 2.7 documentation is now the current “Online Doc’s”. The older downloads have the older documentation inside should you need it.
MvManila 2.7 is probably last public release of MvManila unless there’s feedback. There are no plans to release Version 3.0 – It’s almost a complete rewrite, much more powerful and even more confusing for the average person.